^1^ Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis, ^2^ School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Melbourne, 3010, Australia
*Corresponding author: matthew.malishev@gmail.com
Abstract
Individual body mass is a common and well-studied trait of the animal sensitive to environmental change. We extend the work in Chapter 3 to explore how body mass of simulated animals influences home range size and pattern, activity budgets, and available activity time through individual physiological responses, such as mass-specific response to rates of temperature change, in habitats of varying food and climate space. By grounding these physical responses on a metabolic theory-driven framework, we use differences in mass of juveniles and adults as a surrogate for different life stages of the lifecycle. This aims to explore how resource and climate constraints to movement shape home range area and patterns under varying metabolic demands of the animal life cycle, such as energy investment into growth and reproduction. We show that adults have a selective advantage in their movement potential over juveniles due to their more adaptive physiological traits under thermal extremes. However, access to resources, as determined by resource abundance, can be more important than selective physiological traits at the home range level. Further, movement strategy had no bearing on the relationship between differences in body mass and home range size. Low resources induced higher thermal stress in open patches. Therefore, a minimising movement strategy (satisficing) could easily be the more adaptive strategy when resource abundance is low. We show this strategy is indeed more advantageous under multiple constraints and costs to movement, including the physiological, i.e. heat stress and ecological, i.e. predation, by enabling the animal to mediate the metabolic investment of movement when these costs are inherently uncertain.
Model files and code, data inputs, and appendices.
File extensions:
.R
.nlogo
.csv
.pdf
.rtf
.html
.sh
20170712
R data folders for ghr hr_path mass and tb