Quantifying Behavioral Changes in Territorial Animals Caused by Sudden Population Declines
Quantifying Behavioral Changes in Territorial Animals Caused by Sudden Population Declines
复制标题
量化人口突然减少导致的领地动物行为变化
DOI：
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发表时间：
2013
影响因子：
2.9
通讯作者：
L. Giuggioli
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Jonathan R. Potts;S. Harris;L. Giuggioli
虽然领土动物能够保持对某些空间区域的独占使用，但来自邻近个体的运动数据通常表明重叠的家域。为了解释和统一动物空间利用的这两个方面，我们使用最近开发的集体动物运动的机械模型。我们将我们的方法应用于自然实验的城市红狐（狐）人口，人口密度迅速下降，由于疥螨流行病。通过从位置数据中提取运动和交互策略的细节，我们展示了狐狸如何改变它们的行为，通过获取由于邻居死亡而空出的区域来利用突然的人口水平变化，同时确保领土边界保持连续。随着人口的减少，狐狸对邻近气味的反应时间减少了三分之一，领土边界移动的速度增加了八倍。通过展示观察到的，波动的领土模式是如何从个体动物的运动和相互作用中出现的，我们的研究结果给出了近80年前提出的弹性盘假说的第一个数据验证的机械解释。
Although territorial animals are able to maintain exclusive use of certain regions of space, movement data from neighboring individuals often suggest overlapping home ranges. To explain and unify these two aspects of animal space use, we use recently developed mechanistic models of collective animal movement. We apply our approach to a natural experiment on an urban red fox (Vulpes vulpes) population that underwent a rapid decline in population density due to a sarcoptic mange epizooty. By extracting details of movement and interaction strategies from location data, we show how foxes alter their behavior, taking advantage of sudden population-level changes by acquiring areas vacated due to neighbor mortality, while ensuring territory boundaries remain contiguous. The rate of territory border movement increased eightfold as the population declined and the foxes’ response time to neighboring scent reduced by a third. By demonstrating how observed, fluctuating territorial patterns emerge from movements and interactions of individual animals, our results give the first data-validated, mechanistic explanation of the elastic disc hypothesis, proposed nearly 80 years ago.