Mammals adjust diel activity across gradients of urbanization
- George Mason University, United States
- Lincoln Park Zoo, United States
- University of Rhode Island, United States
- Kansas State University, United States
- Butler University, United States
- California State University, Long Beach, United States
- St. Edward's University, United States
- University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States
- City of Austin, United States
- University of Alberta, Canada
- University of Iowa, United States
- Brandywine Zoo, United States
- The Nature Conservancy, United States
- Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, United States
Abstract
Time is a fundamental component of ecological processes. How animal behavior changes over time has been explored through well-known ecological theories like niche partitioning and predator-prey dynamics. Yet, changes in animal behavior within the shorter 24-hour light-dark cycle have largely gone unstudied. Understanding if an animal can adjust their temporal activity to mitigate or adapt to environmental change has become a recent topic of discussion and is important for effective wildlife management and conservation. While spatial habitat is a fundamental consideration in wildlife management and conservation, temporal habitat is often ignored. We formulated a temporal resource selection model to quantify the diel behavior of eight mammal species across ten U.S. cities. We found high variability in diel activity patterns within and among species and species-specific correlations between diel activity and human population density, impervious land cover, available greenspace, vegetation cover, and mean daily temperature. We also found that some species may modulate temporal behaviors to manage both natural and anthropogenic risks. Our results highlight the complexity with which temporal activity patterns interact with local environmental characteristics, and suggest that urban mammals may use time along the 24-hour cycle to reduce risk, adapt, and therefore persist, and in some cases thrive, in human-dominated ecosystems.
Data availability
All related data and R scripts have been deposited at Dryad: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fxpnvx0tb
-
Mammals adjust diel activity across gradients of urbanizationDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.fxpnvx0tb.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Abra Prentice-Wilkin Foundation
- Travis Gallo
- Mason Fidino
- Elizabeth W Lehrer
- Maureen H Murray
- Seth B Magle
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Yuuki Y Watanabe, National Institute of Polar Research, Japan
Version history
- Preprint posted: September 24, 2021 (view preprint)
- Received: October 15, 2021
- Accepted: March 29, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: March 31, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: April 6, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
Metrics
-
- 2,664
- views
-
- 402
- downloads
-
- 14
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Mammals adjust diel activity across gradients of urbanization
eLife 11:e74756.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74756
Further reading
-
- Ecology
The bacterium responsible for a disease that infects citrus plants across Asia facilitates its own proliferation by increasing the fecundity of its host insect.
-
- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
In the unpredictable Anthropocene, a particularly pressing open question is how certain species invade urban environments. Sex-biased dispersal and learning arguably influence movement ecology, but their joint influence remains unexplored empirically, and might vary by space and time. We assayed reinforcement learning in wild-caught, temporarily captive core-, middle-, or edge-range great-tailed grackles—a bird species undergoing urban-tracking rapid range expansion, led by dispersing males. We show, across populations, both sexes initially perform similarly when learning stimulus-reward pairings, but, when reward contingencies reverse, male—versus female—grackles finish ‘relearning’ faster, making fewer choice-option switches. How do male grackles do this? Bayesian cognitive modelling revealed male grackles’ choice behaviour is governed more strongly by the ‘weight’ of relative differences in recent foraging payoffs—i.e., they show more pronounced risk-sensitive learning. Confirming this mechanism, agent-based forward simulations of reinforcement learning—where we simulate ‘birds’ based on empirical estimates of our grackles’ reinforcement learning—replicate our sex-difference behavioural data. Finally, evolutionary modelling revealed natural selection should favour risk-sensitive learning in hypothesised urban-like environments: stable but stochastic settings. Together, these results imply risk-sensitive learning is a winning strategy for urban-invasion leaders, underscoring the potential for life history and cognition to shape invasion success in human-modified environments.
