New Publication: Lifetime stability of social traits in bottlenose dolphins
Dear colleagues, On behalf of my co-authors, I am pleased to announce our new article in Communications Biology: Evans, T., Krzyszczyk, E., Frère, C., & Mann, J. (2021). Lifetime stability of social traits in bottlenose dolphins. *Communications Biology*, *4*(1), 759. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02292-x Abstract: Behavioral phenotypic traits or “animal personalities” drive critical evolutionary processes such as fitness, disease and information spread. Yet the *stabilit*y of behavioral traits, essential by definition, has rarely been measured over developmentally significant periods of time, limiting our understanding of how behavioral stability interacts with ontogeny. Based on 32 years of social behavioral data for 179 wild bottlenose dolphins, we show that social traits (associate number, time alone and in large groups) are stable from infancy to late adulthood. Multivariate analysis revealed strong relationships between these stable metrics within individuals, suggesting a complex behavioral syndrome comparable to human extraversion. Maternal effects (particularly vertical social learning) and sex-specific reproductive strategies are likely proximate and ultimate drivers for these patterns. We provide rare empirical evidence to demonstrate the persistence of social behavioral traits over decades in a non-human animal. The full article is freely available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-02292-x Regards, Taylor Evans -- *Taylor C. Evans **(**she/hers)* PhD Candidate, Biology Georgetown University 916 412 4080
participants (1)
-
Taylor Evans