Q50 - Repeatability of Personality Traits Across Spider Species

Theoretical 2 Real exam question - full text reproduced under IBO's CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license

Animal personality is defined as individual differences in behaviour that are consistent across time and ecological context. One of the important drivers of personality difference is factors that alter the value of a decision. It was hypothesized that altering the feeding regimes of some spider species affect some aspects of their personality as you can see in graphs below. Estimates of repeatability of boldness and aggressiveness response of three spider species under different feeding regimes. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals for our repeatability estimates (After Lichtenstein, et al. 2016).

Figure 1. Figure 1.

Using the information and data, determine which of the statements are true or which are false.

A. This study failed to demonstrate association between boldness and aggressiveness regardless of feeding regimes.

B. Repeatability of aggressiveness response in L. hesperus is independent of feeding regimes.

C. Behavioural variation of each individual always decreases when spiders suffered prolonged food restrictions.

D. L. hesperus shows different repeatability in behavioural response than two other species regarding to different feeding regime, thus we can assume different species have different behaviour over time and contexts.

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Question reproduced from IBO 2018, Theoretical Paper 2, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 - attributed to the International Biology Olympiad. Open the full exam PDF · Community solutions (unofficial)