Predation facts for kids

Great blue heron with prey

Indian Python swallowing a full grown Chital deer at Mudumalai National Park

In ecology, predation describes a relationship and actions between two creatures. A predator attacks and eats its prey. Predators may or may not kill their prey before eating them. But the act of predation always causes the death of its prey and taking in the prey's body parts into the predators body. A true predator can be thought of as one which both kills and eats another animal but many animals act as both predator and scavenger.

A predator is an animal that hunts, catches and eats other animals. For example, a spider eating a fly caught at its web is a predator, or a pack of lions eating a buffalo. The animals that the predator hunts are called prey. A top predator or apex predator is one that is not the prey of other predators.

Predators are usually carnivores (meat-eaters) or omnivores (eats plants and other animals). Predators will hunt other animals for food. Examples of predators are cats, crocodiles, snakes, raptors, wolves, killer whales, lobsters and sharks.

Ambush predator

A female goldenrod crab spider (Misumena vatia) capturing the female of a pair of mating flies.

Ambush predators or sit-and-wait predators are carnivorous animals or other organisms, such as some carnivorous plants. They capture or trap prey by stealth or strategy (not conscious strategy), rather than just by speed or strength.

These organisms usually hide quiet and wait for prey to come within striking distance. They often are camouflaged, and may be solitary. This may be safer for the predator, because lying in wait exposes it less to its own predators.

When a predator cannot move faster than its preferred prey, ambushing its prey is likely to be more efficient than pursuit. Otherwise, active hunting commonly is more effective. There are however many intermediate strategies; for example when a pursuit predator is faster than its prey over a short distance, but not in a long chase, then either stalking or ambushing becomes necessary as part of the strategy.

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  Meat ants eating a cicada; some species take prey bigger than they are, particularly when working together

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  A lioness with her prey.

Images for kids

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  Spider wasps paralyse and eventually kill their hosts, but are considered parasitoids, not predators.

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  Paramecium, a predatory ciliate, feeding on bacteria

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  The black-browed albatross regularly flies hundreds of kilometres across the nearly empty ocean to find patches of food.

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  Seven-spot ladybirds select plants of good quality for their aphid prey.

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  The chameleon attacks prey by shooting out its tongue.

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  Wolves, social predators, cooperate to hunt and kill bison.

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  An electric ray (Torpediniformes) showing location of electric organ and electrocytes stacked within it

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  Bats use echolocation to hunt moths at night.

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  Eastern coral snake, itself a predator, is venomous enough to kill predators that attack it, so when they avoid it, this behaviour must be inherited, not learnt.

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  Riparian willow recovery at Blacktail Creek, Yellowstone National Park, after reintroduction of wolves, the local keystone species and apex predator. Left, in 2002; right, in 2015

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  Numbers of snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) (yellow background) and Canada lynx (black line, foreground) furs sold to the Hudson's Bay Company from 1845 to 1935

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  Predator-prey population cycles in a Lotka-Volterra model

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  San hunter, Botswana

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  The Capitoline Wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome

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  Large compound eyes, sensitive antennae, and powerful jaws (mandibles) of jack jumper ant

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  Crab spider, an ambush predator with forward-facing eyes, catching another predator, a field digger wasp

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  Red-tailed hawk uses sharp hooked claws and beak to kill and tear up its prey

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  Auroralumina attenboroughii, an Ediacaran predator (c. 560 mya). It was a stem-group cnidarian, catching prey with its nematocysts.

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  The Cambrian substrate revolution saw life on the sea floor change from minimal burrowing (left) to a diverse burrowing fauna (right), probably to avoid new Cambrian predators.

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  Mouth of the anomalocaridid Peytoia, a Cambrian invertebrate, probably an apex predator

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  Dunkleosteus, a Devonian placoderm, perhaps the world's first vertebrate superpredator, reconstruction

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  Meganeura monyi, a predatory Carboniferous insect related to dragonflies, could fly to escape terrestrial predators. Its large size, with a wingspan of 65 cm (30 in), may reflect the lack of vertebrate aerial predators at that time.

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  Tyrannosaurus, a large theropod dinosaur of the Cretaceous, reconstruction

See also

In Spanish: Depredación para niños