Biology Publications
Ecology and Neurobiology of Fear in Free-Living Wildlife
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-2-2020
Journal
Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics
Volume
51
First Page
297
Last Page
318
URL with Digital Object Identifier
10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-011720-124613
Abstract
The ecology of fear concerns the population-, community-, and ecosystem-level consequences of the behavioral interactions between predators and prey, i.e., the aggregate impacts of individual responses to life-threatening events. We review new experiments demonstrating that fear itself is powerful enough to affect the population growth rate in free-living wild birds and mammals, and fear of large carnivoresmdashor the human super predatormdashcan cause trophic cascades affecting plant and invertebrate abundance. Life-threatening events like escaping a predator can have enduring, even lifelong, effects on the brain, and new interdisciplinary research on the neurobiology of fear in wild animals is both providing insights into post-traumatic stress (PTSD) and reinforcing the likely commonality of population- and community-level effects of fear in nature. Failing to consider fear thus risks dramatically underestimating the total impact predators can have on prey populations and the critical role predator-prey interactions can play in shaping ecosystems.
