![]() There has been much change in understanding predator–prey dynamics since the early days of the 1950s to 1970s, and the remainder of this collection of papers will bring you up to date on these advances. But again as in Solomon’s original work, the limitations of these simple models of predator–prey interactions were not clearly identified. Holling’s work was a pioneering effort to describe numerical and functional responses of predators via simple mathematical models so that they could be combined to provide an estimate of the total loss of prey to predators, one of the ultimate goals of predation theory ( Holling, 1961). The principles were clear, the results less so because of statistical problems of obtaining field data on predator feeding rates on sawfly cocoons and the difficulties of scaling laboratory feeding rates to field situations. Holling described three types of functional responses ( Figure 1), which when combined with three kinds of numerical responses would lead to a variety of rates of prey losses to predators. Holling (1959) elaborated the components of predation described earlier by Solomon and applied these to his analysis in a classic paper of small mammal predation rates on the cocooned pupae of the European pine sawfly in Ontario pine forests. There is a great deal of simple theory in Solomon (1949) but the limitations of this pioneering approach as a sufficient tool for understanding the role of predator–prey interactions in population and community dynamics has changed as both theoretical and empirical ecology has developed during the last 70 years. The numerical response was complementary to the functional response and recorded the change in the density of the predator as its prey population rose or fell in density, and it had already been recognized earlier by insect ecologists. In his synthesis, Solomon (1949) defined the functional response as the number of prey items consumed by an individual predator per unit of time, and he explored how the functional response might change in relation to the density of the prey items. Solomon (1949) summarized the existing literature on population dynamics and produced a synthesis that brought data from laboratory and field populations into the framework of density-dependence population regulation framed by A.J. Interest arose in the 1930s and 1940s almost independently in agricultural pest control studies and in wildlife management problems regarding the conservation of mammals and birds. A short history of predator–prey dynamicsĮveryone knew that predators ate prey but in the 1930s and 1940s most questions were about the natural-history interactions of predators and their prey. I present no simple solutions for these problems, but they must be noted and clearly specified. ![]() My purpose here is to provide a capsular history of this early work, and then to explore five general problems that affect the use of functional responses for real world predator prey systems. I present here a brief overview of the history of the functional response concept, having lived through the early work of Maurice Solomon ( Solomon, 1949) followed by the pioneering work of Holling (1959), the additions by Murdoch (1971), and the growing literature that has followed all this early work. ![]()
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