Stability of short-term boldness personality under nutritional and disturbance stress in a social spider

Consistent among-individual differences in behaviours, also known as animal personalities, are ubiquitous across the animal kingdom. At the same time, the expression of these behaviours may remain context- and time- dependent. Social spiders lack morphological castes and apparent dominant hierarchies, but show consistent among-individual differences in behaviours such as boldness and aggression. Previous studies have shown that these personality traits are not associated with task participation and that personality repeatability weakens over longer durations. In this study, we tested whether short-term boldness was stable across intrinsic (nutritional state) and extrinsic (disturbance) contexts in the Indian social spider, Stegodyphus sarasinorum. We subjected individuals to feeding or starvation and repeated disturbance or no disturbance treatments, and measured boldness over three consecutive days.

We found that neither variation in nutritional state nor disturbance influenced the mean boldness scores or their repeatability. Our results show that boldness is robust to short-term changes in hunger and disturbance.

The ecological and social functions of the boldness personality trait remain unresolved in social spiders and further studies are warranted to understand how exactly among-individual variation in boldness influences colony productivity and demographic outcomes.