Behavioral flexibility in an invasive bird is independent of other behaviors
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Zoology
- Keywords
- individual variation, behavioral flexibility, exploration, neophobia, motor diversity, Quiscalus mexicanus
- Copyright
- © 2016 Logan
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Behavioral flexibility in an invasive bird is independent of other behaviors. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1994v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1994v1
Abstract
Behavioral flexibility is considered important for a species to adapt to environmental change. Yet behavioral flexibility relates to problem solving ability and speed in unpredictable ways. This leaves an open question of whether behavioral flexibility instead varies with differences in individual behaviors, such as neophobia or exploration. If present, such correlations would mask which behavior causes individual variation. I investigated whether behavioral flexibility (reversal learning) performances were linked with other behaviors in great-tailed grackles, an invasive bird. I found that behavioral flexibility did not significantly correlate with neophobia, exploration, risk aversion, persistence, or motor diversity. This suggests that great-tailed grackle performance in behavioral flexibility tasks reflect a distinct source of individual variation. Maintaining multiple distinct sources of individual variation, and particularly variation in behavioral flexibility, may be a mechanism for this species’ invasion success by permitting populations to cope with the diversity of novel elements in their environments.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Supplementary Material
GLM outputs (Tables S1 and S2)