Synonyms
Predator satiation; Predator saturation; Safety in numbers
In prey animals, it is widely accepted that living in groups reduces the risk of predation and that this occurs via a number of mechanisms, such as collective detection of predators (see “Grouping and Predation”). While this explains aggregation over space, animals vulnerable to predators are often aggregated in time, where there is temporal synchrony in the period that individuals are exposed to predators. This synchrony in timing “swamps” the response of predators, so that the overall rate of predation does not increase proportionally with the greater availability of prey. The result is a reduced risk of predation per individual prey, and predator swamping provides an evolutionary explanation for the collective emergence of mayfly larvae (Sweeney and Vannote 1982), cicadas (Williams et al. 1993), some species of sea turtle hatchlings (Santos et al. 2016), the young of some ungulates (Milner-Gulland 2001) and birds...
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Ioannou, C. (2021). Predator Swamping. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_2702
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_2702
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