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Nymphal density, behavioral development, and life history in a field cricket

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Abstract

Population density regulates the strength of intraspecific competition and may thereby be reflected in life-history variables, such as development time, growth rate, or investment in immune defense. However, population density may also affect the fitness payoffs of different behaviors and consequently shape the development of personality. Here we studied if population density during nymphal development (one, four, or ten individuals raised together) affects the level of boldness, measured as the latency time to recover from freezing and emerge from a shelter, aggressiveness towards conspecifics or their correlation at the adult stage in the field crickets, Gryllus integer. In addition, we tested if individuals invest more resources in immune function or speed up their development in response to a high conspecifics density during ontogeny. Nymphal density did not affect adult boldness or aggressiveness towards conspecific males per se, but these variables showed a negative association, i.e., indicated an unconventional behavioral syndrome in the highest density treatment. Supporting the effectiveness of density treatments in inducing plastic responses, individuals reached maturity sooner and invested more resources in immune function in the highest nymphal density group compared to groups consisting of one or four individuals. Our results suggest that population density may play an important role in shaping both the realized life history and development of behavioral syndromes.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by the Academy of Finland (project 127398). We would like to thank Arja Kaitala, Eija Hurme, Jukka Forsman, Sami Kivelä, Tatiana Czeschlik, Toomas Tammaru, all the members from the “round table” group, and one anonymous referee for valuable comments for earlier versions of the manuscript. We would also like to thank the University of Oulu Zoo and its very helpful staff for the help with experiments and maintenance of our cricket population. We thank also Annie Leonard, Ann Hedrick, and Markus Rantala who helped us to establish the laboratory population used in this study.

Ethical standards

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. All the experiment was conducted according to the Finnish legislation of animal care.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 3000, 90014, Oulu, Finland

    Petri T. Niemelä, Anssi Vainikka & Sonja Lahdenperä

  2. Department of Biology, University of Eastern Finland, P.O. Box 111, 8101, Joensuu, Finland

    Petri T. Niemelä, Anssi Vainikka & Raine Kortet

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  1. Petri T. Niemelä
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  2. Anssi Vainikka
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Correspondence to Petri T. Niemelä.

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Communicated by M. Siva-Jothy

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Niemelä, P.T., Vainikka, A., Lahdenperä, S. et al. Nymphal density, behavioral development, and life history in a field cricket. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 66, 645–652 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-011-1312-1

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