Meeting Abstract

117.3  Monday, Jan. 7  Personality, stress, and fitness in a long-lived seabird GRACE, J.K.*; ANDERSON, D.J.; Wake Forest Univ.; Wake Forest Univ. gracjk7@wfu.edu

The relationship between the stress response and personality has recently become controversial. General “rules” of personality developed in laboratories appear to be less applicable in the wild or across species. Here, we test the hypothesis that shy individuals mount a greater corticosterone (CORT) stress response than bold individuals in free-living Nazca boobies. Incubating adults were tested in the field for personality, and CORT stress response. We compared structural equation models of personality and stress response using corrected Akaike Information Criterion values. Nazca boobies have a domain-specific personality syndrome (aggression, agitation, and anxiety), including reaction to a novel object, human intruder, and simulated conspecific (mirror), which is repeatable across years. Plasticity between tests was not correlated with any personality domain. Maximum CORT and the area under the CORT curve during a capture-restraint test were repeatable across years, but not baseline CORT. Personality had slight predictive power on the CORT stress response, but no trait was highly correlated with CORT concentration. This supports current research suggesting that links between personality and stress are more complicated in field than lab settings. In many cases, personality can affect mate choice and fitness. In Nazcas, aggressiveness of males and females were generally correlated within pair. However, assortative and dissasortative mating had no impact on fledgling production, within a year. The only personality trait associated with fledgling production was male aggression toward an intimidating novel object. Because this trait was repeatable across years (r = 0.31), this relationship is probably not due to changing behavior based on chick viability, but rather is a fitness consequence of a personality trait.