Informed movement and dispersal in experimental metacommunities

Dispersal, and the underlying movement behaviour, are processes of pivotal importance for understanding and predicting metapopulation and metacommunity dynamics. Generally, dispersal decisions are non-random and rely on information, such as the presence of conspecifics. However, studies on metacommunities that include interspecific interactions generally disregard information use. Therefore, it remains unclear whether and how dispersal in metacommunities is informed and whether rules derived from single-species contexts can be scaled up to (meta-)communities. Using experimental protist metacommunities, we show how dispersal and movement are informed and adjusted by the strength of inter-specific interactions. We found that predicting informed movement and dispersal in metacommunities requires knowledge on behavioural responses to intra- and inter-specific interaction strength. Consequently, metacommunity dynamics inferred directly from single-species metapopulations without taking inter-specific interactions into account are likely flawed. Our work identifies the significance of information use for understanding metacommunity dynamics, stability and the coexistence and distribution of species. Author contributions All authors designed the study. EAF and JK performed the experiments and analysed the data. EAF wrote the manuscript and all authors contributed substantially to revisions.