Leaders Need Followers

Leader and follower personality traits are not uniquely human. They also exist in wolf packs and dog packs. But here, we are talking fish. Follow The Fish Leader Posted by Elie Dolgin [Entry posted at 29th January 2009 05:06 PM GMT] Followers bring out the best in their leaders, and leaders elicit better following skills in their minions, according to a new study of stickleback fish published online today (Jan. 29) in Current Biology. "Actually having good followers helps leaders get on with their tasks," said Andrea Manica, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge who led the study. "They were doing more together than they would be doing by themselves." Manica and his colleagues monitored individual threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) for their willingness to leave their safe, weedy cover and venture out into the risky, open waters to feed -- an indication of fish temperament. They then randomly paired fish of varying bravado, and discovered that the daring fish tended to lead and the shy fish opted to follow. "You find these personality traits that not too long ago we thought were uniquely human, and now they're popping up early in the evolution of vertebrates," Ingo Schlupp, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman who was not involved in the study, told The Scientist. Click here to read more.