Behavioral Carryovers, Tradeoffs and Performance Correlations Across Situations

该项目的中心目标是开发和应用新的统计技术来研究不同背景下的行为相关性，以及它们对不同背景下个体表现（生存率，喂养率，交配成功率）的影响。 例如，对于攻击性水平，尽管所有人都会根据情况改变他们的攻击性水平，但在一系列情况下，同一个人是否倾向于比其他人更具攻击性？ 如果是这样的话，这些一致的攻击水平如何影响不同情况下的表现？实验将研究行为和表现的相关性：1）在社会和生态环境（不同的密度，性别比例和捕食风险水平）; 2）在一生中（青少年与成年人的行为相关）;和3）跨性别（男性和女性兄弟姐妹之间）。实验将集中在一种昆虫上，即Aquarius remigis，它非常适合生成说明新方法所需的大量数据。尽管很明显，人类和一些经过充分研究的哺乳动物在不同的环境中表现出相关的行为（即，人格类型或行为综合征），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.