Animal personality can influence the lifespan of whole ecological communities.

Female Anelosimus studiosus spiders create large webs shared by multiple females of this species and by many other types of spider. Jonathan Pruitt and Andreas Modlmeier of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania started colonies with either two docile spiders or two aggressive ones. Docile females allowed many kinds of spider to colonize and scavenged the other spiders' prey. Aggressive ones caught their own prey and fought off competing and predatory spiders. All of the communities collapsed in the end, but those founded by aggressive females lasted up to three years longer.

Communities founded by docile spiders reached a similar destabilizing species composition to aggressive spiders' colonies, but did so at a faster rate, making the docile-founded colonies shorter lived.

J. Anim. Ecol. http://doi.org/5bt (2015)