Disturbingly, no, you have a university lecturer writing the paper. But as I said, it's not a real physics paper at all, it's aimed at the general public, so they're trying for easy to understand rather than accurate. Not that physics lecturers would know much about modelling predators anyway.

And yes, yes we do. Given how much maths seems to based off other people's unpublished research they told you about in the pub(*), I think reading submitted-but-not-reviewed papers is a step up :)

(*)For example, one of my examiners complained that I hadn't mentioned one of the two seminal papers on a particular area in my lit review. When I asked him for a reference (since he was, coincidentally, the author) he thought about it for a while and remembered that while it's been well known for a decade and everyone refers to it, he still hadn't gotten around to publishing it.