Data from: Individual and group performance suffers from social niche disruption

The social niche specialization hypothesis predicts that animal personalities emerge as a result of individuals occupying different social niches within a group. Here we track individual personality and performance, and collective performance among groups of social spiders where we manipulated the familiarity of the group members. We show that individual personalities, as measured by consistent individual differences in boldness behavior, strengthen with increasing familiarity, and that these personalities can be disrupted by a change in group membership. Changing group membership negatively impacted both individual and group performance. Individuals in less familiar groups lost weight, and these groups were less successful at performing vital collective tasks. These results provide a mechanism for the evolution of stable social groups by demonstrating that social niche re-establishment carries a steep cost to both individuals and groups. Social niche specialization may therefore provide a potential first step on the path towards more organized social systems.社会生态位特化假说（social niche specialization hypothesis）预测，动物个性的产生源于个体在群体中占据不同的社会生态位。本研究追踪了群居蜘蛛群体中个体的个性、表现以及集体绩效，并对群体成员的熟悉度进行了操控。研究结果显示，以个体大胆性行为的一致性差异为衡量标准的个体个性，会随着熟悉度的提升而增强，且这类个性会因群体成员构成的改变而遭到破坏。更换群体成员会对个体和群体绩效均产生负面影响：熟悉度较低的群体中的个体出现体重下降，且此类群体在完成关键集体任务时的成功率更低。本研究通过证明社会生态位的重建会给个体与群体均带来高昂成本，为稳定社会群体的演化提供了一种机制。因此，社会生态位特化或许是迈向更有序社会系统的潜在第一步。