Éditeur(s) :
HAL CCSD Royal Society, The Résumé : International audience
Individuals can play different roles in maintaining connectivity and socialcohesion in animal populations and thereby influence population robustnessto perturbations.We performed a social network analysis in a reef shark populationto assess the vulnerability of the global network to node removal underdifferent scenarios. We found that the network was generally robust to theremoval of nodes with high centrality. The network appeared also highlyrobust to experimental fishing. Individual shark catchability decreased as afunction of experience, as revealed by comparing capture frequency and sitepresence. Altogether, these features suggest that individuals learnt to avoidcapture, which ultimately increased network robustness to experimentalcatch-and-release. Our results also suggest that some caution must be takenwhen using capture–recapture models often used to assess population sizeas assumptions (such as equal probabilities of capture and recapture) maybe violated by individual learning to escape recapture.
EISSN: 1471-2954
hal-01561754
https://hal-univ-perp.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01561754 DOI : 10.1098/rsbl.2016.0824