The role of animal personality in behavioural variation

- proximate mechanisms and ultimate functions

Animals have evolved specific behaviours they use in certain contexts such as in resource defence, reproduction and environmental exploration. Such behaviours and their variation have fundamental implications for an individual’s ability to acquire and defend resources, such as territories, nest sites and mates, and thus are important life history and fitness components. Understanding causes and consequences of these behavioural traits in response to ecological and social demands and constraints is essential in understanding evolutionary processes, leading to and maintaining variation in these characteristics.

Individuals of many species have been shown to differ consistently in several behaviourally relevant characteristics. While traditionally, these differences were seen as random noise around an adaptive mean, behavioural ecologists have increasingly become aware that variation in these traits can be adaptive on its own. Animal personality describes the entirety of these so called personality traits within a specific population, including genetic and neuro-endocrine differences.

This research line investigates a broad range of questions on causes and consequences of behaviour in general and personality in particular. We do so by combining field with laboratory research. This allows us to test the adaptive value of behaviour and specifically of personality traits under descriptive and experimental field conditions while at the same time testing the genetic and environmental causes and consequences by using quantitative- and molecular genetic techniques and by manipulating rearing or social conditions in a controlled manner. Empirical research conducted in this group has shown that selection pressures fluctuate along with a variable unpredictable environment. Models have suggested a possible link between personality and life-history trade-offs, where personality could possibly underlie differences in life-history strategies, but empirical research on this is still scarce. Recent advances have shown that personality is also involved in sexual selection and our research on sexual selection is currently expanding to address links between sexually selected and personality traits.