Digging into the behaviour of an active hunting predator: arctic fox prey caching events revealed by accelerometry
BACKGROUND: Biologging now allows detailed recording of animal movement, thus informing behavioural ecology in ways unthinkable just a few years ago. In particular, combining GPS and accelerometry allows spatially explicit tracking of various behaviours, including predation events in large terrestri...
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Online Access: | http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8626921/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34838144 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-021-00295-1 |
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:8626921 2023-05-15T14:31:09+02:00 Digging into the behaviour of an active hunting predator: arctic fox prey caching events revealed by accelerometry Clermont, Jeanne Woodward-Gagné, Sasha Berteaux, Dominique 2021-11-27 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8626921/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34838144 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-021-00295-1 en eng BioMed Central http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8626921/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34838144 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40462-021-00295-1 © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. CC0 PDM CC-BY Mov Ecol Research Text 2021 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-021-00295-1 2021-12-05T01:52:45Z BACKGROUND: Biologging now allows detailed recording of animal movement, thus informing behavioural ecology in ways unthinkable just a few years ago. In particular, combining GPS and accelerometry allows spatially explicit tracking of various behaviours, including predation events in large terrestrial mammalian predators. Specifically, identification of location clusters resulting from prey handling allows efficient location of killing events. For small predators with short prey handling times, however, identifying predation events through technology remains unresolved. We propose that a promising avenue emerges when specific foraging behaviours generate diagnostic acceleration patterns. One such example is the caching behaviour of the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus), an active hunting predator strongly relying on food storage when living in proximity to bird colonies. METHODS: We equipped 16 Arctic foxes from Bylot Island (Nunavut, Canada) with GPS and accelerometers, yielding 23 fox-summers of movement data. Accelerometers recorded tri-axial acceleration at 50 Hz while we obtained a sample of simultaneous video recordings of fox behaviour. Multiple supervised machine learning algorithms were tested to classify accelerometry data into 4 behaviours: motionless, running, walking and digging, the latter being associated with food caching. Finally, we assessed the spatio-temporal concordance of fox digging and greater snow goose (Anser caerulescens antlanticus) nesting, to test the ecological relevance of our behavioural classification in a well-known study system dominated by top-down trophic interactions. RESULTS: The random forest model yielded the best behavioural classification, with accuracies for each behaviour over 96%. Overall, arctic foxes spent 49% of the time motionless, 34% running, 9% walking, and 8% digging. The probability of digging increased with goose nest density and this result held during both goose egg incubation and brooding periods. CONCLUSIONS: Accelerometry combined with GPS allowed us to ... Text Arctic Fox Arctic Bylot Island Nunavut Vulpes lagopus PubMed Central (PMC) Arctic Bylot Island Canada Nunavut Movement Ecology 9 1 |
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Research Clermont, Jeanne Woodward-Gagné, Sasha Berteaux, Dominique Digging into the behaviour of an active hunting predator: arctic fox prey caching events revealed by accelerometry |
topic_facet |
Research |
description |
BACKGROUND: Biologging now allows detailed recording of animal movement, thus informing behavioural ecology in ways unthinkable just a few years ago. In particular, combining GPS and accelerometry allows spatially explicit tracking of various behaviours, including predation events in large terrestrial mammalian predators. Specifically, identification of location clusters resulting from prey handling allows efficient location of killing events. For small predators with short prey handling times, however, identifying predation events through technology remains unresolved. We propose that a promising avenue emerges when specific foraging behaviours generate diagnostic acceleration patterns. One such example is the caching behaviour of the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus), an active hunting predator strongly relying on food storage when living in proximity to bird colonies. METHODS: We equipped 16 Arctic foxes from Bylot Island (Nunavut, Canada) with GPS and accelerometers, yielding 23 fox-summers of movement data. Accelerometers recorded tri-axial acceleration at 50 Hz while we obtained a sample of simultaneous video recordings of fox behaviour. Multiple supervised machine learning algorithms were tested to classify accelerometry data into 4 behaviours: motionless, running, walking and digging, the latter being associated with food caching. Finally, we assessed the spatio-temporal concordance of fox digging and greater snow goose (Anser caerulescens antlanticus) nesting, to test the ecological relevance of our behavioural classification in a well-known study system dominated by top-down trophic interactions. RESULTS: The random forest model yielded the best behavioural classification, with accuracies for each behaviour over 96%. Overall, arctic foxes spent 49% of the time motionless, 34% running, 9% walking, and 8% digging. The probability of digging increased with goose nest density and this result held during both goose egg incubation and brooding periods. CONCLUSIONS: Accelerometry combined with GPS allowed us to ... |
format |
Text |
author |
Clermont, Jeanne Woodward-Gagné, Sasha Berteaux, Dominique |
author_facet |
Clermont, Jeanne Woodward-Gagné, Sasha Berteaux, Dominique |
author_sort |
Clermont, Jeanne |
title |
Digging into the behaviour of an active hunting predator: arctic fox prey caching events revealed by accelerometry |
title_short |
Digging into the behaviour of an active hunting predator: arctic fox prey caching events revealed by accelerometry |
title_full |
Digging into the behaviour of an active hunting predator: arctic fox prey caching events revealed by accelerometry |
title_fullStr |
Digging into the behaviour of an active hunting predator: arctic fox prey caching events revealed by accelerometry |
title_full_unstemmed |
Digging into the behaviour of an active hunting predator: arctic fox prey caching events revealed by accelerometry |
title_sort |
digging into the behaviour of an active hunting predator: arctic fox prey caching events revealed by accelerometry |
publisher |
BioMed Central |
publishDate |
2021 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8626921/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34838144 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-021-00295-1 |
geographic |
Arctic Bylot Island Canada Nunavut |
geographic_facet |
Arctic Bylot Island Canada Nunavut |
genre |
Arctic Fox Arctic Bylot Island Nunavut Vulpes lagopus |
genre_facet |
Arctic Fox Arctic Bylot Island Nunavut Vulpes lagopus |
op_source |
Mov Ecol |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8626921/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34838144 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40462-021-00295-1 |
op_rights |
© The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
op_rightsnorm |
CC0 PDM CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-021-00295-1 |
container_title |
Movement Ecology |
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