Louise Riotte-Lambert

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Centre de Recherche sur la Cognition Animale - Université de Toulouse 3

Memory allows many animals to benefit from the spatial predictability of their environment by revisiting known profitable places. Travel route optimization or resource acquisition constraints usually lead to repeated sequences of visits, which may have major evolutionary and ecological implications. However, the study of this behavior has been impa...

Most population dynamics studies assume that individuals use space uniformly, and thus mix well spatially. In numerous species, however, individuals do not move randomly, but use spatial memory to visit renewable resource patches repeatedly. To understand the extent to which memory-based foraging movement may affect density-dependent population dyn...

Theoretical studies of marine protected areas (MPAs) suggest that more mobile species should exhibit reduced local effects (defined as the ratio of the density inside vs. outside of the MPA). However, empirical studies have not supported the expected negative relationship between the local effect and mobility. We propose that differential, habitat‐...

Animal aggregations occur in almost all taxa and can be strongly influential for consumer-resource dynamics and population health. Their adaptive value and underlying mechanisms are thus fundamental questions. Many animals use information about resource locations inadvertently broadcasted by other individuals through visual, acoustic, or olfactory...

Spatial segregation of foraging areas among conspecifics breeding in neighbouring colonies has been observed in several colonial vertebrates and is assumed to originate from competition and information use. Segregation between foraging individuals breeding in different parts of a same colony has comparatively received limited attention, even though...

Spatial segregation of foraging areas among conspecifics breeding in different colonies has been observed in several colonial vertebrates and is assumed to originate from competition and information use. Segregation between sub-groups of foraging animals from the same colony (hereafter sub-colonies) has comparatively received limited attention, eve...

Cognitive abilities enabling animals that feed on ephemeral but yearly renewable resources to infer when resources are available may have been favoured by natural selection, but the magnitude of the benefits brought by these abilities remains poorly known. Using computer simulations, we compared the efficiencies of three main types of foragers with...

Central place foragers often segregate in space, even without signs of direct agonistic interactions. Using parsimonious individual-based simulations, we show that for species with spatial cognitive abilities, individual-level memory of resource availability can be sufficient to cause spatial segregation in the foraging ranges of colonial animals....

Context Metapopulation theory makes useful predictions for conservation in fragmented landscapes. For randomly distributed habitat patches, it predicts that the ability of a metapopulation to recover from low occupancy level (the “metapopulation capacity”) linearly increases with habitat amount. This prediction derives from describing the dispersal...

While the tendency to return to previously visited locations—termed ‘site fidelity’—is common in animals, the cause of this behaviour is not well understood. One hypothesis is that site fidelity is shaped by an animal's environment, such that animals living in landscapes with predictable resources have stronger site fidelity. Site fidelity may also...

An animal's movement rate (mobility) and its ability to perceive fitness gradients (fitness sensitivity) determine how well it can exploit resources. Previous models have examined mobility and fitness sensitivity separately and found that mobility, modelled as random movement, prevents animals from staying in high-quality patches, leading to a depa...

The impacts of environmental predictability on the ecology and evolution of animal movement have been the subject of vigorous speculation for several decades. Recently, the swell of new biologging technologies has further stimulated their investigation. This advancing research frontier, however, still lacks conceptual unification and has so far foc...

For scavenging species that evolved to search for ephemeral and unpredictable resources, supplementary feeding may act as an ecological trap. Increasing food predictability may lead to the emergence of foraging routines liable to make individuals too dependent on human-mediated feeding. Using recent methodologies (Fourier, Wavelet and conditional e...

Home ranges (HRs) are a remarkably common form of animal space use, but we still lack an integrated view of the individual-level processes that can lead to their emergence and maintenance, particularly when individuals are in competition for resources. We built a spatially explicit mechanistic movement model to investigate how simple memory-based f...

Wandering albatrosses are large long-lived seabirds that inhabit the Southern Ocean. This species uses wind to move at low energetic costs and probably represents one of the best studied life-history models in animals. Here, using both tracking and isotopic data, we report on the lifetime distribution of wandering albatrosses at sea, constructing a...

Foraging skills of young individuals are assumed to be inferior to those of adults. The reduced efficiency of naive individuals may be the primary cause of the high juvenile mortality and explain the deferment of maturity in long-lived species. However, the study of juvenile and immature foraging behaviour has been limited so far. We used satellite...

The introduction of immigrants into resident populations may disturb the social organisation of the latter. It is often stated that males compete with males for access to mates, while females compete with females and/or males for limited resources (e.g., nest sites, food). Therefore, the impacts of introductions on residents should depend on the im...

The Utilization Distribution (UD) provides a useful global but static (time-integrated) representation of space use patterns of animals that perform home range behavior. To promote a more dynamic approach, we show how areas of particular interest in terms of exploitation intensity (mean residence time per visit) or in terms of path recursions (visi...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are promoted as a tool to protect overfished stocks and increase fishery yields. Previous models suggested that adult mobility modified effects of MPAs by reducing densities of fish inside reserves, but increasing yields (i.e., increasing densities outside of MPAs). Empirical studies contradicted this prediction: as mo...