Researchers Put GPS Tags on Animals in Yellowstone — and Found Surprising Responses to Rising Heat
Environment, which refers to the conditions a living organism lives in, is an overriding factor that influences how that organism behaves, acts, and exists. Fluctuations or triggers in this environment can dramatically alter animal performance, their routines, and probably their biological and mental chemistry, too. Planet Earth cradles a mosaic of habitats scattered across its blue-green-white pieces. In a study published in Ecosphere, scientists documented the habitat of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in southern and western Wyoming, revealing how wild animals living in this region adapt and change their behaviors with varying environmental conditions such as temperatures, vegetation cover, and elevation.
According to Justine Becker, a researcher from Montana State University and the lead author, the objective of this study was to generate a hypothesis that could explain the mechanisms underpinning “behavioral plasticity” at both the individual and population levels in response to variation in summer temperatures. Becker and her team attached GPS collars and tested 1068 animal years in 17 populations across nine species of large mammals.
The animals were selected mostly across low elevation areas dominated by aspens, lodgepole pine, Douglas fir, subalpine fir, conifer forests, and whitebark pines. The animals tagged included bighorn sheep, bison, cougar, elk, Shiras moose, mountain goat, mule deer, and pronghorn. Different animals displayed different behaviors varying with changing summer temperatures. Blue-tailed skinks, for instance, displayed stronger “anti-predator responses” when exposed to rapid human development. Male reed buntings displayed brilliant behavioral plasticity to song frequencies in response to human-induced noises.
Pronghorns displayed a tendency to rush towards tree covers and shaded areas when exposed to intense heat waves. Other animals, including predatory northern pikes, grazing waterbucks, and mountain lions, displayed similar behaviors when grappling with resource limitations or habitat variations. In most animals, the changes were mostly observed in their foraging behaviors, habitat selection, movement characteristics, biological traits, genetic adaptations, and behavioral responses to external stimuli.
The team utilized GPS location data to analyze these behavioral patterns between 2001 and 2019. They found that the behaviors of individuals changed based on their innate behavioral reflexes as well as programmed and learned behaviors from the past. This year, the data was recorded between mid-June and the end of August. In the press release, Becker shared that, initially, the goal was to acquire an understanding of how climate change and rising temperatures affected the animals’ responses, being the prevalent environmental stressors of the time.
Once the data were collected, the focus of the study turned to investigating the “behavioral plasticity” in these animals, which determines not only their fitness, but also decision making, cognition, learning, social regulation, thermoregulation, and space use. Being the “first line of defense against environmental stressors,” plasticity is the primary mechanism that governs the changes and alterations in these animals’ responses.
Researchers explained that this plasticity is influenced by various factors, including environmental variations and endogenous traits such as body size, sex, physiological attributes, and, as noted, temperature stressors. “As far as we know, this is the first study of this nature that’s taken data from a lot of different populations of large mammals and looked at their behavioral plasticity at the same time,” Becker said in the press release.
Apart from mapping the different plasticity mechanisms in these mammals, researchers made an interesting observation. The animals with large body sizes, mainly females or herbivores, seemed to exhibit greater behavioral plasticity because of their intense need for heat mitigation associated with their endogenous traits. The results of this hypothesis, however, are limited due to the limits of data availability. Factors like body size, feeding guild, and sex of the tracked individuals could lead to erroneous measurements at the species level, they noted.
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