Both Environmental Conditions and Intra- and Interspecific Interactions Influence the Movements of a Marine Predator

Abstract

Animal movements are typically influenced by multiple environmental factors simultaneously, and individuals vary in their response to this environmental heterogeneity. Therefore, understanding how environmental aspects, including biotic, abiotic, and anthropogenic factors, influence the movements of wild animals is an important focus of wildlife research and conservation. We apply Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to analyze movement networks of a bull shark population in a network of acoustic receivers and identify the effects of environmental, social, or other types of covariates on their movements. We found that intra- and interspecific factors often had stronger effects on movements than environmental variables. ERGMs proved to be a potentially useful tool for studying animal movement network data, especially in the context of spatial attribute heterogeneity.