Premium
Dispersion and natural‐enemy action
Author(s) -
FRANZ J. M.
Publication year - 1964
Publication title -
annals of applied biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.677
H-Index - 80
eISSN - 1744-7348
pISSN - 0003-4746
DOI - 10.1111/j.1744-7348.1964.tb07271.x
Subject(s) - coincidence , biology , action (physics) , adversary , natural (archaeology) , space (punctuation) , subject (documents) , relation (database) , theme (computing) , ecology , epistemology , evolutionary biology , mathematics , computer science , physics , philosophy , statistics , medicine , paleontology , alternative medicine , pathology , quantum mechanics , database , library science , operating system
Animal dispersion was defined by Wynne‐Edwards (1962) as ‘the placement of individuals and groups of individuals within the habitats they occupy, and the processes by which this is brought about’. This paper deals with a limited aspect of this theme, namely with the influence of the dispersion of host or enemy individuals on their mutual interaction. Obviously, there can only be a relation between feeding organisms and food, between killer and victim, if they coincide in space and in time. Thus, what first seemed to be a limited topic evolves as one of the basic chapters of relations among organisms, that of coincidence (cf. Thalenhorst, 1951). It seems to be impossible to deal with space coincidence here without mentioning time coincidence, too. Recognizing the tremendous amount of information available on this subject, I should like to give some examples only, first on enemy action without man's interference and secondly on human action which either favours or disrupts space coincidence of both groups of organisms. For the sake of brevity, the term host will be frequently used for host and prey together and examples will mostly refer to insects.