Total budget: 39.997.000 HUF

Project manager: Dr. Grant Colin McDonald

Duration:

from 1st December 2020. to 30th November 2024.

 

Summary:

Across the animal kingdom, individuals are remarkably consistent in how they behave. This consistency, named animal personality, is an evolutionary puzzle because theory predicts behaviour to be highly flexible, allowing individuals to optimise behaviour in different situations. Animal personality has important consequences for the reproductive success of individuals and populations by limiting the range of behaviours individuals can display. Crucially, in natural populations, animals rarely behave in isolation, but are integrated in complex networks of social interactions, involving aggression, cooperation and reproduction. Therefore, to understand the evolution of animal personality, it is vital to understand how personality influences these animal social networks and how sociality in turn influences the reproductive success of individuals. The proposed project will explore how animal social networks are influenced by animal personality and what are the effects of this social structure on reproduction using observations and experiments in a wild population of the shorebird Kentish plover. The Kentish plover is an ideal organism for this research, allowing us to measure individual personalities, characterise their position in social networks and experimentally manipulate their perception of the social environment. This project will provide a framework to understand the coevolution of animal personality and animal societies. Importantly, shorebird and plover populations are declining globally due to human disturbance, predation and climate change. This study will provide a key step forward in linking the study of social behaviour with practical conservation management.