Towards an evolutionary ecology of individual differences

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Over the last decade in behavioural ecology there has been an increasing interest in consistent behavioural differences among individuals, also called personality differences. At the centre of this interest are the ecological and evolutionary reasons that individuals of the same species differ in their behaviour. The interest in personality is associated with a resurgence of theoretical activity on some evolutionary hypotheses: spatial and temporal variation in selection and the evolution of individual niche specialisation, frequency-dependent selection, indirect genetic effects, and the evolution of individual social niche specialisation, have all been proposed as alternative explanations to the maintenance of personality differences. At the same time, recent work on the evolution of personality differences has broadened the range of investigation to other traits such as life history or metabolism. Behavioural differences are now assumed to be part of a package of life history/metabolic strategies, which may provide adaptive explanations for the maintenance of behavioural variation in the wild. In this burst of activity around the questions on animal personality, I profit from my pioneering position in the field to propose a research program investigating some of the evolutionary hypotheses for the maintenance of personality differences. Over the next five years, my students and I will use data from unique long-term field studies I have been involved in over the last few years to explore theses different hypotheses. My program will be composed of three main short-term research objectives: 1) Testing the pace-of-life syndrome hypothesis (the hypothesis that personality is a facet of life history strategies, and behavioural variation is tightly linked to the existence of life history trade-offs). 2) Testing the hypothesis that spatial-temporal environmental variations create selection pressures that drive personality differences; and 3) Investigating the link between social niche specialisation and personality differences. My program will provide a unique set of studies that will help to develop an evolutionary ecology of individual differences.