The role of personality variation, plasticity and social facilitation in cockroach aggregation

Personality variation has been proven to affect ecology, evolution and group behaviour in many ways. Nevertheless, how social context influences behavioural strategies and individual personality variation has rarely been addressed. This study sheds light on the relationship between social interactions, personality variation and plasticity in a collective context. For this purpose, we used a binary setup (i.e. an arena with two identical shelters) to study the aggregation process of cockroaches. We tested the same individuals in isolated and social (groups of 16 individuals) conditions. We show that even if social interactions reduce the observation of personality variation, the behaviour in a group is correlated to individual preferences displayed in isolation. Furthermore, our results suggest that individuals show different levels of plasticity according to their shelter occupancy; individuals with high occupancy rates show low levels of plasticity and are less affected by social amplification in social conditions.