Life history variation can often reflect differences in age-specific mortality within populations, with the general expectation that reproduction should be shifted away from ages experiencing increased mortality. Investigators of life history in vertebrates frequently focus on the impact of predation, but there is increasing evidence that predation may have unexpected impacts on population dens...

Depredation of southern rock lobster (Jasus edwardsii) within fishing gear by the Maori octopus (Pinnoctopus cordiformis) has economic and ecological impacts on valuable fisheries in South Australia. In addition, depredation rates can be highly variable resulting in uncertainties for the fishery. We examined how in-pot lobster predation was influenced by factors such as lobster size and sex, se...

BACKGROUND Dispersal is a primary driver in shaping the future distribution of species in both terrestrial and marine systems. Physical transport by advection can regulate the distance travelled and rate of propagule supply to a habitat but post-settlement processes such as predation can decouple supply from recruitment. The effect of flow-mediated recruitment and predation on the recruitment s...

The modeling investigation in this paper discusses the system level effects of a toxicant on a three species food chain system. In the models, we have assumed that the presence of top predator reduces the predatory ability of the intermediate predator. The stability analysis of the models is carried out and the sufficient conditions for the existence and extinction of the populations under the ...

The mechanisms underlying responses of invertebrates to forest edges remain poorly understood. Here, we use an experimental approach to investigate the predation rates on butterflies in two neotropical forest fragments. Neither distance from forest edge nor degree of forest openness affected predation rates on artificial caterpillars. The mean predation rate of artificial caterpillars on Barro ...

Populations of the native ninespotted lady beetle, Coccinella novemnotata Herbst, have undergone precipitous declines in North America following the establishment of the exotic sevenspotted lady beetle, Coccinella septempunctata L. Recent volunteer efforts have made it possible to establish colonies of the now-rare C. novemnotata and test mechanisms contributing to its decline. We evaluated the...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Predation potential of the dytiscid beetle, Rhantus sikkimensis Regimbart 1899 and the larvae of Toxorhynchites splendens Wiedemann 1819 occurring along with the larval stages of the mosquitoes in the annual lentic water bodies of Darjeeling was evaluated using the larvae of Culex quinquefasciatus Say 1823 as preys, in the laboratory under simulated natural conditions....

This article explores effects of adaptive intraguild predation on species coexistence and community structure in three species' food webs. Two Lotka-Volterra models that assume a trade-off between competition and predation strength are considered in detail. The first model does not explicitly model resource dynamics and is considered with both nonadaptive and adaptive intraguild predation; in t...

Gelatinous zooplanktivores (medusae, siphonophores, and ctenophores) and visual zooplanktivores (fish) interact through competition, predation, and commensalism. In the search for key factors governing the outcome of competition, we examined the instantaneous predation efficiency and its light dependency. The visual predator Gobiusculus flavescens and the tactile predator Bolinopsis infundibulu...