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.