Individual behaviour in firebugs (Pyrrhocoris apterus)

Abstract

The concept of animal personalities has recently become of major interest as researchers began to wonder why animals within a given population show consistent behaviour across situations and contexts, what led to the evolution of such behavioural inflexibility and what mechanisms might underlie the phenomenon. A recent model explains individual differences in a population as the result of trade-off between present and future reproduction. We tested this model on the two wing morphs, i.e. short-winged (brachypterous) and long-winged (macropterous) specimens of the firebug (Pyrrhocoris apterus). Since it has been already demonstrated that the two wing morphs differ in their life-history strategies, this species is an ideal subject to test whether the specimens with different life-history strategies have different personalities as well. The results show that individuals behave consistently over time and across contexts, meaning observed bugs do have personalities. We also have found that in females, the two wing morphs have different personalities supporting the theoretical predictions, i.e. winged ones, which are supposed to have lower future reproductive value, are braver and more exploratory. We found no difference between the morphs in males. Differences in reproductive investment might explain this discrepancy between the sexes.

High Repeatability of Anti-Predator Responses and Resting Metabolic Rate in a Beetle

“…Our data suggest that the latency to become immobile and the total duration of immobility to flicking the plastic container or the insect chamber represent valuable parameters for further studies of personality-related behavior in this species (Gyuris et al 2011;Kortet and Hedrick 2007;Pinter-Wollman 2012).…”

Nymphal density, behavioral development, and life history in a field cricket

“…Homoscedasticity of error variances across treatment groups was met according to a Levene's test. Since rank-order differences are more important than absolute differences in personality perspective (Dingemanse and Wolf 2010;Gyuris et al 2010), correlations between boldness score and aggression were studied using Spearman's rank correlation analysis. Other correlations were studied using parametric Pearson's correlation analyses.…”

Personality variation in a clonal insect: The pea aphid,Acyrthosiphon pisum

“…However, this seems difficult to do in model systems used in personality studies, which are usually long-lived vertebrate species with long inter-generational times (see e.g., Gosling & John, 1999;Gosling, 2001), such as chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes (reviewed in Gosling, 2001), bighorn sheep, Ovis canadensis (e.g., Réale, Gallant, Leblanc, & Festa-Bianchet, 2000), great tits, Parus major (reviewed in Groothuis & Carere, 2005) or zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata (e.g., Schuett & Dall, 2009). Surprisingly, little attention has been paid so far to invertebrates in personality research (but see Sih & Watters, 2005;Briffa, Rundle, & Fryer, 2008;Gyuris, Fero, Tartally, & Berta, 2010;Sinn, Moltschaniwskyj, Wapstra, & Dall, 2010), despite the obvious advantages they offer as model organisms.…”