Does personality result from selection or plasticity?
In previous work, I found that behavioral consistency is favored when predation pressure is high. Specifically, whereas sticklebacks from a relatively ‘safe’ population, where predators are rare, do not behave consistently through time or across contexts, sticklebacks from a population under strong predation pressure do behave consistently (Bell 2005, see also Dingemanse et al 2007). We identified predation as the specific selective factor favoring the evolution of personality in sticklebacks by applying real predation pressure by trout to sticklebacks from a ‘safe’ population (which did not behave consistently) and found that behavioral consistency emerged among the survivors (Bell and Sih 2007). An unanswered question that was prompted by this experiment is whether predation caused behavioral consistency via nonrandom mortality of certain behavioral types, or via phenotypic plasticity, or both. That is, perhaps trout selectively ate individuals that did not behave consistently. Alter
