Generation Time Ratios Determinants of Prey Abundance in Insect Predator-Prey Interactions

The potential fitness of an adult insect predator depends mainly on the future trends in resource availability throughout the period of development of its larvae, because they, unlike the adult, are confined to a patch. Thus, adult oviposition strategy is likely to be determined by the bottlenecks in resources that occur during the period of its offspringsʹ development. Therefore, the longer the developmental time of a predator, the smaller the degree of depletion of the patch by that predator species. As a consequence, the relative "efficiency" of predators as biological control agents is negatively correlated with their generation time relativetothatoftheirprey. biological control