Tonically immobilized selfish prey can survive by sacrificing others
@article{Miyatake2009TonicallyIS, title={Tonically immobilized selfish prey can survive by sacrificing others}, author={Takahisa Miyatake and Satoshi Nakayama and Yusuke Nishi and Shuhei Nakajima}, journal={Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences}, year={2009}, volume={276}, pages={2763 - 2767} }
Death-feigning, also called tonic immobility, is found in a number of animal species across vertebrate and invertebrate taxa. To date, five hypotheses have been proposed for the adaptive significance of tonic immobility. These are that tonic immobility is effective for prey because (i) avoiding dead prey is safer for predators, (ii) immobility plays a role in physical defence, (iii) immobility plays a role in concealment and/or background matching, (iv) predators lose interest in unmoving prey…
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