Question

4) Define the following types of species interactions: predation, herbivory, parasitism and parasitoids (you could use a graph, but you need to explain the illustration). Provide 3 examples for each interaction (i.e., predation, herbivory, parasitism and parasitoids).

Answer 1

Predation

It  is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill the host) and parasitoidism (which always does, eventually). It is distinct from scavenging on dead prey, though many predators also scavenge; it overlaps with herbivory, as a seed predator is both a predator and a herbivore.

Predators may actively search for prey or sit and wait for it. When prey is detected, the predator assesses whether to attack it. This may involve ambush or pursuit predation, sometimes after stalking the prey. If the attack is successful, the predator kills the prey, removes any inedible parts like the shell or spines, and eats it.Predators are adapted and often highly specialized for hunting, with acute senses such as vision, hearing, or smell. Many predatory animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate, have sharp claws or jaws to grip, kill, and cut up their prey. Other adaptations include stealth and aggressive mimicry that improve hunting efficiency.

Predation has a powerful selective effect on prey, and the prey develop antipredator adaptations such as warning coloration, alarm calls and other signals, camouflage, mimicry of well-defended species, and defensive spines and chemicals. Sometimes predator and prey find themselves in an evolutionary arms race, a cycle of adaptations and counter-adaptations. Predation has been a major driver of evolution since at least the Cambrian period.

eg 3-lion feeding on a deer

Herbivory

It is the consumption of plant material or tissues by animals, and herbivores are animals adapted to eat plants. As in predator-prey interactions, this interaction drives adaptations in both the herbivore and the plant species it eats.

To maximize nutrient intake, many herbivores have evolved adaptations that allow them to determine which plants contain fewer defensive compounds and more high-quality nutrients. Some insects, such as butterflies, have chemical sensors on their feet that allow them to taste the plant before they consume any part of it. Mammalian herbivores often use their keen sense of smell to detect bitter compounds, and they preferentially tender leaves that contain few chemicals.

• Granivores- grain eaters (ie: some rodents)
• Graminivore- grass eaters (ie: zebra)
• Frugavores- fruit eaters (ie: flying foxes)
• Foliovores- leaf eaters (ie: koalas)
• Nectivores- nectar eaters (ie: hummingbirds)
• Palynivore- pollen eaters (ie: some insects)

Parasitism

parasitism is a symbiotic relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or in another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life. The entomologist E. O. Wilson has characterised parasites as "predators that eat prey in units of less than one". Parasites include protozoans such as the agents of malaria, sleeping sickness, and amoebic dysentery; animals such as hookworms, lice, mosquitoes, and vampire bats; fungi such as honey fungus and the agents of ringworm; and plants such as mistletoe, dodder, and the broomrapes. There are six major parasitic strategies of exploitation of animal hosts, namely parasitic castration, directly transmitted parasitism (by contact), trophically transmitted parasitism (by being eaten), vector-transmitted parasitism, parasitoidism, and micropredation.

Like predation, parasitism is a type of consumer-resource interaction, but unlike predators, parasites, with the exception of parasitoids, are typically much smaller than their hosts, do not kill them, and often live in or on their hosts for an extended period. Parasites of animals are highly specialised, and reproduce at a faster rate than their hosts. Classic examples include interactions between vertebrate hosts and tapeworms, flukes, the malaria-causing Plasmodium species, and fleas.

Parasites reduce host fitness by general or specialised pathology, from parasitic castration to modification of host behaviour. Parasites increase their own fitness by exploiting hosts for resources necessary for their survival, in particular by feeding on them and by using intermediate (secondary) hosts to assist in their transmission from one definitive (primary) host to another. Although parasitism is often unambiguous, it is part of a spectrum of interactions between species, grading via parasitoidism into predation, through evolution into mutualism, and in some fungi, shading into being saprophytic.

Eg flukes,fungi, mosquito

​​​​​​Parasitoids

They are organism that lives in close association with its host, at the host's expense and results in the death of the host. Parasitoidism is one of six major evolutionary strategies within parasitism, distinguished by the fatal prognosis for the host, which makes the strategy close to predation.

Among parasitoids, strategies range from living inside the host, allowing it to go on growing until the parasitoid emerges as an adult, to paralysing the host and living outside it. Hosts include other parasitoids, resulting in hyperparasitism; in the case of oak galls, up to five levels of parasitism are possible. Some parasitoids influence their host's behaviour in ways that favour the propagation of the parasitoid.

Parasitoids are found in a variety of taxa across the endopterygote insects, whose complete metamorphosis may have pre-adapted them for a split lifestyle, with parasitoid larvae and freeliving adults. Most are in the Hymenoptera, where the ichneumons and many other parasitoid wasps are highly specialised for a parasitoidal way of life. Other parasitoids are in the Diptera, Coleoptera and other orders of endopterygote insects. Some of these, usually but not only wasps, are used in biological pest control.

Eg Ichuneumon wasp,flies,beetles