Highcock Laura, Carter Alecia J
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2014 Apr 14;9(4):e95179. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095179. eCollection 2014.
Animals do not behave in exactly the same way when repeatedly tested in the same context or situation, even once systematic variation, such as habituation, has been controlled for. This unpredictability is called intraindividual variability (IIV) and has been little studied in animals. Here we investigated how IIV in boldness (estimated by flight initiation distances) changed across two seasons--the dry, non-breeding season and the wet, breeding season--in a wild population of the Namibian rock agama, Agama planiceps. We found significant differences in IIV both between individuals and seasons, and IIV was higher in the wet season, suggesting plasticity in IIV. Further, IIV was highly repeatable (r = 0.61) between seasons and we found strong negative correlations between consistent individual differences in flight initiation distances, i.e. their boldness, and individuals' IIVs. We suggest that to understand personality in animals, researchers should generate a personality 'profile' that includes not only the relative level of a trait (i.e. its personality), but also its plasticity and variability under natural conditions.
当在相同的环境或情境中反复对动物进行测试时，即使已经控制了诸如习惯化等系统变化，它们的行为也不会完全相同。这种不可预测性被称为个体内变异性（IIV），在动物中对此研究甚少。在这里，我们调查了纳米比亚岩鬣蜥（Agama planiceps）野生种群中，大胆程度的个体内变异性（通过飞行起始距离估计）在两个季节——干燥的非繁殖季节和潮湿的繁殖季节——之间是如何变化的。我们发现个体之间以及季节之间的个体内变异性存在显著差异，并且在潮湿季节个体内变异性更高，这表明个体内变异性具有可塑性。此外，个体内变异性在不同季节之间具有高度重复性（r = 0.61），并且我们发现飞行起始距离的一致个体差异（即它们的大胆程度）与个体的个体内变异性之间存在强烈的负相关。我们建议，为了理解动物的个性，研究人员应该生成一个个性“档案”，其中不仅包括一个特征的相对水平（即其个性），还包括其在自然条件下可塑性和变异性。
