Personality in a group living species : social information, collective movements and social decision-making

movements.Leadership is the initiation of new directions of locomotion by one or more individuals, which are then followed by other group members (Krause et al. 2000). Social information useOne of the benefits of living in groups is that an individual has access to social information.Individuals might use two forms of information, either personal information, usually retrieved on a trial and error basis by interacting with the physical environment, or they might use information made available by other individuals, known as social information (Danchin et al. 2004;Dall et al. 2005).Social information use has been studied extensively in a wide variety of species and in many different contexts (Galef & Giraldeau 2001;Valone & Templeton 2002;Danchin et al. 2004;Valone 2007).Individuals use social information to decide with whom to mate (mate choice copying, Nordell & Valone 1998;Valone & Templeton 2002), where to breed (habitat copying, Danchin et al. 1998), where to forage (Drent & Swierstra 1977; Coolen et al. 2003), when to leave a food patch (Templeton & Giraldeau 1995, 1996), what food to eat (Galef 1990) and when to flee from a predator (Chivers & Smith 1998).Social information use indeed affects various important aspects of an individual's ecology, such as foraging, dispersal and space use (Seppänen et al. 2007).Despite a rich tradition of studies on social information use the relationship between animal personality and social information use is poorly studied.In this thesis I studied whether variation in personality traits is correlated with variation in the use of social information.That the value of social information might be different for 2 individuals in a group can be illustrated by a simple example.Consider a group of 3 individuals with individual a dominant over b and c, and individual b dominant over c.If individual b finds a food patch which can be monopolized this information is valuable for individual a, as it can displace individual b and take over the food patch.However, for individual c the exact same information is not valuable since it cannot use the information as it can not displace individual b and access the food.This illustrates that within a group of individuals the value of social information might differ between individuals.Despite this obvious example, there are few studies which take an individual approach to social information use and generally it is assumed that social information is equally valuable to each individual in a population and consequently most studies focus on the conditions under which an animal is expected to use social information (Galef & Giraldeau 2001;Danchin et al. 2004;Kendal et al. 2005;Valone 2007).In this thesis I studied the relationship between social information use and personality in several different contexts to test if variation in personality reflects differences in the use of social information.Maintenance of variation One of the major challenges in animal personality is to explain the evolution and maintenance of animal personality.Several (non-mutually exclusive) mechanisms have been suggested, including spatiotemporal variation in environmental conditions (Sih et al. 2003;Dall et al. 2004;Dingemanse et al. 2004;Smith & Blumstein 2008;Réale et al. 2010), differences in life-history trade-offs (Wolf et al. 2007;Gyuris et al. 2010; see also Biro & Stamps 2008;Réale et al. 2009) and sexual selection (Schuett et al. 2010).A fourth mechanism is negative frequency dependent selection (Wolf et al. 2008).

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