MOBILITY VERSUS DENSITY-LIMITED PREDATOR PREY DYNAMICS ON DIFFERENT SPATIAL SCALES

We investigate the dynamics of a predator-prey model that explicitly accounts for the spatial position and the movement behaviour of individual prey and predators, and does not assume the law of mass action. We show that limited individual mobility greatly reduces fluctuations in total density, although average densities and vital rates are virtually unaffected. We analyse the dynamics of patterns in the spatial distribution of prey and predator, which are generated by the model, and show that population dynamic observations at different spatial scales depend on the characteristic scale imposed by the individual biology.