Behavioural hypervolumes of spider communities predict community performance and disbandment

Trait-based ecology argues that an understanding of the traits of interactors can enhance the predictability of ecological outcomes. We examine here whether the multidimensional behavioural-trait diversity of communities influences community performance and stability in situ. We created experimental...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Biological sciences, 2016-12, Vol.283 (1844), p.20161409-20161409
Main Authors: Pruitt, Jonathan N., Bolnick, Daniel I., Sih, Andrew, DiRienzo, Nicholas, Pinter-Wollman, Noa
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Appetitive Behavior
Araneae
Behavior, Animal
Behavioural Hypervolume
Behavioural Niche
Behavioural Syndrome
Body Size
Community
Ecology
Exploratory Behavior
Female
Locomotion
Mixed Species Group
Personality
Spiders - classification
Spiders - physiology
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Trait-based ecology argues that an understanding of the traits of interactors can enhance the predictability of ecological outcomes. We examine here whether the multidimensional behavioural-trait diversity of communities influences community performance and stability in situ. We created experimental communities of web-building spiders, each with an identical species composition. Communities contained one individual of each of five different species. Prior to establishing these communities in the field, we examined three behavioural traits for each individual spider. These behavioural measures allowed us to estimate community-wide behavioural diversity, as inferred by the multidimensional behavioural volume occupied by the entire community. Communities that occupied a larger region of behavioural-trait space (i.e. where spiders differed more from each other behaviourally) gained more mass and were less likely to disband. Thus, there is a community-wide benefit to multidimensional behavioural diversity in this system that might translate to other multispecies assemblages.
ISSN:0962-8452
1471-2954
1471-2954
DOI:10.1098/rspb.2016.1409