![]() ![]() Mobbing and sitting tight at the nest as methods of avoiding brood parasites. International Journal for Parasitology 34: 813-821 | abstract Optimal parasite infection strategies: a state-dependent approach. The impact of parasite manipulation and predator foraging behavior on the structure of predator-prey communities. Relevant publicationsįenton A & Rands SA (2006). This work is currently being brought together into a manuscript – please contact Sean if you’re interested in knowing a little more. the predator species is totally dependent on a single prey species as. To keep our model simple, we will make some assumptions that would be unrealistic in most of these predator-prey situations. The Royal Society has also funded some exploratory work considering how state-dependent dynamic game theory can be used to explore the moment-to-moment behavioural rules used by interacting hosts and parasites. In recent years, predatorprey systems have increased their applications and have given rise to systems which represent more accurately different biological issues that appear in the. lions and gazelles, birds and insects, pandas and eucalyptus trees, Venus fly traps and flies. This results in food scarcity for predators, which will again have a decline in their population. As the predator species increases, the numbers of prey decline. ![]() Work (in collaboration with Andrew Fenton at the University of Liverpool) has so far explored how state-dependent foraging theory can be used to explore parasitoid infection strategies, and how parasite manipulation of host behaviour may affect population biology. When there are more prey individuals around, the predators will have more to eat and would then be able to reproduce more and increase their population size. To further address this idea, we computed prey (heterotrophic bacteria) evenness (i.e. This suggests that the behaviour of both the host and the parasite will dynamically change in response to the requirements of the other, which means that we can use approaches used in other fields of behavioural ecology for exploring these interactions. Similarly, a parasite may need to remain in the host for a long period of time, and antagonising the host further could lead to a reduction in the resources the host is able to provide, or maybe even the death of the host at an inappropriate moment (which could be catastrophic to a parasite that relies on the host for its own survival). Once a host has the fortune of being parasitised, it may pay for it to alter its behaviour and physiology to tolerate the parasite (if mounting an immune defence is costlier than simply putting up with the parasite), or at least make the best of the reduction it suffers to its fitness. However, for many parasite-host systems, the relationship isn’t that simple. It is a hands-on way to model predator/prey interactions and explores the basic question of how a population can change in response to their environment and interactions with other organisms. Prey distributions are often clumped, and predators respond by looking for patches where prey is dense and then searching within patches (Kramer 2001).Frequently, we assume that the relationship between parasites and hosts is similar to that between predators and their prey, where one party (the prey or host) tries to avoid any form of interaction with the other (the predator or the parasite): the former will lose fitness (in the worst case, by dying), whilst the latter will gain fitness from the interaction. This lab is cheap and easy to complete in 45-50 min. \): The black-browed albatross regularly flies hundreds of kilometers across the nearly empty ocean to find patches of food. ![]()
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