What is the genetic basis underlying personality traits?
One of the primary behavioral axes along which individual animals, including sticklebacks, vary is their propensity to take risks. Some individuals are relatively risk-averse, in that they hide or freeze in the presence of a predator and are relatively unaggressive toward other sticklebacks. Other individuals are generally more risk-prone in dangerous situations, in that they are willing to forage when predators are present, or to engage in dangerous fights with conspecifics. One hypothesis to explain behavioral consistency is that individuals behave in a consistent way because of an inherited tendency to do so. Previous studies have shown that there is a heritable basis to risk-taking behaviors in sticklebacks, but the identity of the genes underlying such behaviors is unknown. One tactic for identifying the genes responsible for a particular phenotype is to perform controlled laboratory crosses between divergent phenotypes, and to relate phenotypic variation to genetic variation usin
