Edward Grey Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2011;6(10):e26383. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0026383. Epub 2011 Oct 20.
In biparental systems, members of the same pair can vary substantially in the amount of parental care they provide to offspring. The extent of this asymmetry should depend on the relative costs and benefits of care. Individual variation in personality is likely to influence this trade-off, and hence is a promising candidate to explain differences in care. In addition, plasticity in parental care may also be associated with personality differences. Using exploration behaviour (EB) as a measure of personality, we investigated these possibilities using both natural and experimental data from a wild population of great tits (Parus major). Contrary to predictions, we found no association between EB and natural variation in provisioning behaviour. Nor was EB linked to responsiveness to experimentally increased brood demand. These results are initially surprising given substantial data from other studies suggesting personality should influence investment in parental care. However, they are consistent with a recent study showing selection on EB is weak and highly context-specific in the focal population. This emphasises the difficulty faced by personality studies attempting to make predictions based on previous work, given that personalities often vary among populations of the same species.
在双亲系统中，同一对的成员在为后代提供亲代照顾的数量上可能有很大的差异。这种不对称的程度应该取决于照顾的相对成本和收益。个性的个体差异可能会影响这种权衡，因此是解释照顾差异的一个有前途的候选者。此外，亲代照顾的可塑性也可能与个性差异有关。我们使用探索行为 (EB) 作为个性的衡量标准，使用来自野生成年大山雀 (Parus major) 的自然和实验数据来研究这些可能性。与预测相反，我们没有发现 EB 与提供行为的自然变异之间存在关联。EB 也与对实验增加的育雏需求的反应性无关。鉴于其他研究的大量数据表明个性应该影响亲代照顾的投资，这些结果最初令人惊讶。然而，它们与最近的一项研究一致，该研究表明，在焦点种群中，对 EB 的选择是微弱的，并且高度特定于上下文。这强调了个性研究试图基于以前的工作做出预测所面临的困难，因为个性通常在同一物种的不同种群中存在差异。
