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Young adults entering college experience immense shifts in personal and professional environments. Such a potentially stressful event may trigger multiple psychological and physiological effects. In a repeated-measures longitudinal survey (N = 6 time-points) of first year cohort of residential undergraduate students in India, this study evaluates multiple psychological parameters: PSS14 (Perceived Stress Scale), K10 (distress scale) and positive mood measures, along with salivary cortisol levels. We find that compared to women, men showed significantly lower levels of salivary cortisol and also a decrease in perceived stress (PSS14) and distress (K10) with time. By contrast, women reported similar perceived stress and distress levels over time but had higher cortisol levels at the end of the academic year. Academic stress was reported by the students to be the most important stressor. This study highlights notable gender-/sex-differences in psychological and physiological stress responses and adds a valuable longitudinal dataset from the Indian undergraduate student cohort which is lacking in literature.

Most ecosystems have multiple predator species that not only compete for shared prey, but also pose direct threats to each other. These intraguild interactions are key drivers of carnivore community structure, with ecosystem‐wide cascading effects. Yet, behavioral mechanisms for coexistence of multiple carnivore species remain poorly understood. The challenges of studying large, free‐ranging carnivores have resulted in mainly coarse‐scale examination of behavioral strategies without information about all interacting competitors. We overcame some of these challenges by examining the concurrent fine‐scale movement decisions of almost all individuals of four large mammalian carnivore species in a closed terrestrial system. We found that the intensity of intraguild interactions did not follow a simple hierarchical allometric pattern, because spatial and behavioral tactics of subordinate species changed with threat and resource levels across seasons. Lions (Panthera leo) were generally unrestricted and anchored themselves in areas rich in not only their principal prey, but also, during periods of resource limitation (dry season), rich in the main prey for other carnivores. Because of this, the greatest cost (potential intraguild predation) for subordinate carnivores was spatially coupled with the highest potential benefit of resource acquisition (prey‐rich areas), especially in the dry season. Leopard (P. pardus) and cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) overlapped with the home range of lions but minimized their risk using fine‐scaled avoidance behaviors and restricted resource acquisition tactics. The cost of intraguild competition was most apparent for cheetahs, especially during the wet season, as areas with energetically rewarding large prey (wildebeest) were avoided when they overlapped highly with the activity areas of lions. Contrary to expectation, the smallest species (African wild dog, Lycaon pictus) did not avoid only lions, but also used multiple tactics to minimize encountering all other competitors. Intraguild competition thus forced wild dogs into areas with the lowest resource availability year round. Coexistence of multiple carnivore species has typically been explained by dietary niche separation, but our multi‐scaled movement results suggest that differences in resource acquisition may instead be a consequence of avoiding intraguild competition. We generate a more realistic representation of hierarchical behavioral interactions that may ultimately drive spatially explicit trophic structures of multi‐predator communities.

Physiological stress responses are energy intensive. Animals can meet their stress-induced energetic demands by altering foraging or selectively retaining ingested nutrients, although the latter is poorly studied. We tested the effects of elevated stress on elemental retention in Psammophilus dorsalis. Adult lizards of both sexes were allotted to either a stressed group (daily constraint) or control group for 10 days. We measured baseline corticosterone, glucose, and triglyceride levels of lizards at the beginning and end of the experiment, as well as the total amounts of carbon and nitrogen retained based on the ingested and egested content during the treatment phase. Both control and stressed groups had higher corticosterone levels at the end of the experiment, with stressed group males showing the greatest increase. Glucose and triglyceride levels were variable. Contrary to expectation, lizards from both treatments retained similar amounts of carbon and nitrogen during the experiment phase. Our results do not show support for changes in elemental retention under stressful conditions, although the stress of captivity itself could have masked the potential effect on elemental retention. Our study highlights the need to test elemental retention as a potential strategy to meet stress-induced energetic demands when foraging opportunities are limited.

Studies that focus on single predator-–prey interactions can be inadequate for understanding antipredator responses in multi-predator systems. Yet there is still a general lack of information about the strategies of prey to minimize predation risk from multiple predators at the landscape level. Here we examined the distribution of seven African ungulate species in the fenced Karongwe Game Reserve (KGR), South Africa, as a function of predation risk from all large carnivore species (lion, leopard, cheetah, African wild dog, and spotted hyena). Using observed kill data, we generated ungulate-specific predictions of relative predation risk and of riskiness of habitats. To determine how ungulates minimize predation risk at the landscape level, we explicitly tested five hypotheses consisting of strategies that reduce the probability of encountering predators, and the probability of being killed. All ungulate species avoided risky habitats, and most selected safer habitats, thus reducing their probability of being killed. To reduce the probability of encountering predators, most of the smaller prey species (impala, warthog, waterbuck, kudu) avoided the space use of all predators, while the larger species (wildebeest, zebra, giraffe) only avoided areas where lion and leopard space use were high. The strength of avoidance for the space use of predators generally did not correspond to the relative predation threat from those predators. Instead, ungulates used a simpler behavioral rule of avoiding the activity areas of sit-and-pursue predators (lion and leopard), but not those of cursorial predators (cheetah and African wild dog). In general, selection and avoidance of habitats was stronger than avoidance of the predator activity areas. We expect similar decision rules to drive the distribution pattern of ungulates in other African savannas and in other multi-predator systems, especially where predators differ in their hunting modes.

Wind farms are a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels for mitigating the effects of climate change, but they also have complex ecological consequences. In the biodiversity hotspot of the Western Ghats in India, we find that wind farms reduce the abundance and activity of predatory birds (for example, Buteo , Butastur and Elanus species), which consequently increases the density of lizards, Sarada superba . The cascading effects of wind turbines on lizards include changes in behaviour, physiology and morphology that reflect a combination of predator release and density-dependent competition. By adding an effective trophic level to the top of food webs, we find that wind farms have emerging impacts that are greatly underestimated. There is thus a strong need for an ecosystem-wide view when aligning green-energy goals with environment protection. In the Western Ghats of India, the presence of wind farms is found to reduce the abundance and activity of predatory birds, with the associated effect of increasing the density of lizard prey and altering lizard behaviour and physiology.

Ectotherms are particularly vulnerable to climate change, especially those living in extreme areas, such as deserts, where species are already thermally constrained. Using the vulnerable herbivorous lizard Saara hardwickii as a model system, we used a multi-pronged approach to understand the thermal ecology of a desert agamid and potential impacts of rising temperatures. Our data included field-based measures of operative temperatures, body temperatures, and activity, as well as lab-based measures of thermal limits, preferences, and sprint speed. As expected, the temperature dependence of locomotor performance and foraging activity were different, and in the worst-case global warming scenario (SSP5-8.5), potential sprint speed may decrease by up to 14.5% and foraging activity may decrease by up to 43.5% by 2099. Burrows are essential thermal refuges, and global warming projections suggest that S. hardwickii may be restricted to burrows for up to 9 h per day by 2099, which would greatly limit critical activities, like foraging and seeking mating opportunities. Overall, we show that key information on thermal ecology, including temperature-sensitive behaviours in the wild, is necessary to understand the multiple ways in which increasing temperatures may influence ectothermic vertebrates, especially for species like S. hardwickii that are already vulnerable to environmental change.

For large herbivores living in highly dynamic environments, maintaining range fidelity has the potential to facilitate the exploitation of predictable resources while minimising energy expenditure. We evaluate this expectation by examining how the seasonal range fidelity of African elephants ( Loxodonta africana ) in the Kruger National Park, South Africa is affected by spatiotemporal variation in environmental conditions (vegetation quality, temperature, rainfall, and fire). Eight-years of GPS collar data were used to analyse the similarity in seasonal utilisation distributions for thirteen family groups. Elephants exhibited remarkable consistency in their seasonal range fidelity across the study with rainfall emerging as a key driver of space-use. Within years, high range fidelity from summer to autumn and from autumn to winter was driven by increased rainfall and the retention of high-quality vegetation. Across years, sequential autumn seasons demonstrated the lowest levels of range fidelity due to inter-annual variability in the wet to dry season transition, resulting in unpredictable resource availability. Understanding seasonal space use is important for determining the effects of future variability in environmental conditions on elephant populations, particularly when it comes to management interventions. Indeed, over the coming decades climate change is predicted to drive greater variability in rainfall and elevated temperatures in African savanna ecosystems. The impacts of climate change also present particular challenges for elephants living in fragmented or human-transformed habitats where the opportunity for seasonal range shifts are greatly constrained.

The field of animal movement ecology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past few decades with the advent of sophisticated technology, advanced analytical tools, and multiple frameworks and paradigms to address key ecological problems. Unlike the longer history and faster growth of the field in North America, Europe, and Africa, movement ecology in Asia has only recently been gaining momentum. Here, we provide a review of the field from studies based in India over the last 11 years (2011–2021) curated from the database, Scopus, and search engine, Google Scholar. We identify current directions in the research objectives, taxa studied, tracking technology and the biogeographic regions in which animals were tracked, considering the years since the last systematic review of movement ecology research in the country. As an indication of the growing interest in this field, there has been a rapid increase in the number of publications over the last decade. Class Mammalia continues to dominate the taxa tracked, with tiger and leopard being the most common species studied across publications. Invertebrates and other small and medium-sized animals, as well as aquatic animals, in comparison, are understudied and remain among the important target taxa for tracking in future studies. As in the previous three decades, researchers have focussed on characterising home ranges and habitat use of animals. There is, however, a notable shift to examine the movement decision of animals in human-modified landscapes, although efforts to use movement ecology to understand impacts of climate change remain missing. Given the biogeographic and taxonomic diversity of India, and the fact that the interface between anthropogenic activity and wildlife interactions is increasing, we suggest ways in which the field of movement ecology can be expanded to facilitate ecological insights and conservation efforts. With the advancement of affordable technologies and the availability of analytical tools, the potential to expand the field of movement ecology, shift research foci, and gain new insights is now prime.

Dynamic colour change is widespread in ectothermic animals, but has primarily been studied in the context of background matching. For most species, we lack quantitative data on the extent of colour change across different contexts. It is also unclear whether and how colour change varies across body regions, and how overall sexual dichromatism relates to the extent of individual colour change. In this study, we obtained reflectance measures in response to different stimuli for males and females of six species of agamid lizards (Agamidae, sister family to Chameleonidae) comprising three closely related species pairs. We computed the colour volume in a lizard‐vision colour space occupied by males and females of each species and estimated overall sexual dichromatism based on the area of non‐overlapping male and female colour volumes. As expected, males had larger colour volumes than females, but the extent of colour change in males differed between species and between body regions. Notably, species that were most sexually dichromatic were not necessarily those in which males showed the greatest individual colour change. Our results indicate that the extent of colour change is independent of the degree of sexual dichromatism and demonstrate that colour change on different body regions can vary substantially even between pairs of closely related species. We studied the extent of dynamic colour change in both sexes in six agamid species. This study indicates that the extent of colour change is independent of the degree of sexual dichromatism and demonstrates that colour change on different body regions can vary substantially even between pairs of closely related species.

Group dynamics of gregarious ungulates in the grasslands of the African savanna have been well studied, but the trade-offs that affect grouping of these ungulates in woodland habitats or dense vegetation are less well understood. We examined the landscape-level distribution of groups of blue wildebeest, Connochaetes taurinus, and Burchell's zebra, Equus burchelli, in a predominantly woodland area (Karongwe Game Reserve, South Africa; KGR) to test the hypothesis that group dynamics are a function of minimizing predation risk from their primary predator, lion, Panthera leo. Using generalized linear models, we examined the relative importance of habitat type (differing in vegetation density), probability of encountering lion (based on utilization distribution of all individual lions in the reserve), and season in predicting group size and composition. We found that only in open scrub habitat, group size for both ungulate species increased with the probability of encountering lion. Group composition differed between the two species and was driven by habitat selection as well as predation risk. For both species, composition of groups was, however, dominated by males in open scrub habitats, irrespective of the probability of encountering lion. Distribution patterns of wildebeest and zebra groups at the landscape level directly support the theoretical and empirical evidence from a range of taxa predicting that grouping is favored in open habitats and when predation risk is high. Group composition reflected species-specific social, physiological and foraging constraints, as well as the importance of predation risk. Avoidance of high resource open scrub habitat by females can lead to loss of foraging opportunities, which can be particularly costly in areas such as KGR, where this resource is limited. Thus, landscape-level grouping dynamics are species specific and particular to the composition of the group, arising from a tradeoff between maximizing resource selection and minimizing predation risk.