TY - JOUR

T1 - Integration of physiology,behaviour and life-history traits: personality and pace-of-life in a marine gastropod.

T2 - Physiology, behaviour & life history

AU - Cornwell, Tomas

AU - McCarthy, Ian

AU - Biro, Pete

PY - 2020/5

Y1 - 2020/5

N2 - Attempts to unravel the proximate and ultimate causes of individual behavioural and life history variation have often pointed to predicted correlations between behavioural, physiological and life-history traits, forming pace-of-life syndromes (POLS). The POLS hypothesis predicts that high levels of production (growth, fecundity) require high levels of foraging effort and risk-taking, supported by high metabolism. Despite tremendous interest in this topic, the POLS hypothesis still has limited empirical support, which has led to calls for more stringent empirical tests of the hypothesis and its assumptions. To that end, we examined the associations between risk-taking behaviour (boldness), resting metabolic rate (RMR) and somatic growth rate in a marine gastropod, Littoraria irrorata, under controlled laboratory conditions using a longitudinal repeated measures design. After accounting for the effects of sex, size, and time (trial number), a multivariate mixed model revealed that bolder individuals had higher RMR, and grew faster, whereas RMR and growth were not strongly correlated. Further, if individuals were bolder than their average on a given day, then their RMR was also higher. Our study represents rare and compelling support for the POLS hypothesis, simultaneously studying its three key components (behaviour, energetics and life history), the success of which we attribute to careful control, concurrent sampling of each trait, and rigorous analysis of the among- and within-individual patterns of variation and covariance.

AB - Attempts to unravel the proximate and ultimate causes of individual behavioural and life history variation have often pointed to predicted correlations between behavioural, physiological and life-history traits, forming pace-of-life syndromes (POLS). The POLS hypothesis predicts that high levels of production (growth, fecundity) require high levels of foraging effort and risk-taking, supported by high metabolism. Despite tremendous interest in this topic, the POLS hypothesis still has limited empirical support, which has led to calls for more stringent empirical tests of the hypothesis and its assumptions. To that end, we examined the associations between risk-taking behaviour (boldness), resting metabolic rate (RMR) and somatic growth rate in a marine gastropod, Littoraria irrorata, under controlled laboratory conditions using a longitudinal repeated measures design. After accounting for the effects of sex, size, and time (trial number), a multivariate mixed model revealed that bolder individuals had higher RMR, and grew faster, whereas RMR and growth were not strongly correlated. Further, if individuals were bolder than their average on a given day, then their RMR was also higher. Our study represents rare and compelling support for the POLS hypothesis, simultaneously studying its three key components (behaviour, energetics and life history), the success of which we attribute to careful control, concurrent sampling of each trait, and rigorous analysis of the among- and within-individual patterns of variation and covariance.

U2 - 10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.03.009

DO - 10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.03.009

M3 - Article

VL - 163

SP - 155

EP - 162

JO - Animal Behaviour

JF - Animal Behaviour

SN - 0003-3472

ER -