Zoology · Ch 11 — Organisms and Population
Predation
Predation
Predation, scored (+, --), is the interaction in which one animal, the predator, kills another animal, its prey, and consumes it for food; like parasitism, predation shapes community dynamics, but the two differ in a key respect — a predator is typically physically larger than its prey and attacks it from outside the prey's body, whereas a parasite is typically smaller than its host and feeds on it from within. Based on their hunting behaviour, predators are described as specialized, if they are adapted to hunt only a narrow range of specific prey species, or generalized, if they hunt a broad range of prey; the lion-and-deer relationship described in the chapter is a specialized predator-prey pairing. Beyond simply controlling prey numbers, predation is an essential ecological strategy because each act of predation transfers stored ener …
What this figure shows. An illustration of a lion attacking and bringing down a deer, capturing the moment of a predator, the lion, overpowering its prey, the deer, in the open. The image is used to anchor the chapter's definition of predation, showing the predator as the physically larger animal that catches its prey from outside the prey's body — unlike a parasite, which is smaller than its host and feeds from within — and to illustrate how a single predation event transfers energ …