UW Aquatic & Fishery Sciences Quantitative Seminar

James Anderson

Columbia Basin Research, UW School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences

The predator-prey paradox goes away with distance

Abstract

Since Rosenzweig proposed in 1971 that enrichment can destabilize predator-prey systems and cause extinction, the resolution of this paradox has been a challenge. Nearly all of the 671 papers addressing Rosenzweig's paradox have formulated interactions in terms of predator-prey encounter rates. Here, I describe interactions in terms of path lengths and encounter distances and find that the functional form of the interaction can depend on the spatial response of prey to predators. The result is stability and no paradox.