Weak evidence for personality and behavioural syndrome in Teleogryllus commodus crickets

ABSTRACT

Individuals of the same species and even within the same populations often vary in their behavioural responses to environmental cues. Individual variation in behaviour can be consistent across time (personality) and may also be correlated across contexts (behavioural syndromes). Here, we assessed whether Australian black field crickets (Teleogryllus commodus) display consistent inter-individual variation in four different contexts: general activity, exploration in a novel environment, boldness after a predation-risk event, and aggression towards a conspecific (fighting). We then assessed whether these four behaviours are linked, forming a behavioural syndrome. We found weak evidence for consistent individual differences in general activity, latency to touch novel objects (i.e. proxy of boldness), and the outcome of a fight. However, none of the repeatable behaviours were correlated across contexts, indicating that there is no behavioural syndrome linking these three particular behaviours. These results suggest that these behavioural traits might be regulated by different biological processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Consistent individual difference
• repeatability
• activity
• boldness
• aggression
• Orthoptera

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Bruce Patty for technical support, Simon Connolly for assistance learning BORIS software, and to the students of the 2020 BIOEB501 class for the discussions which led to the conception of this project. CP was supported by a Rutherford Postdoctoral Fellowship during the completion of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).