Personality traits, sex and food abundance shape space use in an arboreal mammal

Lucas A Wauters,Damiano G Preatoni,Peter W W Lurz,Francesca Santicchia,Maria Vittoria Mazzamuto,Adriano Martinoli,Claudia Romeo,Sandro Bertolino

doi:10.1007/s00442-021-04901-2

Abstract

Animal space use is affected by spatio-temporal variation in food availability and/or population density and varies among individuals. This inter-individual variation in spacing behaviour can be further influenced by sex, body condition, social dominance, and by the animal’s personality. We used capture-mark-recapture and radio-tracking to examine the relationship between space use and personality in Eurasian red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) in three conifer forests in the Italian Alps. We further explored to what extent this was influenced by changes in food abundance and/or population density. Measures of an individual’s trappability and trap diversity had high repeatability and were used in a Principal Component Analysis to obtain a single personality score representing a boldness-exploration tendency. Males increased home-range size with low food abundance and low female density, independent of their personality. However, bolder males used larger core-areas that overlapped less with other males than shy ones, suggesting different resource (food, partners) utilization strategies among personality types. For females, space use-personality relationships varied with food abundance, and bolder females used larger home ranges than shy ones at low female density, but the trend was opposite at high female density. Females’ intrasexual core-area overlap was negatively related to body mass, with no effect of personality. We conclude that relationships between personality traits and space use in free-ranging squirrels varied with sex, and were further influenced by spatio-temporal fluctuations in food availability. Moreover, different personality types (bold-explorative vs. shy) seemed to adopt different space-use strategies to increase access to food and/or partners.

Highlights

Animals need to travel in search of resources such as food, refuge, nesting site or mates, making movement and space use key aspects of their behaviour, survival and reproductiveCommunicated by Mathew Samuel Crowther.Lucas A
We explored variation in space use using a Linear Mixed Models (LMM) with standardised home-range or core-area size as the dependent variable, adding individual as a repeated measure to account for pseudoreplication (Verbeke and Molenberghs 2000)
Trappability and trap diversity indices were consistent through time and had a high repeatability (R) in both sexes (44 males: trappability R = 0.70, 95% CI = 0.54–0.84; trap diversity R = 0.64, 95% CI = 0.46–0.81; 30 females: trappability R = 0.65, 95% CI = 0.43–0.84; trap diversity R = 0.62, 95% CI = 0.39–0.83; all likelihood ratio test P < 0.001)

Summary

Introduction

Animals need to travel in search of resources such as food, refuge, nesting site or mates, making movement and space use key aspects of their behaviour, survival and reproductiveCommunicated by Mathew Samuel Crowther.Lucas A. Animal movement patterns can vary between and within species, and the size, shape or structure of the space utilised can be affected by both extrinsic and intrinsic factors, which have been widely studied for many species (McLoughlin and Ferguson 2000; Tucker et al 2014). Space use has been widely demonstrated to vary within populations and this inter-individual variation in animal movement and home-range size has led to the concept of individual niche specialization (Schirmer et al 2019). A substantial part of this intraspecific, individual variation in home-range size and movement patterns remains unexplained (van Overveld and Matthysen 2010; Moorcroft 2012; Cote et al 2014). A growing number of studies has acknowledged that consistent individual variation in space use is related to differences in personality (Réale et al 2010; Cote et al 2014; Spiegel et al 2017; Schirmer et al 2019), defined as among-individual differences in behaviour that persist through time and under different ecological contexts (Réale et al 2007; Biro and Stamps 2008; Carter et al 2013)

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