Loss of seeds to consumers is common in plant communities, but the degree to which these losses influence plant abundance or population growth is often unclear. This is particularly the case for postdispersal seed predation by rodents, as most studies of rodent seed predation have focused on the sources of spatiotemporal variation in seed loss but not quantified the population consequences of t...

Visual predation by nocturnal zooplanktivorous fish is assumed to be sufficiently limited to allow the evolution of vertical migration as means for predation avoidance by zooplankton. However, in situ measurements of predation rates by nocturnal fish are lacking. Most of our knowledge of this predation is based on stomach contents and laboratory experiments. Our objectives were to measure the i...

Habitat heterogeneity is thought to affect top-down control of herbivorous insects and contribute to population stability by providing a more attractive microhabitat for natural enemies, potentially leading to reduced population fluctuations. Identifying the parameters that contribute to habitat heterogeneity promoting top-down control of herbivorous insects by natural enemies could facilitate ...

Bird and arthropod predation is often associated with natural pest control in agricultural landscapes, but the rates of predation may vary with the amount of tree cover or other environmental factors. We examined bird and arthropod predation in three tree-rich and three tree-poor landscapes across southwestern Ethiopia. Within each landscape we selected three tree-rich and three tree-poor homeg...

Through laboratory experiments, we analysed the influence of spatial heterogeneity on predation by Mesostoma ehrenbergii on the calanoid Boeckella gracilis and the cyclopoid Acanthocyclops robustus in four horizontal and two vertical spatial arrangements. This spatial heterogeneity simulated that of Juncaceae stems, a major macrophyte in the natural environment of these zooplankton. Our results...

Artificial nest experiments (ANEs) are widely used to obtain proxies of natural nest predation for testing a variety of hypotheses, from those dealing with variation in life-history strategies to those assessing the effects of habitat fragmentation on the persistence of bird populations. However, their applicability to real-world scenarios has been criticized owing to the many potential biases ...

12 Background: Predator assemblages can differ substantially in their topdown effects on 13 community composition and ecosystem function, but few studies have sought to explain 14 this variation in terms of the phylogenetic distance between predators. The effect of a local 15 predator assemblage will depend on three things – which predators tend to co-occur, how 16 similar their prey preference...

Using larval Cx. annulirostris mosquitoes, this study compared the predation rate of Pseudomugil signifer and Gambusia holbrooki for four larval instars, three prey densities, and three vegetation densities. There was no significant difference in the quantity of first, second, and third instar larvae consumed by the two fish species after 24 h. There was a significant negative relationship betw...