thumb|Raccoons and [[skunks are common examples of mesopredators. Pictured are a common raccoon and a striped skunk eating cat food in an urban area.]] A mesopredator is a predator that occupies a mid-ranking trophic level in a food web, , typically preying on smaller animals who are lower-level consumers. There is no standard definition of a mesopredator, but mesopredators are usually medium-sized carnivorous or omnivorous animals such as mustelids (e.g. raccoons, otters, martens and weasels), canines (e.g. foxes and coyotes) or felines (e.g. cats, lynxes, ocelots and the cheetah), often defi
thumb|Raccoons and [[skunks are common examples of mesopredators. Pictured are a common raccoon and a striped skunk eating cat food in an urban area.]] A mesopredator is a predator that occupies a mid-ranking trophic level in a food web, , typically preying on smaller animals who are lower-level consumers. There is no standard definition of a mesopredator, but mesopredators are usually medium-sized carnivorous or omnivorous animals such as mustelids (e.g. raccoons, otters, martens and weasels), canines (e.g. foxes and coyotes) or felines (e.g. cats, lynxes, ocelots and the cheetah), often defined by contrast from the apex predators of a particular food web.
Mesopredators vary across different ecosystems. Sometimes, the same species is a mesopredator in one ecosystem but an apex predator in another ecosystem, depending on the biodiversity composition of the ecosystem and the presence of larger predators. When new species are introduced into an ecosystem, the role of the mesopredator often changes; this can also happen if species are removed.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).