STA 290 Seminar Series
Thursday, November 5th 2015, 4:10pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)
Refreshments at 3:30pm in MSB 4110 (Statistics Lounge)
Speaker: Andy Sih (Environmental Science and Policy, UC Davis)
Title: "Integrating behavioral syndromes (aka animal personalities) with social behavior and ecology"
Abstract: Recent years have seen tremendous interest in the ecological and evolutionary implications of differences among individuals within species in boldness, aggressiveness, sociability and other aspects of what have been termed 'animal personalities'. After providing a brief overview of the state of this field, I present the results of recent work in my lab on how: 1) personality and variation in the social environment (including the mix of personalities in the social group) influence social dynamics and sexual selection; 2) personality-dependent dispersal relates to invasion dynamics; and 3) variation in personalities affect parasite loads and vice versa. These issues are all of high importance to humans; however, to do controlled experiments and generate large amounts of data, we work not on humans, but on insects, fish and lizards.