territorial dynamics and stable home range formation for central place foragers领土动力学和稳定的家庭范围形成中央地方觅食.pdfVIP

Territorial Dynamics and Stable Home Range Formation for Central Place Foragers 1,2 2 1,2,3 Jonathan R. Potts *, Stephen Harris , Luca Giuggioli 1 Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, 2 School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, 3 Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom Abstract Uncovering the mechanisms behind territory formation is a fundamental problem in behavioural ecology. The broad nature of the underlying conspecific avoidance processes are well documented across a wide range of taxa. Scent marking in particular is common to a large range of terrestrial mammals and is known to be fundamental for communication. However, despite its importance, exact quantification of the time-scales over which scent cues and messages persist remains elusive. Recent work by the present authors has begun to shed light on this problem by modelling animals as random walkers with scent-mediated interaction processes. Territories emerge as dynamic objects that continually change shape and slowly move without settling to a fixed location. As a consequence, the utilisation distribution of such an animal results in a slowly increasing home range, as shown for urban foxes (Vulpes vulpes). For certain other species, however, home ranges reach a stable state. The present work shows that stable home ranges arise when, in addition to scent-mediated conspecific avoidance, each animal moves as a central place forager. That is, the animal’s movement has a random aspect but is also biased towards a fixed location, such as a den or nest site. Dynamic territories emerge but the probability distribution of the territory border locations reaches a steady state, causing st