Are animal personality traits linked to life-history productivity?

Animal personality and state–behaviour feedbacks: a review and guide for empiricists

“…Over the past few years, however, theory has been developed to explain the existence of animal personalities from an adaptive perspective. Most of this theory invokes adaptive state-dependent behaviour, explaining personality as an adaptive outcome of among-individual differences in state [11][12][13]. Building on earlier work by Rands et al [14] and Dall et al [15], recent models have focused on the joint emergence and maintenance of among-individual differences in behaviour and state, and how such differences are promoted by positive feedbacks between behaviour and state.…”

“…Although this model is couched in terms of co-evolving physiological state variables, the underlying concepts apply to any co-evolving morphological, cognitive, or life history trait that affects the costs or benefits of behavioural actions [55]. Thus this model formalizes the basic logic underlying the Pace of Life syndrome [21] or life history-productivity syndrome [13] ideas that posit the coevolution of fast versus slow general lifestyles including physiology, behaviour and life histories, and of fast/slow cognition syndromes [56].…”

Diversity of warning signal and social interaction influences the evolution of imperfect mimicry

“…Individuals with bold personalities often have a higher food intake rate (Biro & Stamps, 2008; Kurvers et al., 2010). Thus early differences in individual personality traits, such as boldness and the propensity to quickly explore space, may allow some chicks to begin feeding sooner and develop faster relative to individuals that are shy and slow to explore.…”

“…Nevertheless, the physiological demands of a bold personality may still be the driving force for the eagerness of such chicks to peck at aposematic prey. Bold individuals often have a higher metabolic rate than shy ones (Biro & Stamps, 2008), are at greater risk of starvation (Lichtenstein et al., 2017), and thus may need to be less catholic in their feeding, showing greater resistance to learning to avoid noxious prey (Exnerová et al., 2010). Clearly, the experimental disentanglement of predator personality, early development and motivation to feed discriminately is both relevant to our understanding of the evolution of mimicry and a complex challenge worthy of further research effort.…”

Diet composition and foraging success in generalist predators: Are specialist individuals better foragers?

“…Recent studies (van de Pol et al 2009(van de Pol et al , 2010 showed also the necessity to consider appropriate time-scale to understand the mechanism by which environmental change affects the evolution and maintenance of diet specialization. Additionally, foraging abilities may be associated to other personality traits in behavioural syndromes (Biro and Stamps, 2008) and different personalities may have different fitness in different environmental conditions (Dingemanse et al 2004). Studies combining longer-term and other behavioural aspects would be needed to give a reliable impression of temporal variability in fitness components and highlight the possible payoffs of specializing on different prey types.…”