Studying personality variation in invertebrates: why bother?
By S. Kralj-Fišer, W. Schuett. 2014
220 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Research on animal personality variation has been burgeoning in the last 20 years but surprisingly few studies have investigated personalities in invertebrate species although they make up 98% of all animal species. Such lack of invertebrate studies might be due to a traditional belief that invertebrates are just ‘minirobots’. Lately, studies highlighting personality differences in a range of invertebrate species have challenged this idea. However, the number of invertebrate species investigated still contrasts markedly with the effort that has been made studying vertebrates, which represent only a single subphylum. We describe how investigating proximate, evolutionary and ecological correlates of personality variation in invertebrates may broaden our understanding of personality variation in general. In our opinion, personality studies on invertebrates are much needed, because invertebrates exhibit a range of aspects in their life histories, social and sexual behaviours that are extremely rare or absent in most studied vertebrates, but that offer new avenues for personality research. Examples are complete metamorphosis, male emasculation during copulation, asexual reproduction, eusociality and parasitism. Further invertebrate personality studies could enable a comparative approach to unravel how past selective forces have driven the evolution of personality differences. Finally, we point out the advantages of studying personality variation in many invertebrate species, such as easier access to relevant data on proximate and ultimate factors, arising from easy maintenance, fast life cycles and short generation times.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f2ea48cafde96c6aa323115c33c0f077999d29cb
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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Citations in the corpus
- Keeping invertebrate research ethical in a landscape of shifting public opinion (2019, background): “5 | CURRENT STATE OF ETHICS FOR INVERTEBRATES Invertebrates are key experimental models in a diverse range of research fields from medical biology (Rittschof & Schirmeier, 2018; Sanz et al., 2017) to behavioural ecology (Barron & Klein, 2016; Hollis & Guillette, 2015; Kralj-Fišer & Schuett, 2014).”
- Pesticide-Induced Stress in Arthropod Pests for Optimized Integrated Pest Management Programs. (2016, background): “The recognition of the existence of personality among animals, insects included, and its eco-evolutionary importance support this notion (79), which has been considered in the context of insecticide control of arthropod pest species (97).”
- The development of collective personality: the ontogenetic drivers of behavioral variation across groups (2014, background): “Unlike vertebrates, arthropods tend to have shorter generation times, and a variety of tools are available to study the internal developmental mechanisms (e.g., fixed neural pathways or epigenomic factors) that affect the personality type expressed by an individual (Kralj-Fišer and Schuett, 2014).”