Avoiding the misuse of BLUP in behavioural ecology.

ABSTRACT: Having recognized that variation around the population-level "Golden Mean" of labile traits contains biologically meaningful information, behavioural ecologists have focused increasingly on exploring the causes and consequences of individual variation in behaviour. These are exciting new directions for the field, assisted in no small part by the adoption of mixed-effects modelling techniques that enable the partitioning of among- and within-individual behavioural variation. It has become commonplace to extract predictions of individual random effects from such models for use in subsequent analyses (for example, between a personality trait and other individual traits such as cognition, physiology, or fitness-related measures). However, these predictions are made with large amounts of error

SUBMITTER: Houslay TM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5873244 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul-Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature