Jolles Jolle Wolter, Aaron Taylor Benjamin, Manica Andrea
Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K.
Anim Behav. 2016 Feb;112:139-145. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.12.010.
Animal personalities are ubiquitous across the animal kingdom and have been shown both to influence individual behaviour in the social context and to be affected by it. However, little attention has been paid to possible carryover effects of social conditions on personality expression, especially when individuals are alone. Here we investigated how the recent social context affected the boldness and repeatability of three-spined sticklebacks, , during individual assays. We housed fish either solitarily, solitarily part of the time or socially in groups of four, and subjected them twice to a risk-taking task. The social conditions had a large effect on boldness repeatability, with fish housed solitarily before the trials showing much higher behavioural repeatability than fish housed socially, for which repeatability was not significant. Social conditions also had a temporal effect on the boldness of the fish, with only fish housed solitarily taking more risks during the first than the second trial. These results show that recent social conditions can thus affect the short-term repeatability of behaviour and obfuscate the expression of personality even in later contexts when individuals are alone. This finding highlights the need to consider social housing conditions when designing personality studies and emphasizes the important link between animal personality and the social context by showing the potential role of social carryover effects.
动物个性在动物界普遍存在，并且已被证明既会在社会环境中影响个体行为，也会受到社会环境的影响。然而，很少有人关注社会条件对个性表达可能产生的延续效应，尤其是当个体独处时。在这里，我们研究了近期的社会环境如何在个体测试中影响三刺鱼的大胆程度和行为的可重复性。我们将鱼分别单独饲养、部分时间单独饲养或四尾一组群居，然后让它们两次接受冒险任务。社会条件对大胆程度的可重复性有很大影响，试验前单独饲养的鱼比群居的鱼表现出更高的行为可重复性，群居鱼的可重复性不显著。社会条件对鱼的大胆程度也有时间效应，只有单独饲养的鱼在第一次试验中比第二次试验中冒更多风险。这些结果表明，近期的社会条件因此会影响行为的短期可重复性，甚至在个体后来独处的情况下也会模糊个性的表达。这一发现凸显了在设计个性研究时考虑社会饲养条件的必要性，并通过展示社会延续效应的潜在作用，强调了动物个性与社会环境之间的重要联系。
