Fitness, risk taking, and spatial behavior covary with boldness in experimental vole populations.

Individuals of a population may vary along a pace-of-life syndrome from highly fecund, short-lived, bold, dispersive "fast" types at one end of the spectrum to less fecund, long-lived, shy, plastic "slow" types at the other end. Risk-taking behavior might mediate the underlying life history trade-off, but empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis is still ambiguous. Using experimentally created populations of common voles ()-a species with distinct seasonal life history trajectories-we aimed to test whether individual differences in boldness behavior covary with risk taking, space use, and fitness.

A behavioural syndrome, but less evidence for a relationship with cognitive traits in a spatial orientation context.

Background: Animals show consistent individual behavioural differences in many species. Further, behavioural traits (personality traits) form behavioural syndromes, characterised by correlations between different behaviours. Mechanisms maintaining these correlations could be constrained due to underlying relationships with cognitive traits.

Repeatability and consistency of individual behaviour in juvenile and adult Eurasian harvest mice.

Knowledge on animal personality has provided new insights into evolutionary biology and animal ecology, as behavioural types have been shown to affect fitness. Animal personality is characterized by repeatable and consistent between-individual behavioural differences throughout time and across different situations. Behavioural repeatability within life history stages and consistency between life history stages should be checked for the independence of sex and age, as recent data have shown that males and females in some species may differ in the repeatability of behavioural traits, as well as in their consistency.

Evidence for selection maintaining MHC diversity in a rodent species despite strong density fluctuations.

Strong spatiotemporal variation in population size often leads to reduced genetic diversity limiting the adaptive potential of individual populations. Key genes of adaptive variation are encoded by the immune genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) playing an essential role in parasite resistance. How MHC variation persists in rodent populations that regularly experience population bottlenecks remains an important topic in evolutionary genetics.