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RESEARCH PRODUCT

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

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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 behaviourare usually considered to be independent of any motivational or nutritional state, fewstudies so far have challenged this. Here we show that personality traits, both individu-ally or combined using a principal component analysis, and body condition have additiveeffects on latency to feed following food deprivation in the Zebra Finch Taeniopygia gut-tata, with personality accounting for 41% and body condition for about 20% of the totalvariation in latency to feed. In accordance with the pace-of-life syndrome hypothesis,latency to feed was negatively related to the degree of proactivity and positively relatedto body condition. Thus, proactive individuals and individuals in poorer condition werequicker to start feeding after a period of food deprivation. The absence of a significantinteraction between personality and body condition further suggests that the effect ofpersonality was independent of body condition. We discuss the relevance of our resultsin relation to the different factors influencing foraging in birds. Moreover, we place ourresults within a life-history framework by emphasizing the correlated evolution of life-history traits and personality.Keywords: exploration, feeding latency, life-history trade-offs, pace-of-life syndrome hypothesis,principal component analysis, productivity.A growing literature shows the importance of theconcept of personality, defined as inter-individualdifferences in behaviour that are consistent overtime and across situations, in both captive andwild animal populations (Dingemanse et al. 2002,Montiglio et al. 2010, David et al. 2011a). Thesebehavioural differences may evolve through bothnatural (Reale & Festa-Bianchet 2003) and sexualselection (Schuett et al. 2010). Several hypotheses,from the role of sexual selection (Schuett et al.2010) to state-based differences (Dall et al. 2004),have been formulated to account for the evolutionof personality within populations (Dingemanse &