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Animal behaviour

Personality in the wild

Nature volume 491, pages 341–342 (2012)Cite this article

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Behavioural traits can influence an individual animal's fitness, and trait combinations can change over its lifetime, according to a study of wild trout during a key period in their development.

Life is hard for a young brown trout in a cold Swedish stream. There are so many dangers to watch out for, such as a hungry mink lurking around the bend, and so many things to do, such as competing for food. Indeed, a young brown trout has only around a 10% chance of surviving to adulthood1. If a fish can beat the odds and survive this dangerous period, it emerges different from before — not just bigger, but also behaviourally changed. A recent paper by Adriaenssens and Johnsson in Ecology Letters2 reports that the individuals that make it through this bottleneck behave more predictably across contexts than they did before. Is this because of those harrowing early experiences? Or are these fish the ones that were better adapted in the first place? Adriaenssens and Johnsson's findings suggest that the answer is an intriguing combination of both factors.

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Figure 1: Fishy activity.

L. PITKIN/2020VISION/NATUREPL.COM

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alison M. Bell is in the School of Integrative Biology, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.,

    Alison M. Bell

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  1. Alison M. Bell
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Correspondence to Alison M. Bell.

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Bell, A. Personality in the wild. Nature 491, 341–342 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/491341a

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