Like humans, bugs too have personalities

WASHINGTON - Scientists have revealed that bugs may all look alike to human eyes, but they have their own, unique personalities.

Some individual bugs, like humans, turn out to be shy, while others are very forceful, determined the researchers from University of Debrecen.

“Boldness, explorativeness, activity and aggressiveness are the main personality traits usually measured because these connect to each other and appear together,” Discovery News quoted Eniko Gyuris as saying.

“Boldness — whether they are shier or braver — could be defined, for example, as to how quickly they start after an alarm, or how soon they come out of their refuge,” added Gyuris.

In one experiment, the researchers noted how long it took for a bug to get out of their vials and explore objects kept on an arena’s floor. They also noted how many objects each firebug explored, how fast the bug moved, how long it took to reach the wall of the arena, and more.

Each individual firebug behaved in a unique manner, consistent across all of the experiments. If a particular bug was classified as bold and brave, it acted that way under a variety of circumstances. The same held true for more tentative, less aggressive firebugs.

Raine Kortet, a University of Helsinki researcher, and colleague Ann Hedrick discovered that cricket personalities are all over the chart - some are veritable daredevils, while others are passive and guarded.

Kortet and Hedrick concluded, “more aggressive males are also more active in general, and possibly less cautious towards predation risk.”

The study is published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (ANI)