Don’t Compete If You Don’t Want to Get Eat(en)
Image Credit: Judy Gallagher, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped
Predators weaken prey intraspecific competition through phenotypic selection (2020) Siepielski, Hasik et al., Ecology Letters, https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13491
The Crux
We are all familiar with predator-prey relationships in nature, those in which one organism (a predator) kills and consumes another (the prey). Besides these direct effects on prey via consumption, predators can also impose indirect effects on their prey. An indirect effect is one in which the predator changes some aspect of the prey, such as their behavior or the way that they look, but these changes are brought about just by the predator being around. These predator-mediated effects are known to affect the relationships between prey organisms themselves, such as how prey organisms compete with one another, whether its for food, mates, or other resources.
Predators are known to affect how active their prey are, and this selection on activity results in a trade-off between how much prey can grow and their risk of predation. Being more active can allow you to find and eat more food, but that also means that a potential predator is more likely to see you. Today’s paper used larval damselflies and their fish predators to study how selection of fish on their damselfly prey based on the damselfly activity rates affected competition between the damselflies.
