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Evolutionary biology

Animal personalities

Nature volume 447, pages 539–540 (2007)Cite this article

That different people differ in their readiness to take risks is an obvious feature of human personality. Theoretical advances now help in making sense of observations of analogous behaviour in animals.

Personality might seem to require a complexity and subtlety that is unique to humans. But evidence for individual variation in traits that we would recognize as personality, for example aggressiveness in fighting or boldness in the face of a predator, has cropped up in animals ranging from fish to monkeys to squid. Even an individual spider behaves differently from other spiders, through time and in different situations1. Wolf et al. (page 581 of this issue2) now show how such variation in behaviour can make evolutionary sense.

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  1. Alison M. Bell is in the School of Integrative Biology, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, 505 South Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA. alisonmb@life.uiuc.edu,

    Alison M. Bell

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  1. Alison M. Bell
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Bell, A. Animal personalities. Nature 447, 539–540 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/447539a

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