Abstract
Behavioral phenotypic traits or “animal personalities” drive critical evolutionary processes such as fitness, disease and information spread. Yet the stability of behavioral traits, essential by definition, has rarely been measured over developmentally significant periods of time, limiting our understanding of how behavioral stability interacts with ontogeny. Based on 32 years of social behavioral data for 179 wild bottlenose dolphins, we show that social traits (associate number, time alone and in large groups) are stable from infancy to late adulthood. Multivariate analysis revealed strong relationships between these stable metrics within individuals, suggesting a complex behavioral syndrome comparable to human extraversion. Maternal effects (particularly vertical social learning) and sex-specific reproductive strategies are likely proximate and ultimate drivers for these patterns. We provide rare empirical evidence to demonstrate the persistence of social behavioral traits over decades in a non-human animal.
Highlights
Behavioral phenotypic traits or “animal personalities” drive critical evolutionary processes such as fitness, disease and information spread
Behavioral traits are common across taxa[1], heritable[2,3], and influence population level dynamics such as niche partitioning[4,5,6], responses to environmental change[7,8,9], disease transmission[6,10,11], and fitness[12,13,14]
The extent to which behavioral traits and their syndromes persist throughout ontogeny is still poorly understood, and no obvious patterns have emerged in the literature
Summary
Behavioral phenotypic traits or “animal personalities” drive critical evolutionary processes such as fitness, disease and information spread. Long-lived, social mammals have protracted dependency periods, extensive behavioral repertoires, and can experience environmental change over multiple years and seasons, providing an opportunity to test the limits of behavioral stability To this end, we examined the extent of stability in individual social behavior across decades, from infancy to late adulthood, in the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus). Shark Bay dolphins live in an open fission-fusion society; individual dolphins join and leave groups at will several times per hour, and can associate with any conspecifics they choose within their home range from an unbounded network[52,53,54,55] This flexibility makes group size preferences an informative metric.
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