Sentences with phrase «prey populations»
The phrase "prey populations" refers to groups of animals that are hunted and eaten by other animals. Full definition
As prey populations move away to cooler waters, mother fur seals have a harder time finding the food they need to nourish themselves and their pups.
marinemammalcenter.org
With this, we created the first estimates for snow leopard prey populations.
In general, predator populations tend to track prey populations, not the other way around.
As prey populations fall, so do predator populations.
Fitzgerald, B.M. and Turner, D.C., Hunting Behaviour of domestic cats and their impact on prey populations, in The Domestic Cat: The biology of its behaviour, D.C. Turner and P.P.G. Bateson, Editors.
Predators keep prey populations in check, which saves plants from being overgrazed.
«It has been something of a mystery why predators are so important in animal extinctions,» says Kyle Elliott, an assistant professor in McGill University's Dept. of Natural Resource Sciences and the first author of a recent study on the subject published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. «As prey populations decline, predators should simply switch to other prey.
The idea is that the new grizzly bears would fill the same ecological role as their vanished relatives, as omnivores that spread seeds, break up soil and keep prey populations in check.
Similarities and contrasts in the diets of foxes, Vulpes vulpes, and cats, Felis catus, relative to fluctuating prey populations and drought.
I predict a major decline has occurred in all the local bird of prey populations in the vicinity of every wind turbine farm in North America.
In their paper, Weitz and Cortez simulated models in which the evolutionary process was sped up to show how their theory of co-evolution would affect predator - prey population cycles.
In nature, if predators deplete their prey supply, the depleted prey leads to predator starvation, so predator populations decline, allowing prey populations a chance to recover.
The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that lion populations have declined by 43 percent in the last 20 years due to habitat loss, dwindling prey populations and humans.
Conservationists fear the spill could harm the dolphins» food supply, either by contaminating prey fish and crustaceans or by depleting prey populations.
This revealed that macaques using stone tools alter prey populations in a similar way to human technologies.
The isolated nature of island - dwelling macaques therefore makes them a useful model for assessing how simple technologies may impact prey population dynamics, life histories, and phenotypes.
This puts them at the top of the food chain, where they play an important ecological role by regulating prey populations and structuring animal communities.
Gone are the doubts that George expressed — first, regarding the impact of cat predation on rodent and other prey populations; second, regarding the relationship between these populations and the raptors that feed on them.
But the authors also point out that, «despite occurring at very high densities, the summed effects on prey populations appeared unlikely to affect population size for the majority of prey species.»
The higher cat densities observed near some developed areas may be spillover from overcrowded conditions associated with TNR colonies and unsterilized pets, which may affect native prey populations in areas immediately adjacent to colonies.
As an essential part of the marine ecosystem, they keep food webs in balance, keep prey populations healthy, and keep sea grass beds and other vital habitats healthy, for starters.
Tiger And Prey Populations Stabilized The footage obtained this year shows the vast variety of animals, many of them rare, roaming through Thailand's forests: tigers, elephants, leopards, dholes (a wild species of dog), clouded leopards, bantengs (a wild species of cattle), gaurs, sun bears, lisangs, wild boars, muntjacs (a type of small deer), hog badgers, pangolins, green peafowl, and Malayan tapirs.
At a larger scale, this method would more accurately assess the seasonal variation in predation rates, individual hunting behavior throughout the year and the actual impact of cat predation on prey populations (Tschanz et al., 2011).
«Evolution in species may reverse predator - prey population cycles.»
In turn, the smaller size of these prey populations limits the health and long - term safety of the panther population, which is confined to south of the Caloosahatchee river.
In this cycle of evolutionary attack and counterattack, any genetic variants that enhance venom resistance tend to spread through the prey population, prompting tweaks to the snake venom recipe that restore its effectiveness.
The models included interactions and competition between predators as well as the influence of climate on vegetation and prey populations.
When the predator population becomes too large, however, the prey population often plummets, leaving too little food for the predators, whose population also then crashes.
Prey populations can suddenly boom, putting heavy demand on species further down the food chain.
Unlike previous ones, the new model showed that predator and prey populations fluctuate less in complex food webs — those with long food chains, omnivorous predators, and competing species of plant - eaters.
If predators learn by watching other's errors, however, this might protect the prey population long enough for it to reproduce and evolve.
Not only do we kill other animals at much higher rates than other predators, but our ability to bring down larger adults can make it very difficult for some prey populations to recover.
Particularly, when a population of macaques becomes densely populated, the effect on their prey population becomes obvious.
For periwinkles, the continual arrival of new individuals offers an explanation for why the prey population on Koram has not been entirely consumed, despite high foraging rates, as population replacement is not dependent on local mature individuals.
This activity uses a model of the Virtual Ecosystem with three species in it: grass, rabbits, and hawks, enabling the students to explore the effect of predation on the prey population.
Liberg goes on to point out that the predation he documented did not, «justify a conclusive assessment of the effects of cats on their prey populations, but... indicate [s] that cats by themselves were not limiting any of their prey.»
«This was clearly not realistic, as the estimated maximum numbers of birds killed typically exceeded breeding density and productivity combined, such that the prey populations studied would probably have gone extinct rapidly at a local level or acted as a major sink for birds immigrating from neighbouring areas.»
Consequently, cat populations reach high densities near human settlements, so they impose relatively strong hunting pressure on prey populations (Baker et al. 2005; Sims et al. 2008; Thomas et al. 2012).
Ironically, while the authors express disappointment that «biologists have rarely sampled both cat and prey populations in such a way that direct effects on prey populations can be shown,» [6] they seem to have had no misgivings about how their work — suffering from its own sampling issues — might be used to misrepresent those same effects.
«Hunting behavior of domestic cats and their impact on prey populations.»
Fitzgerald, B.M., Diet of domestic cats and their impact on prey populations, in The Domestic cat: The biology of its behaviour, D.C. Turner and P.P.G. Bateson, Editors.
Territoriality also dampens growth of predator populations, contributing to the lagged response of predator to prey population growth and allowing fluctuating prey populations time to recover from low density in systems with linked predator and prey population dynamics3, 6,7,8.
Most hearteningly, it shows that «tiger and prey populations have stabilized in the large core area of the Western Forest Complex,» according to WCS, and that elephants have found a safe haven there away from ivory - hunters.