Long‐Term Behavioural Syndrome in Subadult Indian Social Spiders But Not Over the Short‐Term or in Juveniles

Abstract

AbstractAnimal personalities and behavioural syndromes have overarching implications for individual survival, fitness and cooperative task participation. In social spiders, personality in boldness and aggression, and their association into behavioural syndromes, are thought to play a role in individual participation and task specialisation in collective behaviours, such as prey capture. However, recent retractions of key publications in this field have exposed gaps and uncertainties in our understanding of factors governing task performance in social spider colonies. Here, we analyse an already‐published data set on animal personalities in the Indian social spider Stegodyphus sarasinorum to investigate whether boldness and aggression form a behavioural syndrome and assess its persistence over the short‐ and long‐term, and across age classes. Boldness and aggression were negatively correlated traits, forming a syndrome, but only over the long‐term in subadult spiders, and not over the short‐term in subadults or in juveniles. These results provide evidence for the existence of a behavioural syndrome in at least one social spider species. However, more work is now required to fully understand the observed inconsistencies in behavioural syndrome structures and animal personalities, as well as their possible role(s) in mediating task partitioning and collective performance in social spider colonies.