Toscano Benjamin J, Gownaris Natasha J, Heerhartz Sarah M, Monaco Cristián J
BioSciences, Rice University, Houston, TX, 77005, USA.
Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA.
Oecologia. 2016 Sep;182(1):55-69. doi: 10.1007/s00442-016-3648-8. Epub 2016 May 11.
Behavioral traits and diet were traditionally thought to be highly plastic within individuals. This view was espoused in the widespread use of optimality models, which broadly predict that individuals can modify behavioral traits and diet across ecological contexts to maximize fitness. Yet, research conducted over the past 15 years supports an alternative view; fundamental behavioral traits (e.g., activity level, exploration, sociability, boldness and aggressiveness) and diet often vary among individuals and this variation persists over time and across contexts. This phenomenon has been termed animal personality with regard to behavioral traits and individual specialization with regard to diet. While these aspects of individual-level phenotypic variation have been thus far studied in isolation, emerging evidence suggests that personality and individual specialization may covary, or even be causally related. Building on this work, we present the overarching hypothesis that animal personality can drive specialization through individual differences in various aspects of consumer foraging behavior. Specifically, we suggest pathways by which consumer personality traits influence foraging activity, risk-dependent foraging, roles in social foraging groups, spatial aspects of foraging and physiological drivers of foraging, which in turn can lead to consistent individual differences in food resource use. These pathways provide a basis for generating testable hypotheses directly linking animal personality to ecological dynamics, a major goal in contemporary behavioral ecology.
行为特征和饮食传统上被认为在个体内部具有高度可塑性。这种观点在最优性模型的广泛应用中得到支持，该模型大致预测个体可以在不同生态环境中改变行为特征和饮食，以实现适应性最大化。然而，过去15年的研究支持了另一种观点；基本行为特征（如活动水平、探索、社交性、大胆和攻击性）和饮食在个体之间往往存在差异，并且这种差异会随着时间和环境的变化而持续存在。就行为特征而言，这种现象被称为动物个性；就饮食而言，则被称为个体专业化。虽然到目前为止，这些个体水平表型变异的方面是孤立研究的，但新出现的证据表明，个性和个体专业化可能相互关联，甚至存在因果关系。基于这项工作，我们提出了一个总体假设，即动物个性可以通过消费者觅食行为各个方面的个体差异来推动专业化。具体来说，我们提出了消费者个性特征影响觅食活动、风险依赖型觅食、社会觅食群体中的角色、觅食的空间方面以及觅食的生理驱动因素的途径，这些反过来又会导致食物资源利用方面持续的个体差异。这些途径为生成直接将动物个性与生态动态联系起来的可测试假设提供了基础，这是当代行为生态学的一个主要目标。
