Recently, there has been increasing interest in behavioral syndrome research across a range of taxa. Behavioral syndromes are suites of correlated behaviors that are expressed either within a given behavioral context (e.g., mating) or between different contexts (e.g., foraging and mating). Syndrome research holds profound implications for animal behavior as it promotes a holistic view in which seemingly autonomous behaviors may not evolve independently, but as a "suite" or "package." We tested whether laboratory-reared male and female European house crickets, Acheta domesticus, exhibited behavioral syndromes by quantifying individual differences in activity, exploration, mate attraction, aggressiveness, and antipredator behavior. To our knowledge, our study is the first to consider such a breadth of behavioral traits in one organism using the syndrome framework. We found positive correlations across mating, exploratory, and antipredatory contexts, but not aggression and general activity. These behavioral differences were not correlated with body size or condition, although age explained some of the variation in motivation to mate. We suggest that these across-context correlations represent a boldness syndrome as individual risk-taking and exploration was central to across-context mating and antipredation correlations in both sexes. Keywords Personality. Boldness. Temperament. Behavioral syndromes. Risk-taking Over the past 5 years, behavioral ecologists and evolutionary biologists have witnessed a dramatic upsurge in behavioral syndrome research (Sih et al. 2004b; Bell 2007; Sih and Bell 2007). Succinctly defined, behavioral syndromes are suites of correlated behaviors expressed either within a given behavioral context (e.g., foraging) or between different contexts (e.g., foraging and antipredator behavior; Sih et al. 2004a, b). Behavioral syndromes hold profound implications for studies of animal behavior as they advocate a holistic view of behavior in which seemingly autonomous behaviors may not evolve independently, but as a "suite" or "package" (Price and Langen 1992; Sih et al. 2004b). As such, selection affecting one behavior in the suite may also affect how other behaviors are expressed across behavioral contexts (Sih et al. 2004b; Sih and Bell 2007). The ramification is that behaviors may not be free to evolve adaptively to independent optima across contexts due to underlying physiological, behavioral, or genetic constraints associated with the syndrome. Thus, the framework of behavioral syndromes has the potential to revolutionize the manner by which we study animal behavior, particularly if syndromes are common across taxa. The ecological and evolutionary importance of behavioral syndromes is increasingly being recognized both empirically (e.g., Bell 2005; Dingemanse et al. 2007; Wilson and McLaughlin 2007) and conceptually (Sih et al. 2004b) as noted in a recent review by Bell (2007). Personality traits (e.g., boldness, sociability, aggressiveness, activity) are difficult to study in isolation as they ...
