Animal behavior can affect their physical state depending on the risks they are taking. Researchers from the University of Jena, Germany, analyzed how hunger affects high-risk behaviors in animals.
The new study has been published in the Cambridge Philosophical Society journal Biological Reviews. Understanding animal behavior and what triggers specific behaviors such as risk-taking, can help ecologists develop ways to protect various species.
Wild animals have to make risky decisions as they hunt prey or acquire resources, reproduce, and survive. For instance, exploring new territory to avoid disease or to search for food puts an animal's life in danger of exposure to predators. In other circumstances, decisions are a matter of life or death, such a mother abandoning her young amid a predator or threat.
Professor Holger Schiezeth, a population ecologist, explained that it is similar to how some people are more cautious than others. Studying what triggers risk-taking and unpredictable outcomes can also reveal the benefits of such behavior.
Different behaviors also depend on individual development. For the study, they looked at how poor nutritional conditions influence the development of high-risk behaviors.
Studying Animal Behavior
The team analyzed 126 animal studies at involved measuring the risk-taking behaviors of over 100 species. Animals ranged from amphibians to birds, crustaceans, and insects.
The studies included experiments that manipulated the nutritional or energetic condition of various species via diet treatments. All the studies included risk appetite measured after phases of varying nutrition levels.
Evolutionary biologist Klaus Reinhold and the team discovered two opposing hypotheses. The first is the assumption that animals who favorable conditions and circumstances may have "much to lose in terms of reproductive potential," or the needs-based hypothesis. On the other hand, having better nutrition could also mean that animals may escape or risky circumstances easier for survival, maximizing "the benefits of engaging in risky behaviors," or the state-dependent safety hypothesis.
The conclusions of all the studies led to one single factor of taking higher risks, which is the lack of nutritional supply. Animals that had poor early-life environments and experienced hunger had a 26 percent increase in risk-taking behavior.
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Hunger and Risky Behaviors
The results were "so clear and unambiguous," said Schielzeth. Risky behaviors did not always mean escaping from animals. Hunger would trigger exploration and migration to risk places in search of food. In general, species with riskier behavior tend to have higher survival rates in the wild, noted by the authors.
Schielzeth explained that since humans are essentially an animal species as well, the same may be true for people to a certain extent. For people, there have been several studies on how certain diets affect behavior and physical conditions.
However, applying the study on humans would mean involving factors such as life history, local environment, and ecological conditions. "Overall," concluded the authors, "there appear to be complex and nuanced effects of diet and condition on behavioral variance warranting further empirical study."
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