Byrne Andrew W, O'Keeffe James, Buesching Christina D, Newman Chris
Agri-food and Biosciences Institute, Veterinary Science Division, Stormont, Belfast, UK.
School of Biological Sciences, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, UK.
Curr Zool. 2019 Oct;65(5):517-525. doi: 10.1093/cz/zoy081. Epub 2018 Nov 28.
Understanding how key parameters (e.g., density, range-size, and configuration) can affect animal movement remains a major goal of population ecology. This is particularly important for wildlife disease hosts, such as the European badger , a reservoir of Here we show how movements of 463 individuals among 223 inferred group territories across 755 km in Ireland were affected by sex, age, past-movement history, group composition, and group size index from 2009 to 2012. Females exhibited a greater probability of moving into groups with a male-biased composition, but male movements into groups were not associated with group composition. Male badgers were, however, more likely to make visits into territories than females. Animals that had immigrated into a territory previously were more likely to emigrate in the future. Animals exhibiting such "itinerant" movement patterns were more likely to belong to younger age classes. Inter-territorial movement propensity was negatively associated with group size, indicating that larger groups were more stable and less attractive (or permeable) to immigrants. Across the landscape, there was substantial variation in inferred territory-size and movement dynamics, which was related to group size. This represents behavioral plasticity previously only reported at the scale of the species' biogeographical range. Our results highlight how a "one-size-fits-all" explanation of badger movement is likely to fail under varying ecological contexts and scales, with implications for bovine tuberculosis management.
了解关键参数（如密度、活动范围大小和结构）如何影响动物的移动，仍然是种群生态学的一个主要目标。这对于野生动物疾病宿主尤为重要，比如欧洲獾，它是牛结核病的宿主。在这里，我们展示了2009年至2012年期间，爱尔兰463只个体在跨越755公里的223个推断群体领地间的移动，是如何受到性别、年龄、过去的移动历史、群体组成以及群体大小指数影响的。雌性个体迁入雄性占比高的群体的可能性更大，但雄性个体迁入群体的行为与群体组成无关。然而，雄性獾比雌性更有可能进入其他领地。之前迁入过某一领地的动物未来更有可能迁出。表现出这种“巡回”移动模式的动物更有可能属于较年轻的年龄组。领地间的移动倾向与群体大小呈负相关，这表明较大的群体更稳定，对迁入者的吸引力（或渗透性）更小。在整个研究区域内，推断出的领地大小和移动动态存在很大差异，这与群体大小有关。这体现了此前仅在物种生物地理范围尺度上报道过的行为可塑性。我们的研究结果凸显了在不同的生态背景和尺度下，对獾的移动采用“一刀切”的解释很可能是行不通的，这对牛结核病的管理具有启示意义。
