Living in a landscape of fear: effects on navigation, demography and trophic interactions

There is growing consensus that fear alone is an important driver for change in natural ecosystems. Predators kill, and thereby affect prey numbers, but they also affect prey via fear alone (perceived predation risk).

At the heart of this proposal is to shed new light on how prey cope with the “Chemical Landscape of Fear”, i.e. the temporal and spatial distribution of waterborne chemical cues aquatic prey rely on to assess predation risk. To achieve this, we perform laboratory studies to investigate inter-individual difference in the perception of predation risk. Furthermore, we use a unique and novel experimental platform that allow us to test for non-random spatial sorting of prey phenotypes in the wild and to determine how non-lethal exposure to predator risk affect long-term prey fitness as well as the importance of non-consumptive predator effects on higher-order interactions (trophic cascades). By use of newly developed methods for detection of chemical gradients in aquatic systems we will quantify the spatial and temporal variability in chemical predator cues, a method that will us to map the Chemical Landscape of Fear. The proposed project will generate unprecedented insights into the interactions between predator’s and their prey. Specifically, the knowledge can be used to predict the spatiotemporal distribution of organism in the wild and the consequences of changing landscapes of fear, an increasingly important capability in a rapidly changing world.