A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
predator
A predator is an animal that kills other animals for food. Ecologists use the word more broadly than ordinary speech does: a shrew, a ladybird, a dragonfly nymph, and a whelk are all predators, and the term covers anything that consumes prey rather than only the large charismatic hunters. The relationship is one of the central organizing forces in any community, and it shapes prey behavior far more than it shapes prey numbers.
Etymology
The word is Latin for a plunderer or one who takes booty, built on a verb meaning to seize, and it arrived in English in the sixteenth century applied to people who robbed. It was borrowed into ecology much later. The Latin root also gives prey and depredation.
Notes
The effect of a predator on a landscape often runs through fear rather than through killing. Grazers avoid places where they are vulnerable, so vegetation recovers there whether or not the predator ever hunts that spot, which is the argument behind ecology of fear. Sea otters and urchins, in the lexicon under otter, are the clearest worked example of a predator determining what an entire habitat looks like.