Antipredator Behavior Lessons

This weeks topic is about something that we found most compelling, so for that I chose the chapter that talks about Anti-predator Behavior. I personally just found that the connections they made from the animal world in terms of predation to our human world were right on point and interesting. For example the first one they mention is that "avoiding risk is impossible" (pg 148). This goes hand in hand with our national security in saying that risk and disaster is basically inevitable, although the next step says that "overestimating risk is a good strategy to prevent it" from happening. Some of the other lessons to be learned are as follows: avoiding risk by limiting your exposure for risky areas or situations, detection of risk is a good way to deter predators, its important to assess people sending signals about risks/predators, there can be different responses, studying and knowing the predator can greatly improve chances, reduce defenses when risk decreases, have generalizes defenses that work against more than one threat, unless there is a great cost to maintain a defense it may be a good idea to maintain all of them, to expect habituation when there are multiple false alarms, and finally maintaining flexible responses is a good idea (pg 148-152). With these in mind I feel like they've addressed ways in which the security can improve and help both the defenses of our national security as well as the economic aspect of our nations. 

When you look at these one of the main points of advice it seems to give is to keep defenses high when you know you need them, keep the defenses varied so that no one can predict how you will  react and they cannot get around them, and lastly to be wise as to how much cost you are putting into the defenses. All of these things would be extremely helpful with our natural security and what amazed me is how they are such common thoughts to me and yet we do usually apply them to our world. To me it shows the great connection that the human world really has to the animal world. After all are we not animals ourselves? Like the book had said completely avoiding risk is impossible so that expectation needs to be realized by people and thrown out the window, but what we can do is improve them enough to make it hard or next to impossible for anyone to bypass our security. And more importantly for our country right now the entire cost aspect needs to be taken into account, too often countries go into massive debts due to paying costly by maintaining and using extra defense forces for things they do not need. So if there is no use you must cut it out until you need it again.

In terms of what this passage, or more or less this book has taught me it is that the main way for us as humans to better defend ourselves from each other and from other organisms is to do this by evolving through adaptation. On several accounts in this book and this passage the main way in which an organisms evolves its defenses or anything else is by having something happen to them and then adapting the way in which they were defending before. By doing this they learn from the past mistake and change it to better prepare them for the future. In some cases, more for animals than us, if a there is something a specific type of species is doing that gets them killed versus a different one that survives all of that species will eventually change to follow the successful path of the survivor. This also ties in with humans, for example when something happens to other countries around the world we take into account what happened and we try to add something to our defense in order to prevent what happened to them.