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Bolder Takes All? The Behavioral Dimension of Biogeography

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Animal personality can influence dispersal processes. Evidence is emerging that personality traits can affect departure, distance covered, transience/settlement success, as well as density-dependent processes related to both natal and novel habitats.

Non-random spatial distributions of the behavioral types that affect dispersal suggest in several instances that dispersers (i.e., colonizers, founders) could be a non-random sample of behavioral types from the source population.

Recent advances in studying the heritability of animal personality indicate that the contribution of additive genetic variance to personality variation is substantial.

The potential contribution of behavioral polymorphism to key historical biogeographic processes is a substantially unexplored research area.

Animal personality can be seen as behavioral polymorphism that could play a direct and active role in driving evolutionary pathways. We argue here that consistent individual differences in key personality traits affecting dispersal and other density-dependent processes have provided substantial contributions to molding biogeographic patterns. Building upon opportunities recently opened by genomics and other novel approaches, we explore the hypothesis that Pleistocene range expansions, island colonizations, and other historical biogeographic processes could have been promoted by non-random samples of behavioral types of the founder populations. We provide context and testable hypotheses, based on case studies, that could bring new implications to our understanding of the processes shaping spatial and temporal patterns of variation in animal biodiversity.

Section snippets

Animal Personality as a Pacemaker of Evolutionary Processes

The role that behavior plays in actively promoting evolutionary change has long been recognized 1, 2, 3. More recently, the realization that animals possess individual personalities (see Glossary) with a heritable, physiological, and epigenetically regulated basis has deeply impacted on several areas of ecology and evolution [4], and has strengthened this view up to the hypothesis that behavioral variation can ‘act as a ‘pacemaker’ of evolution for non-behavioral traits’ through various

Why Should Biogeographers Care About Animal Personality?

Biogeography is, by definition, the study of the present and past distribution of biological diversity and their causal processes. Many new perspectives and technical advances have deeply reshuffled historical biogeography in the past decades to become ‘prototypic of integrative science’ 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. Accordingly, research around long-recognized key processes in biogeography, such as dispersal, has also changed its ‘physiognomy’.

Dispersal (including departure, transience, and

Toward an Integration of Animal Personality and Biogeographic Research

From a historical biogeographic perspective, dispersal events of special interest are diffusion and long-distance dispersal, given their immediate link to contiguous range expansions and colonizations 22, 24. Recent technological progress has allowed extensive documentation of genetic and biogeochemical imprints of these long-controversial events 19, 22, 34, and deep reappraisal of their role in the shaping of biogeographic patterns. In fact, diffusion and long-distance dispersal were once

Concluding Remarks

Trait-based approaches allowing a direct link between ecological and evolutionary processes with biogeographic patterns have proven powerful to ‘opening the black-box of biogeographic processes’ [58]. However, previous research has focused predominantly on morphological characters. We have considered here how behavioral traits (which might also influence morphological trait changes [6]) are involved in the processes that promote range variation over time, because these processes have direct and

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Paul Craze, Dave Jenkins, and Kees van Oers for their very helpful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We thank Kelsey Horvath and Editage for their English revisions. R.B. was supported by a post-doctoral grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities, and Research (PRIN project 2012FRHYRA). C.C. is supported by the European Commission (H2020-MSCA-IF-2014-659106).

Glossary

Behavioral polymorphism
the occurrence of more than one behavioral phenotype within a population.
Bio-logging
the use of miniaturized electronic tags attached to free-ranging animals, and which record or remotely relay data about an animal's behavior, physiology, and environment.
Density-dependent processes
a heterogeneous set of processes that are regulated by the demographic density of a population. They include, but are not limited to, allele effects, competition, predation, and, in behavioral

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