What is a personality
Idk about bugs but snails in captivity have friends who they prefer to spend most of their time with. They also have favorite foods they get excited for.
This comment made me cry. Imagine being a little snail with your little snail best friends getting excited for some lettuce. I can’t handle that.
If this made you cry, don’t think about the fact that swans can be gay.
I also cried when I first learned this 🫂
Snails are the cutest. I used go have them.
They also love scaping their enclosure and hiding. Some of them scape more than others and some had favourite hiding spots.
Personality, in short, is consistent patterns of behavior that exist across time and context. Someone “extroverted” will consistently explore new environments, while someone shy will avoid them
There have been studies that show insects display some aspects of personality
If by personality you mean individual-level differences in behavior, yes, definitely. (It’s old now but it holds up)
I mean, it’d be odd if there was variation like there is in all organisms but it somehow didn’t extend to the brain.
Even wilder, because of the semi-decentralised way an octopus’s central nervous system is set up, it’s been suggested each tentacle might have a personality of it’s own, on top of the octopus’s!
That surprised me about octopuses. They’re really cool animals.
Individual creatures do have their own traits that make them differ from the rest. They aren’t robots following the exact same instruction for every stimulus. That being said, personality implies a sense of agency or self-awareness, and I don’t think they have that. Humans have a built in desire to anthropomorphize anything that begins to resemble something human-like, it’s in our brain.
We had a scorpion growing up that liked me and not my brother, despite both of us being roughly equally responsible for feeding it. It would come right up to me and take food out of my hand but backed away and tried to not make contact with my brother. That’s enough for me without getting all philosophical about what “personality” means.
It’s name was Viggo, as in Mortenson, as in Strider, the Heir of Isildur.
My buddy used to have tarantulas and while I fucking hated and was scared shitless by them, they apparently had recognizable personality quirks and habits according to him. Shiver Creepy little bastards though
Idk about scientifically, but I’ve had spiders at my place that seemed like they had different personalities. For example, one was smaller but liked to traverse around and build lots of webs. He’d disappear and turn up in another corner of the room. He tried all the corners except for the one by the shower cuz it was too wet. Kinda spazzy. I called him Napoleon. Meanwhile there was another spider (same species) in the room that was super chill, just hanging out on the same web for months. Not bothered by anything, even when Napoleon built a web in his corner. I dubbed this one The Dude lol
Yes they have! Here‘s a video a found ages ago and just spent 10 minutes searching
Capture a bunch of these creatures and watch them for a few weeks. You’ll see if they do.
I’m not sure, but the neighbours hand raised a starling who then decided we were his best friend, and I’ve never seen such a personality in a bird. He would yell through the kitchen window for me to come get him and take him for a drive around the block. He loved the car, came for walks with me and my dogs sitting atop my head and rooting through my hair, teased my dog by sitting just out of his reach and squawking at him as a joke, and it was SO amazing, but you could actually pick his specific voice out among all the many chirping birds when he was chirping at us to come outside and pay attention to him and feed him, I had no idea wild birds could be so very funny and demanding. He’s still alive five years later and summons the neighbour to come outside and give him mealworms by yelling through the window.
