Behavioural reaction norms: animal personality meets individual plasticity
Recent studies in the field of behavioural ecology have revealed intriguing variation in behaviour within single populations. Increasing evidence suggests that individual animals differ in their average level of behaviour displayed across a range of contexts (animal ‘personality’), and in their responsiveness to environmental variation (plasticity), and that these phenomena can be considered complementary aspects […]
Of tongues and noses: chemoreception in lizards and snakes
Lizards and snakes inhabit a world so richly textured in chemical information that, as primates, we can only imagine it. Subtle nuances of chemical shading underline nearly every fundamental activity of their lives, from finding foot to finding mates. Recent work examines the nature of these chemical messages, mechanisms for their perception, the interplay of […]
Stimulus control of lingual predatory luring and related foraging tactics of mangrove saltmarsh snakes (nerodia clarkii compressicauda)
Knowledge of the various cues that elicit natural behavior is important to our understanding of why and when animals behave as they do. In order to gain insight into the behavior and ecology of Nerodia clarkii compressicauda, a piscivorous snake that uses a unique form of predatory luring as a foraging tactic, we observed 22 […]
Relationships between locomotor behavior, morphometric characters and thyroid hormone levels give evidence of stage-dependent mechanisms in European eel upstream migration
In order to decipher movements during freshwater eel colonization, we experimentally characterized individual locomotor behavior of two eel life history stages: elvers and yellow eels. A ramp located at the flume tank upstream side required a specific locomotor behavior to be ascended. Placing individually tagged eels in the middle of the tank three times successively […]
Future directions in behavioural syndromes research
A behavioural syndrome occurs when individuals behave in a consistent way through time or across contexts and is analogous to ‘personality’ or ‘temperament’. Interest is accumulating in behavioural syndromes owing to their important ecological and evolutionary consequences. There are plenty of opportunities in this burgeoning young field to integrate proximate and functional approaches to studying […]
How does temperature affect behaviour? Multilevel analysis of plasticity, personality and predictability in hermit crabs
When animals are observed on multiple occasions, consistent between-individual differences in behaviour, often referred to as animal personality, may be observed. However, this does not mean that the behaviour of a given individual is readily predictable. While some individuals show low levels of variation around their behavioural mean, others show high levels of variation, and […]
Using repeatability to study physiological and behavioural traits: ignore time-related change at your peril
Broad sense repeatability, which refers to the extent to which individual differences in trait scores are maintained over time, is of increasing interest to researchers studying behavioural or physiological traits. Broad sense repeatability is most often inferred from the statistic R (the intraclass correlation, or narrow sense repeatability). However, R ignores change over time, despite […]