RESUMO
In a study of gerbils with contrasting social and mating systems (group-living monogamous Mongolian gerbil Meriones unguiculatus, solitary nonterritorial promiscuous midday jird M. meridianus, and solitary territorial promiscuous pale gerbil Gerbillus perpallidus), we employed partner preference tests (PPTs) to assess among-species variation in sociability and pair-bonding patterns and tested whether the nature of contact between individuals: direct contact (DC) versus nondirect contact (NDC) affected our results. We measured male preferences as the time: 1) spent alone, 2) with familiar (partner), and 3) unfamiliar (stranger) female in the 3-chambered apparatus. Gerbil species differed strongly in sociability and male partner preferences. The time spent alone was a reliable indicator of species sociability independent of the nature of contact, whereas the pattern and level of between-species differences in male partner preferences depended on contact type: DC PPTs, unlike NDC-tests, discriminated well between monogamous and promiscuous species. In the DC-tests, stranger-directed aggression and stranger avoidance were observed both in the highly social monogamous M. unguiculatus and the solitary territorial promiscuous G. perpallidus, but not in the nonterritorial promiscuous M. meridianus. In M. unguiculatus, stranger avoidance in the DC-tests increased the time spent with the partner, thus providing evidence of a partner preference that was not found in the NDC-tests, whereas in G. perpallidus, stranger avoidance increased the time spent alone. This first comparative experimental study of partner preferences in gerbils provides new insights into the interspecific variation in gerbil sociality and mating systems and sheds light on behavioral mechanisms underlying social fidelity and pair-bonding.
RESUMO
Theory predicts that due to their resilience, ecosystems and populations are expected to respond to environmental changes not gradually, but in a nonlinear way with sudden abrupt shifts. However, it is not easy to observe and predict the state-and-transition dynamics in the real world because of time lags between exogenous perturbations and species response. Based on yearly surveys, during 21 years (1994-2014), we have studied population dynamics of a desert rodent (the midday gerbil, Meriones meridianus) in the rangelands of southern Russia under landscape change from desert to steppe caused by the drastic reduction of livestock after the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. The population of M. meridianus has remained robust to landscape change from desert to steppe for over 10 years, but then has suddenly dropped down and has not recovered since. The step transition from the high- to low-abundance density-regulated equilibrium was accompanied by an abrupt increase in the spatio-temporal population variability, which may indicate the loss of population resilience. We explain inertia in species response to landscape change and an abrupt regime shift in population dynamics by species-specific ecology and life-history combined with habitat fragmentation that had reached a certain critical threshold level by the early 2000s. This is a rare well-documented demonstration of a delayed threshold response of a wild unexploited mammal population to human-induced environmental change, which may shed light on the mechanisms of population resilience and underlying causes of threshold population dynamics in a changing world.
