Mazes to Study the Effects of Spatial Complexity, Predation and Population Density on Mate Finding.

The difficulty to locate mates and overcome predation can hamper species establishment and population maintenance. The effects of sparseness between individuals or the effect of predators on the probability of population growth can be difficult to measure experimentally. For testing hypotheses about population density and predation, we contend that habitat complexity can be simulated using insect mazes of varying mathematical difficulty.