ETD

• anti-predatory strategy
• artificial predator
• Columba livia
• homing pigeon
• personality

To live as a prey is to always balance any activity against the risk of facing a predator. Most prey animals live in environments where risk of predation is not uniformly distributed creating areas of higher and lower risk. Yet, risk is not necessary determined objectively and different individuals may be characterized by different propensities towards facing threats. While said differences may be partly explained by past experiences and ontogeny, part of them is innate and determined by the individual’s risk propensity. In this regard, animal personality is a research topic that has seen growing interest in the past decades and recently the question of how it shapes individual foraging under varying risk began to be investigated. Aiming to determine the role of personality on individual movement across an area of known risk, we individually released a group of personality-assessed pigeons and subjected them to the repeated presence of an artificial predator, the RobotFalcon. Individual behaviour was recorded using GPS telemetry before, during and after treatment in order to determine anti-predator responses. We found the coexistence of personality-dependent and personality-independent responses to predator stimulus. Additionally, only some behaviours were determined by past experiences interacting with the predator creating, overall, a complex individual response mechanism.