Persistent social interactions beget more pronounced personalities in a desert-dwelling social spider

Abstract

The social niche specialization hypothesis predicts that repeated social interactions will generate social niches within groups, thereby promoting consistent individual differences in behaviour. Current support for this hypothesis is mixed, probably because the importance of social niches is dependent upon the ecology of the species. We test whether repeated interactions among group mates generate consistent individual differences in boldness in the social spider, Stegodyphus dumicola. In support of the social niche specialization hypothesis, we found that consistent individual differences in boldness increased with longer group tenure. Interestingly, these differences took longer to appear than in previous work suggesting this species needs more persistent social interactions to shape its behaviour. Recently disturbed colonies were shyer than older colonies, possibly reflecting differences in predation risk. Our study emphasizes the importance of the social environment in generating animal personalities, but also suggests that the pattern of personality development can depend on subtle differences in species' ecologies.

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

“…For these experiments, we operationally defined 'shy' individuals as those with a boldness score between 0 and 200, and 'bold' individuals as those with a boldness score between 400 and 600. This boldness metric exhibits a very high statistical repeatability (ICC ¼ 0.60-0.80), thus individuals scored as bold remain behaviourally distinct from their shy counterparts [45,51].…”

“…We never mixed individuals from multiple source colonies, in order to preserve natural levels of within-colony relatedness and familiarity [36,45]. Before placing individuals together in an experimental colony, we selected either the bold individual or one shy individual haphazardly for training.…”

Social dynamics, network structure, and information diffusion in fish shoals.

“…An individual's adoption of a social role is then stabilized by positive feedback mechanisms or costs associated with role switching. Support for this hypothesis has been found in social spiders (Laskowski & Pruitt, 2014;Modlmeier, Laskowski, et al, 2014), in which spiders exhibited more pronounced individual differences in boldness when they belonged to colonies in which group members were more familiar with one another; such between-individual variation has been linked to positive colony-level outcomes in both spiders and ants (Pruitt & Riechert, 2011;Modlmeier et al, 2012).…”

“…Direct support for social niche specialization has been found in social spiders (Laskowski & Pruitt, 2014;Modlmeier, Laskowski, et al, 2014), though work on meerkats (Suricata suricatta) (Carter et al, 2014) and sticklebacks (Laskowski & Bell, 2014) failed to detect such an effect. Social network analysis provides a framework in which to test the effects of social niche specialization on the consistency of social traits (Wilson et al, 2013).…”

“…Such stable differences have been observed for numerous traits, including the propensity to use social information (Kurvers et al, 2010), leadership tendencies (Leblond & Reebs, 2006), or averseness toward risk (Laskowski & Pruitt, 2014;Modlmeier, Laskowski, et al, 2014). The mixture of behavioral types within a group can shape both the social decision-making of individuals (Cote et al, 2012) and the group-level outcomes (Dyer et al, 2009;Modlmeier et al, 2012;Pruitt & Goodnight, 2014).…”