Personality Variation in Little Brown Bats

Allyson K Menzies,Liam P Mcguire,Craig K R Willis,Mary E Timonin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0080230

Allyson K Menzies, Liam P Mcguire + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080230

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Nov 27, 2013
Citations: 28	License type: CC BY 3.0

Affiliation: University of Winnipeg

Abstract

Animal personality or temperament refers to individual differences in behaviour that are repeatable over time and across contexts. Personality has been linked to life-history traits, energetic traits and fitness, with implications for the evolution of behaviour. Personality has been quantified for a range of taxa (e.g., fish, songbirds, small mammals) but, so far, there has been little work on personality in bats, despite their diversity and potential as a model taxon for comparative studies. We used a novel environment test to quantify personality in little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) and assess the short-term repeatability of a range of behaviours. We tested the hypothesis that development influences values of personality traits and predicted that trait values associated with activity would increase between newly volant, pre-weaning young-of-the-year (YOY) and more mature, self-sufficient YOY. We identified personality dimensions that were consistent with past studies of other taxa and found that these traits were repeatable over a 24-hour period. Consistent with our prediction, older YOY captured at a fall swarming site prior to hibernation had higher activity scores than younger YOY bats captured at a maternity colony, suggesting that personality traits vary as development progresses in YOY bats. Thus, we found evidence of short-term consistency of personality within individuals but with the potential for temporal flexibility of traits, depending on age.

Highlights

Phenotypic variation within a species is a requirement for natural selection yet, in animal ecology and behaviour, intraspecific and intra-population variation have often been viewed as more of a nuisance than a biologically important phenomenon [1]
Based on our novel environment test, we found evidence for personality traits in little brown bats similar to those previously identified in rodents (e.g., [7,40]), songbirds (e.g., [5,6]) and fish (e.g., [51,52])
We found that behaviours associated with exploration and activity separated into distinct components, suggesting that this test isolates these personality dimensions in bats

Summary

Introduction

Phenotypic variation within a species is a requirement for natural selection yet, in animal ecology and behaviour, intraspecific and intra-population variation have often been viewed as more of a nuisance than a biologically important phenomenon [1]. Five ecologically relevant dimensions of personality have been well defined [2], including reaction to risky situations (i.e., shyness/boldness; e.g., [3,4]), reaction to novel objects or situations (i.e., exploration/avoidance; e.g., [5,6,7]), activity levels (e.g., [8]), agonistic reactions to conspecifics (i.e., aggressiveness; e.g., [9,10]), and non-aggressive reactions to the presence or absence of conspecifics (i.e., sociability; e.g., [11]) These inter-individual differences in behaviour tend to be repeatable across time, and can be heritable across generations [2,6,12,13]. Variation in personality may correlate with metabolism and energetics [16], the ubiquity of these patterns and directions of relationships within species have not been fully established (e.g., [17])

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