Personality and movement ecology in free-living Red Knots

Animal personalities, defined as repeatable inter-individual differences in behaviour, have become a popular concept in biology and is studied in many systems. Personalities have been linked to many individual traits including physiology, foraging behaviours, or movement trajectories.

At our institute, we have been studying exploration personality in red knots and found that exploration was linked to physiology, i.e. explorative birds have smaller muscular stomach muscles (gizzards). Recently, we linked exploration to foraging behaviour and found that explorative birds were more active while foraging than non-explorative birds. Within this project, we now aim to investigate how exploration personality relates to movement trajectories.

Exploration personality implies a tendency to explore environments actively, move around more and search new grounds to gather information about the environment. Laboratory measures of personality traits are often used to answer both evolutionary and ecological questions involving behavioural variations in the wild. However, it has not been easy to follow small birds in the wild before. Thanks to technological improvements, now we can tag and track Red knots in the wild with WATLAS tracking system.

Within this project, a master student will analyse movement data of the individuals with known personality scores and calculate detailed movement trajectories such as cumulative distance travelled (within tide, days, weeks) and compare this to their exploration behaviour.

The master student will learn how to analyse movement data. Because the data is already collected, the project is possible to do remotely (if required). Students can also conduct their research at the NIOZ (Texel). In either circumstance, full support will be given by the daily supervisors.

The student may join fieldwork on catching shorebirds, conducting personality assays, sailing with the NIOZ research vessels.