Lifetime stability of social traits in bottlenose dolphins

Behavioral phenotypic traits or “animal personalities” drive critical evolutionary processes such as fitness, disease and information spread. Yet the stabilit y of behavioral traits, essential by definition, has rarely been measured over developmentally significant periods of time, limiting our understanding of how behavioral stability interacts with ontogeny. Based on 32 years of social behavioral data for 179 wild bottlenose dolphins, we show...