Is there a link between the acute stress response and the movement syndrome of a wild large herbivore?
Résumé
When faced with stressful situations, individuals differ in their behavioural and physiological responses depending on their behavioural type; that is, personality. For mobile organisms, movement is one of the primary responses to threats. Movement syndromes (i.e. suites of correlated movement traits) have been linked to individual differences in risk taking, resource acquisition and performance, and can influence the evolutionary trajectory of these behaviours. Often, standardized tests are used to identify behavioural types; however, behaviours evaluated in controlled settings might not accurately reflect behaviours expressed while free-ranging in the wild. Nonetheless, the acute stress response of an individual expressed during a test could be related to a stress-mitigating behaviour in natural conditions, such as movement. To address this question, we used a long-term monitored population of wild roe deer, Capreolus capreolus, to identify movement-related personality traits and investigate the existence of a movement syndrome. We then examined its link with among-individual differences in the acute stress response (rectal temperature, haematocrit, neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio and docility) expressed during capture and handling. Using GPS monitoring of up to 335 roe deer in a highly heterogenous landscape, we showed that risk-prone individuals (i.e. using riskier habitat and ranging closer to roads during daytime) were also more active, with a lower movement speed and larger home ranges. However, we only found weak support for a link at the among-individual level between an individual's movement syndrome and its stress response during controlled capture, although there was some indication that individuals with an attenuated physiological response to acute stress tended to take more risk when free-ranging. This lack of support might be explained by the fact that different traits reflect different dimensions of the stress response, or by the low number of replicates per individual for these traits. These findings highlight the complexity of interpreting stress responses in natural populations. (c) 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
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