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Abstract
Despite a recent surge in the popularity of animal personality studies and their wide-ranging associations with various aspects of behavioural ecology, our understanding of the development of personality over ontogeny remains poorly understood. Stability over time is a central tenet of personality; ecological pressures experienced by an individual at different life stages may, however, vary considerably, which may have a significant effect on behavioural traits. Invertebrates often go through numerous discrete developmental stages and therefore provide a useful model for such research. Here we test for both differential consistency and age effects upon behavioural traits in the gregarious cockroach Diploptera punctata by testing the same behavioural traits in both juveniles and adults. In our sample, we find consistency in boldness, exploration and sociality within adults whilst only boldness was consistent in juveniles. Both boldness and exploration measures, representative of risk-taking behaviour, show significant consistency across discrete juvenile and adult stages. Age effects are, however, apparent in our data; juveniles are significantly bolder than adults, most likely due to differences in the ecological requirements of these life stages. Size also affects risk-taking behaviour since smaller adults are both bolder and more highly explorative. Whilst a behavioural syndrome linking boldness and exploration is evident in nymphs, this disappears by the adult stage, where links between other behavioural traits become apparent. Our results therefore indicate that differential consistency in personality can be maintained across life stages despite age effects on its magnitude, with links between some personality traits changing over ontogeny, demonstrating plasticity in behavioural syndromes.
Highlights
The direction of most correlations between principal component (PC) scores was consistent between the sexes (S1–S3 Figs) and so data were pooled for subsequent analyses
These analyses did not reveal significant sex differences (S1 Appendix), apart from the analysis of differential consistency in exploration between the life stages, which showed that this trend was likely to be driven by females
Significant correlations between PC scores for both sexes pooled together provided evidence of differential consistency in boldness, exploration and sociality within adults, in boldness within third instars and in boldness and exploration across life stages
Summary
Methods have recently been formalised and adapted [2] to show that personality (where individuals of the same species show consistent differences in their behaviour across time and contexts, [1, 3]) can be detected across a wide spectrum of animal species, including mammals [4, 5], birds [6, 7], fish [8, 9] and insects [10, 11]. Whilst there is a wealth of published studies on animal personality to date, the development of behavioural consistency over ontogeny is an area which has often been neglected [21]
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