Department of Biological Science, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, Mohanpur, West Bengal, 741246, India.
Anim Cogn. 2023 Jul;26(4):1381-1394. doi: 10.1007/s10071-023-01787-w. Epub 2023 May 29.
Aquatic habitats are extremely dynamic, with constantly changing ecological factors, which has now been exacerbated due to human-induced rapid environmental change. In such variable environments, it becomes essential to understand how personality and cognition in organisms affect the adaptability of individuals to different habitat conditions. To test this, we studied how personality-related traits as well as cognitive ability differ between populations of wild-caught zebrafish (Danio rerio) from habitats that differed in various environmental factors. We measured emergence into a novel environment as an indicator of boldness, and performance in a spatial task inferred from feeding latencies in a maze over repeated trials to assess learning and memory, as an indicator of cognitive ability. We found that personality affects cognition and although bolder fish are better learners, they show poorer retention of memory across populations. Although personality and cognitive ability varied between habitats, the patterns of their correlations remained similar within each population. However, the individual traits (such as sex and size) that were drivers of personality and cognition differed between the habitats, suggesting that not only do behavioral traits vary between populations, but also the factors that are important in determining them. Personality and cognitive ability and the correlations between these traits determine how well an organism performs in its habitat, as well as how likely it is to find new habitats and adapt to them. Studying these across wild zebrafish populations helps predict performance efficiencies among individuals and also explains how fish adapt to extremely dynamic environments that can lead to variation in behavioral traits and correlations between them. This study not only sheds light on the drivers of interindividual variation and co-occurrence patterns of personality and cognition, but also individual and population factors that might have an effect on them.
水生栖息地是极其动态的，生态因素不断变化，而由于人类引起的快速环境变化，这种情况现在更加恶化。在这种多变的环境中，了解生物的个性和认知如何影响个体对不同栖息地条件的适应能力变得至关重要。为了检验这一点，我们研究了个性相关特征以及认知能力如何在来自不同环境因素的栖息地的野生斑马鱼（Danio rerio）种群之间存在差异。我们通过进入新环境的能力来衡量大胆程度，通过在迷宫中重复试验的进食潜伏期来衡量空间任务的表现来评估学习和记忆能力，以此作为认知能力的指标。我们发现，个性会影响认知，尽管大胆的鱼是更好的学习者，但它们在不同种群中的记忆保留能力较差。尽管个性和认知能力在栖息地之间存在差异，但在每个种群中，它们的相关性模式仍然相似。然而，驱动个性和认知的个体特征（如性别和大小）在栖息地之间存在差异，这表明不仅行为特征在种群之间存在差异，而且决定这些特征的因素也存在差异。个性、认知能力以及这些特征之间的相关性决定了生物体在其栖息地中的表现如何，以及它寻找新栖息地并适应新栖息地的可能性。通过研究野生斑马鱼种群，可以帮助预测个体之间的表现效率，也可以解释鱼类如何适应极其动态的环境，这些环境会导致行为特征及其相关性的变化。这项研究不仅揭示了个体间变异的驱动因素以及个性和认知的共存模式，还揭示了可能对其产生影响的个体和种群因素。
