What’s your move? The ecological influence of personality-dependent space-use patterns in animals
In ecology we often try to answer questions about the processes that determine population dynamics, and interactions between individuals within or between species (e.g., competition for resources and predator – prey dynamics, respectively). The way animals move and use their surrounding is fundamental to many of these processes, with movements scaling up from local searches within a foraging bout, through the home ranges they maintain, to their lifetime tracks.
Individuals may differ in their behaviors, and show consistently different responses in various contexts. These differences (e.g. in boldness in a risky habitat or in aggressiveness to conspecifics) are often termed ‘behavioral types’ or ‘animal personalities’. It is well known that animals of different personalities may also differ in their tendency to disperse from their natal area. Yet, although for many species dispersal is the longest movement they will do, it is typically also very short with respect to the animal’s life. We know less about how individuals with different personalities differ in other movements, or how such differences affect ecological processes. For instance, understanding these topics better can provide insights into disease spread (e.g., who are the superspreaders? Do they move differently?).
In this study we propose a conceptual framework to address these broader questions, and develop a set of simulation models to demonstrate the carry over effect of individual variation in space-use. We argue that individuals with different personalities also differ consistently in other aspects of their movement (e.g., in foraging) due to various reasons such as the effect of their hormones and genes on their movement, or simply from the way we define personality. These differences, in turn, can affect an individual’s habitat preference (e.g., a particular search-strategy may be more suitable for certain habitat types; Fig. 1); how they use their home-range; how they interact with members of their social network (e.g., mobile individuals may encounter others more frequently); and eventually the spatial assortment of their population (are neighbors likely to be of the same personality or just a random assortment?).
Jointly considering consistent individual variation in behavior and movement can explain the remarkable differences we see between individual trajectories. Behavioral ecologists will benefit from linking the measured variation in personality (often measured in the lab) with its ramification in the field. Our framework may also provide a parsimonious explanation for different patterns like personality-dependent social network position, or individual specialization in diet.
Orr Spiegel
Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, CA, USA
Publication
What’s your move? Movement as a link between personality and spatial dynamics in animal populations.
Spiegel O, Leu ST, Bull CM, Sih A
Ecol Lett. 2017 Jan
Related Articles:
The complex regulation and functional significance… Across animals, variation in body size is often influenced by environmental conditions and is considered to have adaptive value. In bees, in which many species show various degrees of sociality,… | |
Chicago data suggests light pollution disrupts… Population growth, economic development, and urbanization mean more ecosystems are lit throughout the night. Ecologists and astronomers, among other concerned folks, have been raising the alarm that “ecological light pollution”… | |
Social rank recognition is altered in autism… Humans and many other animals spend their lives in social groups, along with constructing social hierarchy within the groups. Since social hierarchy is a principal determinant for allocation of limited… | |
Feedback between organisms and the environment shape… How does the environment shape biodiversity? This is a central question for both the scientific understanding of ecosystems and for practical initiatives in sustainability. Previous work has shown that a… | |
Layer-dependent fast electron transfer at the… The photo-induced effective interfacial charge separation in Zn phthalocyanine/few-layer graphene heterojunctions has been a promising observation for fabrication of efficient energy-conversion devices. Few-layer graphene are two-dimensional (2D) systems composed of… | |
Ultralong room-temperature phosphorescence of a… Glows in the dark after removing energy input, named room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP), has got enormous attention because of its various application in biological imaging, light-emitting devices, information storage and encryption,… |
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.