Venom toxicity assessments are often based upon non-native surrogate prey species that are not consumed in the wild by the venomous predator. This raises questions about the relevance of toxicity results on these "model" prey in addressing ecological or evolutionary questions about venom effects on native prey. We explore this issue by comparing the toxicity of venom from pygmy rattlesnakes (Si...

The food chain refers to a natural system by which energy is transmitted from one organism to another. In fact, a food chain consists of producers, consumers and decomposition. Presence of complex food web increase the stability of the ecosystem. Classical food chain theory arises from Lotka-Volterra model. In the present paper, the dynamics behavior of three level food chain is studied. A syst...

The present article deals with the inter specific competition and intra-specific competition among predator populations of a prey-dependent three component food chain model consisting of two competitive predator sharing one prey species as their food. The behaviour of the system near the biologically feasible equilibria is thoroughly analyzed. Boundedness and dissipativeness of the system are e...

1. Functional response models (e.g. Holling's disc equation) that do not take the spatial distributions of prey and predators into account are likely to produce biased estimates of predation rates. 2. To investigate the consequences of ignoring prey distribution and predator aggregation, a general analytical model of a predator population occupying a patchy environment with a single species of ...

Behavioral ecology and population ecology are two separate branches of ecology; studies linking the effect of individual behavior and population dynamics are rare. This paper connects a stochastic optimal foraging model of insect predators with an age structured population model of its prey. I modeled syrphid larvae feeding on cereal aphids, an interaction critical to cereal crops in Germany. T...

1. Current formulations of functional responses assume that the prey is homogeneous and independent of intraspecific processes. Most prey populations consist of different coexisting size classes that often engage in asymmetrical intraspecific interactions, including cannibalism, which can lead to nonlinear interaction effects. This may be important as the size structure with the prey could alte...

Predator-prey relationships are vital to ecosystem function and there is a need for greater predictive understanding of these interactions. We develop a geometric foraging model predicting minimum prey size scaling in marine and terrestrial vertebrate predators taking into account habitat dimensionality and biological traits. Our model predicts positive predator-prey size relationships on land ...

In this paper, we have studied the diffusive predator-prey model with Monod-Haldane functional response. The stability of the positive equilibrium and the existence of Hopf bifurcation are investigated by analyzing the distribution of eigenvalues without diffusion. We also study the spatially homogeneous and non-homogeneous periodic solutions through all parameters of the system which are spati...

A stochastic version of the classical predatorprey population model is considered through a simple birthdeath formulation. The expected value of the process is obtained and shown to correspond to the deterministic predatorprey population model.