Evolution of animal personalities

1. Do animal personalities emerge?

Animal Personalities: The Advantage of Diversity

Animals do not always perform to the best of their abilities when faced with difficult choices. New findings on foraging honeybees show that co-existing strategies, where some individuals place more emphasis on accuracy and others on speed, can be advantageous to the colony in a variable environment.

Urbanization and biological invasion shape animal personalities.

Novel selective pressures derived from human activities challenge the persistence of animal populations worldwide. Behavior is expected to be a major factor driving animals' responses to global change because it largely determines how animals interact with the environment. However, the role of individual variation in behavior to facilitate the persistence of animals in changing environments rem...

Animal Personalities and Conservation Biology The Importance of Behavioral Diversity

Introduction There is signifi cant concern regarding the widespread loss of biodiversity and the destructive effects of human activity on the natural environment (Carson 1962; Wilson 2002). Over 500 extinctions of animal species have been recorded since 1600 (Frankham et al. 2002), with this rate signifi cantly increasing over the past 150 years (Primack 1998). Furthermore, the International Un...

On the evolution of personalities via frequency-dependent selection.

Personality differences can be found in a wide range of species across the animal kingdom, but why natural selection gave rise to such differences remains an open question. Frequency-dependent selection is a potent mechanism explaining variation; it does not explain, however, the other two key features associated with personalities, consistency and correlations. Using the hawk-dove game and a f...