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Related Concept Videos

Parental Care

Parental Care

Many animals exhibit parental care behavior, including feeding, grooming, and protecting young offspring. Parental care is universal in mammals and birds, which often have young that are born relatively helpless. Several species of insects and fish, as well as some amphibians, also care for their young.

Optimal Foraging

Optimal Foraging

How animals obtain and eat their food is called foraging behavior. Foraging can include searching for plants and hunting for prey and depends on the species and environment.

Predator-Prey Interactions

Predator-Prey Interactions

Predators consume prey for energy. Predators that acquire prey and prey that avoid predation both increase their chances of survival and reproduction (i.e., fitness). Routine predator-prey interactions elicit mutual adaptations that improve predator offenses, such as claws, teeth, and speed, as well as prey defenses, including crypsis, aposematism, and mimicry. Thus, predator-prey interactions resemble an evolutionary arms race.

Population Growth

Population Growth

Population size is dynamic, increasing with birth rates and immigration, and decreasing with death rates and emigration. In ideal conditions with unlimited resources, populations can increase exponentially, which plots as a J-shaped growth rate curve of population size against time. This type of curve is characteristic of newly-introduced invasive species, or populations that have suffered catastrophic declines and are rebounding.

Energy Budgets

Energy Budgets

Organisms must balance energy intake with the energy required for growth, maintenance and reproduction. These trade-offs result in a variety of survivorship and reproductive strategies, including semelparity and iteroparity. Semelparous species, like annual plants, have only one reproductive episode in their lifetimes and consequently have short lifespans. Iteroparous species, by contrast, have many reproductive events during their lifetimes but have relatively few offspring. These two...

What are Populations and Communities?

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jan 9, 2026

Assaying Predatory Feeding Behaviors in Pristionchus and Other Nematodes

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Published on: September 4, 2016

Parental Provisioning in an Urban Apex Predator.

Edward J A Drewitt¹, Brandon Mak², Innes C Cuthill¹

¹School of Biological Sciences University of Bristol Bristol UK.

Ecology and Evolution

|December 8, 2025

Summary

Urban peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) show changing prey delivery as nestlings grow, with larger prey offered later in development. Surprisingly, total food mass didn't vary with brood size.

Keywords:

breeding ecology citizen science parental care prey choice urban wildlife

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Published on: August 8, 2017

Area of Science:

Ornithology
Urban Ecology
Animal Behaviour

Background:

Peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) have adapted to urban environments.
Understanding parental care is crucial for urban wildlife conservation.
Technological advancements offer new avenues for wildlife research.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate parental care strategies in urban peregrine falcons.
To quantify prey composition and delivery rates during nestling development.
To assess the influence of brood size on food provisioning.

Main Methods:

Utilized high-definition webcams across 30 sites in England (2019-2023).
Employed citizen science for data collection and analysis.
Quantified prey types and delivery frequency using video footage.

Main Results:

Common starlings and pigeons were primary prey, with larger prey (pigeons) increasingly delivered as nestlings aged.
Prey delivery rates peaked at 9-12 days old, then declined.
Total food mass and energy supplied did not significantly vary with brood size.

Conclusions:

Urban peregrine parental care is flexible regarding prey type but not total food quantity.
Citizen science and webcam technology are effective tools for studying urban wildlife.
Findings offer insights into the breeding ecology of urban-adapted raptors.