Accidents alter animal fitness landscapes

Abstract

Animals alter their habitat use in response to the energetic demands of movement (‘energy landscapes’) and the risk of predation (‘the landscape of fear’). Recent research suggests that animals also select habitats and move in ways that minimise their chance of temporarily losing control of movement and thereby suffering slips, falls, collisions or other accidents, particularly when the consequences are likely to be severe (resulting in injury or death). We propose that animals respond to the costs of an ‘accident landscape’ in conjunction with predation risk and energetic costs when deciding when, where, and how to move in their daily lives. We develop a novel theoretical framework describing how features of physical landscapes interact with animal size, morphology, and behaviour to affect the risk and severity of accidents, and predict how accident risk might interact with predation risk and energetic costs to dictate movement decisions across the physical landscape. Future research should focus on testing the hypotheses presented here for different real‐world systems to gain insight into the relative importance of theorised effects in the field.

Efficient movement strategies mitigate the energetic cost of dispersal

“…However, the average speed we observed closely matches what might be an alternative optimal point along the speed‐cost curve: the point of maximal curvature (here 0.316 m s −1 ; Figure 6), where the benefits of increased efficiency with increasing speeds taper‐off the fastest. Several factors can shape what optimality criterion applies to animal movements (Pyke, 1981), with higher speeds imposing greater costs arising from diminished spatial information processing (Chittka et al, 2009), increased risk of predation (Kramer & McLaughlin, 2001) and the potential for injury (Wheatley et al, 2021). The diminishing per‐unit savings in the costs of transport at very high movement speeds are therefore likely to become negligible relative to the increase in other, related costs.…”

How Often Should Dead-Reckoned Animal Movement Paths be Corrected for Drift?

“…VP-corrected dead-reckoning provides a means to incorporate all the various scales and directions of movement between VPs (rather than just linear interpolation [14]) and thus has the capacity to map out movement patterns to a hithertounrealized degree [46]. Such expansion of the resolution of animal space-use into ne-scale, uninterrupted movement path networks can enhance insight into a number of fundamental concepts considered important in structuring movement paths and space-use by animals, including energy landscapes [125], landscapes of fear [126] and accident landscapes [127]. VP-corrected dead-reckoning has particular relevance for marine underwater studies because 3-D movement can be reconstructed [54,67] at times when VPs cannot be obtained [123] (e.g., Fig.…”

How often should dead-reckoned animal movement paths be corrected for drift?

“…VP-corrected dead-reckoning provides a means to incorporate all the various scales and directions of movement between VPs (rather than just linear interpolation [14]) and thus has the capacity to map out movement patterns to a hitherto-unrealised degree [46]. Such expansion of the resolution of animal space-use into fine-scale, uninterrupted movement path networks can enhance insight into a number of fundamental concepts considered important in structuring movement paths and space-use by animals, including energy landscapes [132], landscapes of fear [133] and accident landscapes [134]. VP-corrected dead-reckoning has particular relevance for marine underwater studies because 3-D movement can be reconstructed [54,67] at times when VPs cannot be obtained [130] (e.g., Fig.…”