Sex differences, social context and personality in zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata

By W. Schuett, Sasha R. X. Dall. Animal Behaviour, 2009

259 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite burgeoning interest in consistent individual differences in behaviour (animal ‘personality’), the influence of social interactions on the performance of different behavioural types is poorly understood. Similarly, the ecological and evolutionary consequences of personality differences in social contexts remain unexplored. Moreover, the possibility that the sexes differ in the degree to which they exhibit personality in both social and nonsocial contexts has not yet received serious attention, despite the sexes usually being subject to differing selection pressures. Using a highly gregarious species, the zebra finch, we tested for consistent behavioural differences (in exploration) between individuals of both sexes in both nonsocial and social contexts, the latter considering the behavioural influence of opposite-sex companions. We then investigated how exploratory tendencies relate to behaviour in a potentially risky foraging context in mixed-sex dyads of individuals with differing personalities. Males were not more exploratory on average but were more consistent in their exploratory tendencies than females. Additionally, males behaved more consistently across the social and asocial contexts than females, even though individuals of both sexes similarly influenced each other's exploratory behaviour within the social context: the more exploratory the companion, the more exploratory the focal individual (relative to its level of exploration in the asocial context). An individual's exploration also affected its performance in the social foraging context. Our results stress the importance of looking for sex differences in personality and of considering the influence of social context in animal personality studies. We discuss our findings and their implications in the light of the biology of the species and set them in a broader ecological and evolutionary context.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/69e6ac42b1ffa31fccd2ce5467827554e8500af6

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Citations in the corpus

Personality affects zebra finch feeding success in a producer–scrounger game (2011, methodology): “We chose the zebra finch as our model organism as it has already been successfully used in studies of personality (Schuett & Dall 2009; David et al. 2011) and social foraging (Beauchamp 2006).”
Personality predicts social dominance in female zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata, in a feeding context. (2011, methodology): “We chose the zebra finch as our model organism as it is a highly social bird species that is regularly used in experimental studies of behaviour (Zann 1996), including personality (Martins et al. 2007; Schuett & Dall 2009).”
Sex matters: a social context to boldness in guppies (Poecilia reticulata) (2010, background): “…in behavior have been described across a range of taxa, including mammals (Boon et al. 2007; Martin and Réale 2008), birds (Dingemanse et al. 2003; Schuett and Dall 2009), reptiles (Brodie and Russell 1999; Lopez et al. 2005), fish (Magellan and Magurran 2007; Webster et al. 2009), and even…”
Personality differences explain leadership in barnacle geese (2009, background): “Few studies thus far have studied the relationship between behavioural variation and leadership: in zebra finches (Beauchamp 2000; Schuett & Dall 2009 ) and three-spined sticklebacks (Harcourt et al. 2009) more explorative (bolder) individuals led more often, but no evidence for this was found in g”
The fast and the flexible: cognitive style drives individual variation in cognition in a small mammal (2018, background): “…in bank voles (females are territorial and males have large overlapping ranges) and on existing literature on sex differences in cognition, we expected males to be faster learners and females to be more flexible (e.g. Guillam on, Valencia, Cal es, & Segovia, 1986; Schuett & Dall, 2009).”
An empiricist guide to animal personality variation in ecology and evolution (2014, background): “A relevant example here is to consider the open field test (Archer, 1973), in which an animal is released into an unfamiliar cage/ box and the degree of movement in a set period of time is assessed (e.g., Dingemanse et al., 2004; Schuett and Dall, 2009).”
Studying personality variation in invertebrates: why bother? (2014, background): “…as chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, various other primate species, pigs, Sus sp., dogs, Canis lupus familiaris (reviewed in Gosling, 2001), great tits, Parus major (reviewed in Groothuis & Carere, 2005) or zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata (e.g. David, Auclair, & Cézilly, 2011; Schuett & Dall, 2009).”