Animal personality and sexual selection

Naturalists and pet owners have long intuitively recognized that individual animals show personality. Only within the last decade the topic animal personalities have received considerable attention in the scientific community, after consistent individual differences in behaviour have been documented across a wide range of taxa, including species with very simple nervous systems, such as sea anemones and hermit crabs. At the same time, these behavioural differences are expected to have dramatic effects on an individuals fate - in terms of produced offspring and own chances of survival. Previous research has mainly focused on the response of single individuals to changes in their environment or to specific test conditions. However, most behaviour in the context of reproduction and survival is expressed in a social context, with two or more individuals involved. Therefore, in our proposed project Show-off or shy boy? The interplay between animal personality and sexual selection we will investigate how personality differences are reflected in behaviours such as male-male competition and space use, mate choice, and parental care; and how these differences ultimately affect an individuals survival and reproductive performance. The project will focus on the model species Allobates femoralis, a Neotropical poison frog with a prolonged breeding season, pronounced male territoriality, and male parental care. The study will be carried out in an experimental island population in French Guiana. The ability to monitor, assay, and track an entire animal population in its natural habitat in an island setup over several generations makes this project exceptional. All individuals are genetically sampled and their position in a consistent pedigree is known. By identifying respective costs and benefits of specific personality profiles, the proposed project will help us to better understand how behavioural variation can persist over evolutionary time.