Boldness and learning in an active foraging lizard

Abstract

Foraging is a demanding activity for species that search intensively for food, and learning may help them minimise the costs associated with feeding. In different species, there is a relationship between personality (risk-taking) and learning, where bolder individuals learn fast and perform better in stable environments. On the other hand, shy individuals have slower learning rates because they spend more time paying attention to the environment, and their performance peaks under unstable environmental conditions. Therefore, we could expect that these differences will permeate other contexts, such as foraging mode. We evaluated learning and boldness in the active foraging lizard Aspidoscelis costatus costatus to establish if this association is present in reptiles. We found that males and females have similar learning abilities, with bolder individuals learning to find and consume food faster. Females were bolder than males in the presence of a novel object. We suggest that the results are related to the foraging ecology of the species, in which active foragers manifest risky behaviours (i.e. boldness, exploration, and higher activity) to search wide areas for prey, which may be enhanced by faster learning to reduce the costs associated with foraging.