Predators and Prey

Abstract

O NE OF THE MOST interesting areas of ecology deals with the interaction of predators and prey. The popular media often present these dynamics as though they were a simple outcome of the balance of nature, and the complexities of the interactions are frequently neglected or underemphasized in general biology or ecology textbooks. Most textbooks describe a few experiments on population regulation and perhaps the basic Lotka-Volterra equation model. The prey's escape strategy is usually stressed while the predator's efficiency in prey capture is often ignored. This gives the student only a partial picture. The purpose of this article is to review basic concepts of predator-prey interaction, to encourage the presentation of the predator's role, and to describe a model of predator behavior that I have successfully used for the past two years in an introductory ecology course at Michigan Technological University.