After the Didinium have eaten all the Paramecium , they have no other food source. However, in nature the lynx can eat many other foods besides hares. If the number of hares drops, the lynx adjusts its diet. Another difference between the flask and the natural world is that the prey has places to hide - refuges. Hares may hide in their burrows or camouflage themselves against the landscape.
Snowshoe hares are particularly good at camouflage.
Their fur becomes white in the winter, blending in with the snow. In spring their fur is beige, blending with the brush. In contrast, the Paramecium has no place to hide in the flask. Thus Gause' results indicate that predator and prey limit one another. These results, developed in an environment in which only one factor differed between the experiment and control, give us more confidence that the predator-prey cycling seen in the Hudson Bay data represents a real phenomenon.