Animal Personality
I started working on personality differences in animals at the beginning of my PhD in 2004. Animal personality shares many similarities with human personality, such that it describes differences between individuals. These differences are often measured in novel surroundings or using novel objects, to examine how an animal responds to a situation it has never come across before.
Much of my early work focussed on novel exploration in great tits, but most of my post-doctoral work has focussed on a novel object response in seabirds. I measure the response of individuals to an object they have not seen before, to quantify differences in boldness.
A black browed albatross seeing the pink novel Betsy the cow, our novel object for wandering albatrosses,
object for the first time with two juvenile birds displaying in the background
We have shown that these measures are repeatable within individuals and inherited from a bird's parents. I am particularly interested in how these differences in personality are related mating strategies, such as foraging behaviour and reproductive performance.