Sex and the Syndrome: Individual and Population Consistency in Behaviour in Rock Pool Prawn Palaemon elegans

Abstract

Animal personality has been widely documented across a range of species. The concept of personality is composed of individual behavioural consistency across time and between situations, and also behavioural trait correlations known as behavioural syndromes. Whilst many studies have now investigated the stability of individual personality traits, few have analysed the stability over time of entire behavioural syndromes. Here we present data from a behavioural study of rock pool prawns. We show that prawns are temporally consistent in a range of behaviours, including activity, exploration and boldness, and also that a behavioural syndrome is evident in this population. We find correlations between many behavioural traits (activity, boldness, shoaling and exploration). In addition, behavioural syndrome structure was consistent over time. Finally, few studies have explicitly studied the role of sex differences in personality traits, behavioural consistency and syndrome structure. We report behavioural differences between male and female prawns but no differences in patterns of consistency. Our study adds to the growing literature on animal personality, and provides evidence showing that syndromes themselves can exhibit temporal consistency. © 2013 Chapman et al.