{"id":101082,"date":"2019-03-05T07:01:01","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T15:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=101082"},"modified":"2019-05-07T06:50:05","modified_gmt":"2019-05-07T13:50:05","slug":"20190305-01","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20190305-01\/?p=101082","title":{"rendered":"Predator-prey reversal: Rock lobsters vs whelks on Malgas Island and Marcus Island"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Malgas Island is dominated by rock lobsters, who happily feast upon whelks. Just 4km away, Marcus Island is dominated by whelks, not a rock lobster to be found. Researcher Amos Barkai couldn&#8217;t figure out what kept rock lobsters out of Marcus Island. The water conditions are the same, the weather is the same, the geography is the same. When a cage is used to exclude lobsters from a region of Malgas Island, whelks thrive. When they put a few lobsters in a cage and introduced them to Marcus Island, the lobsters survived just fine. <\/p>\n<p>Barkai undertook what he admitted was &#8220;a very naive and not really well thought out idea&#8221;: He introduced 1000 lobsters into Marcus Island to see what happened. <\/p>\n<p>The result was &#8220;like a horror movie&#8221;, but perhaps not in the way you expect. <\/p>\n<p>The lobsters did not feast upon the whelks. <i>The whelks feasted upon the lobsters<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p><a HREF=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/science-sushi\/2018\/08\/27\/predator-prey-reversal-whelk-lobster-amos-barkai\/\">When Snails Attack: The Epic Discovery Of An Ecological Phenomenon<\/a>. Includes pictures and video of the carnage, as well as a discussion of how the two islands evolved towards different equilibria. <\/p>\n<p>Barkai&#8217;s resulting paper was the first documented case of <i>predator-prey reversal<\/i>, evidence of a then-controversial theory that an ecosystem could have multiple stable configurations. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Multiple stable configurations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-101082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Multiple stable configurations.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}