Box Turtle / Painted Turtle Personality

This project was started in Paul Schaeffer’s Lab when Ann Rypstra, a fellow professor at Miami University, wanted to know if a certain biologging data set could potentially be used to look for personality. This data set was taken by Adam Parlin during his Ph.D. work at Miami in 2015, way before I even knew where I wanted to go to college.

The premise of his study was “simple”. Let’s put biologgers (devices that are really similar to fitbits for humans) on box turtles and see what happens! After around 2 weeks of data collection for 11 different turtles, heart rate, GPS location, body temperature, ambient temperature, acceleration, and other derived variables were all complied into a spreadsheet. They also did this in a future year with painted turtles in mesocosms. Although Adam did some awesome work with this (see here!), he never explored personality. That’s where I came in.

As a little freshman with absolutely no experience in R, I was tasked with using repeatability, a commonly used metric in animal personality, to discover if these physiological traits of the box turtles were different from eachother all while being consistent. Three years and I’m still working on it.

What did we find? Well, until the paper is published I won’t say too much. But, let’s just say that the data the biologgers collected showed consistent traits that were different among the individuals. In reality, that’s the basis for animal personality: consistent differences among individuals within a group. So, the next step is to figure out —> what can heart rate show us about personality? If a turtle moves more can we consider them to be more bold?

Manuscript Link: TBD

Contributors:

Adam Parlin

Ann Rypstra

Paul Schaeffer