When prey is detected, the predator assesses whether to attack it. Other adaptations include stealth and aggressive mimicry that improve hunting efficiency. Many predatory animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate, have sharp claws or jaws to grip, kill, and cut up their prey. Predators are adapted and often highly specialized for hunting, with acute senses such as vision, hearing, or smell. Among invertebrates, social wasps (yellowjackets) are both hunters and scavengers of other insects (Schmidt 2009). Scavengers, organisms that only eat organisms found already dead, are not predators, but many predators such as the jackal and the hyena scavenge when the opportunity arises (Kruuk 1972, Kane et al. Animals that graze on phytoplankton or mats of microbes are predators, as they consume and kill their food organisms but herbivores that browse leaves are not, as their food plants usually survive the assault (Bengston 2002). However, since they typically do not kill their hosts, they are now often thought of as parasites (Poulin et al.
Micropredators are small animals that, like predators, feed entirely on other organisms they include fleas and mosquitoes that consume blood from living animals, and aphids that consume sap from living plants. There are other difficult and borderline cases. 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).įigure 3: Spider wasps paralyze and eventually kill their hosts, but are considered parasitoids, not predators. 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. Predation and herbivory overlap because seed predators and destructive frugivores kill their “prey”.įigure 2: The relationship of predation to other feeding strategies. 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. Here, meat ants feed socially on a cicada far larger than themselves.
Other species, like meat ants (photo below), cooperate to feed and are called social predators. \)įigure 1: Polar bears (top photo) are solitary predators, here shown feeding on a beaded seal.
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