A new study published in the journal Borders of ecology and environment discovered that individual organisms have different personalities that shape their ecological roles and therefore their contributions to ecosystem services.
Understanding how animal personality affects processes such as pollination, seed dispersal, pest species regulation, or ecotourism can provide management guidance for ecologists to maximize desired ecosystem services.
“Ecologists rarely consider the roles that individuals, with their own behavior, physiology, and genome, play in shaping ecosystem processes and therefore ecosystem services, but that is changing,” the authors wrote. study.
“A continuing increase in research on animal personalities (i.e. behavioral differences between individuals that are consistent over time and across contexts) exposes the ecological roles of individuals to scientific scrutiny.”
By measuring a wide variety of traits, including boldness, aggression, docility, curiosity or playfulness, a team of scientists led by the University of Maine has shed light on how animal personalities help provide a variety of ecosystem services.
In pollination systems, for example, “fast and imprecise” or “slow and precise” foragers can be successful in different foraging situations. Thus, fast, impulsive bees are likely to forage on flowers of simple design, while slower, more thoughtful bees are generally attracted to complex flowers. In processes such as seed dispersal, bolder and more active animals tend to disperse the seeds they consume farther than timid ones.
According to the researchers, personality traits also impact the effect of control methods on pest species, by influencing an individual’s catching ability and their relationship with predators or humans.
For example, the severity of plague pandemics seemed to decrease once the very friendly rat species rattus rattuswhich transmitted the plague bacillus to man through its fleas, has been supplanted by the more distant and fearful Rattus norvegicus, who preferred to stay further away from human settlements.
Finally, much of ecotourism, like the whale watching industry, depends on friendly, curious, or playful individual creatures. “Some cetaceans are recognizable and repeatedly approach boats for close encounters that are far more exciting than observing them from a legally required distance,” the authors reported.
“These examples demonstrate that there is vast potential to explore the ways in which the personality composition of a population can affect the ecosystem services that the population provides,” the researchers concluded.
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Through Andrei Ionescu, Terre.com Personal editor
