Developing Visual Foraging Models as a Framework for Predicting Predation Risk, Foraging Success, and Distribution in Pelagic Communities

Declining light and increasing turbidity reduce reaction distances, search volumes, and prey encounters at disproportionately higher rates for piscivores than for planktivores.  However, given a predator-prey encounter, capture success for piscivores improves in degraded optical conditions.  These asymmetric threshold responses interact with vertical light gradients, seasonal and inter-basin differences in productivity, thermal stratification and other processes to create complex spatial-temporal patterns of distribution, foraging success, and predation risk. These differential effects on foraging success and risk can provide a mechanistic framework for predictions about distribution, feeding, growth and survival of planktivores and piscivores across a range of optical conditions or productivity gradients.