How past exposure to predation affects personality and behavioural plasticity?

Abstract

When behaviour is observed multiple times on animals from the same population, between-individual difference in mean behaviour (personality) and in behavioural plasticity are often reported. While the developmental environment might explain such an individual difference, the effect of parental environment is still unexplored -a surprising observation as parental carry-over effect are now well-known to influence the average phenotype and plastic responses of offspring-. We tested whether parental and developmental exposure to predator cues impacted the immediate behavioural predator-induced response in the snail Physa acuta at both mean level (average response) and individual level (between-individual variation). Two generations of snails were reared in laboratory without or with exposure to predator cues. Then, escape behaviour was repeatedly assessed on adult snails in the presence or absence of predator cues. Both parental and developmental exposure to predator cues acted additively towards a lower average behavioural plasticity. At the individual level, developmental exposure induced higher differentiation in personality trait but not in behavioural plasticity while parental environment did not influence the between-individual differences. These results highlight that past environments can strongly influence behaviour at the population level and that they should be taken into consideration when investigating why individuals differ in behaviour.