We've seen how wolves affect other species.
How is your food affected by animals? Grab a pencil and paper and write down your answers to the following questions-but keep an eye out for predators! Maybe get a snack while you work, and think about where that snack came from. Lynx, the predator, on over many, many decades to show this predator-prey cycle.We've covered a lot of material, so let's take a moment to reflect. Showing the snowshoe hare, the prey, and the Canadian The prey population is going to decrease. So their population starts to increase, and as the predator population increases, well the prey population, Starting point in that, when I was just reasoning through it. Say, "Hey, it's really "easy for us to find meals right now." That's kind of that Is relatively low, well, then, the predators Is really, really high and the predator population Is really is, well maybe we'll show it right over So the prey population increases, and you see that the other way around. And so the predator population decreases, and as that predator population decreases, well then the prey population increases 'cause there's less folksĪround to hunt them. The predator population starts to decrease and, let me do that same blue color. Have a low population of the food in this situation, the predator population The Canadian lynx around, that we see a lower, a lower population of the prey, of the hare. Population is high, when we have a lot of And as you see, when the prey population is high, when the prey population, sorry, when the predator You have thousands of animals and we're plotting both the population of snowshoe hares and Canadian lynx in a certain area on this chart. Of data that we're showing, and in the vertical axis,
We're starting in the early 1800's going all the way to the early-mid 1900's.
You see the passage of time here, and this is a long passage of time. And you see a very similarĬycle to what I just drew, kind of just reasoning through it, and this, right here, is actual data. Which would be the predator, the predator in this situation. One of the often cited examples is interactions between,īetween the snowshoe hare, which would be the prey in this situation, and the Canadian lynx, But you can also run computer simulations that will show this,Īnd even observational data out in the field also shows this. Have the cycle between predator and prey populations. That you can imagine a world where you can This is often known as the predator-prey cycle. They can kind of form this cyclic interaction with each other. Happen to the prey? Well, then, there's gonnaīe less predators around, so they might be able to, their population might start to increase. Where if the population of the prey gets low enough, the predators are gonna have, they're gonna start having trouble finding food again,Īnd so that their population might start to decrease,Īnd as their population decreases, what's gonna Going to start decreasing all the way to a point Of their hunters around, more of their predators around. Likely that they're gonna, they prey is gonna get caught. But what's going to happen is their population is increasing. Imagine their population starting to increase. It's easier for the predators to find a meal, you can Going to happen here? Well, at this point, withĪ low density of predators, it's gonna be much easierįor them for find a meal, and it's gonna be much easierįor the prey to get caught.
Let's say we're right there in time, and let's say for whatever reason, our predator population is relatively low. And so let's just, in our starting point, let's say that our prey is starting out at a relatively high point. So the time, the horizontal axis is time. Here that you're probably familiar with by now where we show how a population can change over time. So let's just think about how these populations could interact. I'm doing the prey in I guessĪ somewhat bloody color, I guess 'cause, well, So you have the predatorĪnd prey interactions. And so you have the predator population that likes to eat the prey. And there's many cases of this, but the most cited general example is the case when one population wants to eat another population. Wanna do in this video is think about how different populations that share the same ecosystem can interact with each other and actually provide a feedback loop on each other.