Review highlights the trade-offs of predation and parasite infection on food intake and behaviors in prey species, implying ecological interactions shape adaptive strategies.
By living in a landscape of fear, prey species modify their spatial distribution, behaviour, and diet to reduce predation risk, while often compromising food intake. These non-lethal effects often outweigh the lethal effects of predation on prey species. Parasites can have similar effects on their animal hosts, so hosts need to trade-off e.g. resource usage and infection risk in a landscape of disgust. Given these similarities between prey-predator systems and host-parasite systems, we review recent insights from the concepts of the landscape of fear and disgust (combined in a landscape of peril) and suggest novel applications and testable hypotheses for disease ecology. The adaptive behaviours of hosts to avoid parasite infection leads to new predictions for how parasites and predators influence the distribution, behaviour and food intake of animals.
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Boer et al. (2025) studied this question.
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