Gyuris Enikő, Hankó Júlia Fruzsina, Feró Orsolya, Barta Zoltán
MTA-DE "Lendület" Behavioural Ecology Research Group, Department of Evolutionary Zoology, University of Debrecen, Egyetem tér 1, 4010 Debrecen, Hungary; Lendület Evolutionary Ecology Research Group, Plant Protection Institute, Centre for Agricultural Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Herman Ottó út 15, 1022 Budapest, Hungary.
MTA-DE "Lendület" Behavioural Ecology Research Group, Department of Evolutionary Zoology, University of Debrecen, Egyetem tér 1, 4010 Debrecen, Hungary.
Behav Processes. 2016 Jan;122:67-74. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2015.11.011. Epub 2015 Nov 10.
Individuals of the same species often consistently differ in their behaviour across time and context. These stable differences are usually termed 'animal personality'. Parasitism is known to significantly influence the evolution of animal personality at least in part because more explorative individuals may meet parasites more frequently than less explorative ones. Previously, we have demonstrated that consistent individual differences (i.e. boldness, activity, exploration) can be measured in firebugs. As continuation, we examined here the relationship between firebug personality traits and their ectoparasitic mite loads in a wild population. We showed that bugs that behaved in a more explorative way have more mites and we also found a marginally significant interaction between sex, boldness and activity: bolder and more active female firebugs were more infected. In addition, we experimentally tested whether an artificial infection causes any alteration in the bug's behaviour and whether there is any relationship between firebug personality and immune response. This treatment did not induce any alteration in bugs' personality. We found that bugs become more explorative but less active when repeating the experiment, but at the same time all personality traits (boldness, activity and exploration) were repeatable. Furthermore, firebugs with a stronger immune response behaved more boldly but also less actively.
同一物种的个体在行为上往往会随着时间和环境的变化而持续存在差异。这些稳定的差异通常被称为“动物个性”。已知寄生虫感染会显著影响动物个性的进化，至少部分原因是相比不太爱探索的个体，更爱探索的个体可能更频繁地接触到寄生虫。此前，我们已经证明可以在红蝽中测量到一致的个体差异（即胆量、活动能力、探索能力）。作为后续研究，我们在此考察了野生红蝽种群中个性特征与其体表寄生螨负荷之间的关系。我们发现，行为更爱探索的红蝽身上有更多螨虫，并且我们还发现性别、胆量和活动能力之间存在微弱但显著的相互作用：更大胆、更活跃的雌性红蝽感染更严重。此外，我们通过实验测试了人工感染是否会导致红蝽行为发生任何改变，以及红蝽个性与免疫反应之间是否存在任何关系。这种处理并未引起红蝽个性的任何改变。我们发现，在重复实验时，红蝽变得更爱探索但活动能力下降，但与此同时，所有个性特征（胆量、活动能力和探索能力）都是可重复的。此外，免疫反应更强的红蝽行为更大胆，但活动能力也更低。
