Julien Martin (University of Aberdeen) - Within-Individual Variation in Behaviour: Evolutionarily Important or Measurement Error
4:00pm - 5:00pm /
Tuesday 7th November 2017
/ Venue: Lecture Theatre 1 Life Sciences Building
- Kelly Welburn
- Suitable for: Staff and students with an interest in Behaviour, Evolution, Ecology and Microbiology
- Admission: Free event
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In behavioural ecology, variation among individuals has been neglected for a long time until the development of research on personality. Personality studies focus on among individual variation in mean behaviour over time and across contexts such as differences in activity or exploration behaviours. Personality has been shown in all animal species studied. However, individuals do not only differ in their mean behaviour but they can also differ in their variance. Some individuals are more consistent than others in their behaviour over repeated trials meaning that individuals differ in their within-individual variance. This among-individual variation in "within-individual variance" has been neglected so far, and mainly considered random noise, or unmeasured plasticity. Using both a long-term study on Yellow-bellied marmots and a simulation approach, I investigate the existence and evolutionary importance of within-individual variance in behaviours