Heron Shallow Water Lab (2D)

The 3D scene shows a heron hunting shallow water without exposing the mechanism behind it; this 2D lab makes that mechanism explicit and adjustable. A detection radius is computed each frame from two sliders through a Beer–Lambert style attenuation formula — higher turbidity and lower prey visibility both shrink how far a heron can actually spot a fish, and spotting itself is probabilistic rather than a hard cutoff, so fish near the edge of the radius are noticed far less reliably than ones close by. Once a heron spots a fish it computes a genuine intercept point from the fish's current position and velocity rather than chasing where the fish already was, closes the distance at a slow stalking speed, then attempts a strike whose success probability depends on how fast the fish is fleeing at that instant. Herons that go a while without a catch drain their energy budget and drop into a resting state until they recover. Drag the heron count, turbidity, prey-visibility and fish-density sliders and watch the hunt-success stats respond in real time.