What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the epic gardening podcast. I'm here with

Jessica Walliser. The bug, babe, I almost said the bug queen and the author of

the author of attracting beneficial bugs to your garden a natural approach to

pest control. So if you've been following along this week it's been an absolutely

fascinating week of episodes that is reprogramming and I think just going a little bit deeper into what we need to

consider when it comes to what we're doing in the garden. We're building an ecosystem. We're not just

growing food, we're not just growing flowers.

And part of that has to do with understanding something called the predator prey cycle.

So Jessica, can you just start off by kind of giving us the basic overview of what's happening in the

predator price cycle? Sure, so the predator price cycle is a natural cycle that occurs

in any undisturbed ecosystem around the world.

So we can take an example when I always give when I give my lectures

is of the Arctic lemmings.

So you know what a lemming is, right?

It's like this little rodent thing that lives in the in the Arctic, okay? So there's a lot of lemmings in a good year up in the Arctic, right? So let's say there's a lot of grasses and a lot of seeds and a lot of lichens available for them to eat and what do you think happens to the lemming population in those years?

They explode. It goes up, right, because there's a lot of resources available to those to lemmings and so they have more

pups per litter more of those litters survive to adulthood the lemmings are prey they are a

prey animal and prey animals have a reproductive cycle that's pretty fast, right?

So they reproduce at a faster rate than a predator animal would do.

And they have more babies per litter and they're just, you know, they're just more prolific let's say.

Okay, so up in the Arctic you have a good year for lemmings, right?

Well, one of the predators of the Arctic lemming is the Arctic fox.

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