Predation risk induces a myriad of behavioral antipredator responses of prey. However, different antipredator behaviors exhibit different degrees of flexibility within a single prey species. Moreover, how predator species composition and traits interact with the flexibility of particular antipredator behaviors to determine spatiotemporal activity patterns of prey remains unknown. We examined geographic variation in multiple be...

Microbial transmission is hypothesised to be a major benefit of sociality, facilitated by affiliative behaviours such as grooming and communal nesting in group‐living animals. Whether microbial transmission is also present in animals that do not form groups because territoriality limits interactions and prevents group formation remains unknown. Here, we investigate relationships among gut microbiota, population density and dyn...

Spatial confinement to a home range is theorized to be a more energetically efficient method of acquiring resources than random searching due to spatial memory. Intraspecific studies that have compared home range size at different population densities have found that home ranges shrink as population density increases. This negative trend could be due to increased conspecific competition via population density increase or due t...

Animals within social groups respond to costs and benefits of sociality by adjusting the proportion of time they spend in close proximity to other individuals in the group (cohesion). Variation in cohesion between individuals, in turn, shapes important group‐level processes such as subgroup formation and fission–fusion dynamics. Although critical to animal sociality, a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing coh...

Anthropogenic habitat alteration and climate change are two well‐known contributors to biodiversity loss through changes to species distribution and abundance; yet, disentangling the effects of these two factors is often hindered by their inherent confound across both space and time. We leveraged a contrast in habitat alteration associated with the jurisdictional boundary between two Canadian provinces to evaluate the relative...

Climate warming is causing asynchronies between animal phenology and environments. Mismatched traits, such as coat color change mismatched with snow, can decrease survival. However, coat change does not serve a singular adaptive benefit of camouflage, and alternate coat change functions may confer advantages that supersede mismatch costs. We found that mismatch reduced, rather than increased, autumn mortality risk of snowshoe...

Significant gaps remain in understanding the response of plant reproduction to environmental change. This is partly because measuring reproduction in long‐lived plants requires direct observation over many years and such datasets have rarely been made publicly available. Here we introduce MASTREE+, a data set that collates reproductive time‐series data from across the globe and makes these data freely available to the communit...

Optimizing energy acquisition and expenditure is a fundamental trade‐off for consumers, strikingly reflected in how mobile organisms use space. Several studies have established that home range size decreases as resource density increases, but the balance of costs and benefits associated with exploiting a given resource density is unclear. We evaluate how the ability of consumers to exploit their resources through movement (ter...

Snowshoe hare cycles are one of the most prominent phenomena in ecology. Experimental studies point to predation as the dominant driving factor, but previous experiments combining food supplementation and predator removal produced unexplained multiplicative effects on density. We examined the potential interactive effects of food limitation and predation in causing hare cycles using an individual‐based food‐supplementation exp...

Food availability and temporal variation in predation risk are both important determinants of the magnitude of antipredator responses, but their effects have rarely been examined simultaneously, particularly in wild prey. Here, we determine how food availability and long‐term predation risk affect antipredator responses to acute predation risk by monitoring the foraging response of free‐ranging snowshoe hares ( Lepus americanu...

Dispersal is nearly universal; yet, which sex tends to disperse more and their success thereafter depends on the fitness consequences of dispersal. We asked if lifetime fitness differed between residents and immigrants (successful between‐population dispersers) and their offspring using 29 years of monitoring from North American red squirrels ( Tamiasciurus hudsonicus ) in Canada. Compared to residents, immigrant females had 2...

Cyclic fluctuations in abundance exhibited by some mammalian populations in northern habitats (“population cycles”) are key processes in the functioning of many boreal and tundra ecosystems. Understanding population cycles, essentially demographic processes, necessitates discerning the demographic mechanisms that underlie numerical changes. Using mark–recapture data spanning five population cycles (1977–2017), we examined demo...

Interactions between organisms are ubiquitous and have important consequences for phenotypes and fitness. Individuals can even influence those they never meet, if they have extended phenotypes that alter the environments others experience. North American red squirrels ( Tamiasciurus hudsonicus ) guard food hoards, an extended phenotype that typically outlives the individual and is usually subsequently acquired by non‐relatives...