If you own a pet, you’re probably convinced
that it has its own personality. However, science isn’t convinced. Animal
personalities are seen as “goofy, frivolous, and the purview of overly
sentimental dog owners.”, but this begins to change.
Personalities were forgotten
For a long
time, personalities of animals were filtered out in research results. If, for
example, a scientist studies a group of rats, and he or she wants to know how
much they eat, the scientist measures how much food every rat eats for a couple
of days, and then averages the results. With this method, you can’t trace back
the individual preferences of the rats, and thus you can’t study personalities.
This is why it has been thought for a long time that personalities in animals
didn’t exist.
Be bolt and eat the food!
Andy Sih,
one of the pioneers in researching animal personalities, first noticed it in
salamanders. While some of the salamanders hid as bird, which eat salamanders,
fly by, others didn’t seem to react. Sih found this behaviour odd, since only
the salamanders that protect themselves the best from the birds should survive.
Like Charles Darwin already discovered. But then Sih realized that the
salamanders that didn’t hide also had an advantage. They have more time to swim
around and hunt for food than the ‘scared’ salamanders, since they didn’t hide
behind rocks so much. When the ditch where the salamanders lived in would dry
out, the ‘courageous’ salamanders would have more chances of surviving, since
they are bigger because they’ve eaten more.
Shy bird gets the worm
Niels
Dingemanse, of the University of Munich, and his team have discovered a similar
thing in great tits. They found out that aggressive birds in the group don’t
thrive as well as the more timid and docile birds when there isn’t enough food.
This may sound weird, but the team has a good explanation for it. When there
isn’t much food, aggressive great tits get all wound up in fights about the
food. This takes up a lot of energy. While the more timid birds don’t fight and
use way less energy for that, although they may eat a little less. An
interesting thing however, is that this principle has already been seen in
humans. This means that we are now not only able to observe personalities in
animals, but these studies may also learn us more about human behaviour and
personalities.
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