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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on October 17, 2008
Behavioral Ecology 2009 20(1):165-171; doi:10.1093/beheco/arn129
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Shoal composition determines foraging success in the guppy

John R.G. Dyera, Darren P. Croftb, Lesley J. Morrella and Jens Krausea

a Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology, University of Leeds, LS 29JT, UK b School of Biological Sciences, College of Natural Sciences, University of Wales, Bangor, UK

Address correspondence to J.R.G. Dyer. E-mail: bgyjdd{at}leeds.ac.uk.


  Abstract

The composition of an animal group can impact greatly on the survival and success of its individual members. Much recent work has concentrated on behavioral variation within animal populations along the bold/shy continuum. Here, we screened individual guppies, Poecilia reticulata, for boldness using an overhead fright stimulus. We created groups consisting of 4 bold individuals (bold shoals), 4 shy individuals (shy shoals), or 2 bold and 2 shy individuals (mixed shoals). The performance of these different shoal types was then tested in a novel foraging scenario. We found that both bold and mixed shoals approached a novel feeder in less time than shy shoals. Interestingly, we found that more fish from mixed shoals fed than in either bold or shy shoals. We suggest that this can be explained by the fact that nearly all the cases where one fish was followed into the feeder by another occurred within mixed shoals and that it was almost always a shy fish following a bold one. These results suggest clear foraging benefits to shy individuals through associating with bold ones. Surprisingly, our results also suggest potential foraging benefits to bold individuals through associating with shy individuals. This study highlights a possible mechanism by which interindividual variation in behavioral types is maintained in a population.

Key words: behavioral variation, boldness, foraging, personality, producer–scrounger, social environment.

Received 17 July 2007; revised 30 May 2008; accepted 23 August 2008.


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