Animals With Personality Traits

Wide Range of Animals

• Studying a wide range of species, Dr. Samuel D. Gosling of the University of Texas, Austin has found personality traits in non-human animals ranging from guppies and octopi to dogs, dolphins and chimpanzees. How these traits are displayed, says Gosling, depends on the species. However, traits such as dutifulness, self-discipline and order seem only to be possessed by species higher on the evolutionary development scale, such as human beings and chimpanzees.

Evolution and Status

• Both Gosling and Breed believe that personality in non-human animals has developed evolutionarily, much like physical characteristics. Science readily agrees that human and animal physiology has developed similarly, so there's no reason to think that personality in animals didn't develop in the same way, says Gosling. Breed suggests that although different personalities are found within a species, individual animal personalities may be fixed by evolution, based on the group status that the individual animal holds. Successful personality traits exhibited by a dominant animal within the group, says Breed, are different than that of a subordinate animal in the pecking order.

Sex

• Gosling has found a marked difference between the personalities of male and female spotted hyenas. Male hyenas tend to be more neurotic -- high strung and nervous -- than their larger, more dominant, female counterparts. Gosling suggests that these differences indicate that personality is related to the ecological role each sex plays within a species and offers a rich area of study of the impact of social and biological components of personality.

Trout

• A November 2007 story in the Vancouver Sun cites a study by researchers at the University of Guelph that found different personality traits among individual brook trout. The biologists discovered that the different traits exhibited by the fish in the wild, such as risk taking, risk aversion and sociability, were exhibited by the fish in the laboratory. According to lead researcher, Rob McLaughlin, the finding suggests that the individual fish perceive their environments differently. For example, the study found that the risk takers were consistently less afraid of unfamiliar objects placed in their paths, while the risk-averse fish swam more slowly and methodically.