When the mean no longer matters: developmental diet affects behavioral variation but not population averages in the house cricket (Acheta domesticus)

Despite recent progress in elucidating the genetic basis for behavioral variation, the effects of the developmental environment on the maintenance and generation of behavioral variation across multiple traits remain poorly resolved. We investigated how nutritional status during development affected behavioral variation and covariance between activity in an open field test and response to cues of predator presence in the house cricket (Acheta domesticus). We provided 98 juvenile crickets with either a high or low quality diet during development, throughout which we measured body mass, activity in a modified open-field, and response to predator excreta twice every week for 3 weeks. Diet quality affected growth rate but not average activity or response to cues of predator presence, nor the correlation between the 2. However, repeatability (τ) in response to cues of predator presence was reduced by 0.24 in individuals exposed to the high quality diet versus the low quality diet. Larger indi...