Amazing! Many congratulations, dear Miriam! 🥳✨️🤗

Thank you so much, I am very glad to hear this! 😊🤩

@unil.bsky.social @dee-unil.bsky.social @fbm-unil.bsky.social @thesensech.bsky.social @univie.ac.at

The article is co-first authored by Michaela Masilkova and myself, and it has been a great pleasure working with Alisa Höflinger, Nina Lang, Thomas Bugnyar and Martina Konečná! 🥰☺️

Furthermore, our findings promote the implementation of social setting in test designs for animal behaviour and cognition as an equally rigorous yet, in some cases, ecologically more relevant empirical choice. 🐒 😊

These findings indicate that some personality traits may be more plastic than others and that the social environment can be an important modifier of individual behaviour.

✨ Although individual scores of ‘Avoidance/Shyness’ were consistent across settings, ‘Stress/Activity’ scores were modified by the presence of group members: more stressed/active individuals in the individual setting became less stressed/active when tested with conspecifics, and vice versa.

✨ When examining the personality structure containing the same behavioural variables across settings, two principal components emerged: ‘Avoidance/Shyness’ and ‘Stress/Activity’.

✨ We found that most of the behavioural variables showed temporal and contextual consistency and that the resulting personality structure was similar to the previously obtained captive and wild personality structures.

In this study, we aimed to answer this question by replicating a personality test battery previously done in an individual setting, with testing 25 monkeys in a social setting. We assessed their activity, reactions to novel object, food, predator, and their foraging under risk, across 2 sessions.

Animal personality has been studied in many taxa, but studies assessing the same animals in individual and social settings are lacking. Common marmosets live in family groups but also face problems on their own. Whether and how their personality profiles are affected by conspecifics is unknown.

@unil.bsky.social @dee-unil.bsky.social @fbm-unil.bsky.social @thesensech.bsky.social @univie.ac.at

This was a great cross-disciplinary collaboration with Huimin Ye, Buck Hanson, Joana Séneca, Bela Hausmann, Craig Herbold, @ppjevac.bsky.social, Thomas Bugnyar and @loyteam.bsky.social and I am very happy to have been part of this exciting endeavour! 🥰

These findings highlight specific association patterns between microbial taxa and personality, advance our understanding of microbiome-host dynamics and pave the way for research on the mechanistic links between behavior and gut microbiota in other animals and across ecological contexts. 🐒 🧫 🧬

✨ Specific microbial taxa were associated with personality traits: while members of the sulfite-reducing genus Desulfovibrio were enriched in more avoidant individuals, the predominant sulfite-reducing bacterium which was an unknown uncultured bacterium was linked to more explorative individuals.

✨  Beta diversity of the gut microbiota was linked with personality traits, age class, sex, and breeding status, but not with genetic relatedness.

✨ Within-individual microbiota variance was smaller than that between group members, and that group members exhibited more similar gut microbiota than individuals from different groups in each sampling year groups in each sampling year.

In this study, we investigated associations between specific gut microbiota members and personality traits, while controlling for diet and housing conditions. We conducted standard personality tests and fecal samples were analysed with 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. We discovered that:

Recent research has uncovered links between gut microbiota and personality. For instance, high microbiota diversity has been positively linked with exploration, openness, and sociability and negatively with stress and anxiety.