title: Behavioural hypervolumes of spider communities predict community performance and disbandment.
abstract: Trait-based ecology argues that an understanding of the traits of interactors can enhance the predictability of ecological outcomes. We examine here whether the multidimensional behavioural-trait diversity of communities influences community performance and stability in situ We created experimental communities of web-building spiders, each with an identical species composition. Communities contained one individual of each of five different species. Prior to establishing these communities in the field, we examined three behavioural traits for each individual spider. These behavioural measures allowed us to estimate community-wide behavioural diversity, as inferred by the multidimensional behavioural volume occupied by the entire community. Communities that occupied a larger region of behavioural-trait space (i.e. where spiders differed more from each other behaviourally) gained more mass and were less likely to disband. Thus, there is a community-wide benefit to multidimensional behavioural diversity in this system that might translate to other multispecies assemblages.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9610, USA pruitt@lifesci.ucsb.edu.
authors.forename: Jonathan N
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-0326-6755
authors.initials: JN
authors.lastname: Pruitt
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001070:Appetitive Behavior; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D049628:Body Size; D004463:Ecology; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D005260:Female; D008124:Locomotion; D013112:Spiders / Q000145:classification / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: behavioural hypervolume; behavioural niche; behavioural syndrome; community; mixed species group; personality