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Phylogenetically-controlled correlates of primate blinking behaviour

Eye blinking is an essential maintenance behaviour for many terrestrial animals, but is also a risky behaviour as the animal is unable to scan the environment and detect hazards while its eyes are temporarily closed. It is therefore likely that the length of time that the eyes are closed and the len...

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Autor principal: Rands, Sean A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7896502/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33643718
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10950
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author Rands, Sean A.
author_facet Rands, Sean A.
author_sort Rands, Sean A.
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description Eye blinking is an essential maintenance behaviour for many terrestrial animals, but is also a risky behaviour as the animal is unable to scan the environment and detect hazards while its eyes are temporarily closed. It is therefore likely that the length of time that the eyes are closed and the length of the gap between blinks for a species may reflect aspects of the ecology of that species, such as its social or physical environment. An earlier published study conducted a comparative study linking blinking behaviour and ecology, and detailed a dataset describing the blinking behaviour of a large number of primate species that was collected from captive animals, but the analysis presented did not control for the nonindependence of the data due to common evolutionary history. In the present study, the dataset is reanalysed using phylogenetic comparative methods, after reconsideration of the parameters describing the physical and social environments of the species. I find that blink rate is best described by the locomotion mode of a species, where species moving through arboreal environments blink least, ground-living species blink most, and species that use both environments show intermediate rates. The duration of a blink was also related to locomotion mode, and positively correlated with both mean species group size and mean species body mass, although the increase in relation to group size is small. How a species moves through the environment therefore appears to be important for determining blinking behaviour, and suggests that complex arboreal environments may require less interruption to visual attention. Given that the data were collected with captive individuals, caution is recommended for interpreting the correlations found.
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spelling pubmed-78965022021-02-25 Phylogenetically-controlled correlates of primate blinking behaviour Rands, Sean A. PeerJ Animal Behavior Eye blinking is an essential maintenance behaviour for many terrestrial animals, but is also a risky behaviour as the animal is unable to scan the environment and detect hazards while its eyes are temporarily closed. It is therefore likely that the length of time that the eyes are closed and the length of the gap between blinks for a species may reflect aspects of the ecology of that species, such as its social or physical environment. An earlier published study conducted a comparative study linking blinking behaviour and ecology, and detailed a dataset describing the blinking behaviour of a large number of primate species that was collected from captive animals, but the analysis presented did not control for the nonindependence of the data due to common evolutionary history. In the present study, the dataset is reanalysed using phylogenetic comparative methods, after reconsideration of the parameters describing the physical and social environments of the species. I find that blink rate is best described by the locomotion mode of a species, where species moving through arboreal environments blink least, ground-living species blink most, and species that use both environments show intermediate rates. The duration of a blink was also related to locomotion mode, and positively correlated with both mean species group size and mean species body mass, although the increase in relation to group size is small. How a species moves through the environment therefore appears to be important for determining blinking behaviour, and suggests that complex arboreal environments may require less interruption to visual attention. Given that the data were collected with captive individuals, caution is recommended for interpreting the correlations found. PeerJ Inc. 2021-02-17 /pmc/articles/PMC7896502/ /pubmed/33643718 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10950 Text en © 2021 Rands https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Animal Behavior
Rands, Sean A.
Phylogenetically-controlled correlates of primate blinking behaviour
title Phylogenetically-controlled correlates of primate blinking behaviour
title_full Phylogenetically-controlled correlates of primate blinking behaviour
title_fullStr Phylogenetically-controlled correlates of primate blinking behaviour
title_full_unstemmed Phylogenetically-controlled correlates of primate blinking behaviour
title_short Phylogenetically-controlled correlates of primate blinking behaviour
title_sort phylogenetically-controlled correlates of primate blinking behaviour
topic Animal Behavior
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7896502/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33643718
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10950
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