In the animal kingdom, survival essentially boils down to eat or be eaten. How organisms accomplish the former and avoid the latter reveals a clever array of defense mechanisms. Maybe you can outrun your prey. Perhaps you ...
Evolution
Feb 24, 2020
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A female bald eagle took flight in September 2014 from the Maurice River in New Jersey's Cumberland County, soaring westward thousands of feet over the Delaware Bay. Nicknamed Millville after her hometown, she made her way ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 24, 2020
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The Himalayan wolf is considered an ancient wolf as it evolved prior to the contemporary grey wolf which is found in large parts of North America and Eurasia. Very little is known about the Himalayan wolf, because science ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 20, 2020
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636
By watching videos of each other eating, blue tits and great tits can learn to avoid foods that taste disgusting and are potentially toxic, a new study has found. Seeing the 'disgust response' in others helps them recognise ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 20, 2020
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Being inconspicuous might seem the best strategy for spiders to catch potential prey in their webs, but many orb-web spiders, which hunt in this way, are brightly coloured. New research finds their distinct yellow and black ...
Ecology
Feb 11, 2020
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Killing and eating of potential competitors, also known as intraguild predation, is a rare event that occurs only in specific situations such as severe scarcity of food resources, resulting in the competition between predators.
Plants & Animals
Jan 21, 2020
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Dragonflies and damselflies are animals that may appear gentle but are, in fact, ancient hunters. The closely related insects shared an ancestor over 250 million years ago—long before dinosaurs—and provide a glimpse into ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 16, 2020
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Most animals need to move, whether this is to seek out food, shelter or a mate. New research has shown that movement doesn't always break camouflage and if an animal needs to move, animals that are unpatterned and use short, ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 15, 2020
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31
Scientists have developed a new method to investigate links between top predator diets and the amount of microplastic they consume through their prey.
Environment
Jan 06, 2020
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What is the common ground between making a cup of tea and putting on your shoes? Both actions consist of several movements in a row. "Just like language, which is composed of syllables arranged into sentences, many behaviors ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 20, 2019
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In ecology, predation describes a biological interaction where a predator (an organism that is hunting) feeds on its prey, (the organism that is attacked). Predators may or may not kill their prey prior to feeding on them, but the act of predation always results in the death of the prey. The other main category of consumption is detritivory, the consumption of dead organic material (detritus). It can at times be difficult to separate the two feeding behaviors, for example where parasitic species prey on a host organism and then lay their eggs on it for their offspring to feed on its decaying corpse. The key characteristic of predation however is the predator's direct impact on the prey population. On the other hand, detritivores simply eat what is available and have no direct impact on the "donor" organism(s).
Selective pressures imposed on one another has led to an evolutionary arms race between prey and predator, resulting in various antipredator adaptations.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
