Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Behavior and Ethology
Species comparison of among- and within-individual variation and correlations
Published: 2021-05-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Individuals frequently differ consistently from one another in their average behaviors (i.e. “animal personality”) and in correlated suites of consistent behavioral responses (i.e. “behavioral syndromes”). However, understanding the evolutionary basis of this (co)variation has lagged behind demonstrations of its presence. This lag partially stems from comparative methods rarely being used in the [...]
Male age alone predicts paternity success under sperm competition when effects of age and past mating effort are experimentally separated
Published: 2021-05-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Older males often perform poorly under post-copulatory sexual selection. It is unclear, however, whether reproductive senescence is due to male age itself or the accumulated costs of the higher lifetime mating effort that is usually associated with male age. To date, very few studies have accounted for male mating history when testing for the effect of male age on sperm traits, and none test how [...]
Implementing network approaches to understand the socioecology of human-wildlife interactions
Published: 2021-05-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human population expansion into wildlife habitats has increased interest in the behavioral ecology of human-wildlife interactions. To date, however, the socio-ecological factors that determine whether, when or where wild animals take risks by interacting with humans and anthropogenic factors still remains unclear. We adopt a comparative approach to address this gap, using social network analysis [...]
Sex-specific behavioral syndromes allow the independent evolution of behavioral dimorphism
Published: 2021-04-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
When selection differs by sex, the capacity for sexes to reach optimal phenotypes can be constrained by the shared genome of males and females. Because phenotypic traits are often correlated, this difference extends across multiple traits and underlying genetic correlations can further constrain evolutionary responses. Behaviors are frequently correlated as behavioral syndromes, and these [...]
Terminology use in animal personality research: a self-report questionnaire and a systematic review
Published: 2021-04-22
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Whether animal personality studies provide insights of broader evolutionary and ecological relevance to the field of behavioural ecology is frequently questioned. One of the sources of controversy is the vast, but often vague terminology present in the field. From a statistical perspective, animal personality is defined as among-individual variance in behaviour. However, numerous conceptual [...]
How feedback and feed-forward mechanisms link determinants of social dominance
Published: 2021-04-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In many animal societies, individuals differ consistently in their ability to win agonistic interactions, resulting in dominance hierarchies. These differences arise due to a range of factors that can influence individuals’ abilities to win agonistic interactions, spanning from genetically driven traits through to individuals’ recent interaction history. Yet, despite a century of study since [...]
Drivers and Consequences of Partial Migration in an Alpine Bird Species
Published: 2021-04-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
1. Partial migration, where a portion of the population migrates between winter and summer (breeding) areas and the rest remains year-round resident, is a common phenomenon across several taxonomic groups. Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain why some individuals migrate while others stay resident, as well as the fitness consequences of the different strategies. Yet, the drivers [...]
Welcome to the Pyrocene: animal survival in the age of megafire
Published: 2021-04-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Planet Earth is entering the age of megafire, pushing ecosystems to their limits and beyond. While fire causes mortality of animals across vast portions of the globe, scientists are only beginning to consider fire as an evolutionary force in animal ecology. Here, we generate a series of hypotheses regarding animal responses to fire by adopting insights from the predator-prey literature. Fire is a [...]
Effects of wave-driven water flow on the fast-start escape response of juvenile coral reef damselfishes
Published: 2021-03-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Fish often evade predators with a fast-start escape response. Studies typically examine this behaviour in still water despite water motion being an inherent feature of aquatic ecosystems. In shallow habitats, waves create complex flows that likely influence escape performance, particularly in small fishes with low absolute swimming speeds relative to environmental flows. I examined how [...]
Early predation risk shapes adult learning and cognitive flexibility
Published: 2021-03-24
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Predation risk during early ontogeny can impact developmental trajectories and permanently alter adult phenotypes. Such phenotypic plasticity often leads to adaptive changes in traits involved in anti-predator responses. While plastic changes in cognition may increase survival, it remains unclear whether early predation experience shapes cognitive investment and drives developmental plasticity in [...]
Effects of male and female personality on sexual cannibalism in the Springbok mantis
Published: 2021-03-24
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Behaviours that are consistent across contexts (also known as behavioural syndromes) can have evolutionary implications, but their role in scenarios where the sexes conflict, such as sexual cannibalism, is poorly understood. The aggressive spillover hypothesis proposes that cannibalistic attacks during adulthood may depend on female aggressiveness during earlier developmental stages, but evidence [...]
Estimating (non)linear selection on reaction norms: A general framework for labile traits
Published: 2021-03-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Individual reaction norms describe how labile phenotypes vary as a function of organisms’ expected trait values (intercepts) and plasticity across environments (slopes), as well as their degree of stochastic phenotypic variability or predictability (residuals). These reaction norms can be estimated empirically using multilevel, mixed-effects models and play a key role in ecological research on a [...]
Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model
Published: 2021-03-13
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biological Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and propose an alternative, the [...]
Repeatability of endocrine traits and dominance rank in female guinea pigs
Published: 2021-03-11
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology
Background Glucocorticoids (e.g. cortisol) are associated with variation in social behavior, and previous studies have linked baseline as well as challenge-induced glucocorticoid concentrations to dominance status. It is known that cortisol response to an acute challenge is repeatable and correlates to social behavior in males of many mammal species. However, it is unclear whether these patterns [...]
Once an Optimist, Always an Optimist? Studying Cognitive Judgment Bias in Mice
Published: 2021-03-11
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Individuals differ in the way they judge ambiguous information: some individuals interpret ambiguous information in a more optimistic, and others in a more pessimistic way. Over the past two decades, such “optimistic” and “pessimistic” cognitive judgment biases (CJBs) have been utilized in animal welfare science as indicators of animals’ emotional states. However, empirical studies on their [...]