The ecology of fear: optimal foraging, game theory, and trophic interactions

Brown, Laundre and Gurung laid the theoretical foundation for fear-driven predator-prey ecology, integrating optimal foraging theory and game theory to show how prey trade food intake against safety. They introduced the giving-up density concept as a measurable proxy for perceived predation risk and formalized how the costs of vigilance and apprehension propagate through food webs. The framework predicts that predators influence prey not only by killing them but by frightening them, with cascading effects on resource use. This synthesis became the conceptual engine behind the landscape-of-fear research program and is widely applied to felid systems, where stalking predators impose strong, spatially structured risk on foraging herbivores and smaller carnivores.