Is flight initiation distance associated with longer-term survival in yellow-bellied marmots, Marmota flaviventer?

Abstract

The distance at which animals move away from threats, flight initiation distance (FID), is often used to study antipredator behaviour and risk assessment. Variation in FID is explained by a variety of internal and external biotic and physical factors, including anthropogenic activities. Most prior studies focused on unidentified individuals, so our understanding of the fitness consequences of FID is relatively limited. We asked whether consistent individual differences in variation in flight initiation distance is associated with variation in summer survival and/or winter survival in an individually marked population of yellow-bellied marmots. We found no clear association between flight initiation distance and summer survival or winter survival. This suggests that FID decisions, while demonstrably optimizing current survival, may not have longer-term fitness consequences. Our results may be explained by the relatively modest repeatability of FID or it may have emerged from our attempt to explain longer-term measures of fitness. Future studies of the fitness consequences of personality traits should pay particular attention to the time interval between measuring the individuality of a trait and examining its fitness consequences.