Behavioral Syndromes in Paper Wasps: links between social and non-social personality in Polistes fuscatus

Although much work has focused on non-social personality traits such as activity, exploration, and neophobia, there is a growing appreciation that social personality traits play an important role in group dynamics, disease transmission, and fitness, and that social personality traits may be linked to non-social personality traits. These relationships are important because behavioral syndromes, defined here as correlated behavioral phenotypes, can constrain evolutionary responses. However, the strength and direction of relationships between social and non-social personality traits remain unclear. In this project, we examine social and non-social personality traits, and the relationships between them, in the paper wasp Polistes fuscatus. With a novel assay we identify five personality traits, two non-social (exploration and activity) and three social (aggression, affiliation, and antennation) personality traits. We also find that social and non-social personality traits are phenotypically linked. We find a positive correlation between aggression and activity (rs = 0.33) and a negative correlation between affiliation and activity (rs = - 0.35). We also find a positive correlation between exploration and activity. Our work is an important step in understanding how phenotypic linkage between social and non-social behaviors may influence behavioral evolution. As a burgeoning model system for the study of genetic and neurobiological mechanisms of social behavior, Polistes fuscatus has potential to add to this work through exploring the causes and consequences of individual behavioral variation.