The risk of consumption is a pervasive aspect of ecology and recent work has focused on synthesis of consumer–resource interactions (e.g., enemy–victim ecology). Despite this, theories pertaining to the timing and magnitude of defenses in animals and plants have largely developed independently. However, both animals and plants share the common dilemma of uncertainty of attack, can gather information from the environment to predict future attacks and alter their defensive investment accordingly. Here, we present a novel, unifying framework based on the way an organism’s ability to defend itself during an attack can shape their pre-attack investment in defense. This framework provides a useful perspective on the nature of information use and variation in defensive investment across the sequence of attack-related events, both within and among species. It predicts that organisms with greater proportional fitness loss if attacked will gather and respond to risk information earlier in the attack sequence, while those that have lower proportional fitness loss may wait until attack is underway. This framework offers a common platform to compare and discuss consumer effects and provides novel insights into the way risk information can propagate through populations, communities, and ecosystems.

消费的风险是生态学的一个普遍方面，最近的工作集中在消费者与资源之间的相互作用的综合（例如，敌对受害者生态学）上。尽管如此，有关动植物防御的时机和防御程度的理论在很大程度上是独立发展的。然而，动植物都有共同的进攻不确定性困境，可以从环境中收集信息以预测未来的进攻并相应地改变其防御性投资。在这里，我们提出了一个新颖的，统一的框架，该框架基于生物体在攻击过程中进行自我防御的能力可以影响攻击前的防御投入的方式。该框架为物种内部和物种之间一系列与攻击相关的事件提供了信息使用和防御投资变化的性质的有用视角。它预测，如果遭受攻击，则比例适应度丧失较大的生物体会在攻击序列中较早地聚集并响应风险信息，而具有较低的比例适应度损失的生物体可能会等到攻击进行。该框架提供了一个比较和讨论消费者影响的通用平台，并提供了有关风险信息如何通过人群，社区和生态系统传播的新颖见解。