Abstract Animal personality—consistent individual differences in behavior—has been shown to shape ecological and evolutionary outcomes, but its role in prey-specialized predators, with highly-stereotyped behavior, remains poorly understood. Here, we investigated how individual variation in exploration and predatory aggression are associated with hunting tactics, predatory performance, kleptobiosis, and mating behavior in the ant-eating spider Zodarion rubidum. We found high repeatability in aggressiveness and moderate repeatability in exploration, indicating stable personality traits. Higher aggressiveness but not higher exploration was associated with shorter attack latency, higher attack frequency, and faster paralysis of prey, suggesting that more aggressive individuals are more effective hunters. However, personality traits were not related to attack orientation (i.e., frontal, peripheral, or from rear) or paralysis efficiency as measured by the delay between attack and prey immobilization. Furthermore, neither exploration nor aggressiveness were related to kleptobiotic behavior or mating success, and no significant effects of explorative phenotype combinations (in males and females) were detected. These findings demonstrate that while aggressiveness is associated with individual hunting performance in this specialist predator, its role in behaviors like kleptobiosis and mating may be limited or context-dependent. Our study highlights that even in highly-stereotyped foragers, personality can shape foraging efficiency, offering insights into the evolutionary ecology of specialization.
Beydizada et al. (Sun,) studied this question.