Spatiotemporal interactions of predators and prey of a neotropical
mammal community in southern Mexico
Abstract
Predator-prey interactions are one of the central themes in ecology due
to their importance as a key mechanism in structuring biotic
communities. In the predator-prey systems, the no-trophic interactions,
such as persecution and avoidance, have more impact on ecosystems than
the trophic ones. We analyze the spatiotemporal relations between prey
and predators of a community of medium and large-size mammals in a
tropical region. We analyzed time data series of camera-trap data. The
observed data of time lags among occurrences of pairs of species were
compared with random data using the Bootstrap method. We generate a
network of co-occurrences to describe the significant spatiotemporal
patterns between predators and prey and used the kernel density
estimator to analyze the overlap of daily activity patterns themy. We
found 26 predator-prey interactions (p<0.05), which involved
14 species. The results suggest that prey perceives the risk of
predation and display avoidance behavior both spatially and temporally
which is consistent with fear theory. Predators may be deploying
opportunistic and / or intermittent foraging strategies to reduce prey
mobility caused by previous predation encounters. This study provides a
new approach to understand the interactions between predators and prey
through camera-trapping or similar data of spatiotemporal
co-occurrences.