School of Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
Science. 2013 Jul 5;341(6141):68-70. doi: 10.1126/science.1236077. Epub 2013 Jun 6.
Colonial breeding is widespread among animals. Some, such as eusocial insects, may use agonistic behavior to partition available foraging habitat into mutually exclusive territories; others, such as breeding seabirds, do not. We found that northern gannets, satellite-tracked from 12 neighboring colonies, nonetheless forage in largely mutually exclusive areas and that these colony-specific home ranges are determined by density-dependent competition. This segregation may be enhanced by individual-level public information transfer, leading to cultural evolution and divergence among colonies.
动物中广泛存在着殖民式繁殖。一些动物，如群居昆虫，可能会利用争斗行为将可利用的觅食栖息地分割成相互排斥的领地；而另一些动物，如繁殖海鸟，则不会这样做。我们发现，尽管从 12 个相邻的繁殖地对北方塘鹅进行了卫星追踪，但它们仍在很大程度上在相互排斥的区域觅食，而且这些特定于繁殖地的家域是由密度依赖竞争决定的。这种隔离可能会通过个体层面的公共信息传递得到加强，从而导致不同繁殖地之间的文化进化和分歧。
