Linking Movement and Habitat Use to Personality in Fishes

This talk will synthesize evidence for personality in fishes, relationships between personality traits and habitat use and movement, and the management implications of these relationships. Evidence for personality differences in fishes is accumulating. Individuals from the same population commonly differ in behaviour, over time and across environmental situations, and beyond what is attributable to differences in age, size, and sex (broad sense personality).  These behavioural differences often include proposed personality traits - boldness, response to novelty, activity, aggression, and sociability - measured in standardized tests (narrow sense personality).  The differences in personality are usually repeatable, in some populations have a genetic basis, and, in other populations, are at least related to underlying neuroendocrine or energetic characteristics of individuals, such as cortisol responses, brain morphology, and resting metabolic rates.  Increasingly, studies are demonstrating correlations between standardized measures of personality traits and lab and field measures of foraging tactic (sitting and waiting versus actively searching), space use, dispersal, and migration. These relationships between personality and space use and movement are fostering a more integrative view of behaviour. They also have the potential to help us understand the leptokurtic nature of dispersal curves (fat tails), the biology of species invasions, the developmental processes involved with partial migration, individual variation in the catchability of fish, and differences in the survival of stocked and wild fish. Many challenges remain, but fishes are proving to be valuable study subjects for assessing the broader ecological and evolutionary significance of personality differences in animals.