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Nestling activity levels during begging behaviour predicts activity level and body mass in adulthood

Across a range of species including humans, personality traits, or differences in behaviour between individuals that are consistent over time, have been demonstrated. However, few studies have measured whether these consistent differences are evident in very young animals, and whether they persist o...

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Autores principales: McCowan, Luke S.C., Griffith, Simon C.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4179387/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25279258
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.566
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author McCowan, Luke S.C.
Griffith, Simon C.
author_facet McCowan, Luke S.C.
Griffith, Simon C.
author_sort McCowan, Luke S.C.
collection PubMed
description Across a range of species including humans, personality traits, or differences in behaviour between individuals that are consistent over time, have been demonstrated. However, few studies have measured whether these consistent differences are evident in very young animals, and whether they persist over an individual’s entire lifespan. Here we investigated the begging behaviour of very young cross-fostered zebra finch nestlings and the relationship between that and adult activity levels. We found a link between the nestling activity behaviour head movements during begging, measured at just five and seven days after hatching, and adult activity levels, measured when individuals were between three and three and a half years old. Moreover, body mass was found to be negatively correlated with both nestling and adult activity levels, suggesting that individuals which carry less body fat as adults are less active both as adults and during begging as nestlings. Our work suggests that the personality traits identified here in both very young nestlings and adults may be linked to physiological factors such as metabolism or environmental sources of variation. Moreover, our work suggests it may be possible to predict an individual’s future adult personality at a very young age, opening up new avenues for future work to explore the relationship between personality and a number of aspects of individual life history and survival.
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spelling pubmed-41793872014-10-02 Nestling activity levels during begging behaviour predicts activity level and body mass in adulthood McCowan, Luke S.C. Griffith, Simon C. PeerJ Animal Behavior Across a range of species including humans, personality traits, or differences in behaviour between individuals that are consistent over time, have been demonstrated. However, few studies have measured whether these consistent differences are evident in very young animals, and whether they persist over an individual’s entire lifespan. Here we investigated the begging behaviour of very young cross-fostered zebra finch nestlings and the relationship between that and adult activity levels. We found a link between the nestling activity behaviour head movements during begging, measured at just five and seven days after hatching, and adult activity levels, measured when individuals were between three and three and a half years old. Moreover, body mass was found to be negatively correlated with both nestling and adult activity levels, suggesting that individuals which carry less body fat as adults are less active both as adults and during begging as nestlings. Our work suggests that the personality traits identified here in both very young nestlings and adults may be linked to physiological factors such as metabolism or environmental sources of variation. Moreover, our work suggests it may be possible to predict an individual’s future adult personality at a very young age, opening up new avenues for future work to explore the relationship between personality and a number of aspects of individual life history and survival. PeerJ Inc. 2014-09-16 /pmc/articles/PMC4179387/ /pubmed/25279258 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.566 Text en © 2014 McCowan and Griffith http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Animal Behavior
McCowan, Luke S.C.
Griffith, Simon C.
Nestling activity levels during begging behaviour predicts activity level and body mass in adulthood
title Nestling activity levels during begging behaviour predicts activity level and body mass in adulthood
title_full Nestling activity levels during begging behaviour predicts activity level and body mass in adulthood
title_fullStr Nestling activity levels during begging behaviour predicts activity level and body mass in adulthood
title_full_unstemmed Nestling activity levels during begging behaviour predicts activity level and body mass in adulthood
title_short Nestling activity levels during begging behaviour predicts activity level and body mass in adulthood
title_sort nestling activity levels during begging behaviour predicts activity level and body mass in adulthood
topic Animal Behavior
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4179387/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25279258
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.566
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