
Kimberley J. MathotUniversity of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Biological Sciences
Kimberley J. Mathot
Ph.D.
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69
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Introduction
I am a behavioural ecologist interested in a wide range of topics. Broadly speaking, most of my research is aimed at understanding the causes and consequences of individual differences in behaviour, particularly in foraging contexts. I use both theoretical and empirical approaches to investigate the roles of state- and frequency-dependence in generating consistent individual differences in behaviour.
Additional affiliations
November 2014 - December 2016
January 2017 - June 2022
August 2005 - December 2005
Publications
Publications (69)
The success of introduced species often relies on flexible traits, including immune system traits. While theories predict non-natives will have weak defences due to decreased parasite pressure, effective parasite surveillance remains crucial, as infection risk is rarely zero and the evolutionary novelty of infection is elevated in non-native areas....
The timing and amount of foraging in birds are shaped by many of the same extrinsic factors, including temperature and daylength, as well as intrinsic factors, such as sex and age. Here, we investigate co-variation between these traits. We observed a population of 143 individually marked black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) over a 90 day...
Spatial ecology tends to focus on average movement patterns within animal groups; however, recent studies highlight the value of considering movement decisions both within and among individuals. We used a marked population of black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), to assess the causes and consequences of within- and among-individual differ...
Parents are expected to exhibit intermediate levels of investment in parental care that reflect the trade-off between current versus future reproduction. Providing parents with supplemental food may allow for increased care to the current brood (additive model), re-allocation of parental effort to other behaviours such as self-maintenance (substitu...
Historically, spatial ecology studies have focused on average movement patterns within animal groups; however, recent studies highlight the value of considering movement decisions both within- and among-individuals. Using a marked population of black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), we used the number of unique feeders an individual visits...
Despite a wealth of studies documenting prey responses to perceived predation risk, researchers have only recently begun to consider how prey integrate information from multiple cues in their assessment of risk. We conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies that experimentally manipulated perceived predation risk in birds and evaluate...
The hierarchical model of provisioning posits that parents employ a strategic, sequential use of three provisioning tactics as offspring demand increases (e.g., due to increasing brood size and age). Namely, increasing delivery rate (reducing intervals between provisioning visits), expanding provisioned diet breadth, and adopting variance-sensitive...
Despite a wealth of studies documenting prey responses to perceived predation risk, researchers have only recently begun to consider how prey integrate information from multiple cues in their assessment of risk. We conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies that experimentally manipulated perceived predation risk in birds and evaluate...
Sampling, investing time or energy to learn about the environment, allows organisms to track changes in resource distribution and quality. The use of sampling is predicted to change as a function of energy expenditure, food availability, and starvation risk, all of which can vary both within and among individuals. We studied sampling behavior in a...
Behavioral expression can vary both within- (i.e., plasticity) and among-individuals (i.e., animal personality), and understanding the causes and consequences of variation at each of these levels is a major area of investigation in contemporary behavioral ecology. Here, we studied sources of variation in both plasticity and personality in nest defe...
Within species, individuals often show repeatable differences in behaviours, called ‘animal personality’. One behaviour that has been widely studied is how quickly an individual resumes feeding after a disturbance, referred to as boldness or risk-taking. Depending on the mechanism(s) shaping risk-taking behaviour, risk-taking could be positively, n...
The data, meta-data, and code for how selective disappearance and fluctuating selection maintain animal personality in North American red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) in Yukon, Canada. Data obtained with funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada, Northern Scientific Training Program, and the National Science Foundat...
Within populations, individuals often show repeatable variation in behaviour, called 'animal personality'. In the last few decades, numerous empirical studies have attempted to elucidate the mechanisms maintaining this variation, such as life-history trade-offs. Theory predicts that among-individual variation in behavioural traits could be maintain...
Passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags allow a range of individual-level data to be collected passively and have become a commonly used technology in many avian studies. Although the potential adverse effects of PIT tags have been evaluated in several species, explicit investigations of their impacts on small (<12 g) birds are limited. This is i...
Understanding the causes and consequences of repeatable among-individual differences in behavior (i.e., animal personality) is a major area of research in behavioral and evolutionary ecology. Recently, attention has turned to understanding the processes behind changes in repeatability through ontogeny because of their implications for populations....
Foragers rely on various cues to assess predation risk. Information theory predicts that high certainty cues should be valued more than low certainty cues. We measured the latency of black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) to resume feeding during winter in response to cues that conferred different degrees of certainty about current predatio...
Mass regulation is birds is well documented. For example, birds can increase body mass in response to lower availability and/or predictability of food and decrease body mass in response to increased predation danger. Birds also demonstrate an ability to maintain body mass across a range of food qualities. Although the adaptive significance of mass...
No effect of PIT tags on survival or body condition of Black-capped Chickadees in a northern climate
In the last several years, there has been a surge in the number of studies addressing the causes and consequences of among‐individual variation in cognitive ability and behavioural plasticity. Here, we use a recent publication by Herczeg et al. [2019: 32(3), 218‐226] to highlight three shortcomings common to this newly emerging field. In their stud...
Parental provisioning behavior is a major determinant of offspring growth and survival, but high provisioning rates might come at the cost of increased predation threat. Parents should thus adjust provisioning activity according to current predation threat levels. Moreover, life-history theory predicts that response to predation threat should be co...
Natural selection often favors particular combinations of functionally-related traits, resulting in adaptive phenotypic integration. Phenotypic integration has been proposed as a potential mechanism explaining the existence of repeatable among-individual differences in behavior (i.e., animal personality). In this study, we investigated patterns of...
Age-related increases in the repeatable expression of labile phenotypic traits are often assumed to arise from an increase in among-individual variance due to differences in developmental plasticity or by means of state-behavior feedbacks. However, age-related increases in repeatability could also arise from a decrease in within-individual variance...
Migratory birds undergo impressive body remodelling over the course of an annual cycle. Prior to long-distance flights, red knots ( Calidris canutus islandica) reduce gizzard mass while increasing body mass and pectoral muscle mass. Although body mass and pectoral muscle mass are functionally linked via their joint effects on flight performance, gi...
Parasites and parasitic lifestyles have evolved from free-living organisms multiple times. How such a key evolutionary transition occurred remains puzzling. Facultative parasites represent potential transitional states between free-living and fully parasitic lifestyles because they can be either free-living or parasitic depending on environmental c...
Energy metabolism has received much attention as a potential driver of repeatable among-individual differences in behaviour (animal personality). Several factors have been hypothesized to mediate this relationship. We performed a meta-analysis of >70 studies comprised of >8000 individuals reporting relationships between measures of maintenance meta...
Energy metabolism has received much attention as a potential driver of repeatable among‐individual differences in behaviour (animal personality). Several factors have been hypothesized to mediate this relationship. We performed a systematic review with a meta‐analysis of >70 studies comprised of >8000 individuals reporting relationships between mea...
Adaptive theory predicts that the fundamental trade-off between starvation and predation risk shapes diurnal patterns in foraging activity and mass gain in wintering passerine birds. Foragers mitigating both types of risk should exhibit a bimodal distribution (increased foraging and mass gain early and late in the day), whereas both foraging and ma...
Consistent individual differences in behaviour are repeatable and consistent across time and contexts. This has important ecological implications for life history events, however, the ontogenetic explanations behind behavioural consistency remains unresolved. Here we studied behavioural consistency in juvenile North American red squirrels ( Tamiasc...
Variation in life history (LH) traits along the fast-slow continuum (referred to as pace of life, POL) is thought to result from a trade-off between investments in current versus future reproduction. Originally developed for understanding variation in LH strategies at the among-population level, the POL theory has more recently been applied towards...
Shorebirds are major, but thus far under-acknowledged, players in mudflat food webs and associated physio-chemical processes. Mud is a critical habitat type for shorebirds, offering a multi-dimensional matrix of feeding opportunities through space and time. Shorebirds have evolved a spectrum of foraging modes with associated morphologies, and senso...
Parents provisioning their offspring can adopt different tactics to meet increases in offspring demand. In this study, we experimentally manipulated brood demand in free living great tits (Parus major) via brood size manipulations and compared the tactics adopted by parents in 2 successive years (2010 and 2011) with very different ecological condit...
In many situations across biology and economics, there is often one individual, or “agent,” that invests effort into a beneficial task and also one individual that, in contrast, foregoes the effort of investing, and instead simply exploits the efforts of another. What makes an individual choose to invest in production versus exploiting the efforts...
Animals frequently exhibit consistent among‐individual differences in behavioural and physiological traits that are inherently flexible. Why should individuals differ consistently in their expression of labile traits? Recently, positive feedbacks between state and behaviour have been proposed as a possible explanation for the maintenance of consist...
Animals often face a conflict between the speed and accuracy by which a decision is made. Decisions taken quickly might be relatively inaccurate, whereas decisions taken more slowly might be more accurate. Such "speed-accuracy trade-offs" receive increasing attention in behavioral and cognitive sciences. Importantly, life-history theory predicts th...
Males of socially monogamous species can increase their siring success via within-pair and extra-pair fertilizations. In this study, we focused on the different sources of (co)variation between these siring routes, and asked how each contributes to total siring success. We quantified the fertilization routes to siring success, as well as behaviors...
Predators can affect prey both directly (consumptive effects) and indirectly (nonconsumptive effects), with a growing body
of literature showing the latter may have pronounced effects. Prey populations are comprised of individuals that differ in
perception of and willingness to take risk; therefore, studying how different types of individuals respo...
Differences in animal behaviour can arise from individual variation in energy resource allocation decisions. Because energy is essential to fuel all processes that permit behaviour, it is necessary to consider metabolism for a more complete understanding of behavioural ecology. Although many studies have explored interspecific relationships between...
Evolutionary ecologists increasingly study reaction norms that are expressed repeatedly within the same individual's lifetime. For example, foragers continuously alter anti‐predator vigilance in response to moment‐to‐moment changes in predation risk. Variation in this form of plasticity occurs both among and within individuals. Among‐individual var...
Careau and Garland [1] raise discussions around four points from our earlier Opinion [2]. Some of their points reveal differences of opinion (e.g., correct use of terminology) while others develop topics we touched upon in the initial paper as future perspectives. Here, we respond to their four points.
The number of studies investigating links between among-individual differences in metabolic rate (MR) and behavior has grown dramatically in the past several years. A major and often untested assumption of these studies is that the selected measure of MR is a valid proxy for energetic constraints. We argue that without explicitly testing this assum...
An exciting area in behavioural ecology focuses on understanding why animals exhibit consistent among-individual differences in behaviour (animal personal-ities). Animal personality has been proposed to emerge as an adaptation to individual differences in state vari-ables, leading to the question of why individuals differ consistently in state. Rec...
A number of studies have suggested that avian brood size is individually optimized. Yet, optimal reproductive decisions likely vary owing to among-individual differences in environmental sensitivity. Specifically, 'proactive' individuals who do not track environmental changes may be less able to produce optimal brood sizes than 'reactive' individua...
Behavioral ecology has traditionally used what is known as the optimality approach to study animal behavior. This approach is typically used to predict the optimal expression of a behavioral trait for the average individual in a population given any constraints that may limit the expression of that trait (Davies et al. 2012). For example, in order...
Individuals often show consistent differences in risk‐taking behaviours; behaviours that increase resource acquisition at the expense of an increased risk of mortality. Recently, basal metabolic rate ( BMR ) has been suggested as a potentially important state variable underlying adaptive individual differences in a range of behaviours, including ri...
Abstract Variation in how individuals invest in acquiring information (sampling) and in insuring themselves against potential negative consequences of uncertainty (e.g., by storing energy reserves) has been suggested to underlie consistent individual differences in suites of behavioral traits. However, the key drivers of individual differences in i...
Sampling bias is a key issue to consider when designing studies to address biological questions and its importance has been
widely discussed in the literature. However, some forms of bias remain underestimated. We investigated the roosting decisions
of free-living great tits utilizing nest-boxes in response to the installation of a novel object (a...
Quantitative genetic analyses of basal metabolic rate (BMR) can inform us about the evolvability of the trait by providing estimates of heritability, and also of genetic correlations with other traits that may constrain the ability of BMR to respond to selection. Here, we studied a captive population of zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) in which...
There is growing evidence that individuals within populations show consistent differences in their behaviour across contexts (personality), and that personality is associated with the extent to which individuals adjust their behaviour as function of changing conditions (behavioural plasticity). We propose an evolutionary explanation for a link betw...
Theoretical work suggests that both negative frequency-dependent payoffs and state-dependent payoffs can lead to individual variation in behavioural plasticity. We investigated the roles of both frequency- and state-dependence on the occurrence of individual variation in behavioural plasticity in a series of experiments where we manipulated perceiv...
When animals forage in groups, they can search for food themselves (producer tactic), or they can search for opportunities
to exploit the food discoveries of others (scrounger tactic). Both theoretical and empirical work have shown that group-level
use of these alternative tactics is influenced by environmental conditions including group size and f...
Western Sandpipers and Dunlin are capable of grazing biofilm. As there has been no assessment of this dietary constituent in stomach contents, the stomachs of 89 Western Sandpipers and 56 Dunlin collected during breeding migration through the Fraser River delta, British Columbia, Canada, were examined. Invertebrates, traditionally regarded as the p...
When animals live in groups, individuals can invest in resources themselves or exploit the investments of other group members. Grouping with kin may reduce the frequency of exploitation because kin selection should favor individuals that imposed fewer costs on their kin. However, taking into account the gains of the exploited individual, allowing k...
When animals forage socially, individuals can obtain prey from their own searching (producer tactic) or by using the behaviour of others (scrounger tactic) when it provides inadvertent social information (ISI) that food has been located. This ISI may either indicate the location of food (social information, SI), or it may indicate the quality of th...
In most birds, flight is the most important means of escape from predators. Impaired flight abilities due to increased wing
loading may increase vulnerability to predation. To compensate for an increase in wing loading, birds are able to independently
decrease body mass (BM) or increase pectoral muscle mass (PMM). Comparing nearshore and farshore f...
According to the threat-sensitive predator avoidance hypothesis, prey should match the intensity of their antipredation response to the degree of threat posed by predators. We used controlled indoor experiments to investigate the ability of red knots to discern between high- and low-threat encounters with a representative predator, the sparrowhawk....
Social foragers can alternate between searching for food (producer tactic), and searching for other individuals that have located food in order to join them (scrounger tactic). Both tactics yield equal rewards on average, but the rewards generated by producer are more variable. A dynamic variance-sensitive foraging model predicts that social forage...
We show that a higher vertebrate can graze surficial intertidal biofilm, previously only considered a food source for rasping invertebrates and a few specialized fish. Using evidence from video recordings, stomach contents, and stable isotopes, we describe for the first time the grazing behavior of Western Sandpipers (Calidris mauri) and estimate t...
When animals forage in groups, individuals can search for food themselves (producer tactic) or they can search for and join other individuals that have located food (scrounger tactic). The scrounger tactic may provide greater antipredator benefits than the producer tactic because "scroungers" hop with their heads up and tend to occupy central posit...
We report that a latitudinal cline in intertidal food distribution is associated with the nonbreeding distribution of the Western Sandpiper (Calidris mauri). This novel result is the first to demonstrate a clear relationship between patterns of differential nonbreeding distribution and food availability for any shorebird species. Within each age cl...
Thesis (M.Sc.)--Simon Fraser University, 2005. Includes bibliographical references.
Migrating Western Sandpipers, Calidris mauri (Cabanis, 1857), observed feeding at an intertidal stopover site on the Fraser River delta, British Columbia, shifted their foraging mode from surface-pecking to probing over a 3-week period in April and May. We tested possible mechanisms to account for the field observations. Using control and shorebird...
Lorsque des animaux recherchent de la nourriture en groupe, les individus peuvent investir dans la quête de nourriture (tactique producteur) ou dans la recherche d'occasions d'exploiter les découvertes alimentaires d'autres membres du groupe (tactique chapardeur). Les deux tactiques sont maintenues dans les groupes selon la fréquence-dépendance, et...