October 19, 2021 — Personality profiling is not unique to criminology. The method is used to identify health risks, aid personnel recruitment, develop education programs and build dating apps. Despite this wide range of applications, there is one thing all these approaches have in common: they are almost exclusively used on humans.
Biologists recognize that animals have personality traits that are consistent across time. However, animal behaviour is often studied in large groups of animals so that data can be collected to investigate wide-scale trends. This means the need to build detailed personality profiles on an individual scale is uncommon.
Unless, as demonstrated by the case of Jack the Ripper, there are unknown individuals within a population that exhibit a rare behaviour and are avoiding detection.
Cleaner fish remove and eat parasites from the skin of other fishes. Some species of cleaner fish are used in salmon aquaculture to help control parasitic sea lice. Lumpfish are a commonly used cleaner fish, and millions of juveniles are released into salmon farms each year. However, only a minority of lumpfish (around 20 per cent) actually clean salmon of sea lice, while the rest either ignore salmon or compete for pellet food.
It is unclear why only certain lumpfish clean salmon and observing this behaviour is exceedingly rare. As part of a research team at the Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Research at Swansea University, my colleagues and I tried to solve this mystery by following the same logic as the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.
We designed a series of behavioural tests to build detailed personality profiles of lumpfish, in hope of identifying the individuals that showed cleaning behaviour. This involved testing for variation in activity, aggression, anxiety, boldness and sociality of individual lumpfish over repeated sessions, and then recording how these individuals interacted with salmon.
Read the full story at The Conversation