摘要
In animal societies, behavioral idiosyncrasies of the individuals often guide which tasks theyshould perform. Such personality-specific task participation can increase individual task efficiency,thereby improving group performance. While several recent studies have documented group-levelbenefits of within-group behavioral （i.e., personality） diversity, how these benefits are realized atthe individual level is unclear. Here we probe the individual-level benefits of personality-driven taskparticipation in the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola. In S. dumicola, the presence of at leastone highly bold individual catalyzes foraging behavior in shy colony members, and all group con-stituents heavily compete for prey. We assessed boldness by examining how quickly spidersresumed normal movement after a simulated predator attack. We test here whether （1） participantsin collective foraging gain more mass from prey items and （2） whether bold individuals are less re-sistant to starvation than shy spiders, which would motivate the bold individuals to forage more.Next, we assembled colonies of shy spiders with and without a bold individual, added one preyitem, and then tracked the mass gain of each individual spider after this single feeding event. Wefound that spiders that participated in prey capture （whether bold or shy） gained more mass thannonparticipators, and colonies containing a single bold spider gained more total mass than purelyshy colonies. We also found that bold spiders participated in more collective foraging events andwere more susceptible to starvation than shy spiders, suggesting that the aggressive foraging ofbold individuals may represent a strategy to offset starvation risk. These findings add to the bodyof evidence that animal personality can shape social organization, individual performance, andgroup success.
