Environmental complexity during early life shapes average behavior in adulthood

作者：Wenjiu Xu, Qi Yao, Wenwen Zhang, Feng Zhang, Haifeng Li, Renxin Xu, Chunlin Li, Baowei Zhang · 发表于：Behavioral Ecology · 年份：2020 · DOI：10.1093/beheco/araa108 · 被引用次数：26 · 研究领域：Animal Behavior and Reproduction、Fish Ecology and Management Studies、Amphibian and Reptile Biology

Abstract Personality has been identified in a range of animal taxa during the last few decades, with important ecological and evolutionary implications. Investigating the effects of environmental factors during early life can provide important insights into the ontogeny of animal personality. We reared newborn mosquitofish, Gambusia affinis, in tanks of different structural complexities, and measured their behavioral traits (i.e., shyness, exploration, and sociability) when they reached sexual maturity. Univariate linear mixed-effects models were fitted to test the effects of environmental complexity and sex on population-average behavior, whereas multivariate models were fitted to quantify behavioral repeatability (i.e., personality) and among-individual correlations (i.e., behavioral syndromes). On average, females were shyer and more social than males, and the fish reared in complex environments were shyer, less explorative, and more social than those reared in open environments. Among-individual differences were consistently large across trials for all behaviors, indicating that personality variation was present in mosquitofish of both sexes reared in different environments. Repeatability did not differ among behaviors, and there were no differences in repeatability in any behavior between sexes or among environments. A negative correlation between shyness and exploration was found in mosquitofish from all treatments at both phenotypic and among-individual levels, with th...