Personalities And Its Influence On Dominance Hierarchy And Social Calls In Asian Particoloured Bats

Animal personality is defined as the consistency of an individual's behavioral responses over time and across situations.Consistent individual differences in behaviour may affect animal life-history traits and interactions with the environment in several ways,for instance by affecting growth,fecundity,response to predators,food sources or habitat,and social or sexual interactions with conspecifics.The state-dependent behavioural models emphasize that individuals differ in behaviour because they differ in state.State typically refers to any intrinsic morphological or physiological characteristic of an individual or its information state.In addition,state variables can also encompass aspects of an individual's environment.To date,the evidence for the correlation between individual body size differences and personality is still lacking.To understand fully the significance of variation in behavioural profiles,it is crucial to investigate how variation in behavioural profile may affect behaviours directly linked to individual fitness.Dominance has significant costs and benefits associated with it.Dominance has been shown to strongly influence individual fitness in group-living animals.Social calls are an important form of animal communication and play an important role in animal survival and reproduction.Therefore,it is of great ecological and evolutionary significance to explore whether the personality difference of animals affects the acquisition of dominant position and the social calls.In this paper,we quantify exploratory,active,and aggressive behavior in female Asian particoloured bats(Vespertilio sinensis).We used an information-theoretic approach to estimate the effects of body size(body mass,forearm length,and head body length)on the bats' personalities,the effects of three personality traits(exploratory,activity,and aggressive)on the bats' dominance hierarchy.The linear regression method was used to investigate the relationship between the personality of female Asian particoloured bats(Vespertilio sinensis)and the social calls.The specific results are as follows:1.We performed a principal component analysis on the eight behavioral variables of bats recorded in the hole board experiment,and successfully separated the exploration and activity of bats.The first principal component was related to exploratory behavior.The lower the score of the first principal component,the stronger the exploratory ability.The second principal component reflected a series of activities related to overall activity level.The lower the second principal component score,the higher the activity level.The female Asian particoloured bats have a significant variation in aggressiveness(0.167 ± 0.101).The more aggressive an individual is,The more aggressive an individual is,the more likely it is to attack.The intra-class correlation coefficients(ICC)results showed that exploration was repeatable(ICC = 0.361,df = 51,P = 0.004).We did not find significant repeatability in the activity(ICC = 0.181,df = 51,P = 0.101).We did not identify a significant relationship between any personality traits suggesting that there is no behavioral syndrome between these traits in female Asian particoloured bats.Our results indicated that bats with large activity score were associated with heavier body mass(t = 2.838,P = 0.007),bats with higher aggression score were associated significantly with heavier body mass(t = 2.413,P = 0.022),and there were no significant correlations between exploratory score and head body length(t = 1.156,P = 0.253).2.Model selection results indicated that the body size(body mass,forearm length and head body length)do not affect the establishment of dominance hierarchy.Model selection results indicated that the more aggressive the individual is,the higher the dominance score(t = 2.788,P = 0.009),exploratory and activity did not affect the dominance score.3.There were no significant correlations between the two personality traits(exploration and activity)of female Asian particoloured bats and Mean inter-syllable silence,vocal complexity(DI value),number of syllable types,number of sentence types.There was no significant correlation between exploratory and syllabic parameters.There was no significant correlation between the activity and the frequency of syllables,but there was a significant correlation between the activity and the time parameter of bDFM syllables(t =-2.575,P = 0.026).To sum up,this paper confirmed that female Asian particoloured bats have obvious exploration,aggressive and activity variation.This paper reveals the important significance of body size for the evolution and maintenance of the personality of female Asian particoloured bats by clarifying the impact of the body mass of female Asian particoloured bats on aggression and activity.In addition,the aggressiveness of female Asian particoloured bats is significantly related to its dominance hierarchy,which helps to deeply understand the important role of personality in the establishment of animal dominance hierarchy.We also found a significant correlation between the syllable parameters of female Asian particoloured bats and personality,which provides new evidence for the relationship between animal's acoustic behavior and personality.