EARLY HEARING DETECTION AND INTERVENTION VIRTUAL CONFERENCE
MARCH 2-5, 2021

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5/22/2019  |   10:15 AM - 10:30 AM   |  EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL VARIATION ON DISPERSAL DISTANCE IN A STREAM SALAMANDER   |  250 CF

EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL VARIATION ON DISPERSAL DISTANCE IN A STREAM SALAMANDER

Dispersal represents a mechanism to escape fitness costs resulting from changes in environmental conditions. While there is evidence that active dispersers base emigration decisions (stay vs. leave) on environmental factors related to habitat quality (e.g., food availability, mortality risk), it is less well understood how these factors influence dispersal distance – a more comprehensive measure of dispersal. Decades of empirical work suggest that individuals use local habitat cues to make movement decisions, but theory predicts that dispersal can evolve as a fixed trait – independent of local conditions – in environments characterized by a history of stochastic spatiotemporal variation. Our goal was to test whether conditional or fixed models of dispersal predict variation in dispersal distance in the stream salamander Gyrinophilus porphyriticus. We found that dispersal distances increased with declining survival probability – an index of long-term patterns of environmental variability, but were unrelated to spatial variation in body condition – an index of short-term, local conditions. These results provide the first empirical support for fixed models of dispersal evolution and underscore the value of assessing alternative scales of environmental variation to gain the most complete understanding of dispersal evolution.

  • Amphibian
  • Movement
  • Spatial

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Presenters/Authors

Brett Addis (), University of Montana, addisbrett@gmail.com;


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Winsor Lowe (), University of Montana, winsor.lowe@umontana.edu;


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