Hierarchical trade-offs between risk and reward mediated by behavior

Abstract

Understanding the distribution of individuals in space is a primary concern to ecologists and managers. With the advent of remote monitoring technology, we have been able to answer where individuals are but we often lack an understanding of why they are located in a particular place from a behavioral perspective. Increasingly, ecologists are becoming aware of the crucial role individual behavior may play in ecological processes. The movement of individuals within fragmented landscapes is no exception. We used a dynamic state variable model to explicitly account for the behavioral trade-off between acquiring forage and predation risk in a spatial context. We found that when individuals were able to become behaviorally unavailable for predation within a patch as a result of their energetic state, foraging strategy, or the effectiveness of anti-predator behaviors, they were able to mitigate the potential travel costs associated with the spatial configuration of patches to use riskier patches. However, when this was not possible, patch choice became an effective way of minimizing the risk of predation. Individuals appear to trade-off predation risk and the acquisition of forage in a hierarchical fashion depending on whether or not the spatial arrangement and context of patches constrained their anti-predator behavior. We suggest that a better understanding how patch selection and the behavioral trade-offs associated with predation risk occur at multiple scales may help bridge the gap between animal behavior and landscape ecology.