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Testing for between individual correlations of personality and physiological traits in a wild bird

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Abstract

Recently, integration of personality traits into a ‘pace-of-life syndrome’ (POLS) context has been advocated. To be able to understand how an individual’s behavioural, physiological and life history traits may coevolve, we need to jointly quantify these traits in order to study their covariance. Few studies have established links between personality and immunity properties of an individual. We here examined covariation of a measure of skeletal size (tarsus length), three behavioural traits (activity, handling aggression and breath rate) and two immunological traits (IgG level and haematocrit), in 592 wild caught blue tits. Many individuals (201) were tested more than once, allowing quantification of individual consistency of all traits and partition of the covariances between the traits, using a multivariate mixed model, into between individual and residual covariances. We find individual consistency of all behavioural traits, indicating that these capture aspects of blue tit adult personality and also the physiological measures are repeatable. Contrary to the POLS expectation, we find no overall significant individual level correlation structure between these traits and a factor analytical approach confirmed that between individual correlations across traits were not due to a common (POLS) factor or driven by size (tarsus length). Based on a published power study, we conclude that there is no common syndrome of individual level covariance between personality and physiological traits in wild blue tits or that the effect sizes, such a syndrome generates, are too low (r < 0.3) to detect. Future field-based work should be designed to explore low effect sizes and strive to measure specific traits whose involvement is implicated to have large effect sizes as based on, e.g. laboratory findings.

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Acknowledgments

Maaike de Heij, Jaana Kekkonen and Lasse Kurvinen are thanked for their assistance in the field. Several land owners kindly allowed us to work on their properties. Kees van Oers, Alecia Carter, Niels J. Dingemanse and an anonymous reviewer provided comments that helped improve this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bird Ecology Unit, Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 65, Viikinkaari 1, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Edward Kluen

  2. Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Heli Siitari

  3. Department of Biology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Jon E. Brommer

Authors
  1. Edward Kluen
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  2. Heli Siitari
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  3. Jon E. Brommer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jon E. Brommer.

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Communicated by N. Dingemanse

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Kluen, E., Siitari, H. & Brommer, J.E. Testing for between individual correlations of personality and physiological traits in a wild bird. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 68, 205–213 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-013-1635-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-013-1635-1

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