Individual willingness to leave a safe refuge and the trade-off between food and safety: a test with social fish.

Refuges offer prey animals protection from predation, but increased time spent hiding can reduce foraging opportunities. Within social groups, individuals vary in their refuge use and willingness to forage in the presence of a predator. Here, we examine the relative foraging benefits and mortality costs associated with individual refuge use and foraging behaviour within groups of goldfish (Carassius auratus) under predation risk from an avian predator (little egret-Egretta garzetta).

State-dependent foraging among social fish in a risky environment.

In the presence of a predator, foraging is a dangerous task. Social individuals can respond to risk by forming groups, benefiting from enhanced collective anti-predator behavior but suffering from increased conspicuousness to predators. Within groups, individuals exhibit variable foraging behavior.

Binary patch assessment by goldfish under safe and dangerous conditions.

Food resources can occur heterogeneously in space or time and differ in their abundances. A forager should be able to determine the value of a patch and choose optimally how to exploit it. However, patch choice and exploitation may be influenced by predation risk.

A predator equalizes rate of capture of a schooling prey in a patchy environment.

Prey individuals are often distributed heterogeneously in the environment, and their abundances and relative availabilities vary among patches. A foraging predator should maximize energetic gains by selectively choosing patches with higher prey density. However, catching behaviorally responsive and group-forming prey in patchy environments can be a challenge for predators.

Can rare positive interactions become common when large carnivores consume livestock?

Livestock populations in protected areas are viewed negatively because of their interaction with native ungulates through direct competition for food resources. However, livestock and native prey can also interact indirectly through their shared predator. Indirect interactions between two prey species occur when one prey modifies either the functional or numerical responses of a shared predator.

Behavioral indicators for conserving mammal diversity.

Mammals are threatened with population decline and extinction. Numerous species require immediate conservation intervention. But our ability to identify species on the brink of decline, and to intervene successfully, depends on developing reliable leading indicators of population, community, and environmental change.