Department of Biology, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2020 Sep 9;287(1934):20201095. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2020.1095. Epub 2020 Sep 2.
The ideal free distribution (IFD) has been used to predict the distribution of foraging animals in a wide variety of systems. However, its predictions do not always match observed distributions of foraging animals. Instead, we often observe that there are more consumers than predicted in low-quality patches and fewer consumers than predicted in high-quality patches (i.e. undermatching). We examine the possibility that animal personality is one explanation for this undermatching. We first conducted a literature search to determine how commonly studies document the personality distribution of populations. Second, we created a simple individual-based model to conceptually demonstrate why knowing the distribution of personalities is important for studies of populations of foragers in context of the IFD. Third, we present a specific example where we calculate the added time to reach the IFD for a population of mud crabs that has a considerable number of individuals with relatively inactive personalities. We suggest that animal personality, particularly the prevalence of inactive personality types, may inhibit the ability of a population to track changes in habitat quality, therefore leading to undermatching of the IFD. This may weaken the IFD as a predictive model moving forward.
理想自由分布（IFD）已被用于预测各种系统中觅食动物的分布。然而，它的预测并不总是符合观察到的觅食动物的分布。相反，我们经常观察到，在低质量斑块中，消费者比预测的多，而在高质量斑块中，消费者比预测的少（即不匹配）。我们研究了动物个性是否是这种不匹配的一个解释。我们首先进行了文献检索，以确定有多少研究记录了种群的个性分布。其次，我们创建了一个简单的基于个体的模型，从概念上演示了为什么了解个性的分布对于在 IFD 背景下研究觅食者种群很重要。第三，我们提出了一个具体的例子，我们计算了具有相对不活跃个性的个体数量相当多的泥蟹种群达到 IFD 的额外时间。我们认为，动物个性，特别是不活跃个性类型的流行，可能会抑制种群跟踪栖息地质量变化的能力，从而导致 IFD 的不匹配。这可能会削弱 IFD 作为一个预测模型。
