Happy Nice Mall

In August, a mountain lion was spotted several times prowling the suburbs of Conn., New Canaan, and this isn’t the first time. Ten years ago, a young mountain lion prowled more than 1,500 miles through the Black Hills of South Dakota to Connecticut before being killed while crossing a highway.

Malcolm L. Hunter, Jr., professor emeritus of wildlife ecology at the University of Maine. For me, what stands out about these events is the investigative personalities of the tawny felines.

“You can be sure that the young mountain lion who left South Dakota and was run over by a car in Connecticut wasn’t a timid man sitting at home,” he said.

Wildlife biologists have traditionally studied factors such as prey abundance, habitat quality and behavior to assess the roles animals play in certain ecosystems. But a growing number of scientists argue that a critical piece is missing: the spectrum of personality traits in individual animals, whether brown bears, squirrels or worms. Some scientists claim that even bacteria are unique.

“Personality is found in all taxa,” said Alessio Mortelliti, an expert on rodent personalities at the University of Maine and a National Science Foundation career grant recipient.

The five common animal personality traits are courage, aggression, activity, exploratory tendencies, and sociability. To qualify, these features must be available “over time and across contexts”.

Wild animals “are not just little replicating automatons doing what they do; Co-author of a paper encouraging scientists to include such studies in the field of ecology, Dr. “They do it in different ways,” Hunter said. “It’s important to know and appreciate that personality can be taken into account in terms of managing these systems.”

It’s not like a lot of kittens or kittens where every animal is different. But in the wild, these personalities fluctuate with natural processes.

Dr. Hunter noted in his article that Charles Darwin, in his last book, “The Formation of Vegetable Mold by the Action of Worms,” ​​published in 1881, spoke of worms in a diverse, astimid, neat and tidy and sloppy manner. A 2018 study found that the problem-solving skills of worms vary widely.

Dr. “A personality trait that spans many species is that some individuals are more curious, more inquisitive, and more willing,” Hunter said. “Well, I guess a worm doesn’t really have a neck,” he laughed.

Understanding animal personalities paints a more complete picture of the natural world and delves into much deeper individual differences than behavioral ecology, some experts say. It plays a role in every aspect of their life, whether it involves mating or forest regeneration.

Professor of psychology at Cornell University, who studies the social significance of babbling in bird and human infants. Michael Goldstein placed 48 zebra finches in a cage to see how different personality types find a mate and how this affects parenting. “It turns out that they matched through discovery,” he said. “Low-seeking males and low-searching females came together, and high-seeking males and high-searching females came together.”

While the idea that worms or bacteria have personalities may seem a bit of a stretch, it’s clear that more complex animals, including wolves, bears, dolphins, whales, and many birds, have highly developed personalities that reflect human traits.

Take the famous example of the Giefer brown bear, which has a tendency to run away and get in. For several years in the 1980s, the big bear, weighing more than 500 pounds, would break the windows or doors of empty cottage cottages along the North Fork of the Flathead River near Glacier National Park in Montana, and the flour and sugar would help. or whatever food is left behind. The bear searched about two dozen huts.

“This bear has been incredibly tough,” said Chris Servheen, a retired US Fish and Wildlife biologist who tried to catch the bear. “He wouldn’t have fallen into traps and was never seen. He was like a ghost. We tried everything we could to catch this bear, and it didn’t get caught.”

Giefer grizzly was eventually killed by a hunter in British Columbia.

Pack cohesion among wolves is highly dependent on the alpha female. In these matriarchal societies, a strong leader catches and disciplines stray wolves, but no less aggressive leaders. And when an alpha female dies, the herd can often fall apart.

Scientists say personalities play a key role in ecosystem dynamics, and expelling one type of individual can influence evolution. A brave grizzly or cougar can help a population adapt to new terrain and conditions – a trait that can be particularly important as climate change forces some species to light for more favorable living conditions.

Animal personalities can also have profound effects on ecology.

For example, Dr. Rodents play an important role in forest regeneration, in Mortelliti’s research on voles, mice and squirrels in the Penobscot Experimental Forest in Maine. If a mouse running across a forest floor encounters a seed, its personality may cause it to swallow the seed immediately, meaning it won’t grow into a plant. If the mouse bury the seed, it can form a new plant. For example, bolder animals disperse seeds farther than shy individuals. But a brave animal is more likely to get caught in the claws of a hawk or owl.

Rodent personalities are determined by various tests, which are animal versions of the Rorschach. In one test, a mouse is placed in a large box. Shyness can be shown by a mouse’s tendency to spend time near corners or walls, while courage can be shown by those who move to the center. The mouse is placed in a small bag to measure the stress response or examined in an open field for its response to novelty.

Captured animals are marked with a microchip and ear tag and released. They are offered seeds and read the microchip as they pass by an antenna “so we know exactly which person took the seeds and what they did with them,” he said. More than 3,200 rodents evaluated their personalities for these studies.

how a forest is managed can change the balance ratio of personality types.

Dr. “You have a very nice hardy and shy distribution, with unmanaged forests or a relatively natural forest as much as possible,” Mortelliti said.

As plants change their range to adapt to the changing climate, mice and squirrels will come into contact with new, odd-looking seeds and they will be needed to disperse them, an important ecosystem service.

Dr. “An individual’s courage will have an impact on how to engage or not interact with that seed,” Mortelliti said. “This can affect a plant’s likelihood of adapting to climate change.”

Changing landscapes in certain ways changes the course of evolution by supporting certain personality types. And it could have an impact on whether forests and other ecosystems can adapt to a changing world. The key, he said, is the variety of personality in a landscape.

“Natural selection favored this variation in personalities because in some cases, it’s more advantageous to have different personality types over some years and in some contexts,” he said. “The higher the diversity, the more populations can adapt to changes.”

Aggression plays a role in ecosystems by determining territory between species. To measure their level of aggression, an animal is placed in front of a mirror to see how it reacts to what it thinks is an opponent. The winner of the most aggressive rodent contest?

Applying personality tests to rodents around the world, Dr. “The American red squirrel,” Mortelliti said. “They are incredible. They’re the only species you can measure on, you let go and then they climb up a tree and come towards you and yell at you. They’re really touchy, territorial individuals.”

Dr. Research into the ecological role of animal personalities still needs to go before specific forest management recommendations can be made, Mortelliti said.

Iain Couzin is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior at the University of Konstanz in Germany studying herd intelligence – how fish come together to form a school, or how birds fly and dive in unison with their purr. He thinks the concept of animal personalities is an exaggeration.

Biologists said that “all are aware of individual differences” in animals. “Darwin was well aware of individual differences. But I don’t like the term personality. The whole process is highly anthropomorphized.”

Dr. Mortelliti sees it as a useful prism to study animal behavior. “At the end of the day, we all understand that we are measuring individual differences in behavior,” he said. “I have no problem using the term personality because it’s intuitive and allows people to relate to it.”