Jan.
3, 2013 — Marine resource managers often gauge the health of species based
on overall biomass, but a new study of predator-prey relationships in the
Bering Sea found that it isn't the total number of individuals that predators
care about -- it's how densely they are aggregated.
It's
more than searching for an easy meal, the researchers say. Predators need to
balance how much energy they expend in searching for food with the caloric and
nutrient value of that which they consume. When prey doesn't aggregate,
however, the search for food becomes much more difficult -- affecting the
health of the predators' offspring and the vitality of their overall
population.
Results
of the study were published this week in the journal PLOS ONE. The study
was part of the Bering Sea Integrated Ecosystem Research Project, which was
funded by the North Pacific Research Board and the National Science Foundation.
"We
had to think very differently about these interactions, trying to see the world
from the predators' point of view," said Kelly Benoit-Bird, an Oregon
State University marine ecologist and lead author on the study. "When we
first tried to identify good foraging locations for predator species we looked
at areas of high prey numbers because it makes sense that they'd be where the
food is. But the results didn't match what we might have expected.
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