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How do developmental and parental exposures to predation affect personality and immediate behavioural plasticity in the snail Physa acuta?

ABSTRACT: Individuals differ in personality and immediate behavioural plasticity. While developmental environment may explain this group diversity, the effect of parental environment is still unexplored-a surprising observation since parental environment influences mean behaviour. We tested whether developmental and parental environments impacted personality and immediate plasticity. We raised two generations of Physa acuta snails in the laboratory with or without developmental exposure to predator cues. Escape behaviour was repeatedly assessed on adult snails with or without predator cues in the immediate environment. On average, snails were slower to escape if they or their parents had been exposed to predator cues during development. Snails were also less plastic in response to immediate predation risk on average if they or their parents had been exposed to predator cues. Group diversity in personality was greater in predator-exposed snails than unexposed snails, while parental environment did not influence it. Group diversity in immediate plasticity was not significant. Our results suggest that only developmental environment plays a key role in the emergence of group diversity in personality, but that parental environment influences mean behavioural responses to the environmental change. Consequently, although different, both developmental and parental cues may have evolutionary implications on behavioural responses.

SUBMITTER: Tariel J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7779491 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Understanding whether and how ambient ecological conditions affect the distribution of personality types within and among populations lies at the heart of research on animal personality. Several studies have focussed on only one agent of divergent selection (or driver of plastic changes in behavior), considering either predation risk or a single abiotic ecological factor. Here, we investigated how an array of abiotic and biotic environmental factors simultaneously shape population differences in boldness, activity in an open-field test, and sociability/shoaling in the livebearing fish Poecilia vivipara from six ecologically different lagoons in southeastern Brazil. We evaluated the relative contributions of variation in predation risk, water transparency/visibility, salinity (ranging from oligo- to hypersaline), and dissolved oxygen. We also investigated the role played by environmental factors for the emergence, strength, and direction of behavioral correlations. Water transparency explained most of the behavioral variation, whereby fish from lagoons with low water transparency were significantly shyer, less active, and shoaled less than fish living under clear water conditions. When we tested additional wild-caught fish from the same lagoons after acclimating them to homogeneous laboratory conditions, population differences were largely absent, pointing toward behavioral plasticity as a mechanism underlying the observed behavioral differences. Furthermore, we found correlations between personality traits (behavioral syndromes) to vary substantially in strength and direction among populations, with no obvious associations with ecological factors (including predation risk). Altogether, our results suggest that various habitat parameters simultaneously shape the distribution of personality types, with abiotic factors playing a vital (as yet underestimated) role. Furthermore, while predation is often thought to lead to the emergence of behavioral syndromes, our data do not support this assumption.

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How do developmental and parental exposures to predation affect personality and immediate behavioural plasticity in the snail Physa acuta?

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