Premium
Singing Activity Reveals Personality Traits in Great Tits
Author(s) -
Naguib Marc,
Kazek Agnieszka,
Schaper Sonja V.,
Van Oers Kees,
Visser Marcel E.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
ethology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.739
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1439-0310
pISSN - 0179-1613
DOI - 10.1111/j.1439-0310.2010.01791.x
Subject(s) - singing , trait , personality , parus , psychology , repertoire , big five personality traits , variation (astronomy) , quality (philosophy) , developmental psychology , communication , biology , social psychology , ecology , acoustics , computer science , philosophy , physics , epistemology , astrophysics , programming language
In animal communication, sexually selected signals have been shown to often signal individual attributes such as motivation or quality. Birdsong is among the best studied signalling systems, and song traits vary substantially among individuals. The question remains if variation in signalling also reflects more general and consistent individual characteristics. Such consistent individual differences in behaviour that are relatively stable over time and contexts are referred to as personality or behavioural syndromes. Here, we studied the relation between singing and explorative behaviour, a well‐studied personality trait, using great tits ( Parus major ) under standardized aviary conditions. The results show that singing activity measured as the number of songs sung in spring prior to breeding correlated with male but not with female explorative behaviour. In contrast, song repertoire was not related to explorative behaviour but varied over the day. The link between explorative and singing behaviour suggests that sexually selected signals are more than signals of quality but can also reflect other intrinsic behavioural characteristics such as personality traits.