Boldness and behavioral syndromes in the bluegill sunfish, Lepomis macrochirus

Abstract

In recent years, evidence for interindividual variation in ''personality'' within animal populations has been accumulating. Personality is defined as consistency in an individual's behavioral responses over time and/or across situations. One personality trait that has potentially far-reaching implications for behavioral ecology, and may provide insight into the mechanisms by which consistent behavioral correlations arise, is that of boldness. Boldness is defined as the tendency of an individual to take risks and be exploratory in novel contexts. Using the framework of behavioral syndromes, we tested for individual differences in boldness in the laboratory among field-caught juvenile bluegill sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus) within and across the contexts of exploratory behavior, activity, and risk taking (e.g., antipredator) behavior. After such testing, individuals were tagged and returned to their lake of origin as part of a mark-recapture study testing for the repeatability of individual differences in boldness. Here, we report strong and consistent individual differences in boldness within and across all 3 behavioral contexts. Additionally, we observed that at least some boldness behaviors were repeatable after a 1-3 month recapture period. This study provides novel evidence for a boldness syndrome in sunfish, as well as insight into how behavioral types (e.g., shy/bold) may evolve and be maintained in natural populations.

Sexual differences in exploration behavior inXenopus tropicalis?

“…Two major and opposing behavioral syndromes, bold and shy, are typically identified in many species of animals including invertebrates such as spiders (Kralj-Fišer and Schneider, 2012) and crabs (Watanabe et al, 2012), but also a variety of vertebrates including rodents (Shillito, 2013), birds (Dingemanse et al, 2006) and fish (Wilson and Godin, 2009). Bold individuals typically explore more and make fewer stops or pauses.…”

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

“…In experiment 2, focal males (mean ± SE standard length, SL: 22.73 ± 0.58 mm) were characterized along three personality axes before they were tested for MCC: boldness as latency to emerge from shelter and enter an unknown area [76][77][78][79], activity in an open field tank [42,80,81] and sociability (i.e., shoaling tendencies) as time spent in the vicinity of a group of conspecifics [72,82,83]. All tests were performed consecutively in the same arena to minimize handling stress.…”

Trait Variation in an Everglades Invasive Species: Life histories, Boldness, and Dispersal in the African Jewelfish

“…I characterized boldness using a standard emergence test; shown to be an effective method to measure boldness and exploratory behavior (Bell 2005;Brown et al, 2005;Wilson and Godin 2009). In an emergence test, fish are added to a novel arena, placed in a refuge, and the time to emerge from the refuge is quantified, with the notion that bolder individuals will emerge sooner.…”

“…Because dispersal and boldness have been shown to be correlated Rehage and Sih 2004;Duckworth and Badyaev 2007), I also expected frontier populations to be bolder than well-established populations along the invaded range. Bold individuals are highly exploratory and active (Wilson and Godin 2009). Thus, behaving boldly may be an advantage at the expanding front where individuals encounter novel conditions.…”