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"Animal ecology"
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The Physics of Foraging
Do the movements of animals, including humans, follow patterns that can be described quantitatively by simple laws of motion? If so, then why? These questions have attracted the attention of scientists in many disciplines, and stimulated debates ranging from ecological matters to queries such as 'how can there be free will if one follows a law of motion?' This is the first book on this rapidly evolving subject, introducing random searches and foraging in a way that can be understood by readers without a previous background on the subject. It reviews theory as well as experiment, addresses open problems and perspectives, and discusses applications ranging from the colonization of Madagascar by Austronesians to the diffusion of genetically modified crops. The book will interest physicists working in the field of anomalous diffusion and movement ecology as well as ecologists already familiar with the concepts and methods of statistical physics.
eBook
Friend or foe : the whole truth about animals people love to hate
Takes a close look at what we dislike about each of 10 unpopular animals, and then presents the flip side: these very same animals are often smart, helpful to humans and the environment, or inspiring to scientists.
Book
Interpreting the replacement and richness difference components of beta diversity
AIM: The variation in species composition among sites, or beta diversity, can be decomposed into replacement and richness difference. A debate is ongoing in the literature concerning the best ways of computing and interpreting these indices. This paper first reviews the historical development of the formulae for decomposing dissimilarities into replacement, richness difference and nestedness indices. These formulae are presented for species presence–absence and abundance using a unified algebraic framework. The indices decomposing beta play different roles in ecological analysis than do beta‐diversity indices. INNOVATION: Replacement and richness difference indices can be interpreted and related to ecosystem processes. The pairwise index values can be summed across all pairs of sites; these sums form a valid decomposition of total beta diversity into total replacement and total richness difference components. Different communities and study areas can be compared: some may be dominated by replacement, others by richness/abundance difference processes. Within a region, differences among sites measured by these indices can then be analysed and interpreted using explanatory variables or experimental factors. The paper also shows that local contributions of replacement and richness difference to total beta diversity can be computed and mapped. A case study is presented involving fish communities along a river. MAIN CONCLUSIONS: The different forms of indices are based upon the same functional numerators. These indices are complementary; they can help researchers understand different aspects of ecosystem functioning. The methods of analysis used in this paper apply to any of the indices recently proposed. Further work, based on ecological theory and numerical simulations, is required to clarify the precise meaning and domain of application of the different forms. The forms available for presence–absence and quantitative data are both useful because these different data types allow researchers to answer different types of ecological or biogeographic questions.
Journal Article
When and where does mortality occur in migratory birds? Direct evidence from long-term satellite tracking of raptors
1. Information about when and where animals die is important to understand population regulation. In migratory animals, mortality might occur not only during the stationary periods (e.g. breeding and wintering) but also during the migration seasons. However, the relative importance of population limiting factors during different periods of the year remains poorly understood, and previous studies mainly relied on indirect evidence. 2. Here, we provide direct evidence about when and where migrants die by identifying cases of confirmed and probable deaths in three species of long-distance migratory raptors tracked by satellite telemetry. 3. We show that mortality rate was about six times higher during migration seasons than during stationary periods. However, total mortality was surprisingly similar between periods, which can be explained by the fact that risky migration periods are shorter than safer stationary periods. Nevertheless, more than half of the annual mortality occurred during migration. We also found spatiotemporal patterns in mortality: spring mortality occurred mainly in Africa in association with the crossing of the Sahara desert, while most mortality during autumn took place in Europe. 4. Our results strongly suggest that events during the migration seasons have an important impact on the population dynamics of long-distance migrants. We speculate that mortality during spring migration may account for short-term annual variation in survival and population sizes, while mortality during autumn migration may be more important for long-term population regulation (through density-dependent effects).
Journal Article
Eat, poop, die : how animals make our world
\"Reveals how ecosystems are sculpted and sustained by animals eating, pooping, and dying--and how these fundamental functions could help save us from climate catastrophe.\"--Dust jacket
Book
Sensory Ecology, Behaviour, and Evolution
Throughout their lives, animals must complete many tasks, from finding food, avoiding predators, and attracting mates to navigating through the environment. To do so, they must gather and use a range of information from the world around them and from other individuals. For this, animals have evolved a staggering diversity of sensory organs that are both fundamental to survival and reproduction and shape much of evolution and behaviour. Sensory ecology deals with how animals acquire, process, and use information in behaviour and many other aspects of their lives, and the importance of this in evolution. This book is an introduction to sensory ecology, covering the various sensory modalities across all taxonomic groups. Rather than treating each sensory modality separately, they are discussed together from a behavioural and evolutionary approach with the aim of illustrating key principles and differences across modalities and taxonomic groups. Not only does sensory ecology deal with how the senses work and their use in behaviour, but recent work has also dealt more with the role of sensory systems in evolutionary change, as well as new developments in molecular biology and phylogenetics. The book begins with an introduction to the concepts of information and behaviour, followed by a discussion of the sensory systems that exist, how they work, and features of nerve cells and circuits. It then discusses key issues in communication, and the role of sensory systems and information in larger scale evolutionary processes, such as coevolution and speciation. Throughout the book, examples are given from various modalities and taxonomic groups, relating to diverse areas ranging from anti-predator strategies, foraging, and mate choice to navigation.
eBook
Grazers
Grazers all over the Earth provide nourishment for carnivores and are often valuable to humans for meat, skins, and various domestic uses. This volume provides a view of these varied and complex creatures as well as the features and behaviors that both bind them together and set them apart. --from publisher description
Book
A dynamic Brownian bridge movement model to estimate utilization distributions for heterogeneous animal movement
1. The recently developed Brownian bridge movement model (BBMM) has advantages over traditional methods because it quantifies the utilization distribution of an animal based on its movement path rather than individual points and accounts for temporal autocorrelation and high data volumes. However, the BBMM assumes unrealistic homogeneous movement behaviour across all data. 2. Accurate quantification of the utilization distribution is important for identifying the way animals use the landscape. 3. We improve the BBMM by allowing for changes in behaviour, using likelihood statistics to determine change points along the animal's movement path. 4. This novel extension, outperforms the current BBMM as indicated by simulations and examples of a territorial mammal and a migratory bird. The unique ability of our model to work with tracks that are not sampled regularly is especially important for GPS tags that have frequent failed fixes or dynamic sampling schedules. Moreover, our model extension provides a useful one-dimensional measure of behavioural change along animal tracks. 5. This new method provides a more accurate utilization distribution that better describes the space use of realistic, behaviourally heterogeneous tracks.
Journal Article