Prey may compensate for these inabilities - or supplement their broad-scale responses - by instead avoiding areas that predators have frequented within the previous few hours or days. Landscape-level antipredator behaviors may not manifest if prey cannot predict predator activity patterns or are unable to pay the fitness costs of avoiding predators long-term. She is modeling the impact of predator hunting strategy and fluctuating resource conditions on the strength of prey avoidance behaviors in response to predictable levels of predation risk. Meredith is using the Snapshot Serengeti camera trap data on ungulate activity and abundance to test whether fear landscapes affect ungulate foraging decisions. While well-established in small-scale experimental systems, it remains unclear whether this tradeoff significantly affects vertebrate behavioral patterns. The “landscape of fear” hypothesis predicts that the expression of antipredator responses reflect a tradeoff between risk avoidance and energy gain, such that animals avoid areas of high perceived predation risk even if forage is abundant in those areas. Meredith Palmer employs a combination of empirical, experimental, and theoretical approaches to explore how prey ungulates in African large mammal communities utilize a suite of antipredator behaviors to counter a risk-resource tradeoff across a gradient of time and space. Without such data, theories on the adaptive evolutionary significance of antipredator behaviors remain largely untested, nor can we evaluate and predict behaviorally-mediated effects of predators on herbivore populations, which may in turn significantly affect the ecology of ecosystems as a whole. Even fundamental information on the circumstances that elicit particular antipredator behaviors remains under-investigated. An optimal antipredator strategy may involve multiple behaviors performed simultaneously or sequentially, yet surprisingly little research has been conducted on how behaviors interact to counter variations in intensity and type of predation risk. Prey must therefore optimize resource acquisition while avoiding predation. Lost time and energy devoted to defensive behaviors or to avoiding “risky” foraging opportunities make the mere threat of predation detrimental to prey growth, survival, and fecundity. Antipredator defenses, however, also carry fitness costs. Predation exerts an ultimate selective pressure on animal behavior: the fitness consequences of an ineffective behavioral response are immediate and irrevocable.

Predator vs prey