Abstract
SynopsisWild animals often engage in intense physical activity while performing tasks vital for their survival and reproduction associated with foraging, avoiding predators, fighting, providing parental care, and migrating. In this theme issue we consider how viewing these tasks as “exercise”—analogous to that performed by human athletes—may help provide insight into the mechanisms underlying individual variation in these types of behaviors and the importance of physical activity in an ecological context. In this article and throughout this issue, we focus on four key questions relevant to the study of behavioral ecology that may be addressed by studying wild animal behavior from the perspective of exercise physiology: (1) How hard do individual animals work in response to ecological (or evolutionary) demands?; (2) Do lab-based studies of activity provide good models for understanding activity in free-living animals and individual variation in traits?; (3) Can animals work too hard during “routine” activities?; and (4) Can paradigms of “exercise” and “training” be applied to free-living animals? Attempts to address these issues are currently being facilitated by rapid technological developments associated with physiological measurements and the remote tracking of wild animals, to provide mechanistic insights into the behavior of free-ranging animals at spatial and temporal scales that were previously impossible. We further suggest that viewing the behaviors of non-human animals in terms of the physical exercise performed will allow us to fully take advantage of these technological advances, draw from knowledge and conceptual frameworks already in use by human exercise physiologists, and identify key traits that constrain performance and generate variation in performance among individuals. It is our hope that, by highlighting mechanisms of behavior and performance, the articles in this issue will spur on further synergies between physiologists and ecologists, to take advantage of emerging cross-disciplinary perspectives and technologies.
Highlights
The past decade has seen a steep rise in research focussing on individual trait variability within animal species (Williams 2008; Biro and Stamps 2010; Sih et al 2015)
Among-individual variation has been long-recognized as the raw material on which natural selection operates to shape evolutionary trajectories (Darwin 1859; Huntingford 1976), this surge in interest has examined the role of specific traits in evolutionary processes (Dingemanse and Reale 2005; van Oers et al 2005; Wolf and Weissing 2012), trait covariation (Biro and Stamps 2008; Careau et al 2008), and the mechanisms that allow trait variation to persist in wild populations (Wolf et al 2007; Dingemanse and Wolf 2010; Stamps and Groothuis 2010)
We examine the mechanistic underpinnings of individual variation in behavior and, how the physiological capacity for physical activity or “exercise” may directly enhance individual fitness
Summary
The past decade has seen a steep rise in research focussing on individual trait variability within animal species (Williams 2008; Biro and Stamps 2010; Sih et al 2015). An outstanding question is to what extent variation in the maximum capacity for physical activity, often a target of lab-based studies, is ecologically relevant and affects individual fitness (Metcalfe et al 2016).
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