Data from: Social cues affect quantitative genetic variation and covariation in animal personality traits

Dataset

Description

The social environment is expected to have substantial effects on behavior, and as a consequence its heritability and evolvability. We investigated these effects by exposing Australian field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) to either silence or recordings of male acoustic sexual signals. We used a combined pedigree and full-sib/half-sib breeding design to estimate the repeatability, heritability, and evolvability of behaviors related to boldness, exploration, and activity. All behaviors measured were significantly repeatable in both social environments. Additionally, most behaviors showed significant heritabilities in the two environments. We found no difference in repeatabilities between the silent and the acoustic environment but did find significant differences in the heritabilities and evolvabilities between these environments. There was a high degree of similarity between the phenotypic covariance matrices across the two environments, while the genotypic covariance matrices were highly dissimilar. Reflecting this, we found significant genotype-by-environment interactions for most of the behaviors. Lastly, we found that the repeatable aspect of behavior (‘personality’) was significantly heritable for most behaviors, but that these heritabilities were higher in the acoustic than in the silent environment. We conclude that the social environment can have a significant impact on the heritability and evolvability of behavior, and argue that evolutionary inferences from phenotypic studies should be made with caution.,Behavioural trials dataThis file includes the behavioural measures obtained from behavioural trials conducted 1 week apart (first trial = 1, second trial = 2; e.g. Velocity 1 was the velocity measured during the first trial), as well as the size (pronotum width) measures of each individual. The file also includes all information necessary for conducting the quantitative genetic analyses, i.e. sire and dam identities. The second tab ('Pedigree') includes the pedigree that was used in ASReml for the genetic analyses.Rudin et al. data.xlsx,
Date made available26 Nov 2018
PublisherDRYAD

Cite this