SREL Reprint #1759
What is the role of adults in mammalian juvenile dispersal?
Jerry O. Wolff
Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis, OR 97331, USA
Introduction: Considerable controversy exists over the role adults play in juvenile dispersal. The majority of the literature on juvenile dispersal assumes or presumes that resource and/or reproductive competition occur between adults and juveniles and thus juvenile dispersal is forced by resident adults of the same sex (see Dobson 1982, Waser 1985, and Anderson 1989 for reviews). In fact, the conventional wisdom in small mammal ecology is that if juveniles are dispersing, adults must be chasing them. The alternative point of view is that juveniles "voluntarily" disperse as a mechanism to avoid inbreeding with close relatives (e.g. Harvey and Ralls 1986, Pusey 1987). Because dispersal plays such a major role in mammalian demography, behavioral systems, and population regulation, an understanding of its motivation is necessary to understand its evolutionary significance.
SREL Reprint #1759
Wolff, J.O. 1993. What is the role of adults in mammalian juvenile dispersal? Oikos 68:173-176.
This information was provided by the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory (srel.uga.edu).