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Context-Dependent Individual Variation In Foraging Behaviour And Parental Care In House Sparrows, David Moldoff

Theses and Dissertations--Biology

Behaviors can exhibit a wide degree of plasticity depending on the environmental context in which they are expressed. Despite this, repeatable differences have been found among and within individuals across a wide range of taxa. For my thesis, I investigated individual differences in foraging and parental care. In the first experiment, I assessed house sparrows (Passer domesticus) for domain-generality among neophobia, habituation and associative learning as they are all responses to novelty. While the results of the study find individual differences in each of these contexts the conclusion supported separate mechanisms for each response (domain-specificity). In the second experiment, I …