Polistes metricus queens exhibit personality variation and behavioral syndromes.

Consistent differences in behavior between individuals, otherwise known as animal personalities, have become a staple in behavioral ecology due to their ability to explain a wide range of phenomena. Social organisms are especially serviceable to animal personality techniques because they can be used to explore behavioral variation at both the individual and group level. Despite the success of personality research in social organisms generally, and social Hymenoptera in particular, social wasps (Vespidae) have received little to no attention in the personality literature. In the present study, we test Polistes metricus (Vespidae; Polistinae) paper wasp queens for the presence of repeatable variation in, and correlations ("behavioral syndromes") between, several commonly used personality metrics: boldness, aggressiveness, exploration, and activity. Our results indicate that P. metricus queens exhibit personalities for all measured traits and correlations between different behavioral measures. Given that paper wasps have served as a model organism for a wide range of phenomena such as kin selection, dominance hierarchies, mate choice, facial recognition, social parasitism, and chemical recognition, we hope that our results will motivate researchers to explore whether, or to what degree, queen personality is important in their research programs.

Persistent social interactions beget more pronounced personalities in a desert-dwelling social spider.

The social niche specialization hypothesis predicts that repeated social interactions will generate social niches within groups, thereby promoting consistent individual differences in behaviour. Current support for this hypothesis is mixed, probably because the importance of social niches is dependent upon the ecology of the species. We test whether repeated interactions among group mates generate consistent individual differences in boldness in the social spider, Stegodyphus dumicola. In support of the social niche specialization hypothesis, we found that consistent individual differences in boldness increased with longer group tenure. Interestingly, these differences took longer to appear than in previous work suggesting this species needs more persistent social interactions to shape its behaviour. Recently disturbed colonies were shyer than older colonies, possibly reflecting differences in predation risk. Our study emphasizes the importance of the social environment in generating animal personalities, but also suggests that the pattern of personality development can depend on subtle differences in species' ecologies.