All mammals thus far studied sleep, yet important questions remain concerning the ecological factors that influence sleep patterns. Here, we developed an evolutionary individualbased model to investigate the effect of predation pressure on prey sleep. We investigated three ecological conditions, including one that assumed a dynamic interaction between predator and prey behaviour. In condition 1...

Swarming behaviours in animals have been extensively studied owing to their implications for the evolution of cooperation, social cognition and predator– prey dynamics. An important goal of these studies is discerning which evolutionary pressures favour the formation of swarms. One hypothesis is that swarms arise because the presence of multiple moving prey in swarms causes confusion for attack...

Many predators and parasites eavesdrop on the communication signals of their prey. Eavesdropping is typically studied as dyadic predator-prey species interactions; yet in nature, most predators target multiple prey species and most prey must evade multiple predator species. The impact of predator communities on prey signal evolution is not well understood. Predators could converge in their pref...

To assess the effects of fluctuating prey availability on predator population dynamics and grazing impact on phytoplankton, we measured growth and grazing rates of three heterotrophic dinoflagellate species-Oxyrrhis marina, Gyrodinium dominans and Gyrodinium spirale-before and after depriving them of phytoplankton prey. All three dinoflagellate species survived long periods (> 10 d) without alg...

Swarming behaviours in animals have been extensively studied owing to their implications for the evolution of cooperation, social cognition and predator-prey dynamics. An important goal of these studies is discerning which evolutionary pressures favour the formation of swarms. One hypothesis is that swarms arise because the presence of multiple moving prey in swarms causes confusion for attacki...

1. A long-term (13-year) data set, based on > 4000 kills, was used to test whether a sympatric group of large predators adheres to the theoretical predictions that (1) mean prey body size and (2) prey diversity increase as functions of predator body size. 2. All kills observed by safari guides are documented routinely in Mala Mala Private Game Reserve, South Africa. We analysed these records fo...

Linking local communities to a metacommunity can positively affect diversity by enabling immigration of dispersal-limited species and maintenance of sink populations. However, connectivity can also negatively affect diversity by allowing the spread of strong competitors or predators. In a microcosm experiment with five ciliate species as prey and a copepod as an efficient generalist predator, w...

Predator-prey interactions are commonly studied with an interest in determining the optimal strategy for prey. However, the implications of deviating from optimal strategy are often unclear. The present study considered these consequences by studying how the direction of an escape response affects the strategy of prey fish. We simulated these interactions with numerical and analytical mathemati...

This article studies the effects of adaptive changes in predator and/or prey activities on the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey population dynamics. The model assumes the classical foraging-predation risk trade-offs: increased activity increases population growth rate, but it also increases mortality rate. The model considers three scenarios: prey only are adaptive, predators only are adaptive, and...

The increased temperature associated with climate change may have important effects on body size and predator-prey interactions. The consequences of these effects for food web structure are unclear because the relationships between temperature and aspects of food web structure such as predator-prey body-size relationships are unknown. Here, we use the largest reported dataset for marine predato...