Dataset Information

Nomadic-colonial life strategies enable paradoxical survival and growth despite habitat destruction.

ABSTRACT: Organisms often exhibit behavioral or phenotypic diversity to improve population fitness in the face of environmental variability. When each behavior or phenotype is individually maladaptive, alternating between these losing strategies can counter-intuitively result in population persistence-an outcome similar to the Parrondo's paradox. Instead of the capital or history dependence that characterize traditional Parrondo games, most ecological models which exhibit such paradoxical behavior depend on the presence of exogenous environmental variation. Here we present a population model that exhibits Parrondo's paradox through capital and history-dependent dynamics. Two sub-populations comprise our model: nomads, who live independently without competition or cooperation, and colonists, who engage in competition, cooperation, and long-term habitat destruction. Nomads and colonists may alternate behaviors in response to changes in the colonial habitat. Even when nomadism and colonialism individually lead to extinction, switching between these strategies at the appropriate moments can paradoxically enable both population persistence and long-term growth.

SUBMITTER: Tan ZX

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5319843 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Nomadic-colonial life strategies enable paradoxical survival and growth despite habitat destruction.

Tan Zhi Xuan ZX Cheong Kang Hao KH

eLife 20170113

Organisms often exhibit behavioral or phenotypic diversity to improve population fitness in the face of environmental variability. When each behavior or phenotype is individually maladaptive, alternating between these losing strategies can counter-intuitively result in population persistence-an outcome similar to the Parrondo's paradox. Instead of the capital or history dependence that characterize traditional Parrondo games, most ecological models which exhibit such paradoxical behavior depend ...[more]

PMID: 28084993

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Project description:Distribution models are increasingly being used to understand how landscape and climatic changes are affecting the processes driving spatial and temporal distributions of plants and animals. However, many modeling efforts ignore the dynamic processes that drive distributional patterns at different scales, which may result in misleading inference about the factors influencing species distributions. Current occupancy models allow estimation of occupancy at different scales and, separately, estimation of immigration and emigration. However, joint estimation of local extinction, colonization, and occupancy within a multi-scale model is currently unpublished. We extended multi-scale models to account for the dynamic processes governing species distributions, while concurrently modeling local-scale availability. We fit the model to data for lark buntings and chestnut-collared longspurs in the Great Plains, USA, collected under the Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions program. We investigate how the amount of grassland and shrubland and annual vegetation conditions affect bird occupancy dynamics and local vegetation structure affects fine-scale occupancy. Buntings were prevalent and longspurs rare in our study area, but both species were locally prevalent when present. Buntings colonized sites with preferred habitat configurations, longspurs colonized a wider range of landscape conditions, and site persistence of both was higher at sites with greener vegetation. Turnover rates were high for both species, quantifying the nomadic behavior of the species. Our model allows researchers to jointly investigate temporal dynamics of species distributions and hierarchical habitat use. Our results indicate that grassland birds respond to different covariates at landscape and local scales suggesting different conservation goals at each scale. High turnover rates of these species highlight the need to account for the dynamics of nomadic species, and our model can help inform how to coordinate management efforts to provide appropriate habitat configurations at the landscape scale and provide habitat targets for local managers.

Dataset Information

Nomadic-colonial life strategies enable paradoxical survival and growth despite habitat destruction.

Publications

Nomadic-colonial life strategies enable paradoxical survival and growth despite habitat destruction.

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