How to Use prey in a Sentence

prey

1 of 2 noun

• The seals are easy prey for sharks.
• The lion stalked its prey.
• The bird circled above looking for prey.
• Too often elderly people are easy prey for swindlers and other criminals.
• The former prey required twice the force for crabs to crack open with their claws than the latter.
  — WIRED, 8 Nov. 2023
• Groups of whales swim in a circle around their prey … and blow bubbles.
  — Laura Helmuth, Scientific American, 1 Apr. 2023
• Stand up straight to not look like prey, the park service stated, and keep eye contact with the cougar.
  — Hanh Truong, Sacramento Bee, 23 Mar. 2024
• The best way to avoid falling prey to such a scam is to avoid giving money over the phone or through an email.
  — Daniel Neman, Anchorage Daily News, 17 July 2023
• The web’s stiff frame absorbs the impact of the prey before it is trapped by the sticky lines so that the spider can tackle its food.
  — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 18 Apr. 2023
• When whales evolved, Churchill points out, the oceans were not as productive and full of fishy prey as in more recent times.
  — Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 20 Mar. 2024
• Who needs a movie that is almost all predators, with barely a word from their prey?
  — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 15 Sep. 2023
• Deer, bears and rabbits lived among the pines and aspens, and eagles soared above, hunting for prey.
  — Deon J. Hampton, NBC News, 26 Mar. 2023
• The Spinosaurus was semiaquatic, hunting prey in rivers.
  — Vivian La, Chicago Tribune, 4 June 2023
• Bald eagles soar overhead and ospreys dive to prey on fish.
  — Bennet Goldstein, Journal Sentinel, 21 Mar. 2023
• With 40-50 enormous, sharp teeth and a double-hinged jaw, Mosasaurus could open its mouth wide enough to swallow its prey whole.
  — Allison Futterman, Discover Magazine, 8 Sep. 2023
• Adults overwinter in leaf litter and emerge in spring to devour prey.
  — Rita Perwich, San Diego Union-Tribune, 1 July 2023
• The boas will stalk or wait to strike their prey with their jaws, constricting their bodies around the prey and squeezing to ensure death.
  — Elizabeth Gamillo, Discover Magazine, 30 Nov. 2023
• The female spiders will hunt down prey and then share it with their spiderlings.
  — Jason Bittel, National Geographic, 22 Jan. 2024
• As the Tyrannosaurus rex once hunted its prey, so controversy now stalks the trade in its bones.
  — Lucy Alexander, Robb Report, 16 July 2023
• Sperm whales send out clicks and creaks, which bounce off of prey, allowing the whales to detect their dinner at a distance.
  — Sam Walters, Discover Magazine, 17 Oct. 2023
• The fish tempt prey with bioluminescent bacteria that live in the tip of the lure.
  — Elizabeth Anne Brown, New York Times, 22 Nov. 2023
• In that year, declining numbers of their fish prey led to only about a quarter of the birds fledging chicks.
  — Margaret Osborne, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 Sep. 2023
• Like bats, the dolphins use echolocation to forage for prey in the cloudy waters of the Orinoco and Amazon River basins.
  — Elizabeth Gamillo, Discover Magazine, 4 Aug. 2023
• One is the array of senses that a shark uses against its potential prey.
  — Ian Rose, Discover Magazine, 28 Mar. 2023
• Anything not nailed down in America, along with quite a bit that is, becomes prey.
  — David Streitfeld, New York Times, 13 Apr. 2023
• As waters off the northeast coast warm up, both whales and their prey are migrating to new regions.
  — Reader Commentary, Baltimore Sun, 1 Feb. 2024
• Buffalo are larger and risky prey for lions to take on.
  — Popular Science, 25 Jan. 2024
• It’s suspected the motives include warmer water to the south and better prey.
  — Mark Price, Miami Herald, 25 Jan. 2024
• But Sunday was not a great game for Jackson, who fell prey to a strip sack in the first half and was intercepted in the end zone in the fourth quarter.
  — Sam Farmer, Los Angeles Times, 28 Jan. 2024
• The organ looks like a gap in the scales covered by a membrane and allows the snakes to triangulate the location of possible prey, even in the dark, the museum says.
  — Irene Wright, Miami Herald, 5 Apr. 2024

Advertisement

prey

2 of 2 verb

• They’ve been known to scale or dig beneath fences to prey on pets.
  — Alex Wigglesworth, Los Angeles Times, 11 Mar. 2024
• This is due to that area's seal population, which the sharks prey on.
  — Ronn Blitzer, Fox News, 30 June 2022
• Hawks and owls prey on rodents bounding across grassy slopes.
  — Louis Sahagún, Los Angeles Times, 27 Feb. 2024
• On its website, the FBI reminds teens that scammers prey on their fear.
  — Faith Karimi, CNN, 13 May 2023
• Chaplin was not a libertine in the sense of a man who sleeps around or who preys on women.
  — Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 13 Nov. 2023
• And cats tend to prey on weak birds that probably would have died anyway.
  — Avery Hurt, Discover Magazine, 5 July 2022
• The large salamander mainly preys on crayfish, so the team made sure there were plenty in the area.
  — The Indianapolis Star, 17 Aug. 2023
• The rat snakes are common in Texas and usually prey on chicken eggs.
  — Brenton Blanchet, Peoplemag, 14 Apr. 2023
• The pileup of issues is a concern likely to prey on the minds of Twitter’s investors.
  — Wired, 12 July 2022
• Not so long ago, most ranchers kept a pack of dogs to deal with the mountain lions that preyed on their livestock.
  — Bill Heavey, Field & Stream, 1 Feb. 2024
• Of the species humans prey on, almost 40 percent are threatened.
  — Emily Harwitz, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 July 2023
• That’s because there are so many animals that prey on smolts.
  — oregonlive, 27 Aug. 2023
• High transaction fees add to worries that they can be used to prey on poor people.
  — Amrith Ramkumar, WSJ, 25 Aug. 2022
• It’s what moves her to prey on the circling vultures trying to take her family’s land.
  — Daron James, Los Angeles Times, 15 June 2022
• The true enemy is weight-loss schemes, which are designed to prey on women and, by proxy, their daughters.
  — Danielle Sinay, Glamour, 7 Oct. 2022
• Once the parasite decides to prey on your dog, the substance activates in its body.
  — Laxmi Corp, The Salt Lake Tribune, 12 July 2022
• The deer caught on camera likely had been swimming for its life, as gators have been known to prey on them and smaller mammals.
  — Simone Jasper The Charlotte Observer (tns), al, 4 May 2023
• These arthropods are more likely to prey on ticks when they are fully engorged with blood.
  — Paul Richards, Field & Stream, 9 Nov. 2023
• There is no reason this person should ever be set free again to prey on others.
  — Greg Wehner, Fox News, 12 Mar. 2024
• But overall the new research found that only about half of the species humans prey on end up being eaten.
  — Lesley Evans Ogden, Scientific American, 29 June 2023
• Birds prey on dragonflies, but Burne said he’s also seen fish jump out of the water and take dragonflies from the air.
  — Don Lyman, BostonGlobe.com, 10 Aug. 2022
• Serial killers were preying on teenagers in their summer camps, in their dreams.
  — Louis Bayard, Washington Post, 19 Aug. 2023
• Each of those initial five episodes is preying on a different kind of fear people might have.
  — Abbey White, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 Oct. 2023
• Now he and his allies in this effort on the Hill speak of the platforms themselves as preying on children’s well-being.
  — Melissa Gira Grant, The New Republic, 2 Aug. 2023
• That's when fisheries managers began to stock non-native predator fish in Lake Michigan to prey on the alewives.
  — Paul A. Smith, Journal Sentinel, 8 June 2022
• When not preying on Dolores, Humbert Humbert is a poet and a wit.
  — S. C. Cornell, The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2023
• In Knight’s retelling, Pip learns that few fortunes are made without preying on the misfortune of others.
  — Inkoo Kang, The New Yorker, 26 Mar. 2023
• Davis said serial killers tend to prey on people on the margins of society.
  — Aria Jones, Dallas News, 21 July 2023
• But wolves prey on fawns at shockingly higher rates in these areas compared to elsewhere, the study shows.
  — Katie Hill, Outdoor Life, 1 Nov. 2023
• Even with their impressive length, Fraser says that the larger ichthyosaurs of the era — massive marine reptiles that once ruled the seas — may have preyed on Dinocephalosaurus.
  — Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 20 Mar. 2024

Last Updated: 5 Sep 2024