A new study in the journal Ecology finds that in the animal world,
there are worse things than being eaten alive. Rebecca Williams
reports:
Transcript
A new study in the journal Ecology finds that in the animal world,
there are worse things than being eaten alive. Rebecca Williams
reports:
Getting eaten by a predator might be bad, but it might be just the
beginning of the bad news for prey.
Scientists looked at the effects of an invasive species in the Great
Lakes called the spiny water flea. The water fleas eat tiny creatures
called daphnia. In the study, daphnia swam to deeper, colder water to
get away from the predator.
Scott Peacor is a fisheries scientist with Michigan State University
and the Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab:
“Prey of course do all sorts of things to avoid becoming a meal. In this case,
the daphnia swimming down to colder waters means they reproduce at much
slower rates. So that’s a major cost in this case.”
So instead of one daphnia getting eaten, the entire population is at
greater risk of dying off. And that’s bad because daphnia are a key
food source at the bottom of the Great Lakes food web.
For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.