Ioannou Christos C, Carvalho Luis Arrochela Braga, Budleigh Chessy, Ruxton Graeme D
School of Biological Sciences, Life Sciences Building, 24 Tyndall Avenue, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TQ, UK.
School of Biology, University of St Andrews, Sir Harold Mitchell Building, Greenside Place, St Andrews KY16 9TH, UK.
Behav Ecol. 2023 May 18;34(4):695-699. doi: 10.1093/beheco/arad039. eCollection 2023 Jul-Aug.
Of widespread interest in animal behavior and ecology is how animals search their environment for resources, and whether these search strategies are optimal. However, movement also affects predation risk through effects on encounter rates, the conspicuousness of prey, and the success of attacks. Here, we use predatory fish attacking a simulation of virtual prey to test whether predation risk is associated with movement behavior. Despite often being demonstrated to be a more efficient strategy for finding resources such as food, we find that prey displaying Lévy motion are twice as likely to be targeted by predators than prey utilizing Brownian motion. This can be explained by the predators, at the moment of the attack, preferentially targeting prey that were moving with straighter trajectories rather than prey that were turning more. Our results emphasize that costs of predation risk need to be considered alongside the foraging benefits when comparing different movement strategies.
动物行为和生态学中广泛关注的一个问题是动物如何在其环境中寻找资源，以及这些搜索策略是否最优。然而，运动也会通过影响遭遇率、猎物的显眼程度和攻击的成功率来影响被捕食风险。在这里，我们使用捕食性鱼类攻击虚拟猎物模拟物来测试被捕食风险是否与运动行为相关。尽管通常被证明是寻找食物等资源的更有效策略，但我们发现，表现出列维运动的猎物被捕食者盯上的可能性是利用布朗运动的猎物的两倍。这可以解释为，在攻击时刻，捕食者优先瞄准轨迹更直的移动猎物，而不是转弯更多的猎物。我们的结果强调，在比较不同的运动策略时，需要将被捕食风险的代价与觅食收益一并考虑。
