School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, King's College, Aberdeen AB24 3FX, UK.
School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Lighthouse Field Station, George Street, Cromarty IV11 8YL, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2023 Oct 11;290(2008):20231187. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2023.1187.
Social behaviours can allow individuals to flexibly respond to environmental change, potentially buffering adverse effects. However, individuals may respond differently to the same environmental stimulus, complicating predictions for population-level response to environmental change. Here, we show that bottlenose dolphins () alter their social behaviour at yearly and monthly scales in response to a proxy for food availability (salmon abundance) but do not respond to variation in a proxy for climate (the North Atlantic Oscillation index). There was also individual variation in plasticity for gregariousness and connectedness to distant parts of the social network, although these traits showed limited repeatability. By contrast, individuals showed consistent differences in clustering with their immediate social environment at the yearly scale but no individual variation in plasticity for this trait at either timescale. These results indicate that social behaviour in free-ranging cetaceans can be highly resource dependent with individuals increasing their connectedness over short timescales but possibly reducing their wider range of connection at longer timescales. Some social traits showed more individual variation in plasticity or mean behaviour than others, highlighting how predictions for the responses of populations to environmental variation must consider the type of individual variation present in the population.
社会行为可以使个体灵活应对环境变化，从而减轻不利影响。然而，个体可能对相同的环境刺激做出不同的反应，这使得对种群对环境变化的反应进行预测变得复杂。在这里，我们表明，宽吻海豚（）会根据食物供应的代表（鲑鱼丰度）在年际和月度尺度上改变其社会行为，但不会对气候代表（北大西洋涛动指数）的变化做出反应。群居性和与社交网络远距离部分的连接性也存在个体间的可塑性差异，尽管这些特征的可重复性有限。相比之下，个体在年度尺度上与直接社交环境的聚类表现出一致的差异，但在这两个时间尺度上，该特征的可塑性均无个体差异。这些结果表明，自由生活的鲸目动物的社会行为可能高度依赖于资源，个体在短时间内增加其连接性，但可能在较长时间内减少其更广泛的连接范围。一些社会特征的可塑性或平均行为的个体间差异大于其他特征，这突出表明，预测种群对环境变化的反应必须考虑种群中存在的个体间变异的类型。
