Studying Individuality in Behavioural Ecology: Overcoming Epistemic Challenges

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Behavioural ecologists have recently begun to study individuality, that is, individual differences and uniqueness in phenotypic traits and in ecological relations. However, individuality is an unusual object of research. Using an ethnographic case study of individuality research in behavioural ecology, we analyse concerns that behavioural ecologists express about their ability to study individuality. We argue that these concerns stem from two epistemic challenges: the variation-noise challenge and the generalisation challenge. First, individuality is difficult to distinguish from noise, as standard practices lump variation between individuals together with noise. Second, individuality is difficult to capture in generalisations, as they typically involve ignoring idiosyncratic factors. We examine how these challenges shape research practices in behavioural ecology, leading to epistemic strategies for studying individuality via alternative approaches to measurement, experimentation, and generalisation. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2CS7M Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy individuality, individual differences, Variation, measurement, Generalisation, varipraxis Published: 2025-03-29 07:55 Last Updated: 2025-03-29 07:55 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Data and Code Availability Statement: Questionnaire results and interview transcripts from the project cannot be sufficiently anonymised and are therefore not published. Other materials and data from the project such as questionnaire and interview instruments, participant summaries, lists of codes and code co-occurrences are published as an OSF project under https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RKU47. Language: English