Using humans as both hunters and hunted, the game aims to demystify ecological data.
The predator was closing in and the prey had to make a potentially life-changing choice: find food or flee?
This prey was the ecologist David Bolduc. And he was one of many other researchers working in a forest in the Canadian province of Quebec, just trying to stay alive.
“It’s so much fun,” he said.
Bolduc, of Laval University in Quebec, was one of the players in a game designed to explore predator-prey behavior in nature, but with humans instead of animals. And by following a few basic rules, players indeed made decisions similar to those of animalsBolduc and his colleagues reported on November 17 in Methods in ecology and evolution.
Alluding to the position of animals in a food chain, the game Trophic Interactions Experiment, or TrophIE, began as a summer school project in 2023 to teach advanced techniques for analyzing large data sets.
“The game has become a sort of intermediary” between mathematical models of ecosystems and field studies, explains biologist Frédéric Dulude-de Broin, also at Laval University. “We could have a lot of realism, have real players operating in a real landscape, while controlling many parameters and being able to measure everything.”
The researchers organized nine 30-minute matches, each involving between 23 and 31 players, in a park located about 2 hours north of Montreal. Players took on the roles of prey, mesopredator (an animal that preys on smaller animals), and apex predator, each identified by the color of their shirt. The prey’s goals were to find food and mates – not to “die.” Mesopredators had to hunt but not be captured by apex predators, and apex predators had to to hunt both prey and mesopredators. The team tracked each player with GPS.
“To achieve this with animals, you have to capture both predators and prey and hope that they interact,” Bolduc explains. But with the game, “you have the entire population [of animals]which is quite difficult to achieve in the field, if not impossible.
Players were also able to describe what they felt, saw and heard – like the sounds of footsteps on leaves – that cannot be achieved by an animal. Much like wild animals, players preferred areas they already knew, prey players avoided the more exposed and risky main trails, as well as safety and competition. dictated what they chose to do.
And even if the players followed the rules, there were some interesting interpretations that the researchers hadn’t thought of, like prey players staying in a designated safe haven and calling for mates.
The authors note that playing for fun and for research are not the same thing like a wild animal surviving in the wildsomething echoed by Liana Zanette, a wildlife ecologist at Western University in London, Canada. But, she said, TrophIE seems to be a great learning tool for students.
“It’s really great for this purpose,” says Zanette. There is nothing more concrete than choosing certain criteria and asking students to put them into practice, she adds. But, she cautions, any findings from a TrophIE game need to be supported by an experiment that manipulates different factors using real wild animals in the wild.
By the end of the games, the players’ enthusiasm was evident, with frenzied discussions between prey and predators about what they had experienced, says Bolduc. “These are things we read about, but really feeling them unlocks another part of your brain.”