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Project

Dispersal, parental care and personality traits in the Great Tit.

The general aim of this project is to study how individual variation in behaviour, in offspring as well as parents, contributes to variation in dispersal in natural populations. We use the great tit as a model system using dispersal data from an ongoing population study in a fragmented woodland system. The study of personalities is based on previous research showing that a standardized exploration score provides information on heritable behavioural syndromes. We study how different aspects of spatial behaviour (dispersal, home ranges, family movements during parental care) are related to each other and to personality variation. This variation will be linked also to available fitness data (survival and reproduction).
Date:1 Oct 2009 →  30 Sep 2011
Keywords:EXPLORATION BEHAVIOUR, PARENTAL CARE, BEHAVIOURAL ECOLOGY, ORNITHOLOGY, DISPERSAL
Disciplines:Animal biology, Veterinary medicine