PREDATORY BEHAVIOR
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 2608 ▶ |
| Object type | Discipline oriented, General information, Methodology or model |
The behavior of a living organism that obtains the inputs it needs by capturing other organisms or by plundering some other environmental resource .
Practically all living beings eat some other living beings and are eaten by other in turn. This is one of the most basic facts of life and ecology .
The dynamics of the variable interrelations between predators and prey have been researched mainly during the 20th C. by ecologists, demographers and mathematicians.
Two very important contributors have been V. VOLTERRA (1931) and A. LOTKA (1956)
Since the 1970's the subject has been widely reconsidered because some irregularities in the evolving and interrelated populations sequences of preys and predators could not be clearly explained. R. MAY has been possibly the main innovator in the field, by showing that “simple mathematical models ” can produce “very complicated dynamics ” 1976, 1977, 1987)
In fact, these now models have widely contributed to the elaboration of chaos theory, and, in turn, have benefit from other developments in the same theory
See also
Dynamics (chaotic), Growth, Logistic equation