OPUS: integrating ecology, behavioral syndromes and social selection

虽然人们早就知道，有些人比其他人更冒险或更有攻击性，但最近的研究揭示了动物王国中类似的、物种内的胆略和攻击性差异。该项目的总体目标是增加我们对个体行为差异与个体的生态和社会环境之间的关系的理解，以及个体的行为和环境如何相互作用来决定个体的适应性（生存和繁殖成功）。这些知识将阐明个体生态和社会相互作用如何促进种群水平的生态和进化过程。更具体地说，该项目将研究：1)个体在应对危险程度或社会条件变化（如群体规模或性别比例）时行为灵活性的差异模式；2)个体平均行为和行为灵活性的差异如何影响不同风险和社会环境下的生存和繁殖成功等健康结果；情境选择的个体差异（即对不同生态或社会条件的偏好）以及大胆或攻击性、情境选择与适应结果之间的关系。这些目标将通过对过去25年来由首席研究员收集的大型实验数据集的新分析（使用复杂的分层混合建模方法）和相关文献（所有动物，包括人类）的综合，以及用于组织知识和产生新预测的新概念框架的发展，来实现。该项目将培训几名青年科学家，并在科学期刊和教学工具上发表出版物。

While it has long been clear that some humans take more risks or are more aggressive than others, recent work has revealed parallel, within-species differences in boldness and aggressiveness throughout the animal kingdom. The broad goal of the project will be to increase our understanding of how individual differences in behavior relate to the individual's ecological and social environment, and how the individual's behavior and its environment interact to determine the individual's fitness (survival and reproductive success). Such knowledge will clarify how individual ecological and social interactions contribute to population level ecological and evolutionary processes. More specifically, this project will examine: 1) patterns in individual differences in behavioral flexibility in response to changing levels of danger or varying social conditions (e.g., group size, or sex ratio); 2) how individual differences in both average behavior and behavioral flexibility influence fitness outcomes like survival and reproductive success in different risk and social environments; and, 3) individual differences in situation choice (i.e., preference for different ecological or social conditions) and relationships between boldness or aggressiveness, situation choice, and fitness outcomes. These goals will be achieved by a combination of new analyses of large experimental data sets collected by the principal investigator over the last 25 years (using sophisticated hierarchical mixed modeling methods), and syntheses of relevant literature (on all animals, including humans) along with the development of novel conceptual frameworks for organizing knowledge and generating new predictions. The project will train several young scientists and produce both publications in scientific journals and teaching tools.