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Interactions Between Growing Predators and Growing Prey

  • Conference paper
Size-Structured Populations

Abstract

Many concepts in community ecology suffer from a typological approach to species interactions in which the ecological relationships between species are classified as competitive, mutualistic or predatory; and then they are represented by -/-, +/+, or -/+ pairs of elements in a community matrix. These relationships are often diagramed by a food web that represents the presumed trophic connections among species in a community. Species within a trophic level are assumed to be potential competitors and predators are considered to have a negative effect on the population dynamics of their prey. This negative effect arises from predators decreasing the rate of increase of prey or lowering the equilibrium density of prey. Recently, the simplicities of this approach have been recognized as ecologists have studied multispecies communities with techniques designed to understand mechanisms that structure natural communities. It is now recognized that the interaction between two species can depend on the context in which it is measured (Boucher 1985; Kerfoot and Sih 1986). For example, two species may have a competitive (-/-) interaction when raised in isolation, but show mutualistic (+/+) interaction when a predator is added to the system because the two species spread the risk of predation both benefiting from the presence of the other.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 27706, USA

    H. M. Wilbur

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  1. H. M. Wilbur
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of Linköping, S-581 83, Linköping, Sweden

    Bo Ebenman

  2. Department of Ecology, Limnology, P.O. Box 65, S-22100, Lund, Sweden

    Lennart Persson

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© 1988 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Wilbur, H.M. (1988). Interactions Between Growing Predators and Growing Prey. In: Ebenman, B., Persson, L. (eds) Size-Structured Populations. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74001-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74001-5_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-74003-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-74001-5

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