Personality and body condition have additive effects on motivation to feed in Zebra Finches Taeniopygia guttata

Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for the adaptive evolution of person-ality, defined as inter-individual differences in behaviour that are consistent over timeand across situations. For instance, the ‘pace-of-life syndrome’ hypothesis suggests thatpersonality evolved as a behavioural correlate of life-history trajectories that vary withinpopulations. Thus, proactivity, corresponding to higher exploratory tendencies or higherboldness levels, has been linked to higher productivity or mortality rates. However, theextent to which proactivity is associated with a higher motivation to forage remainspoorly understood. Moreover, although personality and its effects on foraging behavi…

Research methods in behavioural ecology.

41 pages

Individual differences in behavioral consistency are related to sequential access to resources and body condition in a producer-scrounger game

Investigating the evolution of consistent between-individual behavioral differences necessitates to explain the emergence of within-individual consistency. Relying on a recent mathematical model, we here test the prediction that the emergence of differences in within-individual consistency is related to the sequential access to resources in a frequency-dependent foraging game. To this end we used flocks of zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) engaged in a producer-scrounger foraging game. Tactic investment (i.e., the proportion of hops with the head down) significantly predicted successful tactic use (i.e., the proportion of seeds produced). In support of predictions, we found that individua…

Speed-accuracy trade-off and its consequences in a scramble competition context.

Abstract: Animals foraging in groups commonly respond to the presence of others by increasing their foraging rate, an increase that could come at the expense of prey detection accuracy. Yet the existence and consequences of such so-called 'speed-accuracy trade-offs' in group-foraging animals remain unexplored. We used group-feeding zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata, to determine how search speed affects food detection accuracy and how a potential speed-accuracy trade-off influences feeding success. We found significant between-individual differences in hopping speed as well as evidence that faster individuals were more likely to overlook food, demonstrating the existence of a trade-off bet…

Ecologie Comportementale. Cours et Questions de rélexion

Behavioural Ecology.

Personality affects zebra finch feeding success in a producer-scrounger game.

7 pages; International audience; Recent evidence strongly suggests that natural selection can favour the evolution of consistent individual differences in behaviour ('personalities'). Indeed, personality shows heritable variation and has been linked to fitness in many species. However, the fitness effects of personality are highly variable within and between species. Furthermore, the nature of the causal influence of personality on an organism's fitness remains unclear so far. Competition has been proposed as a factor modulating this relationship. Thus, personality has been found to affect individual success in competition by interference in a few species, but its influence in scramble comp…

Les sociétés animales : lions, fourmis et ouistitis.