How are individual learning, social learning and ‘personality’ traits connected?
Final Report Abstract
In this project, I investigated the possible relationship between animal personality and individual as well as social learning. I used the Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata) to study the questions I had proposed. During preparations and pre-testing, I discovered problems with the setup and guppy behaviour. Despite previous knowledge of guppy behaviour, individuals did not interact with the setups as planned and/or did not show the expected behaviours in some of the tests. I had to adjust my plans and change some of the protocols. Thankfully, I could salvage some of the data produced during the first experiment, found a different setup that worked for the second experiment, and found an interesting alternative for the third experiment. This demonstrates just how unpredictable work with animals can be and that one needs to be flexible. During the first experiment, I tested female guppies for their behaviour during three ecologically relevant personality tests, namely exploration of a novel environment, sociability as time associated with conspecifics, and boldness as behaviour during a potential predation threat. I measured a number of different behaviours and found one behavioural trait to be repeatable for each of the tests, namely proportion of environment visited during exploration, time spent close to the shoal for sociability, and latency to leave a refuge for boldness. These traits, however, were independent of each other and did not form a behavioural syndrome. During the second experiment, I again tested female guppies for the three personality traits mentioned above. Additionally, each individual was tested for their individual as well as social learning ability. For the learning paradigm, I used associative learning and trained individuals to associate one of two items with the presentation of food. Individuals varied greatly in their learning abilities. I found that individual and social learning ability were independent of each other and that individuals performed slightly better during individual than social learning. Explorative tendency had a positive effect on individual learning, which makes sense considering that more explorative individuals might encounter a new situation more likely than less explorative individuals. When only including individuals that had learned the association, sociability had a positive influence on social learning. Again, this makes sense since more social individuals who spent more time with conspecifics would also be more likely to observe behaviour of other individuals, making it more likely to socially learn something. Overall, however, there were only weak relationships of personality with learning ability in guppy females. The last experiment was conducted to analyse whether male guppy personality traits (exploration and boldness) have an influence on their mate choice. Males could choose between two females of different size. With the bigger female the potential for a higher amount of eggs that can be fertilised comes the potential of sperm competition due to other males making the same choice. Sperm competition might be reduced in smaller females, but so will number of potential eggs to fertilise. I tested whether males show consistent choice when faced with this decision two times and analysed whether this choosiness is associated with explorative tendency or boldness. I am still in the process of analysing this data.
Publications
- (2019). Characterizing the (co)variance of behavioural personality traits in female Trididadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata). Environmental Biology of Fishes
Kniel N, Godin J-G J
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-019-00911-5)
