FIGURE 1.

The experimental design testing for cross‐species conditional syndromes and an example of potential consequences on dispersal and metacommunity dynamics. The experimental design (left panel) manipulates the predation risk and resource density for 15 species in multi‐patch systems to obtain dispersers and residents which were then characterised for their body size, basal activity and locomotion morphology. The right panel shows the dispersal dynamics for scenarios where dispersal was random (left column) or dependent on individual phenotype (here the body size of crickets, right column) and local conditions (here the amount of clover plants in a patch) on top and theoretical consequences of such dispersal modes for metacommunity dynamics on the bottom. In the random scenario, the dispersal rate and body size of dispersers do not vary with patch resources; in the conditional dispersal scenario, dispersers are more numerous and bigger when patch resources are low. Context‐ and phenotype‐dependent dispersal results in the spatial structuring of consumers' population size and phenotype (body size) where patches with more resources host more and bigger consumers and equalise per capita consumption rate whereas random dispersal does not. We expect context‐ and phenotype‐dependent dispersal to equalise the resource densities between patches and stabilise metacommunities.