Behavioral correlations across activity, mating, exploration, aggression, and antipredator contexts in the European house cricket, Acheta domesticus

Abstract

Recently, there has been increasing interest in behavioral syndrome research across a range of taxa. Behavioral syndromes are suites of correlated behaviors that are expressed either within a given behavioral context (e.g., mating) or between different contexts (e.g., foraging and mating). Syndrome research holds profound implications for animal behavior as it promotes a holistic view in which seemingly autonomous behaviors may not evolve independently, but as a "suite" or "package." We tested whether laboratory-reared male and female European house crickets, Acheta domesticus, exhibited behavioral syndromes by quantifying individual differences in activity, exploration, mate attraction, aggressiveness, and antipredator behavior. To our knowledge, our study is the first to consider such a breadth of behavioral traits in one organism using the syndrome framework. We found positive correlations across mating, exploratory, and antipredatory contexts, but not aggression and general activity. These behavioral differences were not correlated with body size or condition, although age explained some of the variation in motivation to mate. We suggest that these across-context correlations represent a boldness syndrome as individual risk-taking and exploration was central to across-context mating and antipredation correlations in both sexes. Keywords Personality. Boldness. Temperament. Behavioral syndromes. Risk-taking Over the past 5 years, behavioral ecologists and evolutionary biologists have witnessed a dramatic upsurge in behavioral syndrome research (Sih et al. 2004b; Bell 2007; Sih and Bell 2007). Succinctly defined, behavioral syndromes are suites of correlated behaviors expressed either within a given behavioral context (e.g., foraging) or between different contexts (e.g., foraging and antipredator behavior; Sih et al. 2004a, b). Behavioral syndromes hold profound implications for studies of animal behavior as they advocate a holistic view of behavior in which seemingly autonomous behaviors may not evolve independently, but as a "suite" or "package" (Price and Langen 1992; Sih et al. 2004b). As such, selection affecting one behavior in the suite may also affect how other behaviors are expressed across behavioral contexts (Sih et al. 2004b; Sih and Bell 2007). The ramification is that behaviors may not be free to evolve adaptively to independent optima across contexts due to underlying physiological, behavioral, or genetic constraints associated with the syndrome. Thus, the framework of behavioral syndromes has the potential to revolutionize the manner by which we study animal behavior, particularly if syndromes are common across taxa. The ecological and evolutionary importance of behavioral syndromes is increasingly being recognized both empirically (e.g., Bell 2005; Dingemanse et al. 2007; Wilson and McLaughlin 2007) and conceptually (Sih et al. 2004b) as noted in a recent review by Bell (2007). Personality traits (e.g., boldness, sociability, aggressiveness, activity) are difficult to study in isolation as they ...

Animal personality as a cause and consequence of contest behaviour

“…In the mangrove rivulus, Kryptolebias marmoratus, for example, aggressive individuals are also the boldest and most explorative [21]. By contrast, in the house cricket, Acheta domesticus, there are significant correlations between boldness, exploration, antipredator behaviour and courtship but aggressiveness does not correlate with any other behavioural context [6]. The temporal stability of links between agonistic and other behaviours was studied in hermit crabs, Pagurus bernhardus, which take on asymmetric attacking and defending roles during contests over gastropod shells [22].…”

“…This variation represents a continuum from bold, risk-prone, individuals to shy, risk-averse, individuals. Animal personalities occur in many contexts (see electronic supplementary material for a glossary of key terms) including foraging and exploration [3], provisioning of young [4], vigilance [5] and courtship [6]. When suites of behaviours are correlated across contexts at the among-individual level, these are described as behavioural syndromes [7].…”

The Achilles' heel hypothesis: misinformed keystone individuals impair collective learning and reduce group success

“…We assessed individuals' boldness as their latency to resume movement following an aversive stimulus, which is a commonly used metric in spiders [47,48] and other arthropods [49,50]. Individual spiders were taken from their home containers and placed in the centre of a circular open-topped arena.…”

Consistent individual variations in aggressiveness and a behavioral syndrome across breeding contexts in different environments in the Black-tailed Gull

“…Such behavioral syndrome could also extend to several other non-aggressive contexts (e.g. foraging, exploration activity in novel environment) Wilson et al 2010). Among birds, individuals exhibiting higher levels of aggression toward conspecific competitors tend to also exhibit higher levels of both anti-predator aggression (Hollander et al 2008) and activity in mating behavior (Day et al 2006;van Oers et al 2008), but lower levels of parental care (Ketterson et al 1992;Magrath and Elger 1997).…”