Cues and the optimal timing of activities under environmental changes

Cues and the optimal timing of activities under environmental changes

McNamara, John M., Barta, Zoltan, Klaassen, Marcel and Bauer, Silke 2011, Cues and the optimal timing of activities under environmental changes, Ecology letters, vol. 14, no. 12, pp. 1183-1190.

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Title	Cues and the optimal timing of activities under environmental changes
Author(s)	McNamara, John M. Barta, Zoltan Klaassen, Marcel Bauer, Silke
Journal name	Ecology letters
Volume number	14
Issue number	12
Start page	1183
End page	1190
Total pages	8
Publisher	Wiley-Blackwell Publishing
Place of publication	London, England
Publication date	2011-12
ISSN	1461-023X
Keyword(s)	cue-response evolutionary trap fitness loss life history activity migration mistiming phenology photoperiod reaction norm reproduction
Summary	Organisms time activities by using environmental cues to forecast the future availability of important resources. Presently, there is limited understanding of the relationships between cues and optimal timing, and especially about how this relationship will be affected by environmental changes. We develop a general model to explore the relation between a cue and the optimal timing of an important life history activity. The model quantifies the fitness loss for organisms failing to time behaviours optimally. We decompose the immediate change in fitness resulting from environmental changes into a component that is due to changes in the predictive power of the cue and a component that derives from the mismatch of the old response to the cue to the new environmental conditions. Our results show that consequences may range from negative, neutral to positive and are highly dependent on how cue and optimal timing and their relation are specifically affected by environmental changes.
Language	eng
Field of Research	060299 Ecology not elsewhere classified
Socio Economic Objective	970106 Expanding Knowledge in the Biological Sciences
HERDC Research category	C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal
Copyright notice	©2011, Blackwell Publishing
Persistent URL	http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30044329

Document type:	Journal Article
Collection:	School of Life and Environmental Sciences

Citation counts:	Cited 7 times in TR Web of Science
Access Statistics:	15 Abstract Views, 0 File Downloads - Detailed Statistics
Created:	Thu, 05 Apr 2012, 16:07:02 EST

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