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Full-Text Articles in Behavior and Ethology
Factors Affecting Green Turtle Foraging Ecology Across Multiple Spatial Scales, Elizabeth Rose Whitman
Factors Affecting Green Turtle Foraging Ecology Across Multiple Spatial Scales, Elizabeth Rose Whitman
FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The hierarchical levels at which resource selection occurs can have important consequences for individual and population energy budgets and structure the impacts of a forager on its ecosystem. Assessing factors affecting resource selection of large marine herbivores across scales is important because of their potentially large impacts on seagrass community dynamics and historical and current changes in their population sizes and those of their potential predators. I explored the factors (predation risk, resource abundance, quality and identity) affecting resource use of large marine herbivores (green turtles, Chelonia mydas) from the scale of habitat patches to forage species within patches. …
A Confluence Of Invasion, Behavioral, And Theoretical Ecology: What Drives Ephemeral Metacommunity Re-Assembly?, Jesse Ryan Blanchard
A Confluence Of Invasion, Behavioral, And Theoretical Ecology: What Drives Ephemeral Metacommunity Re-Assembly?, Jesse Ryan Blanchard
FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Metacommunity theory has been particularly useful in understanding the way spatially structured communities assemble. Both niche and neutral processes are known to influence metacommunity assembly, and the relative influence of each depends on the level of dispersal-limitation. Contemporary trait-based analyses of metacommunity assembly have enhanced our understanding of these processes. Of the traits investigated, individual personalities have received the least attention, but have been suggested to be drivers of metacommunity assembly model parameters, such as dispersal tendencies and patch density. I address this topic from three angles, three chapters, in this dissertation. First, I used a three-year field survey of …