What would happen to a population of predators if there was a sudden increase in food for the prey explain your answer?

What would happen to a population of predators if there was a sudden increase in food for the prey? Predators could potentially enter into exponential growth which harms the prey a lot.

What would cause an increase in predator population?

As their source of food increases, predators rise in abundance. When there are enough predators, prey numbers decline. With a scarcity of food, the number of predators crashes and the cycle repeats.

What factors affect predator/prey populations?

These factors include, but are not limited to, the amount of food available for the prey, the number of different prey spe- cies available for a predator, and how fast the predator and the prey species reproduce.

What is the effect of they are predators?

Predation is a top-down force because the effects of predators start at the top of the food chain and cascade downward to lower trophic levels. A trophic cascade occurs when predators indirectly affect the abundance of organisms more than two trophic levels down (Figure 1).

What happens when predator population decreases?

The most obvious result of the removal of the top predators in an ecosystem is a population explosion in the prey species. When prey becomes more scarce, the predator population declines until prey is again more abundant. Therefore, the two balance each other. When the predators are removed, prey populations explode.

Does a larger prey population growth rate r increase or decrease the stability of the predator/prey interaction?

Faster prey population growth decreases the stability of the system. This counterintuitive result comes from the positive feedback between the two populations. An increase in prey leads to an increase in predators, which leads to more prey killed.

What are predator/prey populations?

Predator-prey cycles are based on a feeding relationship between two species: if the prey species rapidly multiplies, the number of predators increases — until the predators eventually eat so many prey that the prey population dwindles again. Soon afterwards, predator numbers likewise decrease due to starvation.

What factors affect animal population growth?

In the natural world, limiting factors like the availability of food, water, shelter, and space can change animal and plant populations. Other limiting factors, like competition for resources, predation, and disease also impact populations.

How do predators affect the population?

They grow more slowly, reproduce less, and populations decline. As predator populations increase, they put greater strain on the prey populations and act as a top-down control, pushing them toward a state of decline. Thus both availability of resources and predation pressure affect the size of prey populations.

How does the evolution affect on the populations?

There are several ways evolution can affect population variation: stabilizing selection, directional selection, diversifying selection, frequency-dependent selection, and sexual selection.