Foto: Miquel Palmer, Andrea Campos y Josep Alós (Autora: Ana Payo Payo)

Esporles, January 16, 2019. Andrea Campos Candela has defended her doctoral thesis supervised by the doctors Miquel Palmer Vidal and Josep Alós, from IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB). The event took place on January 8 at the Sciences Faculty of the University of Alicante.

Shyness, boldness, aggressiveness, activity, sociability… all these personality axes define animals at the individual level, and individual specificities along them tend to be correlated. Recently, these patterns of covariation have been enlarged to accommodate movement behaviour within a personality-dependent spatial ecology theory. Most animals tend to forage, reproduce and develop any activity within specific bounded space, which leads to the formation of home range areas. Animals differ from each other individually in their home range and movement behaviour leading to well-contrasted spatial behavioural types.

However, many open questions remain in the field of ecology: How does spatial behavioural types connect with life history? What is the role of personality in ecology?

In my PhD thesis, I aimed to address from conceptual, empirical and theoretical perspectives such a cornerstone questions in behavioural ecology. I propose a unifying behavioural-bioenergetics theory to test the adaptive value of behaviour based on dynamic energy budgets. This behavioural-bioenergetics model connects i) personality traits, ii) home range, iii) physiology and iv) LH traits through an interwoven of mass/energy fluxes. I explore empirically how personality relates with feeding behaviour. Moving forward to including management scenarios, I provide two examples on how the consideration of home range related theoretical concepts might improve the management of wild populations.

Source: IMEDEA (UIB-CSIC)

More information: Andrea Campos Candela (Universitat d'Alacant)