Abstract
Animal personalities are ubiquitous across the animal kingdom and have been shown both to influence individual behaviour in the social context and to be affected by it. However, little attention has been paid to possible carryover effects of social conditions on personality expression, especially when individuals are alone. Here we investigated how the recent social context affected the boldness and repeatability of three-spined sticklebacks, Gasterosteus aculeatus, during individual assays. We housed fish either solitarily, solitarily part of the time or socially in groups of four, and subjected them twice to a risk-taking task. The social conditions had a large effect on boldness repeatability, with fish housed solitarily before the trials showing much higher behavioural repeatability than fish housed socially, for which repeatability was not significant. Social conditions also had a temporal effect on the boldness of the fish, with only fish housed solitarily taking more risks during the first than the second trial. These results show that recent social conditions can thus affect the short-term repeatability of behaviour and obfuscate the expression of personality even in later contexts when individuals are alone. This finding highlights the need to consider social housing conditions when designing personality studies and emphasizes the important link between animal personality and the social context by showing the potential role of social carryover effects.
Highlights
It is well known that animal personalities are omnipresent in the animal kingdom (Reale, Dingemanse, Kazem, & Wright, 2010; Reale, Reader, Sol, McDougall, & Dingemanse, 2007; Sih, Bell, & Johnson, 2004). These consistent individual differences in behaviour play a fundamental role in the social organization of animals (Aplin et al, 2013; Croft et al, 2009; Pike, Samanta, Lindstro€m, & Royle, 2008; Sih, Cote, Evans, Fogarty, & Pruitt, 2012; Webster & Ward, 2011) and have considerable impact on a range of evolutionary and ecological processes (Reale et al, 2010, 2007; Sih et al, 2012; Smith & Blumstein, 2008; Wolf & Weissing, 2012)
In three-spined sticklebacks, Gasterosteus aculeatus, risk-taking behaviour and leadership of individuals in a social context are positively linked to their propensity to take risks when alone (‘boldness’), this effect can be strongly enhanced or reduced by the personality of their current (Harcourt et al, 2009; Jolles et al, 2015) and previous group mates (Jolles et al, 2014)
Shy individuals are less affected by previous social experiences than bold individuals (Jolles et al, 2014) and show higher behavioural plasticity between social contexts, in three-spined sticklebacks, perch, Esox lucius, and zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata (Jolles et al, 2014; Magnhagen & Bunnefeld, 2009; Magnhagen & Staffan, 2005; Schuett & Dall, 2009; Webster et al, 2007)
Summary
It is well known that animal personalities are omnipresent in the animal kingdom (Reale, Dingemanse, Kazem, & Wright, 2010; Reale, Reader, Sol, McDougall, & Dingemanse, 2007; Sih, Bell, & Johnson, 2004). In relatively stable social environments individuals are more likely to repeat certain behaviours by positive feedback from experience and optimal behaviour via repeated interactions (Harcourt et al, 2009; Laskowski & Pruitt, 2014; Nakayama, Stumpe, Manica, & Johnstone, 2013) These interactions may increase the behavioural variability among individuals (Laskowski & Pruitt, 2014) and the behavioural repeatability of individuals (Laskowski & Bell, 2013; Wolf, Van Doorn, & Weissing, 2011). The three-spined stickleback is an excellent model system to investigate these questions on personality and social dynamics (see e.g. Bell & Sih, 2007; Bell & Stamps, 2004; Harcourt et al, 2009; Jolles et al, 2014, 2015; Laskowski & Bell, 2014; Pike et al, 2008; Ward, Holbrook, Krause, & Hart, 2005; Webster et al, 2007; Webster, Ward, & Hart, 2009), as it is a social species, with a strong tendency to shoal most of the year (Huntingford & Coyle, 2010; Ostlund-Nilsson, Mayer, & Huntingford, 2010), and is physically and behaviourally robust, and can be kept both solitarily and in groups in a laboratory environment (Huntingford & Ruiz-Gomez, 2009)
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