Male great tits assort by personality during the breeding season

Abstract

Animal personalities can influence social interactions among individuals, and thus have major implications for population processes and structure. Few studies have investigated the significance of the social context of animal personalities, and such research has largely focused on the social organization of nonterritorial populations. Here we address the question of whether exploratory behaviour, a well-studied personality trait, is related to the social structure of a wild great tit, Parus major, population during the breeding season. We assayed the exploration behaviour of wild-caught great tits and then established the phenotypic spatial structure of the population over six consecutive breeding seasons. Network analyses of breeding proximity revealed that males, but not females, show positive assortment by behavioural phenotype, with males breeding closer to those of similar personalities. This assortment was detected when we used networks based on nearest neighbours, but not when we used the Thiessen polygon method where neighbours were defined from inferred territory boundaries. Further analysis found no relationship between personality assortment and local environmental conditions, suggesting that social processes may be more important than environmental variation in influencing male territory choice. This social organization during the breeding season has implications for the strength and direction of both natural and sexual selection on personality in wild animal populations.

Maternal egg hormones in the mating context: The effect of pair personality

“…Laubu, Dechaume‐Moncharmont, Motreuil, & Schweitzer, ; Schuett et al., ; Schweitzer et al., ). Also in our study species, the great tit, the highest feeding rates, number of recruits and fledgling condition were produced by pairs with similar personality types (Both et al., ; Mutzel et al., ; see also Johnson et al., ). This suggests differences in the quality of the anticipated rearing environments for offspring sired by different pair compositions.…”

Integrating models of human behaviour between the individual and population levels to inform conservation interventions

“…To take one example, there is a growing literature on the determinants and consequences of network structure in ecology (e.g. in great tits, Parus major ; [25,84]) and epidemiology (e.g. [27,85]) which is of direct relevance to conservationists' work on information-sharing between people, but as yet this linkage has not been explored.…”

Who is in the neighborhood? Conspecific and heterospecific responses to perceived density for breeding habitat selection

“…Individual traits such as age (Nocera, Forbes, & Giraldeau, 2006), breeding experience (Boulinier, McCoy, Yoccoz, Gasparini, & Tveraa, 2008), and personality (Kurvers et al, 2010;Sih, Bell, & Johnson, 2004) all influence social information use for habitat selection. Thus, it is possible that less detectable individuals, such as females, non-breeding males, or even shy individuals (Johnson et al, 2017;Sih et al, 2004) responded to treatments differently than breeding males did. We banded individuals for spot-mapping purposes, but efforts were not robust enough to assess individual settlement decisions in relation to treatments.…”