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Personality and urbanization: behavioural traits and DRD4 SNP830 polymorphisms in great tits in Barcelona city

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Abstract

Most examples of adaptation to the urban environment relate to plasticity processes rather than to natural selection. Personality, however, defined as consistent individual differences in behaviour related to exploration, caution, and neophobia, is a good behavioural candidate character to study natural selection in relation to the urban habitat due to its heritable variation. The aim of this paper was to analyse variation in personality by comparing urban and forest great tits Parus major using standard tests of exploratory behaviour and boldness. We studied personality in 130 wild great tits captured in Barcelona city and nearby forests and found that urban birds were more explorative and bolder towards a novel object than forest birds. Genotype frequencies of the DRD4 SNP830 polymorphism, a gene region often associated with personality variation, varied significantly between forest and urban birds. Behavioural scores, however, were not correlated with this polymorphism in our population. Exploration scores correlated to boldness for forest birds but not for urban birds. Our findings suggest that the novel selection pressures of the urban environment favour the decoupling of behavioural traits that commonly form behavioural syndromes in the wild.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Alexandre Roulin for comments on an earlier version of the paper. This work was supported by funds from the Ministry of Economy and Competitivity, Spanish Research Council (CGL2012-38262 and CGL2016-79568-C3-3-P) (to J. C. S.), a research grant from the British Ornithology Union (to S. R.), and a FPI BES-2007-16320 grant to F. M. G. (Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology). We thank the Institute of Parks and Gardens for allowing us to sample birds in the Barcelona city parks, Leopoldo Gil for allowing us to sample birds in Can Catà forest area, and the Institut Botànic de Barcelona, especially Alfonso Susanna, for allowing us to use their molecular labs. We also thank Lluïsa Arroyo, Ferrán Bustos and Emilio Pagani-Núñez for their help in the field and in captivity work, and David Carrasco and Carolyn Newey for help with the English. Captive birds were handled with the permission of the Departament d’Agricultura, Generalitat de Catalunya (licences 2012-SF/518, 2013-SF/677 and 2014-SF/090).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Evolutionary and Behavioural Ecology Research Unit, Natural History Museum of Barcelona, Psg. Picasso s/n., 08003, Barcelona, Spain

    Sepand Riyahi & Juan Carlos Senar

  2. Department of Animal Ecology, Evolutionary Biology Centre (EBC), Uppsala University, Norbyvägen 18 D, 752 36, Uppsala, Sweden

    Mats Björklund

  3. Section of Integrative Biology, University of Texas, Austin, USA

    Fernando Mateos-Gonzalez

  4. Department of Collective Behaviour, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

    Fernando Mateos-Gonzalez

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  1. Sepand Riyahi
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  4. Juan Carlos Senar
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Correspondence to Juan Carlos Senar.

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Riyahi, S., Björklund, M., Mateos-Gonzalez, F. et al. Personality and urbanization: behavioural traits and DRD4 SNP830 polymorphisms in great tits in Barcelona city. J Ethol 35, 101–108 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10164-016-0496-2

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