Between- and within-individual variation in activity increases with water temperature in wild perch

Abstract

In contrast to a growing interest in the ecological implications of consistent individual differences in behavior, it is still unclear how consistent those differences are across environmental gradients, especially under ecologically relevant contexts and timescales. We investigated how individual variation in swimming activity of Eurasian perch (Perca fluviatilis) changes in response to natural fluctuations of water temperature as a proxy for an ecological gradient for ectothermic animals. Using an automated acoustic telemetry system, we tracked individual positions of adult perch in a whole natural lake for about 1 year and compared several model frameworks for the individual responses to water temperature. The best-fit model revealed that rising water temperature led to an increase in both between-and within-individual variation in activity, thereby stabilizing behavioral repeatability across temperature. Further, including temporal autocorrelation significantly improved the model performance, suggesting that consistent individual differences in behavior could be partially explained by factors such as slowly changing states in the wild. By using ecologically relevant data, our results revealed complex patterns of behavioral variation in response to an environmental change represented by water temperature.

Fine‐scale movement ecology of a freshwater top predator, Eurasian perch (Perca fluviatilis), in response to the abiotic environment over the course of a year

“…High-resolution telemetry has been applied in many research fields, such as animal personality in the wild (Harrison et al, 2015;Nakayama, Laskowski, Klefoth, & Arlinghaus, 2016;Taylor & Cooke, 2014) and correlations between movement and life history traits (Nakayama, Rapp, & Arlinghaus, 2017). When coupled with environmental data, high-resolution telemetry affords an opportunity to re-evaluate our current knowledge about the behaviour of free-ranging fishes in the wild and offer new insights.…”

Fast and behavior-selective exploitation of a marine fish targeted by anglers

“…23 for exception). Laboratory-based behavioral assays will rarely represent how the very same individuals behave in the wild24, and so far due to the difficulty of tracking fishes over long periods of time in the wild, only a few papers have documented consistent individual heterogeneity in fish behavior in free-ranging individuals targeted by fishers232526.…”

Consistency in boldness expression varies with ecological context in a jumping spider

“…We found that environmental contexts influenced the spiders’ intra‐individual variability as spiders behaved more predictably in some contexts than in other contexts. Previous studies have shown that intra‐individual variability may vary across ecological contexts or environmental conditions (Briffa, ; Highcock & Carter, ; Nakayama et al, ; Pruitt, DiRienzo, Kralj‐Fišer, Johnson, & Sih, ). Here, we find that P. labiata increases the intra‐individual variability when they face conspecific intruders as compared to the context with the environmental change only.…”