ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2012
Exploratory behaviour and stressor hyper-responsiveness facilitate range expansion of an introduced songbird.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Stress in the city: meta-analysis indicates no overall evidence for stress in urban vertebrates.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Pooled it
- A neuro-behavioural model of neophobia.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Movement Ecology of Adult Male Threatened Katipō (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Fortune may favor the flexible: environment-dependent behavioral shifts in invasive coquí frogs.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Spatial neophobia is still not correlated with object neophobia in wild-caught house sparrows (Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Flexible males, proactive females: increased boldness/exploration damping with time in male but not female colonists.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Habitat and food preferences of European rabbits in core and edge populations along the invasion front Patagonia-Monte, Argentina.Current zoology · 2024Article
- HPA flexibility andPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- A conceptual framework for understanding stress-induced physiological and transgenerational effects on population responses to climate change.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Gut microbiome diversity and composition is associated with exploratory behavior in a wild-caught songbird.Animal microbiome · 2023Article
- Review
- Individual Nest Site Preferences Do Not Explain Upslope Population Shifts of a Secondary Cavity-Nesting Species.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- Selection on individuals of introduced species starts before the actual introduction.Evolutionary applications · 2021Article
- Decreasing glucocorticoid levels towards the expansion front suggest ongoing expansion in a terrestrial mammal.Conservation physiology · 2021Article
- Urban resources limit pair coordination over offspring provisioning.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Article
- Sex differences in dispersal syndrome are modulated by environment and evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Behavioural divergence during biological invasions: a study of cane toads (Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- Phenotypic divergence despite low genetic differentiation in house sparrow populations.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- House sparrows' (Frontiers in zoology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Global anthropogenic changes are occurring at an unprecedented rate; one change, human-facilitated introduction of species outside their native range, has had significant ecological and economic impacts. Surprisingly, what traits facilitate range expansions post-introduction is relatively unknown. This information could help predict future expansions of introduced species as well as native species shifting their ranges as climate conditions change. Here, we asked whether specific behavioural and physiological traits were important in the ongoing expansion of house sparrows (Passer domesticus) across Kenya. We predicted that birds at the site of initial introduction (Mombasa, introduced approx. 1950) would behave and regulate corticosterone, a stress hormone, differently than birds at the range edge (Kakamega, approx. 885 km from Mombasa; colonized within the last 5 years). Specifically, we predicted greater exploratory behaviour and stronger corticosterone response to stressors in birds at the range edge, which may facilitate the identification, resolution and memory of stressors. Indeed, we found that distance from Mombasa (a proxy for population age) was a strong predictor of both exploratory behaviour and corticosterone release in response to restraint (but only while birds were breeding). These results suggest that certain behavioural and neuroendocrine traits may influence the ability of species to colonize novel habitats.
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