What makes an organism become a predator or prey?
This is all a question of perspective. Many organisms are predator and prey at the same time. A bass eats a minnow and is thus a predator, but the bass is eaten by an osprey or a human and is thus also prey. There are only a few organisms at the very bottom of the food chain (like plants) that are almost exclusively prey, and a very few organisms at the top of the food chain (like humans, lions, and osprey) that are primarily predators and rarely prey. Biochemically, most organisms are actually very similar, with the exception of those organisms that are only prey and have specializations for making their own food from inorganic sources (for example, photosynthesis and chemosynthesis). When life first formed, all organisms that existed could make all the nutrients they needed by some sort of autotrophy (photosynthesis is an example of autotrophy). However, some organisms found that they could do better by taking the molecules that other organisms produced (by eating them) rather than m
