Pursuit and Evasion Strategies in Zebrafish: Mathematical Modeling and Behavioral Experiments
Predator-prey interactions are important to the ecology and evolution of animals and have major implications for the behavioral and locomotor strategies they exhibit. They offer a system to study the strategies used by animals to pursue prey and evade predators from both a theoretical and experimental perspective. Here I have mathematically modeled the evasion strategy of prey fish, conducted experiments to assess the pursuit strategy of zebrafish, and developed a technique to investigate the biomechanics of fish locomotion during pursuit. My first dissertation chapter revisited the mathematics of a classic pursuit-evasion model and tested the predictions against empirical data on the escape response of larval zebrafish. The evasion strategy of prey in response to an approaching predator had been previously modeled and predicted an optimal escape direction based on the relative speed of the prey, but empirical results often failed to confirm the model predictions. I revisited and gener