Phenotype Matching and Early Social Conditions…
Phenotype Matching and Early Social Conditions Affect Shoaling and Exploration Decisions
In a recent study published in Ethology, Miguel Barbosa, Morelia Camacho-Cervantes and Alfredo Ojanguren investigate the importance of early social conditions for the process of individual recognition in Trinidadian guppies. Namely, they test the hypothesis that social disruptions during ontogeny impact the process of recognition and consequently affect the decision of with whom to shoal and to explore a new habitat.
The results highlight the importance of both early social conditions and population of origin (phenotype matching) in shaping the tendency to shoal and explore new habitat. Interestingly, however, this effect acted differently upon females and males. While females were as likely to associate with phenotypic related individuals as much as with unrelated individuals as long as they have been reared together, males were never keen to associate with any other individuals.
Males were also bolder than females and start exploration without the influence of the group, whereas females only moved to the novel area after seeing the group doing so, revealing sexual dimorphism in exploratory behaviour.
Taken together the results provide novel evidence for a familiarity and phenotypic-matching recognition mechanism at the population level, and also highlight the importance of accounting for differences between sexes when investigating the effects of early social conditions.
The full article can be found here