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Personality does not constrain social and behavioural flexibility in African striped mice

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Abstract

The development and persistence of personality in nature are counterintuitive because, in heterogeneous environments, personality is expected to limit the degree of behavioural flexibility. Recent work has shown that personality and behavioural flexibility might be linked, but their interaction is not well understood and could be elucidated by studying a socially flexible species. Using well-established tests, we measured the personality traits of activity, boldness, exploration and aggressiveness in free-living striped mice (Rhabdomys pumilio) in South Africa. Specifically, we tested whether personality changes when individuals change their reproductive tactic, either from group-living philopatrics to solitary-living females and roaming males or from non-breeding philopatrics to breeders. Our results showed that striped mice have personalities: Individuals behaved consistently for all the behavioural traits measured both over time and contexts (breeding to non-breeding season). While most of the personality traits measured remained consistent among tactics, they did not predict which tactic an individual would adopt next, suggesting that environmental conditions rather than personality influence tactic switching. Additionally, we found important differences in the consistency of the behaviours measured between males and females, indicating that sexual selection might play a prominent role in the maintenance of personality in this species. Our study demonstrates that some personality traits can be stable over an entire lifetime even in socially flexible species and that personality does not constrain social flexibility.

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Acknowledgments

This study was made possible by the administrative and technical support of the Succulent Karoo Research Station (registered South African NPO 122–134), at which field site, the data were collected. We are thankful to the Department of Tourism, Environment and Conservation of the Northern Cape for issuing research permits. We extend warm thanks to the manager and staff of the Goegap Nature Reserve for allowing us to collect data on striped mice within the reserve. We are grateful to several field assistants and honour students for their help with data collection. We are very grateful to Prof. Hayes and two other anonymous reviewers for their comments, which we believe have greatly improved our paper. The Cogito Foundation, National Research Foundation (grant number 87769) and University of the Witwatersrand provided the funding for the project.

Ethical standards

Fieldwork for this study was carried out under the necessary licenses and was in accordance with the relevant animal welfare regulations. We received ethical clearance from the Animal Ethics Committee and the University of the Witwatersrand (AESC: 2007/38/04).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    C. H. Yuen, N. Pillay, I. Schoepf & C. Schradin

  2. Department of Animal Behaviour, Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    M. Heinrichs & C. Schradin

  3. Université de Strasbourg, IPHC-DEPE, 23 rue Becquerel, 67087, Strasbourg, France

    C. Schradin

  4. CNRS, UMR7178, 67087, Strasbourg, France

    C. Schradin

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  1. C. H. Yuen
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  2. N. Pillay
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  3. M. Heinrichs
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  4. I. Schoepf
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  5. C. Schradin
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Correspondence to C. H. Yuen.

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Communicated by C. Soulsbury

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Yuen, C.H., Pillay, N., Heinrichs, M. et al. Personality does not constrain social and behavioural flexibility in African striped mice. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 69, 1237–1249 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-015-1937-6

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