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Different apex predators may share the same resources in a given environment. For instance, the grey wolf and the brown bear are predators of ungulates in North America and Europe. Tallian et al. evaluated a long dataset to understand how the presence of bears affects the killing rate of wolves and found that the time between consecutive kills made by wolves increased in the presence of bears, in both sites. The authors suggest some mechanisms to explain this:

• bears reduce densities of neonate ungulates (i.e. exploitative competition)
• wolves take longer between kills by attacking larger preys or by feeding on usurped kills under bears' presence (i.e. interference competition and/or kleptoparasitism)

© Stan Tekiela

Think about the balance of exploitative and interference competition between bears and wolves. Are there only negative effects of bears to wolves’ kills? Is it possible one competitor to have a positive effect on the other competitor? How bears can increase the feeding rate of wolves? Think about considering the handling time differences in the absence and presence of bears.

Propose a simple mathematical model to describe the coupled dynamics of populations of wolfs and bears. Your model should help to explore the questions above.

The authors suggest that the presence of both predators possibly impact prey less than the sum of their individual impacts. How does including prey's population dynamics explicitly can account for that effect? How the sympatric populations of predators affect differently from the predictions of the sum of allopatric populations?

Competition between apex predators? Brown bears decrease wolf kill rate on two continents. Tallian et al. 2017. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 284: 20162368.http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royprsb/284/1848/20162368.full.pdf