Many people think their dog has the best personality in the world, but when they think of sharks a surfer-mauling robot comes to mind. Researchers think sharks actually have personalities too.
Personality can be observed in animals through "behavioral consistency," meaning an aggressive animal will act aggressively in almost all situations and a shy one will do the same, a Bimini Biological Field Station press release reported.
Researchers noticed some young lemon sharks were more likely to explore and socialize than others, the Daily Mail reported.
Lemon sharks are small, so tagging and capturing them is not difficult. The researchers captured about 60 sharks located around the Bahamas.
Once in captivity, the team put the sharks in a tank together, and documented every 30 seconds whether or not they were interacting with each other, the Smithsonian reported.
"If you see two sharks following each other, that is typical social behavior," Jean Sebastian Finger of the Bimini Biological Field Station, said. "It's very similar to humans in the sense that some people will be in groups more often than other people."
The team also dropped individual sharks into a pen they had never seen before, and recorded how much they explored.
The sharks then went through a process of catch-and release, where they were captured and re-rested after one week and then after six months.
The study concluded the sharks that were more interested in exploring were less interested in socializing, and vice versa.
Finger believes sharks that prefer to move in groups don't feel the need to take as many risks. Reclusive sharks have a larger threat of danger, but get the food they catch all to themselves.
Researchers hope to compare personality qualifications in different types of animals, and even people, to get an idea of how and why personalities exist.
"We find in the human literature that personality is massively important for things like work satisfaction, marital stability, how long we live, whether we get heart attacks," Alexander Weiss, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh who studies evolution of personality, said.
