Among-individual differences in risk-taking behavior are associated with shell repair rate but not growth in a marine gastropod

Shell maintenance and repair are fundamental to reproductive success and survival in shelled molluscs, yet potential links to other key processes and biological characteristics are poorly understood. Here, we examined individual associations between shell repair, risk-taking (boldness), and somatic growth; two important fitness related traits, often predicted to covary among individuals as part of pace-of-life syndromes. The pace-of-life syndrome hypothesis predicts covariation between high levels of production and behaviors associated with increased food intake (e.g. risky behavior, high foraging effort), underpinned by high metabolism, in a trade-off between early reproduction and long-term survival. Shell repair requires considerable energy investment and can interrupt periods of normal growth, thus we predicted that individual repair rates would covary negatively with boldness and growth. To test this, we examined potential (co)variation between these traits in the marine gastropod, Buccinum undatum, under controlled laboratory conditions. After accounting for sex, size, shell aperture width, and time effects, repair rates were not found to be repeatable over time, thus covariance with labile traits was not possible. Subsequent analysis revealed that bolder individuals repaired more slowly during the second stage of shell repair (but not other stages), indicating that selection might act on individual mean trait expression, and the possibility of correlated selection for these two important traits. Growth was not correlated with either boldness or repair rates. Nonetheless, our results provide novel insight to the potential relationship between shell repair and risk-taking behavior, and to the recovery capabilities of this commercially-important species following periods of disturbance.