DISSERTATION RESEARCH: The role of the social environment in promoting consistent individual differences in responsiveness and other behaviors in sticklebacks

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Animal personality, also known as behavioral syndromes and temperament, refers to consistent individual differences in behaviors across time and/or contexts. This field seeks mechanisms that can explain why individuals behave consistently and why they behave differently from each other. Recent models suggest that responsiveness, or how sensitive an individual is to changes in their environment, might be an especially important axis of behavioral variation. While the importance of the social environment on personality traits has long been recognized in human personality research, this factor is only starting to gain attention in animal personality research. The goal of this project is to investigate how repeated social interactions might promote consistent individual differences in responsiveness and other personality traits. The proposed studies will reveal whether social familiarity promotes individual behavioral consistency and whether changes in group composition cause individuals to modify their behavior. These studies will use threespine sticklebacks, a model behavioral organism that demonstrates extensive variation in responsiveness and other personality traits. In the spirit of this grant, collaboration with a local high school has been initiated, where students in the AP biology course will use sticklebacks to learn about environmental influences on behavior. Students will develop, design and execute their own experiments to determine how sticklebacks? behavior changes in the face of environmental stressors; the end result will be poster presentations that the students will give to their peers and teachers. Given the rapid rate of anthropogenic change to the environment, understanding why some individuals are more responsive to environmental change than others has important conservation implications. Moreover, understanding the causes of variation in responsiveness in diverse organisms, including humans, can provide insight into individual differences in resilience, or why some people are more affected by negative life experiences than others.