Abstract
While personality differences in animals are defined as consistent behavioural variation between individuals, the widely studied field of foraging specialisation in marine vertebrates has rarely been addressed within this framework. However there is much overlap between the two fields, both aiming to measure the causes and consequences of consistent individual behaviour. Here for the first time we use both a classic measure of personality, the response to a novel object, and an estimate of foraging strategy, derived from GPS data, to examine individual personality differences in black browed albatross and their consequences for fitness. First, we examine the repeatability of personality scores and link these to variation in foraging habitat. Bolder individuals forage nearer the colony, in shallower regions, whereas shyer birds travel further from the colony, and fed in deeper oceanic waters. Interestingly, neither personality score predicted a bird’s overlap with fisheries. Second, we show that both personality scores are correlated with fitness consequences, dependent on sex and year quality. Our data suggest that shyer males and bolder females have higher fitness, but the strength of this relationship depends on year quality. Females who forage further from the colony have higher breeding success in poor quality years, whereas males foraging close to the colony always have higher fitness. Together these results highlight the potential importance of personality variation in seabirds and that the fitness consequences of boldness and foraging strategy may be highly sex dependent.
Highlights
The field of animal personalities has been one of fastest growing areas of behavioural ecology in the last decade
Principal component one explained 32% of the population variation in response to the novel object (Table 2), which is comparable to other studies using PCA to derive personality scores e.g. [21,43]
We found that foraging behaviour is highly repeatable in black browed albatross and it can be consider as a personality trait. This trait and the widely considered personality trait of boldness correlate with aspects of reproductive success
Summary
The field of animal personalities has been one of fastest growing areas of behavioural ecology in the last decade. In the marine biology literature, there has been an increasing number of foraging studies on marine predators with the development of telemetry, and evidence is accumulating that there is a substantial individual component to foraging strategies, such as prey choice or spatial movement (Reviewed by [5]). While these individual differences in foraging can conceptually be considered as personality differences, the lack of overlap between behavioural ecology and marine biology has meant that there has been little attempt to implement the same analytical techniques, nor to consider these foraging behaviours within the framework of personality differences
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