![]() There are other difficult and borderline cases. Spider wasps paralyze and eventually kill their hosts, but are considered parasitoids, not predators. A predator can be defined to differ from a parasitoid in that it has many prey, captured over its lifetime, where a parasitoid's larva has just one, or at least has its food supply provisioned for it on just one occasion (Lafferty & Kuris 2002, Gurr & Wratten 2012). Zoologists generally call this a form of parasitism, though conventionally parasites are thought not to kill their hosts. ![]() ![]() A parasitoid, such as an ichneumon wasp, lays its eggs in or on its host the eggs hatch into larvae, which eat the host, and it inevitably dies. The concept of predation is broad, defined differently in different contexts, and includes a wide variety of feeding methods and some relationships that result in the prey's death are not generally called predation. Relation of predation to other feeding strategies Predation and herbivory overlap because seed predators and destructive frugivores kill their “prey”. It is distinct from scavenging on dead prey, though many predators also scavenge. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviors that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill the host) and parasitoidism (which always does, eventually). Predation is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. Social predators: meat ants cooperate to feed on a cicada far larger than themselves. Solitary predator: a polar bear feeds on a bearded seal it has killed.
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