Testing transgenerational transfer of personality in managed wildlife populations: a house mouse control experiment

Pest species control operations are most effective if every individual in a population is targeted. Yet, individual personality drives variation in animal responses to devices such as traps and baits. Failing to account for differences in behavior during control operations may drive a selective removal, resulting in residual animals with biased expressions of personality. If these biased traits are passed onto offspring, control operations would become increasingly problematic. To test if biased trait expressions in founding populations are passed onto offspring, we quantified personality traits in wild-caught house mice (Mus musculus) and created founder populations selected for biased (High, Low) or Intermediate expressions of Activity. We released the behaviorally biased populations into outdoor yards to breed to the F1 generation, and ten weeks later, removed the mice and quantified the personality traits of the offspring. Despite the strong personality bias in founder populations, we observed no transgenerational transfer of personality and detected no personality bias in the F1 generation. Our results provide reassuring evidence that a single intensive control operation which selects for survivors with a personality bias is unlikely to lead to a recovering population inherently more difficult to eradicate, at least for house mice.