How do foragers decide when to leave a patch? A test of alternative models under natural and experimental conditions.

This is the peer reviewed version of the article which has been published in final form at DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.12089. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.© 2013 The Authors. Journal of Animal Ecology © 2013 British Ecological Society.A forager's optimal patch-departure time can be predicted by the prescient marginal value theorem (pMVT), which assumes they have perfect knowledge of the environment, or by approaches such as Bayesian updating and learning rules, which avoid this assumption by allowing foragers to use recent experiences to inform their decisions. In understanding and predicting broader scale ecological patterns, individual-level mechanisms, such as patch-departure decisions, need to be fully elucidated. Unfortunately, there are few empirical studies that compare the performance of patch-departure models that assume perfect knowledge with those that do not, resulting in a limited understanding of how foragers decide when to leave a patch. We tested the patch-departure rules predicted by fixed rule, pMVT, Bayesian updating and learning models against one another, using patch residency times (PRTs) recorded from 54 chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) across two groups in natural (n = 6175 patch visits) and field experimental (n = 8569) conditions. We found greater support in the experiment for the model based on Bayesian updating rules, but greater support for the model based on the pMVT in natural foraging conditions. This suggests that foragers may place more importance on recent experiences in predictable environments, like our experiment, where these experiences provide more reliable information about future opportunities. Furthermore, the effect of a single recent foraging experience on PRTs was uniformly weak across both conditions. This suggests that foragers' perception of their environment may incorporate many previous experiences, thus approximating the perfect knowledge assumed by the pMVT. Foragers may, therefore, optimize their patch-departure decisions in line with the pMVT through the adoption of rules similar to those predicted by Bayesian updating.Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)Fenner School of Environment and SocietyLeakey FoundationAnimal Behavior Society (USA)International Primatological SocietyExplorers Club Exploration Fun

Monitoring wild animal communities with arrays of motion sensitive camera traps

Studying animal movement and distribution is of critical importance to addressing environmental challenges including invasive species, infectious diseases, climate and land-use change. Motion sensitive camera traps offer a visual sensor to record the presence of a broad range of species providing location -specific information on movement and behavior. Modern digital camera traps that record video present new analytical opportunities, but also new data management challenges. This paper describes our experience with a terrestrial animal monitoring system at Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Our camera network captured the spatio-temporal dynamics of terrestrial bird and mammal activity at the site - data relevant to immediate science questions, and long-term conservation issues. We believe that the experience gained and lessons learned during our year long deployment and testing of the camera traps as well as the developed solutions are applicable to broader sensor network applications and are valuable for the advancement of the sensor network research. We suggest that the continued development of these hardware, software, and analytical tools, in concert, offer an exciting sensor-network solution to monitoring of animal populations which could realistically scale over larger areas and time spans

The emergence of leaders and followers in foraging pairs when the qualities of individuals differ.

BACKGROUND: Foraging in groups offers animals a number of advantages, such as increasing their likelihood of finding food or detecting and avoiding predators. In order for a group to remain together, there has to be some degree of coordination of behaviour and movement between its members (which may in some cases be initiated by a decision-making leader, and in other cases may emerge as an underlying property of the group). For example, behavioural synchronisation is a phenomenon where animals within a group initiate and then continue to conduct identical behaviours, and has been characterised for a wide range of species. We examine how a pair of animals should behave using a state-dependent approach, and ask what conditions are likely to lead to behavioural synchronisation occurring, and whether one of the individuals is more likely to act as a leader. RESULTS: The model we describe considers how the energetic gain, metabolic requirements and predation risks faced by the individuals affect measures of their energetic state and behaviour (such as the degree of behavioural synchronisation seen within the pair, and the value to an individual of knowing the energetic state of its colleague). We explore how predictable changes in these measures are in response to changes in physiological requirements and predation risk. We also consider how these measures should change when the members of the pair are not identical in their metabolic requirements or their susceptibility to predation. We find that many of the changes seen in these measures are complex, especially when asymmetries exist between the members of the pair. CONCLUSION: Analyses are presented that demonstrate that, although these general patterns are robust, care needs to be taken when considering the effects of individual differences, as the relationship between individual differences and the resulting qualitative changes in behaviour may be complex. We discuss how these results are related to experimental observations, and how the model and its predictions could be extended.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Compromised survivorship in zoo elephants

Keeping elephants in zoos is extremely costly, yet does not yield self-sustaining 16 populations. In Europe, which holds c. half the global zoo elephant population, a long17 term decline of c.10% per year is expected in both species, if reliant on zoo-bred animals 18 under historically prevailing conditions. Fitness in zoos is compromised in several ways. 19 Compared with protected in situ populations (Burmese working Asians; Kenyan free20 living Africans), zoo elephants show premature reproductive senescence and -- despite 21 improving adult survivorship for Africans -- die earlier in adulthood than expected. In 22 Asian elephants, infant survivorship in zoos is also greatly reduced relative to Burmese 23 elephants, and furthermore, zoo-born animals die earlier in adulthood than wild-caught 24 conspecifics kept in zoos, via effects ‘programmed’ peri-natally. In this species, being 25 transferred between zoos also increases mortality rates. Both survival and fecundity 26 would need to improve to attain self-sustaining zoo populations. Our findings 27 demonstrate deficits in zoo elephant management, particularly for Asians, and implicate 28 stress and obesity as likely problems

Analysing age structure, residency and relatedness uncovers social network structure in aggregations of young birds

Animal sociality arises from the cumulative effects of both individual social decisions and environmental factors. While juveniles' social interactions with parents prior to independence shape later life sociality, in most bird and mammal species at least one sex undergoes an early life dispersal before first-year reproduction. The social associations from this period could also have implications for later life yet are rarely characterized. Here, we derived predictions from available examples of juvenile groups in the literature (mobile 'flocks', spatially stable 'gangs' or adult-associated 'creches') and then used three cohorts of juvenile hihi, Notiomystis cincta, a threatened New Zealand passerine, to demonstrate how multistate modelling and social network analysis approaches can be used to characterize group type based on residency, movement, relatedness and social associations. At sites where hihi congregated, we found that juveniles were resighted at a higher frequency than adults and associated predominantly with unrelated juveniles rather than siblings or parents. Movement between group sites occurred, but associations developed predominantly within the sites. We suggest therefore that juvenile hihi social structure is most similar to a 'gang', a group structure in which juveniles congregate without adults at predictable sites. Such gangs have previously only been described formally in ravens, Corvus corax. By combining spatial and social network analyses, our study demonstrates how social group structures can be described and therefore facilitate broader comparisons and discussion about the form and function of juvenile groups across taxa. (C) 2020 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Land-use change alters the mechanisms assembling rainforest mammal communities in Borneo

1. The assembly of species communities at local scales is thought to be driven by environmental filtering, species interactions and spatial processes such as dispersal limitation. Little is known about how the relative balance of these drivers of community assembly changes along environmental gradients, especially manmade environmental gradients associated with land-use change. 2. Using concurrent camera- and live-trapping, we investigated the local-scale assembly of mammal communities along a gradient of land-use intensity (old-growth forest, logged forest and oil palm plantations) in Borneo. We hypothesised that increasing land-use intensity would lead to an increasing dominance of environmental control over spatial processes in community assembly. Additionally, we hypothesised that competitive interactions among species might reduce in concert with declines in α-diversity (previously documented) along the land-use gradient. 3. To test our first hypothesis, we partitioned community variance into the fractions explained by environmental and spatial variables. To test our second hypothesis, we used probabilistic models of expected species co-occurrence patterns, in particular focussing on the prevalence of spatial avoidance between species. Spatial avoidance might indicate competition, but might also be due to divergent habitat preferences. 4. We found patterns that are consistent with a shift in the fundamental mechanics governing local community assembly. In support of our first hypothesis, the importance of spatial processes (dispersal limitation and fine-scale patterns of home-ranging) appeared to decrease from low to high intensity land-uses, whilst environmental control increased in importance (in particular due to fine-scale habitat structure). Support for our second hypothesis was weak: whilst we found that the prevalence of spatial avoidance decreased along the land-use gradient, in particular between congeneric species pairs most likely to be in competition, few instances of spatial avoidance were detected in any land-use, and most were likely due to divergent habitat preferences. 5. The widespread changes in land-use occurring in the tropics might be altering not just the biodiversity found in landscapes, but also the fundamental mechanics governing the local assembly of communities. A better understanding of these mechanics, for a range of taxa, could underpin more effective conservation and management of threatened tropical landscapes

Analysing age structure, residency and relatedness uncovers social network structure in aggregations of young birds

Animal sociality arises from the cumulative effects of both individual social decisions and environmental factors. While juveniles' social interactions with parents prior to independence shape later life sociality, in most bird and mammal species at least one sex undergoes an early life dispersal before first-year reproduction. The social associations from this period could also have implications for later life yet are rarely characterized. Here, we derived predictions from available examples of juvenile groups in the literature (mobile 'flocks', spatially stable 'gangs' or adult-associated 'creches') and then used three cohorts of juvenile hihi, Notiomystis cincta, a threatened New Zealand passerine, to demonstrate how multistate modelling and social network analysis approaches can be used to characterize group type based on residency, movement, relatedness and social associations. At sites where hihi congregated, we found that juveniles were resighted at a higher frequency than adults and associated predominantly with unrelated juveniles rather than siblings or parents. Movement between group sites occurred, but associations developed predominantly within the sites. We suggest therefore that juvenile hihi social structure is most similar to a 'gang', a group structure in which juveniles congregate without adults at predictable sites. Such gangs have previously only been described formally in ravens, Corvus corax. By combining spatial and social network analyses, our study demonstrates how social group structures can be described and therefore facilitate broader comparisons and discussion about the form and function of juvenile groups across taxa. (C) 2020 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Characteristics and Risk Perceptions of Ghanaians Potentially Exposed to Bat-Borne Zoonoses through Bushmeat.

Emerging zoonotic pathogens from wildlife pose increasing public health threats globally. Bats, in particular, host an array of zoonotic pathogens, yet there is little research on how bats and humans interact, how people perceive bats and their accompanying disease risk, or who is most at risk. Eidolon helvum, the largest and most abundant African fruit bat species, is widely hunted and eaten in Ghana and also carries potentially zoonotic pathogens. This combination raises concerns, as hunting and butchering bushmeat are common sources of zoonotic transmission. Through a combination of interviews with 577 Ghanaians across southern Ghana, we identified the characteristics of people involved in the bat-bushmeat trade and we explored their perceptions of risk. Bat hunting, selling and consumption are widely distributed across regional and ethnic lines, with hotspots in certain localities, while butchering is predominantly done by women and active hunters. Interviewees held little belief of disease risk from bats, saw no ecological value in fruit bats and associated the consumption of bats with specific tribes. These data can be used to inform disease and conservation management plans, drawing on social contexts and ensuring that local voices are heard within the larger global effort to study and mitigate outbreaks.This is the final version. It was first published by Springer in EcoHealth at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10393-014-0977-0

Vpliv centralno delujočih zdravil na privzem histamina v podganje astrocite, gojene v primarni kulturi

A social group's time budget is an emergent property of individual-level decisions about how to allocate time. One fundamental determinant of these time allocation decisions is foraging success. Yet while there is a growing appreciation of how social animals optimize their foraging behaviour, our understanding of the mechanisms that link this behaviour with individual time use, and thus group-level time budgets, is relatively poor. In this review, we explore the current understanding of social foraging behaviour and time budgets at the individual level and emergent group-level time budgets. We highlight how research into individual-level differences in time budgets is comparably limited. We then explore how individual-based mechanistic modelling may provide a useful tool for elucidating how social foraging behaviour drives individual time budget patterns, and how these patterns in turn give rise to group-level time budgets. An improved understanding of the links between these three phenomena will not only allow us to address more challenging evolutionary questions, but also enable us to better predict and manage the impacts of a changing environment on social animals in the future