Is flight initiation distance associated with longer-term survival in yellow-bellied marmots (<i> Marmota flaviventer </i>)?

Abstract

The distance at which animals move away from threats, flight initiation distance (FID), is often used to study antipredator behavior and risk assessment. Variation in FID is explained by a variety of internal and external biotic and physical factors, including anthropogenic activities. Most prior studies focused on unidentified individuals, so our understanding of the fitness consequences of FID is relatively limited. We asked whether consistent individual differences in variation in flight initiation distance is associated with variation in summer survival or winter survival in an individually- marked population of yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer). We found no clear association between flight initiation distance and summer survival or flight initiation distance and winter survival. This suggests that FID decisions, while demonstrably optimizing current survival, may not have longer-term fitness consequences. Our results may have been explained by the relatively modest repeatability of FID or it may have emerged from our attempt to explain longer-term measures of fitness. Future studies of the fitness consequences of personality traits should pay particular attention to the time between which individuality of traits are measured and the fitness consequences are studied.

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