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Sharks may have individual social style

The Columbian
Published: November 28, 2014, 12:00am

Small-spotted catsharks show signs of having social personalities, according to new research.

You can look at just about any animal and see that it has quirks: Dogs who are pessimistic, octopodes that squirt their least favorite researchers in the lab, and moray eels that like to cuddle — just to name a few.

But this study, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, wasn’t just looking to see which sharks were grumpy or friendly. Instead, researchers wanted to see if the sharks would repeat the same behaviors in different settings — the same way we do.

“Imagine if we took 10 work colleagues and plonked them in a bar, and observed which individuals sat with which other individuals over the course of an evening,” said William Hughes, a University of Sussex animal behavior researcher who wasn’t involved in the study.

To see whether someone was inherently solitary or socially gregarious, you could repeat the experiment in different places — and with different individuals — to see who tended to form large, lively social gatherings and who tended to socialize with as few people as possible.

Ten groups, each with 10 of the catsharks, were put in three different environments.

To stay safe in the ocean, a young shark has one of two options — group up to rely on the buddy system, or stay isolated and try to blend in with its surroundings. The researchers hypothesized that sharks would stick to one adaptation — that some would be social, and some would be loners. Sure enough, the sharks that liked big groups did so in any location, while the loners stayed as such.

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