The Geography of Fear: A Latitudinal Gradient in Anti-Predator Escape Distances of Birds across Europe
All animals flee from potential predators, and the distance at which this happens is optimized so the benefits from staying are balanced against the costs of flight. Because predator diversity and abundance decreases with increasing latitude, and differs between rural and urban areas, we should expe...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:3665823 2023-05-15T17:42:44+02:00 The Geography of Fear: A Latitudinal Gradient in Anti-Predator Escape Distances of Birds across Europe Díaz, Mario Møller, Anders Pape Flensted-Jensen, Einar Grim, Tomáš Ibáñez-Álamo, Juan Diego Jokimäki, Jukka Markó, Gábor Tryjanowski, Piotr 2013-05-28 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3665823 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23724070 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064634 en eng Public Library of Science http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3665823 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23724070 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064634 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. CC-BY Research Article Text 2013 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064634 2013-09-05T00:19:51Z All animals flee from potential predators, and the distance at which this happens is optimized so the benefits from staying are balanced against the costs of flight. Because predator diversity and abundance decreases with increasing latitude, and differs between rural and urban areas, we should expect escape distance when a predator approached the individual to decrease with latitude and depend on urbanization. We measured the distance at which individual birds fled (flight initiation distance, FID, which represents a reliable and previously validated surrogate measure of response to predation risk) following a standardized protocol in nine pairs of rural and urban sites along a ca. 3000 km gradient from Southern Spain to Northern Finland during the breeding seasons 2009–2010. Raptor abundance was estimated by means of standard point counts at the same sites where FID information was recorded. Data on body mass and phylogenetic relationships among bird species sampled were extracted from the literature. An analysis of 12,495 flight distances of 714 populations of 159 species showed that mean FID decreased with increasing latitude after accounting for body size and phylogenetic effects. This decrease was paralleled by a similar cline in an index of the abundance of raptors. Urban populations had consistently shorter FIDs, supporting previous findings. The difference between rural and urban habitats decreased with increasing latitude, also paralleling raptor abundance trends. Overall, the latitudinal gradient in bird fear was explained by raptor abundance gradients, with additional small effects of latitude and intermediate effects of habitat. This study provides the first empirical documentation of a latitudinal trend in anti-predator behavior, which correlated positively with a similar trend in the abundance of predators. Text Northern Finland PubMed Central (PMC) Fid ENVELOPE(-65.939,-65.939,-68.664,-68.664) PLoS ONE 8 5 e64634 |
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PubMed Central (PMC) |
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ftpubmed |
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topic |
Research Article |
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Research Article Díaz, Mario Møller, Anders Pape Flensted-Jensen, Einar Grim, Tomáš Ibáñez-Álamo, Juan Diego Jokimäki, Jukka Markó, Gábor Tryjanowski, Piotr The Geography of Fear: A Latitudinal Gradient in Anti-Predator Escape Distances of Birds across Europe |
topic_facet |
Research Article |
description |
All animals flee from potential predators, and the distance at which this happens is optimized so the benefits from staying are balanced against the costs of flight. Because predator diversity and abundance decreases with increasing latitude, and differs between rural and urban areas, we should expect escape distance when a predator approached the individual to decrease with latitude and depend on urbanization. We measured the distance at which individual birds fled (flight initiation distance, FID, which represents a reliable and previously validated surrogate measure of response to predation risk) following a standardized protocol in nine pairs of rural and urban sites along a ca. 3000 km gradient from Southern Spain to Northern Finland during the breeding seasons 2009–2010. Raptor abundance was estimated by means of standard point counts at the same sites where FID information was recorded. Data on body mass and phylogenetic relationships among bird species sampled were extracted from the literature. An analysis of 12,495 flight distances of 714 populations of 159 species showed that mean FID decreased with increasing latitude after accounting for body size and phylogenetic effects. This decrease was paralleled by a similar cline in an index of the abundance of raptors. Urban populations had consistently shorter FIDs, supporting previous findings. The difference between rural and urban habitats decreased with increasing latitude, also paralleling raptor abundance trends. Overall, the latitudinal gradient in bird fear was explained by raptor abundance gradients, with additional small effects of latitude and intermediate effects of habitat. This study provides the first empirical documentation of a latitudinal trend in anti-predator behavior, which correlated positively with a similar trend in the abundance of predators. |
format |
Text |
author |
Díaz, Mario Møller, Anders Pape Flensted-Jensen, Einar Grim, Tomáš Ibáñez-Álamo, Juan Diego Jokimäki, Jukka Markó, Gábor Tryjanowski, Piotr |
author_facet |
Díaz, Mario Møller, Anders Pape Flensted-Jensen, Einar Grim, Tomáš Ibáñez-Álamo, Juan Diego Jokimäki, Jukka Markó, Gábor Tryjanowski, Piotr |
author_sort |
Díaz, Mario |
title |
The Geography of Fear: A Latitudinal Gradient in Anti-Predator Escape Distances of Birds across Europe |
title_short |
The Geography of Fear: A Latitudinal Gradient in Anti-Predator Escape Distances of Birds across Europe |
title_full |
The Geography of Fear: A Latitudinal Gradient in Anti-Predator Escape Distances of Birds across Europe |
title_fullStr |
The Geography of Fear: A Latitudinal Gradient in Anti-Predator Escape Distances of Birds across Europe |
title_full_unstemmed |
The Geography of Fear: A Latitudinal Gradient in Anti-Predator Escape Distances of Birds across Europe |
title_sort |
geography of fear: a latitudinal gradient in anti-predator escape distances of birds across europe |
publisher |
Public Library of Science |
publishDate |
2013 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3665823 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23724070 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064634 |
long_lat |
ENVELOPE(-65.939,-65.939,-68.664,-68.664) |
geographic |
Fid |
geographic_facet |
Fid |
genre |
Northern Finland |
genre_facet |
Northern Finland |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3665823 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23724070 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064634 |
op_rights |
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
op_rightsnorm |
CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064634 |
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PLoS ONE |
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8 |
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5 |
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e64634 |
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