Behavioral Carryovers, Tradeoffs and Performance Correlations Across Situations

该项目的核心目标是开发和应用新的统计技术来检查不同环境下的行为相关性，以及它们对不同环境下个体表现（存活率、摄食率、交配成功率）的影响。例如，攻击水平，尽管所有个体都会根据情境改变他们的攻击水平，但同一个体在一系列情境中是否会比其他人更具攻击性？如果是这样，这些持续的攻击性水平如何影响不同情况下的表现？实验将检验行为和表现的相关性：1)在不同的社会和生态背景下（不同的密度、性别比例和被捕食风险水平）；2)终生（青少年与成人行为的相关性）；3)跨性别（男性和女性兄弟姐妹）。实验将集中在一种名为宝瓶座的昆虫身上，这种昆虫非常适合生成大量数据来说明新方法。虽然很明显，人类和一些研究充分的哺乳动物在不同的背景下表现出相关的行为（即，性格类型或行为综合症），但直到现在才清楚，其他动物也存在类似的行为相关性。该项目产生的技术和见解应该会促进我们对行为相关性的生态和进化意义的理解。

The central goals of this project are to develop and apply new statistical techniques to examine behavioral correlations across different contexts, and their effects on individual performance (survival, feeding rate, mating success) across contexts. For example, for aggression level, although all individuals alter their aggression levels depending on the situation, do the same individuals tend to be more aggressive than others across a range of situations? If so, how do these consistent aggression levels influence performance in the different situations? Experiments will examine behavioral and performance correlations: 1) across social and ecological contexts (different densities, sex ratios and levels of predation risk); 2) over a lifetime (correlating juvenile versus adult behavior); and 3) across genders (between male and female siblings). Experiments will focus on an insect, Aquarius remigis, that is ideal for generating the large amounts of data required to illustrate the new methods.Although it is clear that humans and some well-studied mammals exhibit correlated behaviors across contexts (i.e., personality types or behavioral syndromes), it is only now becoming clear that parallel behavioral correlations occur in other animals. The techniques and insights generated by this project should advance our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary significance of behavioral correlations.