Stressful juvenile developmental conditions can affect performance and fitness later in life. In holometabolous insects such as butterflies, development under stressful conditions may lead to smaller adult size, lower reproductive output and shorter lifespan. However, how larval developmental stress

Climate change can impact plant fitness and population persistence directly through changing abiotic conditions and indirectly through its effects on species interactions. Pollination and seed predation are important biotic interactions that can impact plant fitness, but their impact on population g

Coalitions occur when multiple individuals cooperate against a common opponent or for a common goal. Coalition formation is a complex behavior, typically described in highly social and cognitively complex species. Surprisingly, we know little about the social and environmental factors that may selec

We suggest that trapline foraging by pollinators increases variation among plant populations in genetic diversity, inbreeding depression and contributions of floral traits to plant fitness, which should in turn affect the rates and directions of floral evolution. More theoretical and empirical studi

Traditionally, models of resource extraction assume individuals act as if they form strategies based on complete information. In reality, gathering information about environmental parameters may be costly. An efficient information gathering strategy is to observe the foraging behavior of others, ter

Individuals frequently leave home before reaching reproductive age, but the proximate causes of natal dispersal remain relatively unknown. The social cohesion hypothesis predicts that individuals who engage in more (affiliative) interactions are less likely to disperse. Despite the intuitive nature

AbstractVocal structure should reflect vocal function. While much attention has focused on quantifying attributes of harmonic vocalizations, the vocalizations of many species also may contain non‐linear phenomena such as warbles, subharmonics, biphonation, and deterministic chaos or noise. The funct

Visual predator discrimination for ontogenetically and evolutionarily novel predators may be maintained in yellow-bellied marmots by extant predation risk by the multipredator hypothesis.

Animals generally allocate some time during foraging to detecting predators. We used a combination of observations and an experiment to examine how vegetation height and peripheral obstructions influence vigilance by foraging yellow-bellied marmots ( I Marmota flaviventris /I ). First, we analyzed a

Fur color that differs from the typical shades of brown and gray occurs in eight species of marmots. Albinism generally is rare whereas melanism is more common. Melanism may persist in some populations at low frequencies averaging 16.1% in M. monax and in M. flaviventris for as long as 80 years. Whi

Time budgets of the yellow-bellied marmot (Marmota flaviventris) were created observing two different localities within the Rocky Mountains of Colorado at different elevations (Cement Creek, 2641m and North Picnic, 2900m). Six behaviors (foraging, sitting/lying, locomotion (moving from place to plac

Optimal foraging theory states that there are benefits and costs from foraging. If the animal shows optimal foraging behavior, the benefits minus the costs from foraging should be maximized. One assumption of optimal foraging theory is that animals can recognize food, which for butterflies means det

A prospective overview of social network analysis' general utility for the study of animal social behaviour is provided and relevance and constraints of some network measures are highlighted.