Cara Knief

eLife Assessment There is a growing interest in understanding the individuality of animal behaviours. In this important article, the authors build and use an impressive array of high throughput phenotyping paradigms to examine the 'stability' (consistency) of behavioural characteristics in a range of contexts and over time. The results show that certain behaviours are individualistic and persist robustly across external stimuli while others are less robust to these changing parameters.

Abstract Over the past decade, several studies have demonstrated that idiosyncratic animal behaviors remain stable over long time periods. The stability of individually variable behaviors over time is often referred to as an animal's individuality, or personality. However, most experimental studies have focused on individuality in a single, well-defined environmental context, whereas it is well-established from population studies that animal behavior is highly context-dependent.