The question ‘what is an individual’ does not often arise in studies within the field of behavioural ecology. Generally behavioural ecologists do not think about what makes an individual because they tend to use intuitive working concepts of individuality. Rarely do they explicitly mention how individuality affects their experimental design and interpretation of results. By contrast, the concept of individuality continues to intrigue philosophers of biology. It is interesting that while philosophers of biology debate definitions of individuality, biologists generally use the concept of individuality every day without much thought. Here we review the philosophical approaches to defining biological individuality, and illustrate how the biological individuality concepts used by biologists are affected by their study question and choice of organism. We clarify the behavioural perspective of biological individuality by introducing the concept of the behavioural individual. The notion of the behavioural individual is particularly interesting when explored in less‐conventional study organisms. By including less‐conventional organisms, it becomes clear why the concept of biological individuality is usually intuitive in behavioural ecology.

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看不到蜂群：生物个体的行为视角

“什么是个体”这个问题在行为生态学领域的研究中并不经常出现。一般来说，行为生态学家不会考虑是什么造就了一个人，因为他们倾向于使用个性的直觉工作概念。他们很少明确提及个性如何影响他们的实验设计和对结果的解释。相比之下，个性的概念继续引起生物学哲学家的兴趣。有趣的是，虽然生物学哲学家争论个性的定义，但生物学家通常每天都在不加思索地使用个性的概念。在这里，我们回顾定义生物个体的哲学方法，并说明生物学家使用的生物个体概念如何受到他们的研究问题和生物体选择的影响。我们通过引入行为个体的概念来阐明生物个体的行为视角。当在非传统的研究有机体中探索时，行为个体的概念特别有趣。通过包括非传统生物，很清楚为什么生物个体的概念在行为生态学中通常是直观的。