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Institute
In this field experiment we investigate the impact of land use induced savanna degradation on movement behaviour of the spotted sand lizard (Pedioplanis l. lineoocellata) in the southern Kalahari. Foraging behaviour of lizards was tested in a factorial design (low vs. high prey availability) in degraded and non-degraded habitats.
An interaction between habitat structure and prey availability affected movement behaviour. In degraded habitats with low prey availability and in non-degraded habitats with high prey availability the spotted sand lizard moved more like an active forager. In contrast, in degraded habitats with high prey availability and in non-degraded habitats with low prey availability lizards moved like sit-and-wait foragers. Interestingly, the behavioural flexibility of the spotted sand lizard seems to buffer extreme conditions and negative effects of land use impacts.
Infanticide, the killing of unrelated young, is widespread and frequently driven by sexual conflict. especially in mammals with exclusive maternal care, infanticide by males is common and females suffer fitness costs. Recognizing infanticide risk and adjusting offspring protection accordingly should therefore be adaptive in female mammals. Using a small mammal (Myodes glareolus) in outdoor enclosures, we investigated whether lactating mothers adjust offspring protection, and potential mate search behaviour, in response to different infanticide risk levels. We presented the scent of the litter’s sire or of a stranger male near the female’s nest, and observed female nest presence and movement by radiotracking. While both scents simulated a mating opportunity, they represented lower (sire) and higher (stranger) infanticide risk. compared to the sire treatment, females in the stranger treatment left their nest more often, showed increased activity and stayed closer to the nest, suggesting offspring protection from outside the nest through elevated alertness and vigilance. females with larger litters spent more time investigating scents and used more space in the sire but not in the stranger treatment. Thus, current investment size affected odour inspection and resource acquisition under higher risk. Adjusting nest protection and resource acquisition to infanticide risk could allow mothers to elicit appropriate (fitness-saving) counterstrategies, and thus, may be widespread.
Perceived predation risk varies in space and time creating a landscape of fear. This key feature of an animal's environment is classically studied as a species-specific property. However, individuals differ in how they solve the tradeoff between safety and reward and may, hence, differ consistently and predictively in perceived predation risk across landscapes. To test this hypothesis, we quantified among-individual differences in boldness and activity and exposed behaviourally phenotyped male bank voles Myodes glareolus individually to two different experimental landscapes of risks in large outdoor enclosures and provided resources as discrete food patches. We manipulated perceived predation risk via vegetation height between 2 and > 30 cm and quantified patch use indirectly via RFID-logging and giving-up densities. We statistically disentangled among-individual differences in microhabitat use from spatially varying perceived risk, i.e. landscape of fear. We found that individuals varied in mean vegetation height of their foraging microhabitats and that this microhabitat selection matched the intrinsic individual differences in perceived risk. As predicted by the patch use model, all individual's perceived higher risks when foraging in lower vegetation. However, individuals differed in their reaction norm slopes of perceived risk to vegetation height, and these differences in slopes were consistent across two different landscapes of risks and resources. We interpret these results as evidence for individual landscapes of fear, which could be predicted by among-individual differences in activity and boldness. Since perceived predation risk affects when and where to forage, among-individual differences in fear responses could act as a mode of intraspecific niche complementarity (i.e. individual niche specialization), help explain behavioural type by environment correlations, and will likely have cascading indirect effects on lower trophic levels.
Of city and village mice
(2020)
A fundamental question of current ecological research concerns the drives and limits of species responses to human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC). Behavioural responses to HIREC are a key component because behaviour links individual responses to population and community changes. Ongoing fast urbanization provides an ideal setting to test the functional role of behaviour for responses to HIREC. Consistent behavioural differences between conspecifics (animal personality) may be important determinants or constraints of animals’ adaptation to urban habitats. We tested whether urban and rural populations of small mammals differ in mean trait expression, flexibility and repeatability of behaviours associated to risk-taking and exploratory tendencies. Using a standardized behavioural test in the field, we quantified spatial exploration and boldness of striped field mice (Apodemus agrarius, n = 96) from nine sub-populations, presenting different levels of urbanisation and anthropogenic disturbance. The level of urbanisation positively correlated with boldness, spatial exploration and behavioural flexibility, with urban dwellers being bolder, more explorative and more flexible in some traits than rural conspecifics. Thus, individuals seem to distribute in a non-random way in response to human disturbance based on their behavioural characteristics. Animal personality might therefore play a key role in successful coping with the challenges of HIREC.
Biodiversity and abundance of wildlife has dramatically declined in agricultural landscapes. Sown, short-lived wildflower (WF) strips along the margins of crop fields are a widespread and often subsidised in agri-environmental schemes, intended to enhance biodiversity, provide refuges for wild plant and arthropod populations and to provide ecosystem services to crops. Meanwhile, WF elements are also criticised, since their functionality decreases with plant succession, the removal of aged WF strip poses an ecological trap for the attracted arthropod populations and only common and mobile species benefit. Further, insects in WF strips are impacted by pesticides from agricultural fields due to shared boundaries with crop fields and by edge effects. The performance of the measure could be improved by combining several WF strips of different successional stages, each harbouring a unique community of plants and arthropods, into persistent, composite WF block, where successional stages exist in parallel. Monitoring data on many taxa in the literature shows, that a third of species are temporarily present in an ageing WF stip, thus offering composite WF blocks should increase cumulative species richness by 28%-39% compared to annual richness in WF strips. Persistence of composite WF blocks would offer reliable refuge for animal and plant populations, also supporting their predators and herbivores. Further, WF blocks have less boundaries to crops compared to WF strips of the same area, and are less impacted by edge effects and pesticides. Policy implications. Here I suggest a change of conservation practice changing from successional WF strips to composite WF blocks. By regular removal and replacement of aged WF strips either within the block (rotational) or at its margins (rolling), the habitat heterogeneity in composite WF block could be perpetuated. Rolling composite WF blocks change locations over years, and the original location can be reconverted to arable land while a nearby WF block is still available to wildlife. A change in agricultural schemes would be necessary, since in some European countries clustered WF strips are explicitly not subsidised.
Pregnancy termination after encountering a strange male, the Bruce effect, is regarded as a counterstrategy of female mammals towards anticipated infanticide. While confirmed in caged rodent pairs, no verification for the Bruce effect existed from experimental field populations of small rodents. We suggest that the effect may be adaptive for breeding rodent females only under specific conditions related to populations with cyclically fluctuating densities. We investigated the occurrence of delay in birth date after experimental turnover of the breeding male under different population composition in bank voles (Myodes glareolus) in large outdoor enclosures: one-male-multiple-females (n = 6 populations/18 females), multiple-males-multiplefemales (n = 15/45), and single-male-single-female (MF treatment, n = 74/74). Most delays were observed in the MF treatment after turnover. Parallel we showed in a laboratory experiment (n = 205 females) that overwintered and primiparous females, the most abundant cohort during population lows in the increase phase of cyclic rodent populations, were more likely to delay births after turnover of the male than year-born and multiparous females. Taken together, our results suggest that the Bruce effect may be an adaptive breeding strategy for rodent females in cyclic populations specifically at low densities in the increase phase, when isolated, overwintered animals associate in MF pairs. During population lows infanticide risk and inbreeding risk may then be higher than during population highs, while also the fitness value of a litter in an increasing population is higher. Therefore, the Bruce effect may be adaptive for females during annual population lows in the increase phases, even at the costs of delaying reproduction.
Use of large Acacia trees by the cavity dwelling Black-tailed Tree Rat in the southern Kalahari
(2006)
Recent extensive harvesting of large, often dead Acacia trees in and savanna of southern Africa is cause for concern about the conservation status of the arid savanna and its animal community. We mapped vegetation and nests of the Black-tailed Tree Rat Thallomy's nigricauda to assess the extent to which the rats depend on particular tree species and on the existence of dead, standing trees. The study was conducted in continuous Acacia woodland on the southern and eastern edge of the Kalahari, South Africa. Trees in which there were tree rat nests were compared with trees of similar size and vigour to identify the characteristics of nest sites. Spatial analysis of tree rat distribution was conducted using Ripley's-L function. We found that T nigricauda was able to utilize all available tree species, as long as trees were large and old enough so that cavities were existing inside the stem. The spatial distribution of nest trees did not show clumping at the investigated scale, and we therefore reject the notion of the rats forming colonies when inhabiting continuous woodlands. The selection of a particular tree as a nest site was furthermore depending on the close proximity of the major food plant, Acacia mellifera. This may limit the choice of suitable nest sites. since A. mellifera was less likely to grow within a vegetation patch containing a large trees than in patches without large trees.
Indirect resource competition and interference are widely occurring mechanisms of interspecific interactions. We have studied the seasonal expression of these two interaction types within a two-species, boreal small mammal system. Seasons differ by resource availability, individual breeding state and intraspecific social system. Live-trapping methods were used to monitor space use and reproduction in 14 experimental populations of bank voles Myodes glareolus in large outdoor enclosures with and without a dominant competitor, the field vole Microtus agrestis. We further compared vole behaviour using staged dyadic encounters in neutral arenas in both seasons. Survival of the non-breeding overwintering bank voles was not affected by competition. In the spring, the numbers of male bank voles, but not of females, were reduced significantly in the competition populations. Bank vole home ranges expanded with vole density in the presence of competitors, indicating food limitation. A comparison of behaviour between seasons based on an analysis of similarity revealed an avoidance of costly aggression against opponents, independent of species. Interactions were more aggressive during the summer than during the winter, and heterospecific encounters were more aggressive than conspecific encounters. Based on these results, we suggest that interaction types and their respective mechanisms are not either-or categories and may change over the seasons. During the winter, energy constraints and thermoregulatory needs decrease direct aggression, but food constraints increase indirect resource competition. Direct interference appears in the summer, probably triggered by each individual's reproductive and hormonal state and the defence of offspring against conspecific and heterospecific intruders. Both interaction forms overlap in the spring, possibly contributing to spring declines in the numbers of subordinate species.
Background: Short lived, iteroparous animals in seasonal environments experience variable social and environmental conditions over their lifetime. Animals can be divided into those with a "young-of-the-year" life history (YY, reproducing and dying in the summer of birth) and an "overwinter" life history (OW, overwintering in a subadult state before reproducing next spring).
We investigated how behavioural patterns across the population were affected by season and sex, and whether variation in behaviour reflects the variation in life history patterns of each season. Applications of pace-of-life (POL) theory would suggest that long-lived OW animals are shyer in order to increase survival, and YY are bolder in order to increase reproduction. Therefore, we expected that in winter and spring samples, when only OW can be sampled, the animals should be shyer than in summer and autumn, when both OW and YY animals can be sampled. We studied common vole (Microtus arvalis) populations, which express typical, intra-annual density fluctuation. We captured a total of 492 voles at different months over 3 years and examined boldness and activity level with two standardised behavioural experiments.
Results: Behavioural variables of the two tests were correlated with each other. Boldness, measured as short latencies in both tests, was extremely high in spring compared to other seasons. Activity level was highest in spring and summer, and higher in males than in females.
Conclusion: Being bold in laboratory tests may translate into higher risk-taking in nature by being more mobile while seeking out partners or valuable territories. Possible explanations include asset-protection, with OW animals being rather old with low residual reproductive value in spring. Therefore, OW may take higher risks during this season. Offspring born in spring encounter a lower population density and may have higher reproductive value than offspring of later cohorts. A constant connection between life history and animal personality, as suggested by the POL theory, however, was not found. Nevertheless, correlations of traits suggest the existence of animal personalities. In conclusion, complex patterns of population dynamics, seasonal variation in life histories, and variability of behaviour due to asset-protection may cause complex seasonal behavioural dynamics in a population.