期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2022
卷号：119
期号：7
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2112404119
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Significance
Accurately evaluating the total impact of predators on prey population growth rates is fundamental to forecasting the consequences of predator conservation and management. That the fear (antipredator responses) predators inspire could contribute to this total impact has only relatively recently been recognized. We experimentally demonstrate that fear itself can impact prey population growth rates in free-living wildlife, extending to transgenerational impacts reducing population growth beyond the parental generation. We report how fear may contribute considerably to the total impact of predators and why this may be the norm in birds and mammals. The critical significance of our work lies in experimentally establishing that inferring the effects of predators using data on direct killing alone risks dramatically underestimating their total impact.
Correctly assessing the total impact of predators on prey population growth rates (lambda, λ) is critical to comprehending the importance of predators in species conservation and wildlife management. Experiments over the past decade have demonstrated that the fear (antipredator responses) predators inspire can affect prey fecundity and early offspring survival in free-living wildlife, but recent reviews have highlighted the absence of evidence experimentally linking such effects to significant impacts on prey population growth. We experimentally manipulated fear in free-living wild songbird populations over three annual breeding seasons by intermittently broadcasting playbacks of either predator or nonpredator vocalizations and comprehensively quantified the effects on all the components of population growth, together with evidence of a transgenerational impact on offspring survival as adults. Fear itself significantly reduced the population growth rate (predator playback mean λ = 0.91, 95% CI = 0.80 to 1.04; nonpredator mean λ = 1.06, 95% CI = 0.96 to 1.16) by causing cumulative, compounding adverse effects on fecundity and every component of offspring survival, resulting in predator playback parents producing 53% fewer recruits to the adult breeding population. Fear itself was consequently projected to halve the population size in just 5 years, or just 4 years when the evidence of a transgenerational impact was additionally considered (λ = 0.85). Our results not only demonstrate that fear itself can significantly impact prey population growth rates in free-living wildlife, comparing them with those from hundreds of predator manipulation experiments indicates that fear may constitute a very considerable part of the total impact of predators.
关键词：enecology of fearperceived predation riskpopulation growth ratepredator–prey interactionsantipredator behavior
