What's your move? Movement as a link between personality and spatial dynamics in animal populations

Abstract

Recent studies have established the ecological and evolutionary importance of animal personalities. Individual differences in movement and space-use, fundamental to many personality traits (e.g. activity, boldness and exploratory behaviour) have been documented across many species and contexts, for instance personality-dependent dispersal syndromes. Yet, insights from the concurrently developing movement ecology paradigm are rarely considered and recent evidence for other personality-dependent movements and space-use lack a general unifying framework. We propose a conceptual framework for personality-dependent spatial ecology. We link expectations derived from the movement ecology paradigm with behavioural reaction-norms to offer specific predictions on the interactions between environmental factors, such as resource distribution or landscape structure, and intrinsic behavioural variation. We consider how environmental heterogeneity and individual consistency in movements that carry-over across spatial scales can lead to personality-dependent: (1) foraging search performance; (2) habitat preference; (3) home range utilization patterns; (4) social network structure and (5) emergence of assortative population structure with spatial clusters of personalities. We support our conceptual model with spatially explicit simulations of behavioural variation in space-use, demonstrating the emergence of complex population-level patterns from differences in simple individual-level behaviours. Consideration of consistent individual variation in space-use will facilitate mechanistic understanding of processes that drive social, spatial, ecological and evolutionary dynamics in heterogeneous environments.

Learning from the mistakes of others: How female elk (Cervus elaphus) adjust behaviour with age to avoid hunters

“…Our results showed that it is important to let individuality emerge when making population-level inferences. Recent studies targeting different species and ecological contexts are increasingly paying more attention on the importance of considering inter-individual variability as a key component of a population rather than noise in the analyses [9, 25, 55–58]. Large variation in the learning process may be due to variation in the factors affecting the animal when and how learning occurs.…”

“…e ., random slope for age and random intercept for individual, thus allowing animals of different age to learn differently). Further investigations should identify personality traits from spatial behaviour [55], and then disentangle how learning specifically varies as a function of personality types. There is an urgent need to deepen our understanding of the relation between inter-individual variability in behaviour in the wild to personality traits [58] to better tackle variation in the responses by wildlife to human activity.…”

Social Information Links Individual Behavior to Population and Community Dynamics

“…For instance, bolder barnacle geese produce more information, whereas shy individuals use this information more than others [47]. Thus, the density or spatial distribution of particularly informative individuals could have a disproportionate effect on population demographics [48,49], a concept we revisit in the section on community dynamics. Clearly, this kind of positive feedback has the potential to interact with negative density dependence in complex ways.…”

Personalities influence spatial responses to environmental fluctuations in wild fish

“…However, the first and fastest way to cope with a novel situation is often an individual behavioural response that ultimately depends on the behavioural plasticity that has evolved under past conditions (Sih et al., ; Wong & Candolin, ). Plasticity in spatial behaviour is particularly important because spatial dynamics determine the interaction with conspecifics, with other species and with the surrounding abiotic environment (Clobert, Galliard, Cote, Meylan, & Massot, ; Spiegel, Leu, Bull, & Sih, ). Accordingly, interindividual differences in movement ecology, and the range of spatial plasticity, likely play an important role in determining the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of populations (e.g., Harrison et al., ; Villegas‐Ríos, Réale, Freitas, Moland, & Olsen, ).…”

“…For instance, bolder or more aggressive individuals tend to be more exploratory and disperse further (Cote, Clobert, Brodin, Fogarty, & Sih, ). Yet, empirical evidence of personality‐dependent spatial behaviour for traits other than dispersal is still scarce (Spiegel, Leu, Sih, Godfrey, & Bull, ; Spiegel et al., ). Personalities may also explain the differences in plasticity observed between individuals in response to changes in their social environment (Aplin et al., ) and population dynamics (Cote & Clobert, ).…”