title: What's your move? Movement as a link between personality and spatial dynamics in animal populations.
abstract: Recent studies have established the ecological and evolutionary importance of animal personalities. Individual differences in movement and space-use, fundamental to many personality traits (e.g. activity, boldness and exploratory behaviour) have been documented across many species and contexts, for instance personality-dependent dispersal syndromes. Yet, insights from the concurrently developing movement ecology paradigm are rarely considered and recent evidence for other personality-dependent movements and space-use lack a general unifying framework. We propose a conceptual framework for personality-dependent spatial ecology. We link expectations derived from the movement ecology paradigm with behavioural reaction-norms to offer specific predictions on the interactions between environmental factors, such as resource distribution or landscape structure, and intrinsic behavioural variation. We consider how environmental heterogeneity and individual consistency in movements that carry-over across spatial scales can lead to personality-dependent: (1) foraging search performance; (2) habitat preference; (3) home range utilization patterns; (4) social network structure and (5) emergence of assortative population structure with spatial clusters of personalities. We support our conceptual model with spatially explicit simulations of behavioural variation in space-use, demonstrating the emergence of complex population-level patterns from differences in simple individual-level behaviours. Consideration of consistent individual variation in space-use will facilitate mechanistic understanding of processes that drive social, spatial, ecological and evolutionary dynamics in heterogeneous environments.
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Orr
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Spiegel
authors.affiliation: School of Biological Sciences, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA, Australia.|Department of Biology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA.
authors.forename: Stephan T
authors.initials: ST
authors.lastname: Leu
authors.affiliation: School of Biological Sciences, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA, Australia.
authors.forename: C Michael
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Bull
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sih
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004463:Ecology; D017753:Ecosystem; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D006702:Homing Behavior; D008954:Models, Biological; D009068:Movement; D010551:Personality; D012919:Social Behavior
keywords: Animal personality; behavioural syndromes; fractal landscapes; home range; movement ecology; optimal foraging; population structure; search strategies; social networks; spatial ecology