Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
3
Individual Variation in Behavior
A fundamental question in behavioral biology is “Why does animal A
do X while animal B does Y?” h e answer is usually found by looking
for dif erences in the experiences of the individuals, the environments
they occupy, or the genes and developmental processes that build their
anatomical, physiological, and behavioral phenotypes. Before the mid-
to late 1980s, observable variation in behavior among nestmate social
insects was attributed almost exclusively to nongenetic factors. I re-
member that when I i rst encountered the topic edited by Robert Jeanne
in 1988 titled
Interindividual Behavioral Variability in Social Insects,
a
collection of chapters written by key people in the i eld of social insect
biology, I was struck by the lack of any consideration of the role of ge-
netic variability within colonies. I decided that this needed to be inves-
tigated and set of on a quest that continues today.
In the sections that follow, I will present evidence demonstrating the
ef ects of genetic variation on individual and colony behavior. First, I
will show how the mating behavior of queens and the extremely high
rates of genetic recombination during meiosis af ect ge ne tic variation
within colonies. h en I will present evidence showing how nestmate
workers with dif erent fathers perform tasks with dif erent probabili-
ties and how behavioral interactions of individuals with dif erent geno-
types mutually af ect their individual behavior, resulting in colony-
level phenotypic ef ects. Finally, I will show the ef ects of an individual 's
genotype on behavioral plasticity at the individual and colony levels.
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