Personality differences explain leadership in barnacle geese

Kurvers, Ralf H. J. M.; Eijkelenkamp, Babette; Oers, Kees van; Lith, Bart van; Wieren, S.E. van; Ydenberg, Ronald C.; Prins, Herbert H. T.

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.06.002

Cited by 161 publications

(145 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Other studies suggest that personality traits will exert effects on the sequence of decision opportunities. For instance, Kurvers et al [30] show that bold barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) arrive more quickly on food patches. They also show, as we would expect from our simulation, that individuals show consistent differences in foraging tactic use that are related to boldness and so perhaps the order of arrival [41].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such dependency may arise for at least two different reasons: experience of one decision episode influences the sequence of arrival in the next thereby leading to differences in leadership among the members of a group even in the absence of any variation in state [37,38], or individual arrival sequences depend on intrinsic individual attributes (e.g. dominance rank, activity level, boldness, exploratory tendency or hunger level) [27,28,30,39]. In that later case, we would not only expect that individuals will differ consistently in their tactic use and level of behavioural plasticity, but that those differences will also be correlated with the intrinsic attributes that determine the order of arrival.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One case in which these assumptions apply repeatedly is when animal groups move through space such that they arrive in a habitat sequentially. If, as has been suggested by a number of published studies of groupliving animals, the order in which individuals move between locations remains consistent over time and across contexts say because it is related to individual characteristics, such as dominance [26], exploration [27,28] or boldness [29,30], then an individual's sequence of arrival may constrain its choice of options leading to the emergence of correlated behaviours. This correlation would be a simple by-product of the sequential decision-making process in a frequency-dependent context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Frequency-dependent payoffs and sequential decision-making favour consistent tactic use

2012

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Although natural selection should have favoured individuals capable of adjusting the weight they give to personal and social information according to circumstances, individuals generally differ consistently in their individual weighting of both types of information. Such individual differences are correlated with personality traits, suggesting that personality could directly affect individuals' ability to collect personal or social information. Alternatively, the link between personality and information use could simply emerge as a by-product of the sequential decision-making process in a frequency-dependent context. Indeed, when the gains associated with behavioural options depend on the choices of others, an individual's sequence of arrival could constrain its choice of options leading to the emergence of correlated behaviours. Any factor such as personality that affects decision order could thus be correlated with information use. To test this new explanation, we developed an individual-based model that simulates a group of animals engaged in a game of sequential frequency-dependent decision: a producer -scrounger game. Our results confirm that the sequence of decision, in this case enforced by the order in which animals enter a foraging area, consistently influences their mean tactic use and their individual plasticity, an outcome reminiscent of the correlation reported between personality and social information use.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Frequency-dependent payoffs and sequential decision-making favour consistent tactic use

2012

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“…These consistent behaviours are often called animal personalities, temperaments or behavioural types, and have been documented in a wide range of behavioural traits associated with activity [1], anti-predator [2], exploration [3] and risk-taking [4]. Of these, individual variation along the bold/shy continuum [5] has received most attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual boldness is linked to protective shell shape in aquatic snails

et al. 2015

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The existence of consistent individual differences in behaviour ('animal personality') has been well documented in recent years. However, how such individual variation in behaviour is maintained over evolutionary time is an ongoing conundrum. A well-studied axis of animal personality is individual variation along a bold-shy continuum, where individuals differ consistently in their propensity to take risks. A predation-risk cost to boldness is often assumed, but also that the reproductive benefits associated with boldness lead to equivalent fitness outcomes between bold and shy individuals over a lifetime. However, an alternative or complementary explanation may be that bold individuals phenotypically compensate for their risky lifestyle to reduce predation costs, for instance by investing in more pronounced morphological defences. Here, we investigate the 'phenotypic compensation' hypothesis, i.e. that bold individuals exhibit more pronounced anti-predator defences than shy individuals, by relating shell shape in the aquatic snail Radix balthica to an index of individual boldness. Our analyses find a strong relationship between risk-taking propensity and shell shape in this species, with bolder individuals exhibiting a more defended shell shape than shy individuals. We suggest that this supports the 'phenotypic compensation' hypothesis and sheds light on a previously poorly studied mechanism to promote the maintenance of personality variation among animals.

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“…To date, however, most studies of collective behaviour have assumed that group members are identical in their movements and responses to their neighbours [2][3][4] (but see [8][9][10] for theoretical predictions and [11,12] for empirical observations about individual differences in groups). This common assumption of homogeneity contrasts with a large and growing body of work documenting consistent inter-individual differences in behaviour [13][14][15][16][17][18] and evidence that differences in the social affiliations between group members, and individual differences, can affect leadership and the collective decision-making process [12,19,20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of individuality in collective group movement

et al. 2013

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How different levels of biological organization interact to shape each other's function is a central question in biology. One particularly important topic in this context is how individuals' variation in behaviour shapes group-level characteristics. We investigated how fish that express different locomotory behaviour in an asocial context move collectively when in groups. First, we established that individual fish have characteristic, repeatable locomotion behaviours (i.e. median speeds, variance in speeds and median turning speeds) when tested on their own. When tested in groups of two, four or eight fish, we found individuals partly maintained their asocial median speed and median turning speed preferences, while their variance in speed preference was lost. The strength of this individuality decreased as group size increased, with individuals conforming to the speed of the group, while also decreasing the variability in their own speed. Further, individuals adopted movement characteristics that were dependent on what group size they were in. This study therefore shows the influence of social context on individual behaviour. If the results found here can be generalized across species and contexts, then although individuality is not entirely lost in groups, social conformity and group-size-dependent effects drive how individuals will adjust their behaviour in groups.

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Personality differences explain leadership in barnacle geese

Cited by 161 publications

References 39 publications

Frequency-dependent payoffs and sequential decision-making favour consistent tactic use

Frequency-dependent payoffs and sequential decision-making favour consistent tactic use

Individual boldness is linked to protective shell shape in aquatic snails

The role of individuality in collective group movement

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