Predator abundance drives the association between exploratory personality and foraging habitat risk in a wild marine meso-predator.

1. In recent years, the incorporation of lower levels of organization to the understanding of population ecology, has led to an increase in interest for animal personality and individual foraging specialization. Despite these topics investigating comparable phenomena, i.e. individual consistency in behavior and in food resource use respectively, they have rarely been investigated together.

2. Food resource use is thought to be at the interface between personality and life-history. More explorative individuals in a population, for example, are thought to increase encounter rates with food resources and consequently have faster growth than less explorative conspecifics.

3. Such hypotheses have so far only received partial support, and the link between personality and life-history is increasingly speculated to be plastic and dependent on spatio-temporal variation in ecological conditions. Intra-specific competition and/or predation risk, for example are known to influence foraging sp...