Animal personality, the study of individual behavioral differences

摘要: This chapter reviews the main aspects related to the recent trends in animal personality. Newcomers in animal personality raise some questions about the field and its concepts, and discusses terminological and other issues related to personality. The chapter presents a brief history, with an emphasis on behavioral ecology, and reviews the different sources of consistent individual behavioral variation and describes the main methodological advances in the field over the last few decades. Behavioral ecologists investigated the agents of selection acting on behavior and described how long‐term, invariant selection pressures could explain the behavioral strategies currently expressed by animals. Physiological processes can translate the diverse genetic or environmental effects into behavioral differences. Behavioral reaction norms provide an interesting framework to study both personality and plasticity within the …