Interactions between boldness, foraging performance and behavioural plasticity across social contexts.

Guðbjörg Ásta Ólafsdóttir,Kit Magellan

doi:10.1007/s00265-016-2193-0

Abstract

Boldness, the tendency to be explorative, risk prone and proactive, often varies consistently between individuals. An individual’s position on the boldness–shyness continuum has many implications. Bold individuals may outperform shyer conspecifics during foraging as they cover more ground, accumulate information more rapidly and make more frequent food discoveries. Individual variation in boldness may also affect behavioural plasticity across environmental contexts, as the time to process new information, the ability to locate and memorise resources and the time and ability to apply prior information in a novel context all differ between individuals. The primary aim of the current study was to examine plasticity in, and covariation between, boldness, foraging speed and foraging accuracy across social foraging contexts. We showed that the stickleback that were shyest when foraging alone became relatively boldest when foraging in a social context and also delayed their entry to a known food patch the most in the presence of conspecifics. These results support the assertion that shyer foragers are more reactive to social cues and add to current knowledge of how an individual’s position on the boldness–shyness continuum may correlate to foraging task performance and behavioural plasticity. We conclude that the correlation between boldness and behavioural plasticity may have broad relevance as the ability to adjust or retain behaviours in changing social environments could often have consequences for fitness.Significance statementAnimal personality may affect how much individuals change their behaviour to suit different environments. We studied the link between threespine stickleback personality (boldness or shyness), foraging performance and change in foraging performance when either alone or in the presence of other stickleback. We found that shyer threespine stickleback were more reactive to the presence of other fish when foraging. When observed or joined by other fish, shy stickleback started exploring earlier, but entered a known food patch later, than when alone. Bolder stickleback changed their foraging behaviour much less in the presence of other fish. Our results suggest that how bold or shy individuals are may have important consequences on how well they adjust their foraging behaviour to environmental change.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00265-016-2193-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Highlights

Consistent variation in individual behaviour across contexts and behavioural trait correlation are often termed animal personality and behavioural syndromes (Dingemanse et al 2003; Dall et al 2004; Sih et al 2004; Réale et al 2007)
3 South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity, Private Bag 1015, Grahamstown 6139, South Africa of how an individual’s position on the boldness–shyness continuum may correlate to foraging task performance and behavioural plasticity
Individual intercept and slope of boldness were negatively correlated (Table 2) and there were negative correlations between individual boldness in the social foraging task and boldness in each of task 1 and task 2 (r = −0.73, p < 0.01 and r = −0.75, p < 0.01, respectively). These results support that shyer individuals became relatively bolder in a social context and that the correlation is not a statistical artefact caused by regression to the mean

Summary

Introduction

Consistent variation in individual behaviour across contexts and behavioural trait correlation are often termed animal personality and behavioural syndromes (Dingemanse et al 2003; Dall et al 2004; Sih et al 2004; Réale et al 2007). Speed may come at the cost of accuracy as individuals that make rapid decisions may not weigh all relevant data (Chittka et al 2003; Sih and Del Giudice 2012; Moiron et al 2016). Traits such as the speed and accuracy of locating food resources have been quantified and discussed in relation to cognitive abilities (Burns and Rodd 2008; Ducatez et al 2015; Mamuneas et al 2015). Task performance has been correlated with boldness in previous studies. A recent study on threespine stickleback found that bold individuals were no less accurate than shy ones in a t-maze foraging task (Mamuneas et al 2015)

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