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Measuring individuality in habitat use across complex landscapes: approaches, constraints, and implications for assessing resource specialization

  • Special Topic: Individual-level niche specialization
  • Published:
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Abstract

Many mobile marine species are presumed to utilize a broad spectrum of habitats, but this seemingly generalist life history may arise from conspecifics specializing on distinct habitat alternatives to exploit foraging, resting/refuge, or reproductive opportunities. We acoustically tagged 34 red drum, and mapped sand, seagrass, marsh, or oyster (across discrete landscape contexts) use by each uniquely coded individual. Using 144,000 acoustic detections, we recorded differences in habitat use among red drum: proportional use of seagrass habitat ranged from 0 to 100 %, and use of oyster-bottom types also varied among fish. WIC/TNW and IS metrics (previously applied vis-à-vis diet specialization) consistently indicated that a typical red drum overlapped >70 % with population-level niche exploitation. Monte Carlo permutations showed these values were lower than expected had fish drawn from a common habitat-use distribution, but longitudinal comparisons did not provide evidence of temporally consistent individuality, suggesting that differences among individuals were plastic and not reflective of true specialization. Given the range of acoustic detections we captured (from tens to 1,000s per individual), which are substantially larger sample sizes than in many diet studies, we extended our findings by serially reducing or expanding our data in simulations to evaluate sample-size effects. We found that the results of null hypothesis testing for specialization were highly dependent on sample size, with thresholds in the relationship between sample size and associated P-values. These results highlight opportunities and potential caveats in exploring individuality in habitat use. More broadly, exploring individual specialization in fine-scale habitat use suggests that, for mobile marine species, movement behaviors over shorter (≤weeks), but not longer (≥months), timescales may serve as an underlying mechanism for other forms of resource specialization.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Abigail Poray and Chris Baillie for field help, and Sean Powers for use of the MAP 600 system. Don Field was instrumental in finding the aerial imagery used to create habitat maps. The Redfish Action Series fishermen and organizers were crucial in collecting red drum. We also thank Tara Gancos Crawford and Seth Newsome for organizing the special topics feature, and Nathan Lemoine for contacting us to participate. Comments from three anonymous reviewers greatly improved our manuscript. This work was funded by the North Carolina Marine Resources Fund. (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee ID: 11-241.0-A.)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Marine Sciences, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 3431 Arendell Street, Morehead City, NC, 28557, USA

    F. Joel Fodrie, Lauren A. Yeager & Matthew D. Kenworthy

  2. National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, 1 Park Place Suite 300, Annapolis, MD, 21401, USA

    Lauren A. Yeager

  3. Marine Science Center, Northeastern University, 430 Nahant Road, Nahant, MA, 01908, USA

    Jonathan H. Grabowski

  4. Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University, 248 David Clark Labs, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA

    Craig A. Layman

  5. Gulf of Maine Research Institute, 350 Commercial Street, Portland, ME, 04101, USA

    Graham D. Sherwood

Authors
  1. F. Joel Fodrie
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  2. Lauren A. Yeager
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  3. Jonathan H. Grabowski
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  4. Craig A. Layman
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  5. Graham D. Sherwood
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  6. Matthew D. Kenworthy
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to F. Joel Fodrie.

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Communicated by Aaron J. Wirsing.

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Fodrie, F.J., Yeager, L.A., Grabowski, J.H. et al. Measuring individuality in habitat use across complex landscapes: approaches, constraints, and implications for assessing resource specialization. Oecologia 178, 75–87 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3212-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3212-3

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