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.

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