Claudio Carere

• PhD Biology of Behaviour
• Professor (Associate) at University of Tuscia

Understanding how and why animal groups behave collectively is a central question in behavioural and social sciences. Variation in the phenotypic composition of the individuals within a group can lead to differences in group attributes and performance. However, whether and how individual personalities translate into group performance is not yet ful...

How individual differences translate into group outcomes is a controversial issue and depends on the phenotypic composition of the group. Research on the effect of within-group homogeneity/heterogeneity in phenotypic composition provided contrasting results, with some studies supporting benefits of homogeneity and others the opposite. We characteri...

Developmental plasticity refers to an organism's ability to adjust its development in response to changing environmental conditions, leading to changes in behaviour, physiology, or morphology. This adaptability is crucial for survival and helps organisms to cope with environmental challenges throughout their lives. Understanding the mechanisms unde...

Mito-nuclear discordances across secondary contact zones have been described in a wide range of organisms. They consist of a spatial mismatch between nuclear and mitochondrial genomes in terms of location and extension of the contact zone between distinct evolutionary lineages. Despite the evolutionary and biogeographic causes of mito-nuclear disco...

Understanding the origin, universality, and maintenance of among-individual variation in behaviour is a current focus of behavioural ecology and comparative psychology. Research on animal personality emphasising the central role of the individual contributes to conservation efforts and animal welfare by tailoring guidelines and interventions at the...

For many animal species, the ability to adapt to coexistence with the human species and to the environmental changes that humans cause is a biological imperative. This adaptive capacity varies not only between species, but within species. Studying individual differences in animals' behavioral, cognitive and physiological adaptability is important f...

Behaviour is predicted to be a primary determinant of the success of the invasion process during the early phases of colonization. Comparing invaders with sympatric native species may provide a good approach to unravel behavioural traits involved in an invasion process. In this study, we carried out an experimental simulation of the introduction an...

Patterns of collective escape of a bird flock from a predator are fascinating, but difficult to study under natural conditions because neither prey nor predator is under experimental control. We resolved this problem by using an artificial predator (RobotFalcon) resembling a peregrine falcon in morphology and behaviour. We imitated hunts by chasing...

A well-established field of research in vertebrates focuses on the variability of cognitive abilities within species. From mammals to fish, numerous studies have revealed remarkable differences in the cognitive phenotype among individuals, particularly in terms of sex or personality. However, many aspects of the mechanisms, genetics, and selective...

Inter-individual variation in antipredatory behaviour has long attracted curiosity among scientists. Deimatism is a complex, multi-component antipredatory strategy consisting of prey suddenly unleashing unexpected defences to startle predators and stop their attack. Deimatic species provide an appealing system to investigate the trade-offs between...

Migratory species are changing their timing of departure from wintering areas and arrival to breeding sites (i.e. migration phenology) in response to climate change to exploit maximum food availability at higher latitudes and improve their fitness. Despite the impact of changing migration phenology at population and community level, the extent to w...

Conservation aquaculture offers important tools to secure sustainable animal supplies for human use. However, intensive aquaculture practices are increasingly raising concerns about the welfare conditions of farmed animals, which typically face high mortality rates due to diseases, cannibalism, and aggression. Here we focus on the European lobster...

Biotic conflict can create evolutionary competition across species in the quest to maintain vital populations. In some cases, this process is driven by conflict among members of the same species, an important selective force in high-density non-indigenous populations. By killing and feeding on their intraspecific competitors, cannibals enhance thei...

Behaviour is predicted to be a primary determinant of the success of the invasion process during the early phases of colonization. Comparing sympatric invaders and native species may provide a good approach to unravel behavioural traits involved in an invasion process. In this study, we carried out an experimental simulation of the introduction and...

How individual differences translate into group outcomes is a timely and debated issue. Recent studies, especially in social arthropods and fish, focus on diversity of personality traits. These studies suggest that the phenotypic group assortment by personality type of an animal group, including the presence of keystone individuals, leads to group-...

Collisions between birds and airplanes can damage aircrafts, resulting in delays and cancellation of flights, costing the international civil aviation industry more than 1.4 billion US dollars annually. Driving away birds is therefore crucial, but the effectiveness of current deterrence methods is limited. Live avian predators can be an effective d...

Recent empirical and theoretical studies suggest that personality and locomotory performance traits linked to dispersal abilities are crucial components of the dispersal syndromes, and that they can evolve during range expansions and colonization processes. Island colonization is one of the best characterised processes in dispersal biogeography, an...

Patterns of mito-nuclear discordance across secondary contact zones have been reported in a wide range of animal and plant organisms. They consist of a spatial mismatch between nuclear and mitochondrial genomes, in terms of the geographic location and/or extension of the secondary contact zone between distinct evolutionary lineages. Several theoret...

Collisions between birds and airplanes, bird strikes, can damage aircrafts, resulting in delays and cancellation of flights, costing the international civil aviation industry more than 1.4 billion U.S. dollars annually. Bird deterrence is therefore crucial, but the effectiveness of all available deterrence methods is limited. For example, live avia...

P r e s e n t i n g A u t h o r (s) Background/Question/Methods Mito-nuclear discordance across secondary contact zones have been widely reported in many taxa, including animal and plant species. It consists of a mismatch between nuclear and mitochondrial genomes in the geographic location and/or extension of the secondary contact zone between dist...

Telomere length variation has been implicated in processes of ecological and evolutionary importance in a wide range of organisms. However, while the temporal component of this variation has been the subject of much research, we do not know yet whether a spatial component exists within species in telomere dynamics. Here, we investigated for the fir...

Regulation of oxidative status plays a substantial role in physiological ageing. However, we know little about age-related changes of oxidative status in wild animals, and even less about the role of population history in moulding ageing rates. We addressed these questions by means of a common garden experiment, using the Tyrrhenian tree frog Hyla...

Individual animals across all taxa differ consistently in behaviour, i.e. they show personality traits. This inter-individual variability has significant ecological and evolutionary consequences, since it affects a range of population-level processes. Here, we focus on the selection and recruitment of nursery habitats in temperate fish larvae. The...

Objective uncontrolled ingestion of alcohol has dramatic consequences on the entire organism also associated with the oxidation process induced by alcohol by elevating radical oxygen species (ROS). Resveratrol, a non-flavonoid phenol, shows well-documented antioxidant properties. We investigated the potential antioxidant ability of this natural com...

When a predator attacks a flock of starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), involving thousands of individuals, a typical collective escape response is the so-called agitation wave, consisting of one or more dark bands (pulses) propagating through the flock and moving away from the predator (usually a Peregrine falcon, Falco peregrinus). The mechanism underly...

This introductory chapter sets up the roots and rationale of the volume while outlining its logical structure, contents and goals. It is about welfare, not of the captive laboratory or farm mammals and birds that we usually consider but about invertebrates, the other 99% of animal species. Invertebrates have been previously relegated to the categor...

Personality, defined as consistent between-individual variation in clusters of behavioral traits independent of factors such as age or sex, emerges in most animal species tested so far. The number of invertebrate species discovered to have clear personality profiles is rapidly increasing. This previously neglected variation harbors many unsolved qu...

Collective behaviour of animals has been a main focus of recent research, yet few empirical studies deal with this issue in the context of predation, a major driver of social complexity in many animal species. When starling (Sturnus vulgaris) flocks are under attack by a raptor, such as a peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus), they show a great diver...

Studies of animal personality have shown consistent between-individual variation in behaviour in many social and non-social contexts, but hunting behaviour has been overlooked. Prey capture sequences, especially in invertebrates, are supposed to be quite invariant. In cuttlefish, the attack includes three components: attention, positioning, and sei...

Attempts to breed crustacean species of commercial interest to promote the conservation, restoration and enhancement of the stocks are increasing. Optimization of diet for larval growth is a crucial step for successful actions. Here we focus on the caramote prawn (Penaeus kerathurus), a primary target of small-scale fishery because of its high comm...

The link between individual and group-level behaviour may help understanding cooperation and division of labour in social animals. Despite the recent surge of studies, especially in social insects, the way individual differences translate into group performance remains debated. One hypothesis is that groups may simply differ in the average personal...

Capturing wild birds with mist nets is very common for studying many aspects of avian biology. However, except for adrenocortical reactivity, little is known about other physiological responses to this potentially stressful procedure. Here, we focused on body temperature (Tb) in migratory songbirds, as large numbers are caught for population monito...

Various methods have been adopted for monitoring marine megafauna and cetaceans in particular. Most of them rely on direct observation and have strong limitations: they are expensive and time-consuming; they allow monitoring only at small spatial and temporal scales; they require specialised technical staff. Satellite imagery to detect and count ma...

Compensatory growth may increase molecular oxidative damage, which may be mitigated through the intake of dietary antioxidants. However, dietary antioxidants may also reduce concentration of antioxidant enzymes, which have a key role in regulating the oxidative status. Here we investigated whether feeding on a diet rich in antioxidants (vitamin E)...

Habitat choice is defined as a nonrandom distribution of genotypes in different microhabitats. Therefore, it could exert a great impact on the genetic variance of natural populations by promoting genetic divergence, local adaptation, and may even lead to sympatric speciation. Despite this potential role in micro- and macro-evolutionary processes, t...

Personality differences can have consequences on the behavioural performance of an individual, which might even lead to emerging group-level phenomena. We studied such potential effects in sibling groups of juvenile mound building mice (Mus spicilegus). We asked whether personality was associated with individual transport performance and whether th...

An intriguing question in behavioural biology is whether consistent individual differences (called animal personalities) relate to variation in cognitive performance because commonly measured personality traits may be associated with risk-reward trade-offs. Social insects, whose learning abilities have been extensively characterized, show consisten...

Emotional state may influence cognitive processes such as attention and decision-making. A cognitive judgement bias is the propensity to anticipate either positive or negative consequences in response to ambiguous information. Recent work, mainly on vertebrates, showed that the response to ambiguous stimuli might change depending on an individual’s...

Spatial sorting of dispersal-enhancing traits has been implicated in substantial directional changes in the phenotypic and genotypic makeup of populations undergoing range expansion. Here we explore the evolutionary consequences of these changes, when two divergent lineages come into secondary contact. We combine instances from the study of contemp...

Environmental stress can promote evolutionary forces and genetic divergence, but at which microgeographic scale divergence may arise, even in the presence of gene flow, remains poorly known. We studied the effects of eutrophication in a saltwork over a period of 6 years on the gene pool of a local population of the Mediterranean killifish Aphanius...

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Animal personality can be seen as behavioural polymorphism that could play a direct and active role in driving evolutionary pathways. Here, we argue that consistent individual differences in key personality traits affecting dispersal and other density-dependent processes provided substantial contributions to moulding biogeographic patterns. Buildin...

Cephalopods have been defined as "advanced invertebrates" due to the complexity of their nervous system and to their sophisticated behavioural repertoire. However, until recently, the protection and welfare of this class of invertebrates has been mostly disregarded by EU regulations on the use of laboratory animals. The inclusion of "live cephalopo...

The identification of foraging hotspots able to support the co-existence of multiple top predators provides a potential approach to addressing protection measures for marine ecosystems. In this study, we conducted visual surveys in the central Tyrrhenian Sea to determine areas with simultaneous presence of bottlenose dolphins, four species of seabi...

Consistent individual differences in clusters of behaviour (animal personalities) are being increasingly recognized by researchers of different disciplines, but studies on invertebrates are still scanty. In order to test for the presence of personality-like individual profiles we assessed the behavioural responsiveness of adult male cuttlefish temp...

The bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) is one of the Mediterranean cetaceans listed in the Annex II of Habitat Directive for which the designation of Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) is required. Bottlenose dolphins occur regularly in most coastal waters of the basin and around many of the region’s offshore islands and archipelagos. Within...

Restocking and stock enhancement of marine organisms are increasingly becoming a common practice to replenish populations of fish and invertebrates. As for aquaculture, they raise several conservation and welfare issues. Here, we focus on lobsters (Homarus sp.), crustacean decapods that have been cultivated and released since the end of the ninetee...

The choice of a suitable species to translate pollution signals into a quantitative monitor is a fundamental step in bio-monitoring plans. Here we present the results of three years of biomonitoring at a new coal power plant in central Italy using three different aquatic and terrestrial wildlife species in order to compare their reliability as sent...

The choice of a suitable species to translate pollution signals into a quantitative monitor is a fundamental step in biomonitoring plans. Here we present the results of three years of biomonitoring at a new coal power plant in central Italy using three different aquatic and terrestrial wildlife species in order to compare their reliability as senti...

Migratory birds have evolved physiological and behavioural adaptations for crossing large ecological barriers through the accumulation of large amounts of fat and protein during the pre-migratory phase. Nevertheless, most migrant passerines usually need several stopovers en route to replenish their energy reserves and to rest. Migratory decisions a...

Understanding the responses of ecological communities to human-induced perturbations is crucial for establishing conservation goals. Ecological communities are dynamic entities undergoing fluctuations due to their intrinsic characteristics as well as anthropogenic pressures varying over time. In this respect, long-term studies, based on large spati...

In birds reproductive activities tend to be synchronized within populations to the period in which the fitness benefits are the highest. In seasonal environments the period of food abundance is one of the crucial factors to which breeding time should be synchronized. Global warming has led to changes in timing of many species. These changes can dif...

Coping styles represent alternative response patterns in reaction to a stressor. The coping style model provides a set of predictions about correlations between behavioural and neurophysiological reactions to a stressful situation. According to this model, high levels of activity should be correlated with high levels of aggressiveness at the behavi...

We validated the alkaline comet assay in two species of land snail (Helix aspersa and Helix vermiculata) to test their suitability as sentinels for primary DNA damage in polluted environments. The study was conducted under the framework of a biomonitoring program for a power station in Central Italy that had recently been converted from oil to coal...

While invertebrates make up the majority of animal species, their welfare is overlooked compared to the concern shown to vertebrates. This fact is highlighted by the near absence of regulations in animal research, with the exception of cephalopods in the European Union. This is often justified by assumptions that invertebrates do not experience pai...

Ask anyone who has owned a pet and they’ll assure you that, yes, animals have personalities. And science is beginning to agree. Researchers have demonstrated that both domesticated and nondomesticated animals—from invertebrates to monkeys and apes—behave in consistently different ways, meeting the criteria for what many define as personality. But w...

This chapter explores the relationship between physiological and behavioral traits commonly considered in animal personality assessments, discussing the physiological responses to stress and the activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), the sympatho-adrenomedullary pathway (SAM), and the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis (HPG). I...

Variation in how individuals cope behaviourally and physiologically with stressors is widespread and can have a significant impact on life-history traits and fitness. Individual coping styles are characterised by differential behavioural and adrenocortical reactivity to various challenges. As stress hormones can affect the production of reactive ch...

Gli uccelli migratori necessitano di specifici adattamenti fisiologici e comportamentali per coprire grandi distanze ed attraversare barriere ecologiche senza avere la possibilità di fermarsi ed alimentarsi. Durante la migrazione gli uccelli utilizzano il grasso e le proteine accumulate durante la fase pre-migratoria. Nonostante l’elevato acc...

The formation of waves is a vivid example of collective behaviour occurring in insects, birds, fish and mammals, which has been interpreted as an antipredator response. In birds a quantitative characterization of this phenomenon, involving thousands of individuals, is missing and its link with predation remains elusive. We studied waves in flocks o...

The study of animal personality has attracted considerable attention, as it has revealed a number of similarities in personality between humans and several nonhuman species. At the same time the adaptive value and evolutionary maintenance of different personalities are the subject of debate. Since Pavlov's work on dogs, students of comparative cogn...

Migratory birds use stopover sites for resting and feeding. Breaks after prolonged flights may allow cooling down the muscles and save energy through hypothermia. We measured hypothermic abilities in two long-distance migratory songbirds (garden warbler, Sylvia borin, and icterine warbler, Hippolais polyglotta) at a stopover site during spring migr...

In the past decade there has been a profusion of studies highlighting covariation between individual differences in stress physiology and behavioural profiles, here called personalities. Such individual differences in ways of coping with stress are relevant both in biomedicine, since different personalities may experience a different stress and dis...

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Predators use diverse hunting strategies to maximize hunting success, while preys adopt anti-predator strategies to maximize escape chances, among which flocking, communal roosting, and the related collective responses are a common pattern in gregarious species. Prey-predator interactions involving a single predator and flocks, a common situation i...

Exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) is a widespread phenomenon in nature. Although the mechanisms of action of EDCs are actively studied, the consequences of endocrine disruption (ED) at the population level and the adaptations evolved to cope with chronic EDC exposure have been overlooked. Birds probably represent the animal taxon mo...

In the present study, large scale geographical variation in the occurrence of organohalogenated pollutants (OHPs) was investigated throughout Europe using eggs of a terrestrial resident passerine species, the blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus). Blue tit eggs from 10 sampling locations, involving suburban, rural and remote areas, in 7 European countries...

Through combining theoretical models and empirical data, complexity science has increased our understanding of social behavior of animals, in particular of social insects, primates, and fish. What are missing are studies of collective behavior of huge swarms of birds. Recently detailed empirical data have been collected of the swarming maneuvers of...

During migration, a number of bird species rely on stopover sites for resting and feeding before and after crossing ecological barriers such as deserts or seas. The duration of a stopover depends on the combined effects of environmental factors, endogenous programmes and physiological conditions. Previous studies indicated that lean birds prolong t...

To test the hypothesis that variation in aerial flocking behaviour is adaptively related to predation risk, we described and quantified the flocking patterns of starlings, approaching two urban roosts, which differed in predation pressure (by peregrine falcons, Falco peregrinus). We predicted that the higher predation pressure in one of the roosts...

Large-scale studies are essential to assess the emission patterns and spatial distribution of organohalogenated pollutants (OHPs) in the environment. Bird eggs have several advantages compared to other environmental media which have previously been used to map the distribution of OHPs. In this study, large-scale geographical variation in the occurr...

The use of the behavioural repertoire approach in comparative personality research involves the compilation of an ethogram. However, what behaviours should be included in the ethogram and whether they should be grouped into categories is unclear. To ensure that the behaviours belong to the natural repertoire of the species, certain assumptions rega...

The increase or decrease in yolk androgens over the laying sequence of a clutch in birds may mitigate or enhance, respectively, the disadvantage of the last-hatched chicks, providing a potentially adaptive tool to adjust brood size to food conditions. This variation may involve a genetic component on which Darwinian selection can act. We found that...

In this study we investigated the accumulation of polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs), polychlorodibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs), polychlorodibenzofurans (PCDFs), and the chlorinated pesticides 1,1-dichloro-2,2-bis(4-chlorophenyl)-ethene (DDE), 1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-bis(4-chlorophenyl)-ethane (DDT), and hexachlorobenzene (HCB) in the breast muscle, liver, lung, hea...

Handling and bleeding are frequently used procedures in avian research and several studies show that they can exert short-term effects, such as elevation in corticosterone levels. However, the long-term effects of exposure to such manipulations are largely unknown, but could have important implications, especially for much of the long-term research...

Mice selected for aggression and coping (long attack latency (LAL), reactive coping strategy; short attack latency (SAL), pro-active coping strategy) are a useful model for studying the physiological background of animal personalities. These mice also show a differential stress responsiveness, especially in terms of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal a...

Avian embryos are exposed not only to endogenous sex steroids, which are produced by their gonads and have a key role in sexual differentiation, but also to maternal steroids transferred into the egg yolk, which can modulate the development of individual differences in behavior. Studies of maternal hormones have primarily focused on ultimate questi...

In many vertebrate species the medial preoptic area projects to a premotor nucleus, the periaqueductal central gray (PAG). This connection plays an important role in the control of reproductive behavior. In male Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) specifically, the medial preoptic nucleus (POM), where various types of sensory inputs converge, is a c...

We quantified in the garden warbler (Sylvia borin) and the barn swallow (Hirundo rustica), two long-distance migratory songbirds, the early oxidative damage (ROMs) and plasma anti-oxidant capacity (OXY) variation of individuals caught at a stop-over site after a sustained flight across the sea, during spring migration. Our main goal was to quantify...

The contribution of social factors to seasonal plasticity in singing behavior and forebrain nuclei controlling song, and their interplay with gonadal steroid hormones are still poorly understood. In many songbird species, testosterone (T) enhances singing behavior but elevated plasma T concentrations are not absolutely required for singing to occur...

Yolk androgens affect offspring hatching, begging, growth and survival in many bird species. If these effects are sex-specific, yolk androgen deposition may constitute a mechanism for differential investment in male and female offspring. We tested this hypothesis in zebra finches. In this species, females increase yolk-testosterone levels and produ...

We carried out a longitudinal study on great tits from two lines bidirectionally selected for fast or slow exploratory performance during the juvenile phase, a trait thought to reflect different personalities. We analysed temporal stability and consistency of responses within and between situations involving exploratory and sociosexual behaviour. E...

Individuals of the same sex or age within a given species often differ from each other in their behaviour and underlying physiology, even under stan-dardized conditions. Most of this variation is non-random and is consistent across situations or contexts and across time. Frequently, these individual dif-ferences become conspicuous and easily measur...