Boldness suppresses hoarding behavior in food hoarding season and reduces over-wintering survival in a social rodent

The "pace-of-life" syndrome (POLS) framework can encompass multiple personality axes that drive important functional behaviours (e.g., foraging behaviour) and that co-vary with multiple life history traits. Food hoarding is an adaptive behaviour important for an animal's adaptation to seasonal fluctuations in food availability. However, the empirical evidence for the relationships between animal personality and hoarding behaviour remains unclear, including its fitness consequences in the POLS framework. In this study, the Mongolian gerbil (Meriones unguiculatus), a social rodent, was used as a model system to investigate how boldness or shyness is associated with food hoarding strategies in the food hoarding season and overwinter survival or reproduction at individual and group levels. The results of this study showed that compared to shy gerbils, bold gerbils had a lower effort foraging strategy during the food hoarding season and exhibited lower overwinter survival, but bold–shy personality differences had no effect on overwinter reproduction. These findings suggest that the personality of the animal is a key factor that affects the foraging strategy during the food hoarding season in Mongolian gerbils. Personality may be related to energy states or the reaction to environmental change (e.g., predation risk, food availability) in bold or shy social animals. These results reflect animal life history trade-offs between "current versus future reproduction" and "reproduction versus self-maintenance", thereby helping Mongolian gerbils adapt to seasonal fluctuations in their living environment.