Abstract
Animals disperse in response to poor resource conditions as a strategy of escaping harsh competition and stress, but may also disperse under good resource conditions, as these provide better chances of surviving dispersal and gaining fitness benefits such as avoiding kin competition and inbreeding. Individual traits should mediate the effect of resources, yielding a complex condition-dependent dispersal response. We investigated how experimental food reductions in a food-rich environment around poultry-growing villages interact with individual-traits (age, gender, body-mass) in two sympatric canids, red foxes and golden jackals, to jointly affect emigration propensity and survival during dispersal. Sub-adult foxes emigrated more frequently from the food-rich habitat than from the pristine, food-limited habitat, while adult foxes showed the opposite trend. During dispersal, adults exhibited lower survival while sub-adults did not experience additional mortality costs. Although fox mortality rates increased in response to food reduction, dispersal remained unchanged, while jackals showed strong dispersal response in two of the three repetitions. Jackal survival under food reduction was lowest for the dispersing individuals. While resources are an important dispersal determinant, different age classes and species experience the same resource environment differently and consequently have different motivations, yielding different dispersal responses and consequences.
Highlights
Balance, gaining a broader view on why individuals disperse or not under particular circumstances requires examining the causes of dispersal but its consequences as well
In this work we studied how resource conditions are combined with individual traits to affect emigration probability and the probability of surviving dispersal in populations of red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and golden jackals (Canis aureus) inhabiting the same area in northern Israel
Since the rich habitat in our study system supported a much denser population, no substantial differences may exist in the per-capita food intake between the habitats, given that populations in both habitats are stable over time[12], and differences in densities reflect steady-state differences in carrying-capacity
Summary
Balance, gaining a broader view on why individuals disperse or not under particular circumstances requires examining the causes of dispersal but its consequences as well. In this work we studied how resource conditions are combined with individual traits to affect emigration probability and the probability of surviving dispersal in populations of red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and golden jackals (Canis aureus) inhabiting the same area in northern Israel. The populations of both species occupy two distinct habitats: a rich habitat resulting from poor sanitation in and around poultry farm villages, and a relatively poor habitat in the more pristine areas away from the villages[12]. To understand how individual traits (age class, gender and body-mass) mediate the effects of resources on dispersal behavior, we examined how individual traits interact with resource-related factors to affect emigration rates, and how these traits interact with dispersal to affect survival
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