Abstract
Animal innovations range from the discovery of novel food types to the invention of completely novel behaviours. Innovations can give access to new opportunities, and thus enable innovating agents to invade and create novel niches. This in turn can pave the way for morphological adaptation and adaptive radiation. The mechanisms that make innovations possible are probably as diverse as the innovations themselves. So too are their evolutionary consequences. Perhaps because of this diversity, we lack a unifying framework that links mechanism to function. We propose a framework for animal innovation that describes the interactions between mechanism, fitness benefit and evolutionary significance, and which suggests an expanded range of experimental approaches. In doing so, we split innovation into factors (components and phases) that can be manipulated systematically, and which can be investigated both experimentally and with correlational studies. We apply this framework to a selection of cases, showing how it helps us ask more precise questions and design more revealing experiments.
Highlights
A changing world both poses challenges to, and provides new opportunities for, an organism
When studies rely on anecdotal reports, there is a possibility that these are shaped by reporting biases, but substantial effort has been invested in accounting for research and observation biases, increasing confidence that taxonomic differences in innovation counts are not purely attributable to these confounding variables [3,5]
We suggest that innovation processes can be decomposed into six phases characterized by different combinations of the structural components proposed above. 1
Summary
A changing world both poses challenges to, and provides new opportunities for, an organism. Behavioural innovations allow humans and other animal species to respond adaptively to a changing world As such, they provide a route for animals to deal with challenges, and to capitalize on them, and even create novel opportunities. Large-scale multi-species analyses have related anecdotal reports of novel feeding behaviours to ecological and evolutionary parameters (see reviews [3,4,5]) These studies aim to determine the environmental drivers, the adaptive significance and the evolutionary consequences of innovations, while making few assumptions about mechanisms (reviewed by [3]). License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited Spurred along by these macro-ecological level findings, an experimental programme aims to identify the proximate mechanisms of innovation [14,15]. This paper develops a more comprehensive framework and shows how it can generate new research directions
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