Abstract
Animal personality has been widely documented across a range of species. The concept of personality is composed of individual behavioural consistency across time and between situations, and also behavioural trait correlations known as behavioural syndromes. Whilst many studies have now investigated the stability of individual personality traits, few have analysed the stability over time of entire behavioural syndromes. Here we present data from a behavioural study of rock pool prawns. We show that prawns are temporally consistent in a range of behaviours, including activity, exploration and boldness, and also that a behavioural syndrome is evident in this population. We find correlations between many behavioural traits (activity, boldness, shoaling and exploration). In addition, behavioural syndrome structure was consistent over time. Finally, few studies have explicitly studied the role of sex differences in personality traits, behavioural consistency and syndrome structure. We report behavioural differences between male and female prawns but no differences in patterns of consistency. Our study adds to the growing literature on animal personality, and provides evidence showing that syndromes themselves can exhibit temporal consistency.
Highlights
Individual personality was once thought to be a uniquely human phenomenon [1]
Do males and females have a similar degree of consistency in behaviour? Do patterns of correlation between different behavioural traits differ between sexes? In this paper we address a number of questions about animal personality using the rock pool prawn Palaemon elegans as a model organism
Our study revealed that both individual behaviours and population-level behavioural syndrome structure are consistent in our study organism, the rock pool prawn
Summary
Individual personality was once thought to be a uniquely human phenomenon [1]. a plethora of recent studies show that the existence of individual personality is taxonomically widespread [2], with data from animals as diverse as non-human primates [3], birds [4] and fish [5], highlighting that many animals show consistency in their behaviour. The concept of personality involves behavioural consistency over time or situation, and the idea that an individual can have a ‘‘behavioural type’’ [17]: i.e. that linkages can exist between functionally different behaviours These linkages, when conceptualised as correlations at a population level, are known as behavioural syndromes [17]. Examples of behavioural syndromes in nature are population-level positive correlations between boldness, aggression and activity in red ants [18], or aggression and boldness in female spiders [19]. Both consistency and the presence of behavioural syndromes are thought to be different facets characterising animal personality. Both components of personality are becoming increasingly well studied, only a handful of studies (e.g. Bell & Sih, [20] Adriaenssens & Johnsson [21]) have broached a key and unresolved question that goes to the heart of bridging these two separate properties which together characterise animal personality: to what degree are behavioural syndromes consistent over time? Whilst many single behaviours have been shown to be consistent in many examples, are the trait-linkages consistent?
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