How will climate change affect foraging decisions and the evolution of personalities in marine predators?

背景：随着环境的变化，动物如何寻找食物？在海洋环境中，动物们必须在一片看似毫无特色的海洋中寻找，然而成功的策略已经进化出来了。虽然最近的技术已经揭示了运动路径的细节，但我们推断觅食策略的能力还不发达。海洋生物学和数学理论之间缺乏整合。当前的觅食理论假设动物对环境要么完全了解（最优觅食理论，OFT），要么一无所知（随机搜索理论，RST）。然而，大多数动物实际上都有部分信息。目的：我们将建立搜索模型与部分信息，基于海鸟研究系统与广泛的预先存在的运动数据。我们将对这些数据应用我们的模型来回答：1。在给定部分信息的情况下，个体的最佳觅食策略是什么？信息在这些决策中有多重要？它们如何随着信息的可用性而变化？为什么个体之间会出现不同的最佳觅食策略？4. 如何解释这些个体差异，包括年龄、性别和性格等因素？5. 在不同的气候变化情景下，哪些单独的策略最有可能持续下去？最终，我们将利用我们的结果来预测海洋群落中的个性如何随着环境变化而演变。新颖性：(a)通过追求OFT和RST之间的中点，我们将建立一个新的觅食理论，更适合于真实的生物系统和准确的预测。(b)我们将阐明个体差异如何及为何演变和维持。及时性：最近，关于海鸟的高分辨率数据迅速增加。这使得在OFT和RST的基础上开发觅食决策的现实模型成为可能。尽管跟踪数据迅速增加，但这一领域的模型发展缓慢，现在是改变这种状况的理想时机。

Background: How will animals find food as their environment changes? In marine environments, animals must search across a seemingly featureless ocean, yet successful strategies have evolved. Although recent technology has uncovered fine-details of movement paths, our ability to infer foraging strategies is under-developed. Integration between marine biology and mathematical theory is lacking. Current foraging theory assumes animals have either total (optimal foraging theory, OFT) or zero (random search theory, RST) knowledge of their environment. Yet most animals actually have partial information.Objectives: We will build models of search with partial information, based on seabird study systems with extensive pre-existing movement data. We will apply our models to these data to answer:1. Given partial information, what is the optimal foraging strategy for an individual?2. How important is information in these decisions and how do they vary with the availability of information?3. Why do different optimal foraging strategies emerge between individuals? 4. What explains these individual differences, including factors such as age, sex, and personality? 5. Which individual strategies are most likely to persist under different climate change scenarios?Ultimately, we will use our results to predict how personalities within marine communities might evolve as a result of environmental change.Novelty: (a) By pursuing the mid-point between the OFT and RST we will build a new foraging theory, better suited to real biological systems and accurate predictions. (b) We will shed light on how and why individual differences evolve and are maintained.Timeliness: Recently, there has been a rapid increase in high-resolution data on seabirds. This makes it possible to develop realistic models of foraging decisions, building on OFT and RST. Despite rapid increases in tracking data, development of models in this area has been slow and now is an ideal time to change this.