Handling Stress as a Measurement of Personality in Great Tit Nestlings (Parus major)

Abstract

Interest in personality is growing in a wide range of disciplines, but only in a few systems it is possible to assess the survival value of personality. Field studies looking at the relationship between personality and survival value early in life are greatly hampered by the fact that personality can at present only be assessed after individuals become independent from their parents. In passerines, for example, this is often after a period of intensive selection for the survival on fledglings. The main aim of this study is therefore to develop a method to measure personality before this period of selection. For this purpose, we developed the handling stress (HS) test. We measured HS in 14‐d‐old great tit nestlings by counting the number of breast movements (breath rate) in four subsequent 15‐s bouts for 1 min; before and after they were socially isolated from their siblings for 15 min. To calculate the repeatability of HS, we repeated the test 6 mo later. To assess the relationship between HS and exploratory behaviour, we correlated the outcome of both tests. We ran tests both on birds of lines selected for extreme personality and on wild birds from a natural population. We found that birds selected for fast exploration reacted more to HS compared with birds selected for slow exploration and that HS was repeatable in different life phases. We confirmed this by finding an increase in the HS with increasing exploratory scores in wild birds. These results show that we can use the HS test as a measurement of personality, making it a potential tool for studying the relationship between personality and survival value early in life.

Social personality traits in chimpanzees: temporal stability and structure of behaviourally assessed personality traits in three captive populations

“…after aggressive conflicts and cognitive challenge (Levins et al 2001;Maestripieri et al 1992) and the baseline anxiety (Aureli and de Waal 1997;Schino et al 1996). Some primate and bird studies have found covariation between anxiety and social behaviour (Papio anubis: Virgin and Sapolsky 1997; Pan troglodytes: Anestis 2006) and exploration tendency (Parus major: Fucikova et al 2009). In contrast, anxiety is encompassed by an independent construct, namely neuroticism, in the Five-Factor Model of human personality.…”

Smelling Out Predators is Innate in Birds

“…In the Great Tit, birds from wild populations can be placed along an axis ranging from slow to fast explorers in a novel environment (Verbeek et al 1994, Drent et al 2003. This is correlated with differences in their reaction to novel objects (Verbeek et al 1994), aggressiveness (Verbeek et al 1996), recovery time and behaviour after lost contests (Verbeek et al 1999), foraging behaviour (Drent & Marchetti 1999, Marchetti & Drent 2000 and reactions to stress (Carere & van Oers 2004, Fucikova et al 2009). Artificial selection combined with cross fostering resulted in clear evidence for a genetic basis of these traits (heritabilities between 20 and 50%; Drent et al 2003, van Oers et al 2004b and in natural populations variation in personality was found to be under natural (Dingemanse & Réal 2005) and sexual selection (van Oers et al 2008).…”

Urban Great Tits (Parus major) Show Higher Distress Calling and Pecking Rates than Rural Birds across Europe

“…We recorded three behaviors known to reflect coping style and stress responsiveness and/or fighting propensity during handling (Carere and van Oers, 2004;Fucikova et al, 2009;Laiolo et al, 2009;Markó et al, 2013;Torné-Noguera et al, 2014). Breath rate, distress call rate, and pecking rate were recorded in the same consecutive order.…”

“…Breath rate was recorded by counting the number of breast respiratory movements within 30 s, while holding the wings fixed and also ensuring reduced disturbance by visual and sound cues (Markó et al, 2013;Torné-Noguera et al, 2014). Pecking rate and distress calling rate were subsequently quantified by counting the number of pecks and distress calls that were emitted during the next 15 s of handling (Fucikova et al, 2009;Laiolo et al, 2009). Pecking rate refers to the number of pecks against a straight finger positioned at 1-2 cm from the beak of the focal bird while holding its legs (Markó et al, 2013).…”