Meeting Abstract
Helmeted guinea fowl (Numida meleagris ) have served as a useful animal model for bipedal locomotion, with well-studied features of gait dynamics, musculoskeletal function, energetics, and muscle-tendon dynamics. Yet, wider aspects of behavior have been sparsely studied in guinea fowl. Literature on other vertebrates suggests that individuals within species vary in behavior along a bold/shy personality axis, and these differences are stable across contexts. Bold individuals readily explore novel environments and exhibit higher levels of locomotor activity and lower frequency of observable stress behaviors. We have measured bold/shy personality expression and locomotor dynamics in a flock of guinea fowl in a longitudinal study. Exploratory behavior and activity levels in various environments were used to quantify bold/shy personality expression. We find evidence that, like other species, guinea fowl do exhibit stable variation among individuals consistent with bold/shy personality. In separate experiments, we also measured locomotor dynamics of the same flock of birds while executing turning maneuvers on terrains of different friction. We found that running speed during turns varied significantly among individuals, and the random effect coefficients for individuals from a mixed-model ANOVA showed a positive correlation with independently measured bold/shy personality scores (r = 0.61). We also see evidence that ‘bold’ individuals exhibit a greater learning effect across repeated trials than ‘shy’ individuals. These preliminary findings suggest interesting interactions between personality and locomotor dynamics, which warrants further consideration for how biomechanics studies can be designed to adequately capture behavioral variation among individuals within a species.
