Maternal diet affects juvenile Carpetan rock lizard performance and personality

Abstract

Differences in both stable and labile state variables are known to affect the emergence and maintenance of consistent interindividual behavioral variation (animal personality or behavioral syndrome), especially when experienced early in life. Variation in environmental conditions experienced by gestating mothers (viz. nongenetic maternal effects) is known to have significant impact on offspring condition and behavior; yet, their effect on behavioral consistency is not clear. Here, by applying an orthogonal experimental design, we aimed to study whether increased vitamin D3 content in maternal diet during gestation (vitamin‐supplemented vs. vitamin control treatments) combined with corticosterone treatment (corticosterone‐treated vs. corticosterone control treatments) applied on freshly hatched juveniles had an effect on individual state and behavioral consistency of juvenile Carpetan rock lizards (Iberolacerta cyreni). We tested the effect of our treatments on (a) climbing speed and the following levels of behavioral variation, (b) strength of animal personality (behavioral repeatability), (c) behavioral type (individual mean behavior), and (d) behavioral predictability (within‐individual behavioral variation unrelated to environmental change). We found higher locomotor performance of juveniles from the vitamin‐supplemented group (42.4% increase), irrespective of corticosterone treatment. While activity personality was present in all treatments, shelter use personality was present only in the vitamin‐supplemented × corticosterone‐treated treatment and risk‐taking personality was present in corticosterone control treatments. Contrary to our expectations, behavioral type was not affected by our treatments, indicating that individual quality can affect behavioral strategies without affecting group‐level mean behavior. Behavioral predictability decreased in individuals with low climbing speed, which could be interpreted as a form of antipredator strategy. Our results clearly demonstrate that maternal diet and corticosterone treatment have the potential to induce or hamper between‐individual variation in different components of boldness, often in interactions.

Measuring personality traits in Eurasian red squirrels: A critical comparison of different methods

“…Animal personality is defined as consistent among‐individual differences in behaviour which persist through time and in different contexts (Carter et al., 2013; Koski, 2014; Réale et al., 2007) and is commonly described by several underlying personality traits, each of which reflects a particular aspect of an individual's behavioural repertoire (Carter et al., 2013; Réale et al., 2007). Personality has been documented across taxa in several recent studies (insects: Crall et al., 2018; fish: Barber et al., 2017; Jolles et al., 2019; reptiles: Horváth et al., 2019; Michelangeli et al., 2019; birds: Morinay et al., 2019; Richardson et al., 2019; mammals: Brehm et al., 2019; DeRango et al., 2019; Petelle et al., 2019), and personality traits such as activity (Michelangeli et al., 2019), exploration (Arvidsson et al., 2017) and boldness–shyness (Jolly et al., 2019; Perals et al., 2017) have been quantified using different methods under laboratory conditions and in free‐living populations in the wild (Krebs et al., 2019; Réale et al., 2007; Šlipogor et al., 2020; Tkaczynski et al., 2019).…”

Sex-Specific Effect of the Dietary Protein to Carbohydrate Ratio on Personality in the Dubia Cockroach

“…Maternal diets can influence the personality of the offspring [51], and the diet consumed at the juvenile stage can affect the personality of adults [28,29,33]. Our study is the first to show that the diet consumed at adult stages can affect personality.…”

Shrinking into the big city: influence of genetic and environmental factors on urban dragon lizard morphology and performance capacity

“…These urban dragons also had several gut microbial taxa associated with obesity, which were occurring at a much higher frequency and abundance within urban populations compared to their natural conspecifics (Littleford-Colquhoun et al 2019a). Although the maternal effects of anthropogenically-subsidized maternal diets on offspring morphology are widely understudied for reptiles, previous research has seen maternal diet quantity or quality affect offspring body size, growth, and performance capacity (Sorci and Clobert 1997;Warner and Lovern 2014;Wang et al 2017;Horváth et al 2019). Overall, we are unable to clearly delineate the mechanism driving the innate expression of the urban water dragon hatchling morphology, whether it be fixed and heritable or a result of adaptive or circumstantial maternal effects.…”