Definition

Predation is when one animal hunts, kills, and eats another, the predator taking the prey, as when a hawk swoops on a mouse or a shark catches a seal, and predators are not villains, since by eating the sick and the slow they keep prey populations healthy and stop them from exhausting their own food supply. More formally, predation is a biological interaction in which a predator captures, kills, and consumes its prey, a major ecological force that regulates prey population size while prey in turn limits predator numbers, driving an evolutionary arms race of adaptations such as speed, camouflage, venom, warning colors, and mimicry; herbivory and parasitism are related but distinct interactions. At the dynamical level, predation is a consumer-resource interaction distinguished from parasitism and most herbivory by the resource individual's death, modeled by the Lotka-Volterra equations $\frac{dN}{dt} = rN - aNP$ and $\frac{dP}{dt} = baNP - mP$, which predict coupled oscillations and can be extended with functional responses describing how kill rate saturates with prey density; predators drive coevolutionary defenses such as crypsis, aposematism, and mimicry along with counter-adaptations in predators, top predators can trigger trophic cascades, and predation risk alone shapes prey foraging and habitat use even without a kill.