Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Bellevue, QC, Canada.
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
Ecol Lett. 2020 May;23(5):841-850. doi: 10.1111/ele.13494. Epub 2020 Mar 18.
Animals switch between inactive and active states, simultaneously impacting their energy intake, energy expenditure and predation risk, and collectively defining how they engage with environmental variation and trophic interactions. We assess daily activity responses to long-term variation in temperature, resources and mating opportunities to examine whether individuals choose to be active or inactive according to an optimisation of the relative energetic and reproductive gains each state offers. We show that this simplified behavioural decision approach predicts most activity variation (R = 0.83) expressed by free-ranging red squirrels over 4 years, as quantified through accelerometer recordings (489 deployments; 5066 squirrel-days). Recognising activity as a determinant of energetic status, the predictability of activity variation aggregated at a daily scale, and the clear signal that behaviour is environmentally forced through optimisation of gain, provides an integrated approach to examine behavioural variation as an intermediary between environmental variation and energetic, life-history and ecological outcomes.
动物在不活动和活动状态之间切换，同时影响它们的能量摄入、能量消耗和被捕食风险，并共同决定它们如何与环境变化和营养相互作用。我们评估了对温度、资源和交配机会的长期变化的日常活动反应，以检查个体是否根据每个状态提供的相对能量和繁殖收益的优化来选择活跃或不活跃。我们表明，这种简化的行为决策方法预测了 4 年来自由放养的红松鼠的大部分活动变化（R = 0.83），这些变化通过加速度计记录（489 次部署；5066 只松鼠日）来量化。将活动视为能量状态的决定因素，活动变化在每日尺度上的可预测性，以及行为通过收益优化受到环境强制的明显信号，为作为环境变化与能量、生活史和生态结果之间的中介的行为变化提供了一种综合方法。
