Changes in the social behavior of urban animals: more aggression or tolerance?
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Changes in the social behavior of urban animals: more aggression or tolerance? Rafał Łopucki1 · Daniel Klich2 · Adam Kiersztyn3 Received: 28 April 2020 / Accepted: 4 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Behavioral traits play a major role in successful adaptation of wildlife to urban conditions. However, there are few studies showing how urban conditions affect the social behavior of urban animals during their direct encounters. It is generally believed that the higher density of urban populations translates into increased aggression between individuals. In this paper, using a camera-trap method, we compared the character of direct encounters in urban and non-urban populations of the striped field mouse Apodemus agrarius (Pallas, 1771), a species known as an urban adapter. We confirmed the thesis that urbanization affects the social behavior and urban and rural populations differ from each other. Urban animals are less likely to avoid close contact with each other and are more likely to show tolerant behavior. They also have a lower tendency towards monopolization of food resources. The behavior of urban animals varies depending on the time of day: in the daytime, animals are more vigilant and less tolerant than at night. Our results indicate that, in the case of the species studied, behavioral adaptation to urban life is based on increasing tolerance rather than aggression in social relations. However, the studied urban adapter retains the high plasticity of social behavior revealed even in the circadian cycle. The observation that tolerance rather than aggression may predominate in urban populations is a new finding, while most studies suggest an increase in aggression in urban animals. This opens an avenue for formulating new hypotheses regarding the social behavior of urban adapters. Keywords Urbanization · Behavior · Adaptation · Mammals · Intra-population interactions · Escape behavior
Introduction
Handling editor: Raquel Monclús. * Rafał Łopucki [email protected] Daniel Klich [email protected] Adam Kiersztyn [email protected] 1
Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Konstantynów 1J, 20‑708 Lublin, Poland
2
Department of Animal Genetics and Conservation, Warsaw University of Life Sciences-SGGW, Ciszewskiego 8, 02‑786 Warsaw, Poland
3
Institute of Computer Science, Lublin University of Technology, Nadbystrzycka 36B, 20‑618 Lublin, Poland
Wild terrestrial vertebrates under the pressure of urbanization are usually forced to use highly transformed and fragmented habitats and novel sources of food. They also have to interact with constant anthropogenic disturbances and highly diverse stimuli and stressors, including vehicular traffic, human presence, pets, light pollution, and anthropogenic noise (Atwell et al. 2012; Swaddle et al. 2015; Weaver et al. 2019). Given such a diverse set of evolutionarily novel factors affecting animals, only some wild species are able to adapt to city life (McKinney 2008; Francis an
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