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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Emotions et personnalité : au cœur des décisions chez un poisson monogame

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During their lives animals constantly need to make decisions that influence their survival and their reproductive success. The objective of this thesis was to evaluate the role of two variability sources in decision-making — personality and emotional states — in a sexual context in a monogamous fish, the convict cichlid. Our work about personality highlights its importance on pair compatibility and reproductive success. We also observe that reactive individuals adjusted their behaviour to their partner and thus increased their reproductive fitness. This result supports the hypothesis that reactive individuals are more flexible and thus compensate for their weak competitiveness.Personality traits are thus to be considered as co-existing alternative strategies. The maintenance of this inter-individual variability can be results from their equal success on the long run. Emotional states are source of intra-individual variability that has been largely underestimate. However they may represent an internal information used by individuals to make choice. We developed a protocol of cognitive judgment bias test in fish to evaluate their emotional states, and we observed a strong relationship with the presence/absence of the preferred partner. These results suggest that emotions is a key component of pair-bonding and then question how animals use them to make decision. Do they choose a partner based on their emotional states in an adaptive way? Through these different studies, we have shown that behavioural variability is not randomly distributed. On the contrary, it is linked to different strategies and it can influence reproductive success. It is thus crucial to take this parameter into account in order to understand the evolution of decision processes.