10. Fourteen Security Lessons from Antipredator Behavior

Abstract

Knowledge is power, whether it creates new ways to control a situation, or whether it simply explains the biological basis of a situation. I believe that there are lessons about security that we can learn from the sheer diversity of ways that nonhumans avoid predation. I am a behavioral ecologist. Behavioral ecologists adopt an economic approach when we study animals in natural settings to understand the evolution, diversity, and maintenance of behavior. We expect that costly behaviors will be selected against, unless there are overwhelming benefits associated with them. We expect animals will make fundamental trade-offs in how they allocate time and energy, and that over evolutionary time those that make the proper trade-offs will persist, while others will go extinct. Below I derive 14 lessons from the study of antipredator behavior that are relevant to designing security systems to manage terrorist threats, dealing with insurgencies, as well as managing ongoing biosecurity challenges. We can make sense of the diversity of antipredator behavior several ways. One useful way focuses on the predatory sequence (Endler 1986; Caro 2005). Predators encounter potential prey and must identify them as suitable. Then, they must approach and attack the prey, prevent them from escaping, and consume them. Antipredator defenses may work at any of these steps. With this predatory sequence in mind, we can examine the interactions between predators and prey. For instance, prey should engage in behaviors that reduce detection by predators: they should be cryptic, or active at times when predators are not around. Prey may engage in group defenses. A commonly hypothesized benefit of sociality is to reduce the risk of predation by either increasing the ability of prey to detect predators, or simply spreading the risk among more individuals (Krause and Ruxton 2002). Once detected, prey should make themselves less profitable to predators. Increasing the cost of attacking or handling