ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Fear of predators in free-living wildlife reduces population growth over generations.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
- Modeling species co-occurrence effects to inform invasive barred owl management and recovery of the northern spotted owl.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2026Article
- Odours from killed conspecifics affect survival and population dynamics in a spider mite.Experimental & applied acarology · 2025Article
- Quick on their paws: mice living in human-disturbed areas are faster problem-solvers than mice in strictly protected areas.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Food web trophic control modulates tropical Atlantic reef ecosystems response to marine heat wave intensity and duration.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Fear of Predators Suppresses Neurogenesis in the Brains of Wild Songbirds.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Fear of the human 'super predator' in native marsupials and introduced deer in Australia.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Auditory risk recognition is socially transmitted across territory borders in wild birds.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Moving beyond the mean: an analysis of faecal corticosterone metabolites shows substantial variability both within and across white-tailed deer populations.Conservation physiology · 2024Article
- Sounds of danger and post-traumatic stress responses in wild rodents: ecological validity of a translational model of post-traumatic stress disorder.Molecular psychiatry · 2023Article
- A short pre-conception bout of predation risk affects both children and grandchildren.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Development under predation risk increases serotonin-signaling, variability of turning behavior and survival in adult fruit fliesFrontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- No effect of a widespread pharmaceutical pollutant on behavior, physiology, or morphology in guppies.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Interplay of cooperative breeding and predation risk on egg allocation and reproductive output.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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