Personality, spatiotemporal ecological variation, and resident/explorer movement syndromes in the sleepy lizard

Individual variation in movement is profoundly important for fitness and offers key insights into the spatial and temporal dynamics of populations and communities. Nonetheless, individual variation in fine-scale movement behaviours are rarely examined even though animal tracking devices offer the long-term, high-resolution, repeatable data in natural conditions that are ideal for studying this variation. Furthermore, of the few studies that consider individual variation in movement, even fewer also consider the internal traits and environmental factors that drive movement behaviour which are necessary for contextualising individual differences in movement patterns.
In this study, we GPS-tracked a free-ranging population of sleepy lizards, Tiliqua rugosa, each Austral spring over five years to examine consistent among-individual variation in movement patterns, as well as how these differences were mediated by key internal and ecological factors.
We found that individuals consisten...