The effect of personality on social foraging: shy barnacle geese scrounge more

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

doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.1474

Cited by 223 publications

(141 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…The tendency for individuals to differ consistently in their behaviour through time and across contexts (i.e. 'animal personality' [3][4][5]) is often a major determinant of collective behaviours [6,7], colony productivity [8] and survival [9,10] in a variety of taxa (fish [11,12], birds [13]). This is in part because individual traits, like personality, influence task participation [14][15][16], individual aptitudes for those tasks [17] (but see [18]) and the manner in which tasks are executed [19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personality composition is more important than group size in determining collective foraging behaviour in the wild

Keiser

Pruitt

2014

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Describing the factors that shape collective behaviour is central to our understanding of animal societies. Countless studies have demonstrated an effect of group size in the emergence of collective behaviours, but comparatively few have accounted for the composition/diversity of behavioural phenotypes, which is often conflated with group size. Here, we simultaneously examine the effect of personality composition and group size on nest architecture and collective foraging aggressiveness in the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola. We created colonies of two different sizes (10 or 30 individuals) and four compositions of boldness (all bold, all shy, mixed bold and shy, or average individuals) in the field and then measured their collective behaviour. Larger colonies produced bigger capture webs, while colonies containing a higher proportion of bold individuals responded to and attacked prey more rapidly. The number of attackers during collective foraging was determined jointly by composition and size, although composition had an effect size more than twice that of colony size: our results suggest that colonies of just 10 bold spiders would attack prey with as many attackers as colonies of 110 'average' spiders. Thus, personality composition is a more potent (albeit more cryptic) determinant of collective foraging in these societies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personality composition is more important than group size in determining collective foraging behaviour in the wild

Keiser

Pruitt

2014

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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“…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]. A simple way to test whether boldness per se or its consequence, order of arrival, are the cause of increased use of producer would be by experimentally controlling individuals' order of arrival at a foraging site and testing to see whether boldness still exerts an effect on foraging tactic use.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

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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“…Similarly, overall group behavioral type influences foraging activity in barnacle geese. Groups containing fewer neophobic individuals were more likely to discover new food patches than groups containing more neophobic individuals (Kurvers et al 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A proactive–reactive syndrome affects group success in an ant species

Blight

Díaz-Mariblanca

Cerdá

et al. 2015

BEHECO

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Social insects have been particularly evolutionarily successful: they dominate terrestrial ecosystems all over the globe. Their success stems from their social organization, where one or a few individuals reproduce, whereas others carry out different colony tasks. From an evolutionary standpoint, social species are particularly interesting because natural selection acts at both the individual and colony levels. Therefore, we might expect to see selection acting simultaneously on personality at the individual level and colony level. In this study, we tested whether captive colonies of the ant Aphaenogaster senilis exhibited different behavioral types and evaluated their consequences for intraspecific competition. Our results demonstrate that colonies of the same age exposed to standardized laboratory conditions did indeed have different personalities. In addition, we found that A. senilis demonstrated a behavioral syndrome that included proactive and reactive behaviors: colonies varied in their approaches to exploration, risk taking, food retrieval, and conspecific interactions. This syndrome appears to be associated with a trade-off between competition for food resources and temperaturerelated foraging risks. "Bold" colonies contained individuals who more readily explored novel environments, exhibited aggressive behaviors, and demonstrated higher food-retrieval efficiency during intraspecific competition trials. However, such colonies were also more risk prone: workers suffered higher mortality rates because they more frequently foraged over their critical thermal maximum. The trade-off we observed under laboratory conditions might be key in maintaining colony-level personality, thus driving local-level adaptations in collective behavior.

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The effect of personality on social foraging: shy barnacle geese scrounge more

Cited by 223 publications

References 53 publications

Personality composition is more important than group size in determining collective foraging behaviour in the wild

Personality composition is more important than group size in determining collective foraging behaviour in the wild

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

A proactive–reactive syndrome affects group success in an ant species

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