Balance of terror: an alternative mechanism for competitive trade-offs and its implications for invading species

This article uses models to propose an explanation for three observations in community ecology: the apparent overreaction of prey to attack by specialist predators, the existence of a common trade-off among components of competitive ability in communities of unrelated competitors, and the ability of invading species to break the native trade-off. Strategies that increase resource collection ability are assumed to increase vulnerability to attack by specialist consumers according to a vulnerability function.