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.

A standardized method for quantifying consistent individual differences in schooling behaviour.

A method for quantifying consistent individual differences in schooling behaviour is presented. This method, which utilizes a school of models, improves on previous methods by removing the unwanted variation that is introduced by live stimulus fish while still providing the physiological experience of schooling to the focal fish. Three-spined stickleback Gasterosteus aculeatus observed in the model school assay exhibited consistent individual differences in schooling behaviour.

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.

Behavioral type-environment correlations in the field: a study of three-spined stickleback.

Behavioral type-environment correlations occur when specific behavioral types of individuals are more common in certain environments. Behavioral type-environment correlations can be generated by several different mechanisms that are probably very common such as niche construction and phenotypic plasticity. Moreover, behavioral type-environment correlations have important ecological and evolutionary implications.

Avoidance or escape? Discriminating between two hypotheses for the function of schooling in threespine sticklebacks.

In many species, there are antipredator benefits of grouping with conspecifics. For example, animals often aggregate to better avoid potential predators (the 'avoidance hypothesis'). Animals also often group together in direct response to predators to facilitate escape (the 'escape hypothesis').