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）提出，动物个性的产生源于群体内个体占据不同的社会生态位。本研究以社会性蜘蛛为实验对象，通过调控其群体成员间的熟悉程度，追踪了个体个性、个体表现以及群体的集体表现。研究表明，以大胆性行为的个体间稳定差异为衡量标准的个体个性，会随熟悉程度提升而增强，且这类个性会因群体成员组成的变更而遭到破坏。群体成员组成的变更会对个体表现与群体表现均产生负面影响：熟悉程度较低的群体中的个体出现体重下降，且这类群体在完成关键集体任务时的表现更差。本研究证实，社会生态位重建会给个体与群体均带来极高代价，这为稳定社会群体的演化提供了一套机制。因此，社会生态位特化或许是迈向更具组织性的社会系统的潜在第一步。