Abstract
Understanding whether and how ambient ecological conditions affect the distribution of personality types within and among populations lies at the heart of research on animal personality. Several studies have focussed on only one agent of divergent selection (or driver of plastic changes in behavior), considering either predation risk or a single abiotic ecological factor. Here, we investigated how an array of abiotic and biotic environmental factors simultaneously shape population differences in boldness, activity in an open‐field test, and sociability/shoaling in the livebearing fish Poecilia vivipara from six ecologically different lagoons in southeastern Brazil. We evaluated the relative contributions of variation in predation risk, water transparency/visibility, salinity (ranging from oligo‐ to hypersaline), and dissolved oxygen. We also investigated the role played by environmental factors for the emergence, strength, and direction of behavioral correlations. Water transparency explained most of the behavioral variation, whereby fish from lagoons with low water transparency were significantly shyer, less active, and shoaled less than fish living under clear water conditions. When we tested additional wild‐caught fish from the same lagoons after acclimating them to homogeneous laboratory conditions, population differences were largely absent, pointing toward behavioral plasticity as a mechanism underlying the observed behavioral differences. Furthermore, we found correlations between personality traits (behavioral syndromes) to vary substantially in strength and direction among populations, with no obvious associations with ecological factors (including predation risk). Altogether, our results suggest that various habitat parameters simultaneously shape the distribution of personality types, with abiotic factors playing a vital (as yet underestimated) role. Furthermore, while predation is often thought to lead to the emergence of behavioral syndromes, our data do not support this assumption.
Highlights
Individual variation in behavioral tendencies that is consistent over time and across contexts— referred to as animal personality (AP)— has been reported for a multitude of species, including both vertebrates and invertebrates
Several studies reported population differences in other personality traits like shoaling/sociability (e.g., P. reticulata: Seghers, 1973, 1974; Phoxinus phoxinus: Magurran, 1986), activity (B. episcopi: Archard & Braithwaite, 2011), and exploration tendencies (B. episcopi: Archard & Braithwaite, 2011) among fish populations exposed to varying degrees of predation risk
We found a significant influence of the fixed factor “lagoon”, suggesting differences in consistency among populations
Summary
Individual variation in behavioral tendencies that is consistent over time and across contexts— referred to as animal personality (AP)— has been reported for a multitude of species, including both vertebrates and invertebrates (reviewed in Gosling & John, 1999; Gosling, 2001; Réale, Reader, Sol, McDougall, & Dingemanse, 2007; Bell, Hankison, & Laskowski, 2009). Most studies investigating the influence of environmental factors on population differences in AP in fish focused on only one environmental factor (e.g., Archard & Braithwaite, 2011; Brown et al, 2005; Fraser & Gilliam, 1987; Harris et al, 2010), while Brydges, Colegrave, Heathcote, and Braithwaite (2008) found that the interaction between predation risk and habitat stability but not predation alone predicted differences in boldness among populations of three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) This approach is clearly prone to overlook complex patterns of environmentally induced population differences in AP, where a multitude of ecological factors simultaneously drive divergence in population means of different personality traits. Other environmental factors could alter predation-dependent syndrome structures, for example, if high predation pressure favors individuals that are active (Archard & Braithwaite, 2011) and show a high shoaling tendency (Godin, 1986), while low transparency of water (low visibility) leads to decreased shoaling behavior (Kelley et al, 2012)
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