Exploring the genetics of nestling personality traits in a wild passerine bird: testing the phenotypic gambit
نویسندگان
چکیده
When several personality traits covary, they form a behavioral syndrome. Understanding the evolutionary dynamics of a behavioral syndrome requires knowledge of its genetic underpinning. At present, our understanding of the genetic basis of behavioral syndromes is largely restricted to domestic and laboratory animals. Wild behavioral syndromes are mostly inferred on the basis of phenotypic correlations, and thus make the "phenotypic gambit" of assuming that these phenotypic correlations capture the underlying genetic correlations. On the basis of 3 years of reciprocal cross-fostering of 2896 nestlings of 271 families within a pedigreed population, we show that the nestling personality traits handling aggression, breathing rate, and docility are heritable (h(2) = 16-29%), and often have a pronounced "nest-of-rearing" variance component (10-15%), but a relatively small "nest-of-origin" variance component (0-7%). The three nestling personality traits form a behavioral syndrome on the phenotypic and genetic level. Overall, the phenotypic correlations provide a satisfactory description of the genetic ones, but significantly underestimate the magnitude of one of the pairwise genetic correlations, which mirrors the conclusion based on domestic and laboratory studies.
منابع مشابه
Exploring the genetics of aging in a wild passerine bird.
Senescence is the decline in survival and reproduction as an organism ages and is known to occur in collared flycatchers Ficedula albicollis. We consider annual fitness (the estimated genetic contribution that an individual makes to next year's gene pool) as a measure of age-specific fitness. We apply a restricted maximum likelihood linear mixed-model approach on 25 years of data on 3,844 male ...
متن کاملFood supplementation mitigates dispersal-dependent differences in nest defence in a passerine bird.
Dispersing and non-dispersing individuals often differ in phenotypic traits (e.g. physiology, behaviour), but to what extent these differences are fixed or driven by external conditions remains elusive. We experimentally tested whether differences in nest-defence behaviour between dispersing and non-dispersing individuals changed with local habitat quality in collared flycatchers, by providing ...
متن کاملEstimation of Genetic and Phenotypic Parametersof Some Reproductive Traits of Black Bengal Does
The objective of this study was to evaluate genetic and phenotypic parameters for some reproductive traits of Black Bengal does. Genetic parameters were estimated by Residual Maximum Likelihood procedure, fitting an animal model ignoring maternal genetic or permanent environmental effects. The least-squares means of litter size at birth (LSB), litter size at weaning (LSW), litter weight at birt...
متن کاملLow Cross-Sex Genetic Correlation in Carotenoid-Based Plumage Traits in the Blue Tit Nestlings (Cyanistes caeruleus)
In some bird species, both adult and juvenile individuals are often brightly coloured. It has been commonly assumed that identical plumage colouration present in both sexes results from strong intersexual genetic correlations in colour-related traits. Here, we aimed at testing this hypothesis in juvenile individuals and looked at genetic parameters describing carotenoid-based colouration of blu...
متن کاملRepeatable and heritable behavioural variation in a wild cooperative breeder
Quantifying consistent differences in behaviour among individuals is vital to understanding the ecological and evolutionary significance of animal personality. To quantify personality, the phenotypic variation of a behavioural trait is partitioned to assess how it varies among individuals, which is also known as repeatability. If pedigree data are available, the phenotypic variation can then be...
متن کامل