Exploration behaviour in a different light: testing cross-context consistency of a common personality trait

Laboratory measures of personality traits are often used to answer both evolutionary and ecological questions involving behavioural variations in the wild within and between populations. However, little is known about the actual behavioural mechanisms behind any correlation with behaviours in the wild, and traits often lack validation in a different context. We examined whether the commonly used exploration behaviour trait constitutes an active exploration strategy, by testing whether the activity in the exploration test could also be captured in a different exploration context. We subjected great tits, Parus major, to two different tests, one being the standardized exploration behaviour test and one a newly constructed test. The new test arena contained eight large rooms connected by corridors, where we scored the activity of individuals and the number of rooms visited as a proxy for exploration. We found that our new exploration test captured repeatable behaviour in activity and exploration of rooms both within and across years. We found no correlations between the two tests, suggesting that they may not capture the same behaviour, in terms of exploration of rooms or activity. We conclude that in our study population, the classic exploration behaviour test seems context specific, rather than constituting a general exploration strategy.