Towards an evolutionary ecology of individual differences

在过去的十年中，在行为生态学中，人们越来越关注个体之间一致的行为差异，也称为个性差异。这种兴趣的核心是生态和进化的原因，即同一物种的个体在行为上不同。对人格的兴趣与一些进化假说的理论活动的复苏有关：选择的时空变化和个体生态位专业化的进化，频率依赖选择，间接遗传效应，以及个体社会生态位专业化的进化，都被提出作为维持人格差异的替代解释。与此同时，最近关于人格差异进化的研究将调查范围扩大到了其他特征，如生活史或新陈代谢。行为差异现在被认为是一个包的生活史/代谢策略，这可能会提供适应性的解释在野外的行为变化的维护的一部分。在围绕动物人格问题的这一系列活动中，我从我在该领域的先驱地位中获益，提出了一个研究计划，调查一些维持人格差异的进化假设。

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.