Abstract
Individuals from the same population generally vary in suites of correlated behavioral traits: personality. Yet, the strength of the behavioral correlations sometimes differs among populations and environmental conditions, suggesting that single underlying mechanisms, such as genetic constraints, cannot account for them. We propose, instead, that such suites of correlated traits may arise when a single key behavior has multiple cascading effects on several other behaviors through affecting the range of options available. For instance, an individual's shyness can constrain its habitat choice, which, in turn, could restrict the expression of other behavioral traits. We hypothesize that shy individuals should be especially restrained in their choice of habitat when the risk of predation is high, which then canalizes them into different behavioral options making them appear behaviorally distinct from bolder individuals. We test this idea using an individual-based simulation model. Our results show that individual differences in boldness can be sufficient, under high predation pressure, to generate behavioral correlations between boldness and both the tendency to aggregate and the propensity to use social information. Thus, our findings support the idea that some behavioral syndromes can be, at least to some extent, labile. Our model further predicts that such cascading effects should be more pronounced in populations with a long history of predation, which are expected to exhibit a low average boldness level, compared with predator-naïve populations.
Highlights
Individuals from the same population generally vary in suites of correlated behavioral traits
When the predation risk rapidly increases with distance to cover, shy individuals prefer to forage in subareas closer to cover, where the resulting density of individuals becomes higher than in other subareas
Because they prefer the same set of subareas, shy individuals will appear more sociable than bold individuals (Fig. 4A) and so a behavioral correlation emerges
Summary
Individuals from the same population generally vary in suites of correlated behavioral traits. The differences between bold and shy individuals in their propensity to use the producer tactic are more pronounced when food patches are poor (i.e., small values of F) and the number of competitors is small.
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