Consistent among-individual variation in behavior and environmental niche associations influences interactions between conspecifics and heterospecifics. Thus, understanding the ecological pressures that drive individual variation, and the mechanisms that maintain such variation over time is critical for furthering our understanding of, and capacity to conserve, population and community dynamics. Further, consistent individual variation may provide the raw variation upon which natural selection can act and may therefore allow for rapid behavioral adaptation to environmental change. The WERC Lab uses animal tracking and movement technologies as well as field and genomic tools to generate data across all of its current projects in pursuit of discovering new knowledge about how the interplay between resource availability, predators, maternal programming, social learning, and cultural transmission may create and maintain individual variation.
