Describing and understanding behavioral responses to multiple stressors and multiple stimuli.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the effects of environmental change on natural ecosystems is a major challenge, particularly when multiple stressors interact to produce unexpected "ecological surprises" in the form of complex, nonadditive effects that can amplify or reduce their individual effects. Animals often respond behaviorally to environmental change, and multiple stressors can have both population-level and community-level effects. However, the individual, not combined, effects of stressors on animal behavior are commonly studied. There is a need to understand how animals respond to the more complex combinations of stressors that occur in nature, which requires a systematic and rigorous approach to quantify the various potential behavioral responses to the independent and interactive effects of stres

SUBMITTER: Hale R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5214703 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature