We determined the responses of a model laboratory community to resource enrichment and compared these responses to the predictions of prey-dependent and ratiodependent food chain models. Our model community consisted of Escherichia coli B and bacteriophage T4 in chemostats supplied with different concentrations of glucose. We observed the following responses to enrichment: (1) a large and highl...

This study considers a delayed biological system of predator-prey interactions where the predator has stage-structured preference. It is assumed that the prey population has two stages: immature and mature. The predator population has different preference for the stage-structured prey. This type of behavior has been reported in Asecodes hispinarum and Microplitis mediator. By some lemmas and me...

The energetic return rates of many small animal and plant resources are often density dependent. When these resources are collected in mass, change in abundance can dramatically affect diet rank, and challenges the assumption that return rates are generally correlated with body size. When mass collecting is employed, as a result of either natural events (e.g. windrows) or technological developm...

Many cyclopoid copepods change their feeding habits during development. Young stages are herbivorous, whereas adults are carnivores or omnivores. A demographic model based on physiological parameters is developed to study the effect of cannibalism on the population dynamics of cyclopoids and their prey. If alternative prey are available and their potential growth rate is higher than the potenti...

Density dependence in demographic rates can strongly affect the dynamics of populations. However, the mechanisms generating density dependence (e.g., predation) are also dynamic processes and may be influenced by local conditions. Understanding the manner in which local habitat features affect the occurrence and/or strength of density dependence will increase our understanding of population dyn...

We used literature data to compare the relative influences of body size, water temperature, food density and experimental method on laboratory derived estimates of the ingestion rates of marine fish larvae. We subsequently used these results to evaluate whether larval feeding rates in nature are likely to be food-limited. Larval dry weight, temperature and food density explained 85 % of the var...

The aim of this paper is to consider a non-autonomous predator-prey-like system, with a Gompertz growth law for the prey. By introducing random variations in both prey birth and predator death rates, a stochastic model for the predator-prey-like system in a random environment is proposed and investigated. The corresponding Fokker-Planck equation is solved to obtain the joint probability density...

Many prey modify traits in response to predation risk and this modification of traits can influence the prey's resource acquisition rate. A predator thus can have a "nonlethal" impact on prey that can lead to indirect effects on other community members. Such indirect interactions are termed trait-mediated indirect interactions because they arise from a predator's influence on prey traits, rathe...

In areas of oil and gas exploration, seismic lines have been reported to alter the movement patterns of wolves (Canis lupus). We developed a mechanistic first passage time model, based on an anisotropic elliptic partial differential equation, and used this to explore how wolf movement responses to seismic lines influence the encounter rate of the wolves with their prey. The model was parametriz...