The relationship between personality and the collective motion of schooling fish
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ARTICLE
The relationship between personality and the collective motion of schooling fish Jin‑Yu Tang1 · Shi‑Jian Fu1 Received: 22 January 2020 / Accepted: 12 June 2020 © Japan Ethological Society 2020
Abstract The personalities of schooling fish members are thought to have profound effects on group behavior, indicating that group members must maintain their personality to some extent. However, whether and to what extent personality traits are maintained or sacrificed during schooling has seldom been investigated. Thus, we aimed to verify the possible correlation between an individual’s personality traits and its movement characteristics during schooling. We first measured the boldness, exploration, activity and sociability personality traits of pale chubs (Zacco platypus). Then, we randomly divided the individuals into ten groups containing six members and measured their movement characteristics. In factor analysis, boldness and activity variables could be reduced to a single factor, and two variables related to sociability and one variable related to boldness (time spent outside the shelter) could be reduced to a single factor. The correlation between factor scores and collective motion traits showed that proactive pale chubs (with greater boldness and activity) swam with higher polarity with the centroid of the group than did reactive individuals, and individuals with higher sociability were more synchronized with the group centroid in terms of swimming speed. These findings suggest that proactive individuals have a greater alignment tendency and might have an advantage of efficient information transfer, enabling them to gain more synergistic benefits as group members than reactive individuals. The present study, along with information from our recent study, suggests that variation in the personality (especially boldness and sociability) composition of fish groups might be a major cause of variation in group-level behavior. Keywords Boldness · Sociability · Personality · Schooling Animal personalities are defined as consistent individual differences in behaviors across time and contexts (Réale et al. 2010; Wolf and Weissing 2012; Killen et al. 2016; Tang and Fu 2019; Lloren et al. 2019). Animals are thought to exhibit different behavioral syndromes, as proactive individuals are usually bolder and more explorative but less sociable than reactive individuals (Martins and Bhat 2014). The maintenance of personality types is thought to be of vital ecological relevance in fish species (Sih et al. 2012; Jolles et al. 2017; Knebel et al. 2019), as individuals with different personalities exert varying influences on group behaviors such as decision making (Harcourt et al. 2009) as well as the cohesion and alignment of collective * Shi‑Jian Fu [email protected] 1
Laboratory of Evolutionary Physiology and Behavior, Chongqing Key Laboratory of Animal Biology, Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing 401331, China
motions (Cote et al. 2011; Jolles et al. 2018; Planas-Sitja et al. 2018; Tang and Fu 2019). If so, th
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