The Safest Personality Depends on Who’s Hunting
posted in: Ecology, Conservation & Natural History
0
Being a cotton rat in the Everglades is dangerous, but there may be no single safest way to behave. A new study by Rebecca McKee and colleagues in Behavioral Ecology found that shyness and activity affected survival differently depending on whether rats were hunted by active predators such as birds and mammals or ambush predators such as snakes. The results help explain how diverse predator communities may maintain behavioral variation in prey.