Sex and the Syndrome: Individual and Population Consistency in Behaviour in Rock Pool Prawn Palaemon elegans

Abstract

Animal personality has been widely documented across a range of species. The concept of personality is composed of individual behavioural consistency across time and between situations, and also behavioural trait correlations known as behavioural syndromes. Whilst many studies have now investigated the stability of individual personality traits, few have analysed the stability over time of entire behavioural syndromes. Here we present data from a behavioural study of rock pool prawns. We show that prawns are temporally consistent in a range of behaviours, including activity, exploration and boldness, and also that a behavioural syndrome is evident in this population. We find correlations between many behavioural traits (activity, boldness, shoaling and exploration). In addition, behavioural syndrome structure was consistent over time. Finally, few studies have explicitly studied the role of sex differences in personality traits, behavioural consistency and syndrome structure. We report behavioural differences between male and female prawns but no differences in patterns of consistency. Our study adds to the growing literature on animal personality, and provides evidence showing that syndromes themselves can exhibit temporal consistency.

Personality does not constrain social and behavioural flexibility in African striped mice

“…Our results corroborate previous finding by Schoepf and Schradin (2012b) that showed male striped mice to be more socially investigative than females, which they interpreted as a willingness of males to more rapidly assess whether a stranger was a potential competitor or a mate. Taken together, our results indicate that there are important differences in the way personality is maintained within the sexes in striped mice, which could be related to differences between males and females in the costs and benefits of expressing a particular behaviour (Chapman et al 2013). Our findings that the personality of striped mice does not affect their social and reproductive tactics suggest that personality is unlikely to influence tactic switching and social systems, at least in species in which tactic switching follows a single strategy.…”

“…Consistent individual differences may explain up to 30 % of the behavioural phenotypic variance within populations (Bell et al 2009;Chapman et al 2013). While most studies have measured the consistency of personality traits within a relatively short period of time of a few weeks (Chapman et al 2013), few long-term studies about personality have been conducted (Dammhan 2012;Herde and Eccard 2013;Montiglio et al 2014). Here, we showed that behavioural traits of individuals were consistent in the short (2 weeks) and long term (4-5 months), after one third of the lifespan of a striped mouse.…”

The influence of urbanization on the behaviour of an Australian lizard and the presence of an activity–exploratory behavioural syndrome

“…We also predicted that there would be correlations between several key behavioural traits. Such behavioural syndromes have been seen in the rockpool prawn Palaemon elegans , where activity, exploration and boldness were correlated (Chapman, Hegg & Ljungberg, ).…”

Personality and its variation between sexes in the black‐bellied bunchgrass lizard Sceloporus aeneus during the breeding season

“…Differences between sexes in personality traits were assessed using Mann-Whitney U tests. The consistency of behaviour by sex was evaluated by comparing the values from the first set of assays with the second set using a Spearman's rank correlation test, as previously reported (Bell, et al, 2009;Chapman, Hegg, & Ljunberg, 2013;Herde & Eccard, 2013).…”

“…Differences between sexes in personality traits were assessed using Mann–Whitney U tests. The consistency of behaviour by sex was evaluated by comparing the values from the first set of assays with the second set using a Spearman's rank correlation test, as previously reported (Bell, et al, ; Chapman, Hegg, & Ljunberg, ; Herde & Eccard, ). To evaluate consistency over time, we compared the values of each behaviour measured in the first set of assays with the behaviours from the second set.…”