concept

Landscape of fear

A map of a habitat drawn not in food but in risk - how a predator reshapes where and how its prey can live, long before it catches anything. Prey that know a hunter stalks the open meadow avoid the open meadow, feeding in safer but worse ground, spending time watching that they could have spent eating, carrying a chronic dread that even suppresses breeding. On Pandora a sturmbeest herd shuns the dense forest edge where a thanator could wait, so the vegetation there grows untouched - shaped by a predator that never came, regrown because of a fear that was never tested. Often this fear moves more vegetation than the killing does.