‘I can’t help Lentille. Even though she roars. As long as she roars, I won’t be able to work.’ An essay from Urs Mannhart, translated by Christine Müller
The presence of repeatable behaviours that vary between individuals (animal personality) and the mechanisms that underpin these behaviours are of significant ecological and evolutionary importance. With current climatic trends predicted to facilitate biological invasions, we sought to examine how personality and behavioural syndromes may influence invasion potential in the face of a changing climate. We assessed a population of an invasive crayfish, Cherax destructor, in a laboratory setting for (1) the presence of temporally and contextually repeatable behavioural differences between individuals along three axes: (i) activity, (ii) boldness/shyness and (iii) exploration/avoidance, (2) correlations between body size, sex and behavioural traits at the between-individual level, (3) the influence of predicted near-future increases in temperature on personality and (4) the presence of behavioural syndromes (between-individual correlations among behaviours). Individuals exhibited repeatable