A Behavioral Syndrome Linking Boldness and Flexibility Facilitates Invasion Success in Sticklebacks.

AbstractFor a species to expand its range, it needs to be good at dispersing and also capable of exploiting resources and adapting to different environments. Therefore, behavioral and cognitive traits could play key roles in facilitating invasion success. Marine threespined sticklebacks () have repeatedly colonized freshwater environments and rapidly adapted to them.

Predictors of individual variation in reversal learning performance in three-spined sticklebacks.

Behavioral flexibility is a type of phenotypic plasticity that can influence how animals cope with environmental change and is often measured with a reversal learning paradigm. The goal of this study was to understand why individuals differ in behavioral flexibility, and whether individual differences in behavioral flexibility fit the predictions of coping styles theory. We tested whether individual variation in flexibility correlates with response to novelty (response to a novel object), boldness (emergence into a novel environment), and behavioral persistence (response to a barrier), and tested for trade-offs between how quickly individuals learn an initial discrimination and flexibility.

Social environment determines the effect of boldness and activity on survival.

Populations of animals are composed of individuals that differ in ecologically relevant behaviors. Building evidence also suggests that individuals occupy different social niches. Here, in a mark-recapture experiment, we show evidence of an interacting effect of behavior and social niche on survival in the wild: bold individuals had higher survival if they were initially captured in groups while shy, inactive individuals had higher survival if they were initially captured when alone.

Neurogenomic insights into paternal care and its relation to territorial aggression.

Motherhood is characterized by dramatic changes in brain and behavior, but less is known about fatherhood. Here we report that male sticklebacks-a small fish in which fathers provide care-experience dramatic changes in neurogenomic state as they become fathers. Some genes are unique to different stages of paternal care, some genes are shared across stages, and some genes are added to the previously acquired neurogenomic state.

Intraspecific variation in cue-specific learning in sticklebacks.

Animals must identify reliable cues amidst environmental noise during learning, and the cues that are most reliable often depend on the local ecology. Comparing the performance of populations of the same species across multiple versions of a cognitive task can reveal whether some populations learn to use certain cues faster than others. Here, using a criterion-based protocol, we assessed whether two natural populations of sticklebacks differed in how quickly they learned to associate two different discrimination cues with the location of food.

Temporal dynamics of neurogenomic plasticity in response to social interactions in male threespined sticklebacks.

Animals exhibit dramatic immediate behavioral plasticity in response to social interactions, and brief social interactions can shape the future social landscape. However, the molecular mechanisms contributing to behavioral plasticity are unclear. Here, we show that the genome dynamically responds to social interactions with multiple waves of transcription associated with distinct molecular functions in the brain of male threespined sticklebacks, a species famous for its behavioral repertoire and evolution.

Testing the predictions of coping styles theory in threespined sticklebacks.

Coping styles theory provides a framework for understanding individual variation in how animals respond to environmental change, and predicts how individual differences in stress responsiveness and behavior might relate to cognitive differences. According to coping styles theory, proactive individuals are bolder, less reactive to stressors, and more routinized than their reactive counterparts. A key tenet of coping styles theory is that variation in coping styles is maintained by tradeoffs with behavioral flexibility: proactive individuals excel in stable environments while more flexible, reactive individuals perform better in variable environments.

Predictors of Individual Variation in Movement in a Natural Population of Threespine Stickleback ().

Species abundances and distributions are inherently tied to individuals' decisions about movement within their habitat. Therefore, integrating individual phenotypic variation within a larger ecological framework may provide better insight into how populations structure themselves. Recent evidence for consistent individual differences in behaviour prompts the hypothesis that variation in behavioural types might be related to variation in movement in natural environments.