Emergence of functional responses from interactions of individuals

Abstract

Ratio-dependent functional responses are regarded by many ecologists to be relatively uncommon in nature, or at least lacking in a solid mechanistic basis. Our objective was to show that such responses can be given a mechanistic basis, and to show that such responses might actually occur more commonly than thought and can be appropriate for some broad classes of consumer-resource systems, such as wading birds feeding in a wetland. The prey-dependent Holling Type II functional response, F, can be written as