Fig. 4

Individual variation in the movement behavior of 35 African elephants. We highlight five individuals (elephant 4, 8, 17, 20, 36) to facilitate the interpretation of individual differences across hierarchical levels: a) Elephants differed in their average behavioral type for daily movement distance from individuals with a daily movement distance of 10 km (elephant 4) to 20 km (elephant 8) in January. Shaded areas indicate the posterior 95% credible interval of the population level daily movement distance for male (blue) and female (red) elephants, respectively. 22% of the variation in daily movement distance was due to differences among individuals. Individual variation in behavioral shifts over time are unaccounted for (inset) (b) Elephants however differed in how they adjusted their movement behavior over month of the year. Most elephant decreased movement from the beginning of the year (wet season) towards the middle of the year (dry season) and then increased movement again towards the end of the year. Some elephants however did not adjust movement (elephant 36) or increased movement (elephant 17) during the middle of the year. c Elephants differed in within-individual variance from less predictable individuals (e.g. elephant 17) with high variance around their behavioral mean to more predictable individuals (e.g. elephant 36) with low variance around their behavioral mean. The posterior 95% credible interval of the population level residual variance (γ₀) is shown in gray. Note, we here show exponentiated model estimates to facilitate biological interpretation on the km scale. d Elephants with on average longer daily movement distances also had on average shorter residence times. The among-individual correlation between the two behaviors was − 0.4. Because distance (km) and residence time (hrs) are on different scales, behaviors were scaled to a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1 prior to model fitting. Figures are based on bayesian model results