Behavioural Ecology

Behavioural ecology is the study of the ecological and evolutionary basis for animal behaviour. It explores how behaviour allows an animal to adapt to its environment. The discipline emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four complimentary ways in which behaviour could be studied (functional, evolutionary, developmental and causal).

Behavioural studies in the past

The EGI has a long history of research in animal behaviour and behavioural ecology, and a diverse range of topics have been covered over the last 60 years. Some of the earliest work on spatial memory in animals was done here on the food-hoarding Marsh Tit, while the EGI was a driving proponent of optimal foraging theory, one of the most important concepts in the field over the last 30 years.

The textbooks "An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology" & "Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach" were coauthored/edited by John R. Krebs at the EGI.

Personality and behavioural syndromes

Individuals of many species from a variety of taxa have been shown to possess 'personalities' or coping styles, which can be defined as within-individual correlated behaviours across and within contexts. At the population level these correlations are referred to as behavioural syndromes. The great tit Parus major has proven one of the best model species for the study of behavioural syndromes. At one end of the personality continuum, some great tits are consistently bold across contexts, tend to be more dominant, more competitive, take more risks and disperse further. At the other end of the continuum, shy individuals tend to be the opposite in all of these behavioural facets. There is also some evidence that plasticity covaries with personality. Behavioural syndromes therefore provide an appealing explanation for much of the behavioural variation seen amongst individuals. Furthermore these genetically inherited correlations imply that different personality types do better in different environments, providing a plausible mechanism for how variation is maintained in the face of directional selection.

Since 2005 several members of the EGI have been investigating the behavioural and evolutionary ecological consequences of personality for the Wytham population of great tits. Wild great tits are kept in captivity overnight and their personalities assayed by means of novel environment exploration tests. Birds are then released back into the wild within 24 hours when their behaviour and reproductive success is monitored in the field. This general approach allows us to investigate the following general questions:

• Can behavioural syndromes help explain whether individuals and populations can adapt to environmental heterogeneity?
• What are the implications of behavioural syndromes for individual variation in mating success specifically and for life history strategies in general?
• What are the underlying proximate (e.g. genetic, physiological) causes of individual variation in personality type?
• Does personality modulate the way individuals manage their risks of starvation and predation?
• How general is the link between personality and behavioural plasticity?
• What is the scope of behavioural correlation within a population? For example, do personality types differ in cognitive or problem solving ability (see Video 1)?

See John Quinn's, Sandra Bouwhuis' and Sam Patrick's webpages for further details

Predator-prey interactions

Predation explains much diversity seen in animal behaviour. Topics currently under investigation include the following:

Group living: Spacing, domains of danger and the confusion effect are all considered to be ubiquitous selective mechanisms for group living but their relative importance and whether they are truly independent effects remain to be established. In general predator behaviour is notoriously difficult to characterise and is consequently often excluded from theoretical models of predator-prey interactions. The effect of predator-prey interactions on group living is currently under investigation using a wild sparrowhawk-redshank system in Scotland (in collaboration with Will Cresswell, the University of St Andrews; see Video 2 & 3), a laboratory spider system and the great tit population at Wytham. See John Quinn's webpage.

Mass dependent predation risk: Birds are thought to regulate their body mass with respect to their perceived risk of predation. One study at the EGI showed that long term trends in the body mass of British great tits were influenced by pesticide induced declines of their main predator, the sparrowhawk (see Figure 1). The precise mechanisms behind body mass regulation remain to be elucidated and are currently being studied at the EGI. See Andy Gosler's webpage.

Figure 1: Changes in residual mass of great tits during sparrowhawk recolonization after DDT was banned 1969-1983 - Download as PDF.

Behaviour and conservation

Studying the mechanisms underlying observed behaviour can help explain why some populations adapt poorly to a changing agricultural landscape. The starling is currently being used as a model species to investigate how micro-habitat heterogeneity influences foraging success and the ability to trade-off the risks of starvation and predation effectively. For example, starlings avoid tall grass patches primarily because this increases their perception of predation risk rather than because of differences in food availability. See webpages for John Krebs, Claire Devereux and Kat Jones.

Collaborations

Our main current external collaborators in our behavioural ecology research are:

Will Cresswell (St. Andrews)

Esteban Fernández-Juricic (Sherbrooke, Canada)

Juliet Vickery (British Trust for Ornithology)

Mark Whitingham (Newcastle)

Copyright © The Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology - Contact Us