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Chapter 10 FOURTEEN SECURITY LESSONS FROM ANTIPREDATOR BEHAVIOR DANIEL T. BLUMSTEIN Knowledge is power, whether it creates new ways to control a situation, or whether it simply explains the biological basis of a situation. I believe that there are lessons about security that we can learn from the sheer diversity of ways that nonhumans avoid predation. I am a behavioral ecologist. Behavioral ecologists adopt an economic approach when we study animals in natural settings to understand the evolution, diversity, and maintenance of behavior. We expect that costly behaviors will be selected against, unless there are overwhelming benefits associated with them. We expect animals will make fundamental trade-offs in how they allocate time and energy, and that over evolutionary time those that make the proper trade-offs will persist , while others will go extinct. Below I derive 14 lessons from the study of antipredator behavior that are relevant to designing security systems to manage terrorist threats, dealing with insurgencies, as well as managing ongoing biosecurity challenges. We can make sense of the diversity of antipredator behavior several ways. One useful way focuses on the predatory sequence (Endler 1986; Caro 2005). Predators encounter potential prey and must identify them as suitable. Then, they must approach and attack the prey, prevent them from escaping, and consume them. Antipredator defenses may work at any of these steps. With this predatory sequence in mind, we can examine the interactions between predators and prey. For instance, prey should engage in behaviors that reduce detection by predators: they should be cryptic, or active at times when predators are not around. Prey may engage in group defenses. A commonly hypothesized benefit of sociality is to reduce the risk of predation by either increasing the ability of prey to detect predators, or simply spreading the risk among more individuals (Krause and Ruxton 2002). Once detected, prey should make themselves less profitable to predators. Increasing the cost of attacking or handling 147 prey is an effective means to decrease profitability (Krebs and Davies 1993). For instance, many species have spines or other defensive structures . Remember, from the predator’s perspective, it is looking for a meal, so the economics of handling a difficult prey will reduce the prey’s profitability . Prey may also communicate to predators that they have been detected (Blumstein 2007). Such detection signaling works when predators require stealth for success. When a prey signals that it has identified a predator, the predator’s hunting success has just been massively decreased. Prey may gang up and attack a predator. Such mobbing is common in a variety of species, and it often successfully moves the predator away from a particular location. Individually fighting a predator, or fleeing from a predator is an action of last resort. Flight is both energetically costly and involves an opportunity cost in that animals must stop what they have already been engaged in. Fighting is risky and therefore something that should be avoided at all costs. A common behavioral ecological paradigm envisions individuals trading off the probability of starvation versus the probability of predation (Mangel and Clark 1988). Imagine a refuging rodent, for example, a kangaroo rat that lives in the desert, or a marmot in an alpine meadow. It lives in a burrow but must come out to forage. If it remains in its safe burrow, it will ultimately starve to death. If it emerges, it faces some risk of predation. Our first lesson is that avoiding all risk is impossible. Virtually all animals must live with some risk of predation at some point in their lives. What cues should they use to assess risk? How should they modify their foraging behavior based on these cues? Animals may use direct or indirect cues of risk. Direct cues are those by which individuals detect a predator. Indirect cues are those where there is some probabilistic relationship with predation. For instance, if predators hide in dense cover, avoiding dense cover might be an effective way to avoid predation. Regardless of whether they are direct or indirect, all cues vary in their reliability. For instance, if a predator is sighted, the prey knows that it is around, whereas if the scent of a predator is detected, the predator may be around now, or it may have been around at some previous time. Thus, prey often face the problem of estimating the reliability of a particular cue or situation. Our second lesson is that overestimating risk is a good strategy in...

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