Asking the pikas politely…
Describing and quantifying animal personality is now an integral part of behavioral studies because individually distinctive traits may have ecological and evolutionary consequences. Yet, to fully understand how personality traits may respond to selection, one must understand the underlying heritability and genetic correlations between traits. Most studies that have investigated the additive genetic variance of personality traits typically find a moderate amount of heritable variation, but few studies have been conducted on wild populations. Estimating heritability in the wild is important because environmental conditions reveal the often reduced, additive genetic variance found in nature. In addition, to understand how a population may respond to selection, one must identify possible constraints caused by genetic correlations. We estimated the additive genetic variance of docility, exploration, and activity in a wild population of yellow- bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris), and the additive genetic variance for exploration and activity in a second context. We found little to no significant heritability in these traits (0.033-0.151). We found phenotypic correlations were explained by both genetic and permanent environment correlations but not correlations between maternal effects. This is one of a handful of studies to take a quantitative genetic approach to understand personality traits in the wild, and thus, gives insights into the evolution and maintenance of personality. 60
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