Data from: Food-safety trade-offs drive dynamic behavioral antipredator responses among snowshoe hares

Prey adopt various antipredator responses to minimize the risk of
predation; the fitness costs of antipredator responses can have emergent
effects on the population dynamics of prey species. While the trade-off
between food acquisition and predation avoidance has long been recognized
in predicting antipredator responses, less attention has examined how the
dynamics of the food-safety trade-off are driven by temporal variation in
multiple risk factors under changing seasonal conditions. Here, we
monitored foraging and vigilance behavior of a central prey species,
snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus), at fine temporal scales over the winter
with various types of predation risk, while also experimentally
manipulating predation risk by attracting predators to foraging patches.
Hares increased foraging and decreased vigilance over the winter, but
hares under chronic risk decreased their antipredator efforts to a lesser
degree, indicating that those individuals prioritized risk avoidance over
food acquisition. Hares also decreased foraging and increased antipredator
efforts in response to the temporal activity of predators and
environmental cues of predation risk. However, the magnitude of the
responses to the environmental cues was mediated by time of winter. While
we did not detect a reactive response of hares to acute risk, we did find
that hares exhibiting camouflage mismatch proactively increased vigilance.
Overall, our results highlight the importance of species-specific traits
and changing seasonal conditions in addition to temporal variation in
multiple risk factors in predicting antipredator responses and the context
dependence of risk effects.