Reconciling social interaction with habitat selection in territorial species
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Reconciling social interaction with habitat selection in territorial species Thomas A. Scott • Pey-Yi Lee
Received: 4 November 2011 / Accepted: 16 August 2012 / Published online: 18 September 2012 Ó Springer-Verlag 2012
Abstract The concept of habitat selection as the primary force in clustered distributions has been challenged by behavioral studies of conspecific attraction. This has lead to two conflicting explanations for settlement behavior, which we have integrated into one model. This model creates a range of fitness outcomes for different settlement strategies, encompassing the four combinations of positive and negative effects of the habitat selection and social interaction. It expands the ideal free distribution models (negative intra-specific interactions and positive habitat selection), to consider alternative situations where (1) beneficial social interaction increases fitness for clustered pairs in poor quality habitat, (2) neither habitat selection nor conspecific attraction can improve fitness, and (3) where both are beneficial and do not interfere with each other. The model does this by establishing an intrinsic fitness, where the effects of both habitat selection (h) and conspecific attractions (c) are neutral (h = c = 1) and do not influence settlement. Clustered distributions occur when h c [ 1 because the fitness in clusters is greater than intrinsic fitness. Dispersed distributions occur when h c \ 1 and fitness is lower than the intrinsic. The benefit of the model is that it allows conspecific attraction to be T. A. Scott P.-Y. Lee (&) Department of Earth Sciences, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA e-mail: [email protected] T. A. Scott Center for Conservation Biology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA T. A. Scott Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
considered a positive force in fitness without rejecting the proven concept of ideal free distribution. Keywords Allee effect Conspecific attraction Dispersion patterns Habitat selection
Introduction Habitat selection is an important point of natural selection in animal populations and remains a fundamental concept in studies of animal distributions and abundances (Block and Brennan 1993; Cody 1985; Fretwell and Lucas 1970; Grinnell 1917; Lack 1933). Therefore, it is intuitive to credit clustered distributions of individuals to selection of high-quality habitat in patchy environment (Kiester and Slatkin 1974). However, Allee (1931, 1951) suggested conspecific attraction as an alternative explanation to habitat selection in clustered distributions, and this concept has gained support from empirical studies of sexual selection (Courchamp et al. 1999; Danchin and Wagner 1997; Stamps 1994; Stephens and Sutherland 1999) and other social advantages (Lee 2006; Stamps 1988) that explained breeding clusters that were independent of habitat conditions. The concepts of the ideal-free or idealdespotic distribution (Fretwell
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