Meeting Abstract
The burgeoning field of movement ecology has taken up the challenge of integrating studies of organismal movement, offering a unifying paradigm for the causes, consequences, underlying mechanisms, and patterns of all movement-related phenomena. Movement ecology highlights the interplay among the external and internal factors affecting movement, including the internal state (why move?), motion (how to move?), and navigational decision-making (when and where to move?) of individuals. In my talk I will outline a framework that links each of these mechanistic tenets within the behavioural framework of speed choice. An animal’s movement speed dramatically affects its probability of survival and reproductive success, and so has the potential to structure populations, communities, and ecosystems. Yet we understand little about why animals select the speeds they do in nature. My talk will discuss how internal state and the external environment interact to drive speed choice in animals, allowing ecologists to predict how environmental change affects behaviours as diverse as dispersal, foraging, migration, fighting, signalling, and predator escape, as well as the success of conservation schemes and the spread of invasive species or infectious diseases. A universal framework for predicting animal movement speed should be applicable to the movement of any animal across different ecological contexts. In fact, the most appropriate studies to-date are those focusing on the flying speed of migrating birds and speed selection by (human) drivers of motor vehicles, though both areas are limited in certain key aspects.
