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Only child syndrome in snakes: Eggs incubated alone produce asocial individuals
Egg-clustering and communal nesting behaviours provide advantages to offspring. Advantages range from anti-predatory benefits, maintenance of moisture and temperature levels within the nest, preventing the eggs from rolling, to enabling hatching synchrony through embryo communication. It was recentl...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5071763/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27761007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep35752 |
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author | Aubret, Fabien Bignon, Florent Kok, Philippe J. R. Blanvillain, Gaëlle |
author_facet | Aubret, Fabien Bignon, Florent Kok, Philippe J. R. Blanvillain, Gaëlle |
author_sort | Aubret, Fabien |
collection | PubMed |
description | Egg-clustering and communal nesting behaviours provide advantages to offspring. Advantages range from anti-predatory benefits, maintenance of moisture and temperature levels within the nest, preventing the eggs from rolling, to enabling hatching synchrony through embryo communication. It was recently suggested that embryo communication may extend beyond development fine-tuning, and potentially convey information about the quality of the natal environment as well as provide an indication of forthcoming competition amongst siblings, conspecifics or even heterospecifics. Here we show that preventing embryos from communicating not only altered development rates but also strongly influenced post-natal social behaviour in snakes. Clutches of water snakes, Natrix maura, were split evenly into half-clutches and incubated as (1) clusters (i.e. eggs in physical contact with each other) or (2) as single eggs placed in individual goblets (i.e. no physical contact amongst sibling eggs). Single incubated eggs produced less-sociable young snakes than their siblings that were incubated in a cluster: the former were more active, less aggregated and physically contacted each other less often than the latter. Potential long-term effects and evolutionary drivers for this new example of informed dispersal are discussed. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5071763 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-50717632016-10-26 Only child syndrome in snakes: Eggs incubated alone produce asocial individuals Aubret, Fabien Bignon, Florent Kok, Philippe J. R. Blanvillain, Gaëlle Sci Rep Article Egg-clustering and communal nesting behaviours provide advantages to offspring. Advantages range from anti-predatory benefits, maintenance of moisture and temperature levels within the nest, preventing the eggs from rolling, to enabling hatching synchrony through embryo communication. It was recently suggested that embryo communication may extend beyond development fine-tuning, and potentially convey information about the quality of the natal environment as well as provide an indication of forthcoming competition amongst siblings, conspecifics or even heterospecifics. Here we show that preventing embryos from communicating not only altered development rates but also strongly influenced post-natal social behaviour in snakes. Clutches of water snakes, Natrix maura, were split evenly into half-clutches and incubated as (1) clusters (i.e. eggs in physical contact with each other) or (2) as single eggs placed in individual goblets (i.e. no physical contact amongst sibling eggs). Single incubated eggs produced less-sociable young snakes than their siblings that were incubated in a cluster: the former were more active, less aggregated and physically contacted each other less often than the latter. Potential long-term effects and evolutionary drivers for this new example of informed dispersal are discussed. Nature Publishing Group 2016-10-20 /pmc/articles/PMC5071763/ /pubmed/27761007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep35752 Text en Copyright © 2016, The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Aubret, Fabien Bignon, Florent Kok, Philippe J. R. Blanvillain, Gaëlle Only child syndrome in snakes: Eggs incubated alone produce asocial individuals |
title | Only child syndrome in snakes: Eggs incubated alone produce asocial individuals |
title_full | Only child syndrome in snakes: Eggs incubated alone produce asocial individuals |
title_fullStr | Only child syndrome in snakes: Eggs incubated alone produce asocial individuals |
title_full_unstemmed | Only child syndrome in snakes: Eggs incubated alone produce asocial individuals |
title_short | Only child syndrome in snakes: Eggs incubated alone produce asocial individuals |
title_sort | only child syndrome in snakes: eggs incubated alone produce asocial individuals |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5071763/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27761007 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep35752 |
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