Social cues affect quantitative genetic variation and covariation in animal personality traits

Abstract

The social environment is expected to have substantial effects on behavior, and as a consequence, its heritability and evolvability. We investigated these effects by exposing Australian field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) to either silence or recordings of male acoustic sexual signals. We used a combined pedigree and full‐sib/half‐sib breeding design to estimate the repeatability, heritability, and evolvability of behaviors related to boldness, exploration, and activity. All behaviors measured were significantly repeatable in both social environments. Additionally, most behaviors showed significant heritabilities in the two environments. We found no difference in repeatabilities between the silent and the acoustic environment but did find significant differences in the heritabilities and evolvabilities between these environments. There was a high degree of similarity between the phenotypic covariance matrices across the two environments, while the genotypic covariance matrices were highly dissimilar. Reflecting this, we found significant genotype‐by‐environment interactions for most of the behaviors. Lastly, we found that the repeatable aspect of behavior (“personality”) was significantly heritable for most behaviors, but that these heritabilities were higher in the acoustic than in the silent environment. We conclude that the social environment can have a significant impact on the heritability and evolvability of behavior, and argue that evolutionary inferences from phenotypic studies should be made with caution.

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“…By analyzing the gazing directions of the subjects, the authors found that "always obedient" dogs keep gazing at the human partner instead of the food, "always ignorant" dogs do not gaze at the human, and "hesitant" dogs tend to look at the food before they would steal it, but after the deed they gaze rather to that person who might see their action. These findings about the role of individual differences among dogs regarding the effect of a human "audience" on their forbidden activity fits well to the steadily growing interest in animal personalities and individual strategies (e.g., Rudin et al, 2019). One of the basic requirements for sophisticated social interactions is the capacity of individual recognition.…”

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