Personality-dependent dispersal in the invasive mosquitofish: group composition matters

Abstract

Understanding/predicting ecological invasions is an important challenge in modern ecology because of their immense economical and ecological costs. Recent studies have revealed that within-species variation in behaviour (i.e. animal personality) can shed light on the invasion process. The general hypothesis is that individuals' personality type may affect their colonization success, suggesting that some individuals might be better invaders than others. We have recently shown that, in the invasive mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis), social personality trait was an important indicator of dispersal distance, with more asocial individuals dispersing further. Here, we tested how mean personality within a population, in addition to individual personality type, affect dispersal and settlement decisions in the mosquitofish. We found that individual dispersal tendencies were influenced by the population's mean boldness and sociability score. For example, individuals from populations with more asocial individuals or with more bold individuals are more likely to disperse regardless of their own personality type. We suggest that identifying behavioural traits facilitating invasions, even at the group level, can thus have direct applications in pest management.

Ecological effects of pharmaceuticals in aquatic systems—impacts through behavioural alterations

“…B 369: 20130580 arena. Individual boldness was scored as latency to enter the arena; bolder fish enter the open area faster than shy [14,33].…”

“…Yet, whether, or how, pharmaceuticals alter wildlife behaviour remains poorly studied. For example, despite boldness being crucial for antipredator response as well as the tendency to disperse or migrate [14,78], the consequence of changed boldness after exposure to dilute pharmaceutical concentrations has so far not been studied. Further, some pharmaceuticals have the potential to alter sociality [33], and thereby schooling tendency.…”

“…The ability of potential prey to correctly assess predation risk is therefore crucial for fitness. Dispersal and migration are also examples of behaviours that have direct importance for population persistence, especially in the face of rapid environmental change [11], as individuals that express more active, bold and/or asocial behaviours tend to be more prone to disperse or migrate [12][13][14][15]. Lastly, among fish, schooling-a behaviour tightly linked to sociality-is directly important [16], as it confuses the predator and thereby increases each schooling individual's chance of survival [17].…”

Does Individual Variation in Male Mate Choice Copying Reflect Differences in Social Responsiveness?

“…However, studies exploring how individual differences in social information use (especially in a mate choice context) relate to individual differences in personality traits are scarce [64] and no study to date has made an attempt to link variation in males' tendency to show MCC to variation in personality traits but see [65] for an investigation of the link between personality and female MCC in zebra finches. In our study, we explored the relationship between male MCC and three behavioral parameters that are widely used to characterize animal personality in fish, namely boldness [66][67][68][69][70], activity [42,68,70,71] and sociability [68,69,[72][73][74].…”

The link between behavioural type and natal dispersal propensity reveals a dispersal syndrome in a large herbivore

“…However, while these studies have provided evidence that some personality traits do influence dispersal, they did not address the question of whether dispersal propensity is associated with a behavioural syndrome independently of condition-dependence [12]. Indeed, the vast majority of studies on personality-dependent dispersal have focused on a single behavioural trait, while the three that used a multi-trait approach were carried out under laboratory conditions and did not account for possible confounding effects of condition-dependence [22][23][24]. The use of a multi-trait approach while correcting for possible condition-dependence provides the most robust way to test for the existence of a behavioural syndrome associated with dispersal propensity.…”