Why predators boom after the prey do: Lotka–Volterra and the Adriatic fish puzzle
30seconds
After the First World War, an Italian biologist noticed something odd in Adriatic fish catches: with less fishing, the share of predators had gone up, not down. Vito Volterra explained it in 1926 with two simple rules, prey multiply and predators eat them, and the same equations had been written down earlier by Alfred Lotka.
Drag the dot around a live map of predators and prey and watch the endless chase cycle, then turn up the fishing and see why netting both species helps the prey and hurts the predators.
Deep dive · 4 min
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