General Research Interests:
I am interested in the ecology and evolution of animal behaviour with a specific focus on social behaviour. I am particularly interested in the links between social behaviour, movement ecology, and space use and how these behaviours relate to one another within the context of disease ecology. We test our hypotheses in three primary systems: Caribou in Newfoundland, Caribou in Ontario, and bats in Ontario (on Manitoulin Island and southwestern Ontario).
1. Integrating animal social and spatial behaviour: Individuals that are connected in their social network are also connected spatially in the sense that they must share space to interact with one another. Investigation into the relationship between social and spatial behaviour is relatively novel and I am broadly interested in the empirical, conceptual, and methodological synthesis of social and spatial behaviour. While the spatial-social interface can be very complex, we are interested in tackling different subsets of interactions in natural systems. See my published work discussing the spatial-social interface (Webber et al. 2023 Biol Rev; Albery, Webber et al. 2024 Phil Trans) and some of our published empirical work (Webber et al. 2024 Movement Ecology).
Figure 1 from Webber et al. 2023: Conceptual symmetry at the spatial–social interface, decomposed into (1) spatial versus social environment; (2) spatial versus social phenotype; (3) social phenotype versus spatial environment; (4) spatial phenotype versus social environment.
2. Caribou spatial and movement ecology: In Ontario, caribou are delineated into two ecotypes: eastern migratory and sedentary boreal ecotypes. We are working with government collaborators to better delineate reproductive success, space use, habitat selection, and movement of these ecotypes to inform conservation and management of caribou in Ontario. Our work on caribou in Ontario also relates to how caribou interact with dynamic energy landscapes and whether they select for quality-quantity trade-offs throughout the year. Finally, we are interested in cross-trophic interactions within the framework of the disturbance mediated apparent competition hypothesis in a caribou, wolf, moose system in Northern Ontario. Much of this work is only just beginning and there will be lots of new opportunities. Our work studying caribou in Ontario is highly collaborative and includes collaborators across institutions and in government.
Photo credit: Juliana Ballufi-Fry
3. Dietary and resource specialization and foraging ecology: Individual animals are predicted to vary in the extent to which they specialize or generalize in their diets and the resources they use. The degree to which individuals vary in their resource use falls along a generalist-specialist continuum. Individuals vary in their resource use to reduce intra-specific competition through specializing on a subset of the resources available to the population. For example, the niche variation hypothesis predicts that individuals should become resource specialists when population density is high to reduce competition. Our research group is focused on assessing how dietary and resource specialization varies as a function of the availability of food or resources, across population density gradients, and how specialization affects fitness (Webber et al. 2024 Nat Comm).
Figure 3 from Webber et al. 2024 Nat Comm: Phenotypic covariance between reproductive success and habitat specialization at relatively high (left panel) and relatively low (right panel) population density for caribou. At high density, more specialized individuals also tended to have an overall higher fitness value, whereas there was no effect of habitat specialization on fitness at low density.
4. Parasites, pathogens, and behaviour: Among the most important costs of social behaviour is an increased risk of transmitting parasites and pathogens. In theory, animals living at higher population densities or in larger social groups tend to face greater risk of acquiring and transmitting pathogens. Our work on elk (Webber and Vander Wal 2020) and bats (Webber et al. 2017) supports theory when testing the relationship between parasitism, group size, and population density. We are also interested in host-parasite dynamics in the context of animal health and how parasites influence the health of their hosts (work on this coming!).

Animal social and spatial behaviour (see above) should influence parasite dynamics. One of the labs new interests is the role of the "landscape of disgust" in shaping the ecology, evolution, and behaviour of host-parasite interactions (Love et al. 2024 Proc B). In this synthetic review article, we discuss the limitations of the current landscape of disgust framework and we explore the specific requirements for implementing a landscape of disgust framework in empirical systems. We also propose greater integration of habitat selection and evolutionary theories, aiming to generate novel insight, by exploring how the landscape of disgust varies within and across generations, presenting opportunities for future research. Despite interest in the impacts of parasitism on animal movement and behaviour, many unanswered questions remain.
Figure 1 from Love et al. (2024): Factors affecting the formation and demonstration of the landscape of disgust. Here, we illustrate a hypothetical system to demonstrate different factors that affect the landscape of disgust both within (tan boxes on the left) and across (yellow boxes on the right) generations. These factors include principles from habitat selection theory operating at varying spatial scales that could be impacted by the detection of risk and ecological context, along with evolutionary principles such as selection for traits associated with the detection and avoidance of parasites, or gene flow or genetic drift impacting genetic variation for selection.
5. Predator-prey dynamics: A new aspect of our research group is tackling questions about predator-prey dynamics, from the perspective of both predators (wolves and bats) and prey (ungulates and insects). We are interested in questions related to how prey respond behaviourally to risk of predation (Atkinson et al. CJZ in review), but also how predators use space to access available prey. In bats, we are interested in how insect abundance and biomass varies through space and time and, in turn, how bat space use responds to these patterns. Similarly, we have recently begun a project focused on variation in wolf territoriality across a north-south prey availability (e.g. white-tailed deer, moose, caribou, and beaver) gradient with an aim to test hypotheses about the extrinsic factors influence wolf space use and territoriality.
Figure 1 from Atkinson et al. (in revision): Predicted movement rates of GPS collared caribou from two populations (Fogo Island and Middle Ridge) as a function of time of day in spring (panel A) and winter (panel B) as well as GPS collared coyotes and black bears in spring (panel C) and winter (panel D). Grey bands around predicted movement rates are standard error generated from general additive models. Vertical dashed lines indicate average sunrise and sunset times in each season.