Individual Specialization

Abstract

Natural populations are collections of ecologically diverse individuals, which are often specialized in small subsets of the population niche. Nearly two decades after the concept of individual specialization was formally coined, accumulated evidence confirms that this phenomenon is prevalent in nature across a myriad of taxa and has major ecological, evolutionary, and conservation implications. Ecologists now possess a diverse toolbox of methods to quantify niches at the scale of individuals with unprecedented accuracy. Despite recent advances on the relevance of individual specialization for higher levels of biological organization (e.g., populations, communities), key questions about its causes and consequences remain unanswered.