{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/predator-confusion-is-sufficient-to-evolve","title":"Predator confusion is sufficient to evolve swarming behavior","arxiv_id":"1209.3330","date":"2012-09-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Randal S. Olson","Arend Hintze","Fred C. Dyer","David B. Knoester","Christoph Adami"],"abstract":"Swarming behaviors in animals have been extensively studied due to their\nimplications for the evolution of cooperation, social cognition, and\npredator-prey dynamics. An important goal of these studies is discerning which\nevolutionary pressures favor the formation of swarms. One hypothesis is that\nswarms arise because the presence of multiple moving prey in swarms causes\nconfusion for attacking predators, but it remains unclear how important this\nselective force is. Using an evolutionary model of a predator-prey system, we\nshow that predator confusion provides a sufficient selection pressure to evolve\nswarming behavior in prey. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the evolutionary\neffect of predator confusion on prey could in turn exert pressure on the\nstructure of the predator's visual field, favoring the frontally oriented,\nhigh-resolution visual systems commonly observed in predators that feed on\nswarming animals. Finally, we provide evidence that when prey evolve swarming\nin response to predator confusion, there is a change in the shape of the\nfunctional response curve describing the predator's consumption rate as prey\ndensity increases. Thus, we show that a relatively simple perceptual\nconstraint--predator confusion--could have pervasive evolutionary effects on\nprey behavior, predator sensory mechanisms, and the ecological interactions\nbetween predators and prey.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.3330v3","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.3330v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"predator-confusion-is-sufficient-to-evolve","repo_url":"https://github.com/adamilab/eos-data","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}