Zebra finches bi-directionally selected for personality differ in repeatability of corticosterone and testosterone

Abstract

Consistent between-individual differences in behaviour have been documented across the animal kingdom. Such variation between individuals has been shown to be the basis for selection and to act as a pacemaker for evolutionary change. Recently, equivocal evidence suggests that such consistent between-individual variation is also present in hormones. This observation has sparked interest in understanding the mechanisms shaping individual differences, temporal consistency and heritability of hormonal phenotypes and to understand, if and to what extent hormonal mechanisms are involved in mediating consistent variation in behaviour between individuals. Here, we used zebra finches of the fourth generation of bi-directionally selected lines for three independent behaviours: aggression, exploration and fearlessness. We investigated how these behaviours responded to artificial selection and tested their repeatability. We further tested for repeatability of corticosterone and testosterone across and within lines. Moreover, we are presenting the decomposed variance components for within-individual variance (i.e. flexibility) and between-individual variance (i.e. more or less pronounced differences between individuals) and investigate their contribution to repeatability estimates. Both hormones as well as the exploration and fearlessness but not aggressiveness, were repeatable. However, variance components and hence repeatability differed between lines and were often lower than in unselected control animals, mainly because of a reduction in between-individual variance. Our data show that artificial selection (including active selection and genetic drift) can affect the mean and variance of traits. We stress the importance for understanding how variable a trait is both between and within individuals to assess the selective value of a trait.