Behavioural response to simulated avian predation varies with latitude and predation intensity of natural populations
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Behavioural response to simulated avian predation varies with latitude and predation intensity of natural populations Zachary W. Culumber1 Received: 4 May 2020 / Accepted: 31 August 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The intensity of ecological interactions is generally expected to increase at lower latitudes, suggesting potential to shape prey behavior at broad spatial scales. Yet, there is relatively limited understanding of how animal behavior varies across major environmental gradients for most taxonomic groups. In this study, I investigated behavioral response of a livebearing fish, Gambusia holbrooki, to a simulated avian predator. Fish originated from 17 populations distributed across 15° latitude. Across this latitudinal expanse, the richness of piscivorous birds varied significantly. Consistent with putative predation pressure, antipredator responses were more frequent in regions with greater inferred predation pressure. Predator richness and latitude covaried significantly across the study region, indicating a need to further disentangle drivers of behavioral evolution including potentially correlated unmeasured variables. Nonetheless, this study demonstrates the importance of environmental variation for shaping patterns of animal behavior at a broad spatial scale (2000+ km), which may be important for understanding a range of ecological processes such as disease transmission and invasion dynamics. Keywords Behavioral variation · Animal personality · Predator–prey interaction · Life history evolution
Introduction Behavioral divergence among natural populations is common across taxonomic groups (Bulova 1994; McIntosh and Townsend 1994; Endler and Houde 1995; Downes and Adams 2001). Despite the critical role that behavior plays in adaptation and speciation, focus on the causes and consequences of such geographic variation in behavior is relatively recent (Foster and Endler 1999). In this context, some of the best understood
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1068 2-020-10075-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Zachary W. Culumber [email protected] 1
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alabama in Huntsville, 301 Sparkman Drive, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA
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Evolutionary Ecology
cases of geographic divergence in behavior come from systems with clear asymmetries in selective regimes such as differences in predation (Herczeg et al. 2009; Rasmussen and Belk 2017; Fowler et al. 2018). Given the importance of decision making under threat of predation, predator–prey interactions should be a particularly strong source of selection for behavioral evolution (Abrams and Matsuda 1997). However, we know much less about how antipredator behaviors, in particular, are shaped by ecological interactions at much larger spatial scales. Species interactions—including predator–prey interactions—tend to be stronger at lower latitudes (Schemske et al. 2009)
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