Data from: Integrating thermal physiology within a syndrome: locomotion, personality and habitat selection in an ectotherm

1. Physiology and temperature can both have a profound influence on
behaviour and metabolism. Despite this, thermal physiology has rarely been
considered within the animal personality framework, but could be an
inherent mechanism maintaining consistent individual differences in
behaviour, particularly in species that need to thermoregulate (i.e.
ectotherms). 2. Here, we present evidence for a thermal-behavioural
syndrome and detail how it is linked to variation in habitat selection in
an Australian lizard, the delicate skink, Lampropholis delicata. 3. We
predicted that individuals would occur along a cold-hot continuum –
analogues to the slow-fast continuum proposed by the pace-of-life
hypothesis - whereby an individual’s placement along a thermal
physiological axis will correspond with their placement along a
personality axis. We first tested the thermal-behavioural syndrome by
measuring the thermal preferences and optimal performance temperature of
individual skinks and linking it to their activity, exploratory, social
and boldness behaviours. 4. In line with our predictions, we found that
individuals with a ‘hot’ thermal type performed optimally at higher
temperatures, had faster sprint speeds and were more active, explorative
and bold relative to ‘cold’ thermal types. 5. We then monitored each
individual’s habitat selection within an artificial environment containing
three microhabitats differing in their thermal characteristics. 6. We
found that an individual’s thermal type mediated their use of habitat, in
which ‘hot’ individuals utilised a hotter microhabitat more regularly than
both ‘cold’ and ‘intermediate’ thermal types, suggesting that the
thermal-behavioural syndrome could drive ecological niche partitioning in
this species. 7. We envisage that the thermal-behavioural syndrome concept
is likely to extend to other study systems, particularly to ectothermic
organisms that rely heavily on behavioural thermoregulation to maintain
optimal body temperature.