Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência

Funder

Organizational Unit

Publications

Expanding the concept of social behavior to interspecific interactions

Publication . Oliveira, Rui F.; Bshary, Redouan

In pretty much any species, an individual's survival and reproduction depends crucially on the outcome of interactions with other individuals. Key interactions may take place between individuals of the same species but also between individuals belonging to different species. However, the most accepted definition of social behavior only considers interactions between conspecifics. Here, we argue that the distinction between intra- and interspecific interactions is largely artificial and hinders the integration of the historically separately developed concepts. At the ultimate level, given that the ecological landscape of organisms is composed both by interactions with conspecifics and with heterospecifics, and both types of interactions may have evolutionary consequences. Although intraspecific interactions usually have a higher impact in fitness because in most species interactions relevant for reproduction (mating, parenting) exclusively involve conspecifics, and interactions relevant for survival are more probable between conspecifics because they share the same ecological niche, hence competing for the same resources (e.g., food, shelter), there are notable exceptions in both fitness components (e.g., heterospecific mating in parthenogenic all-female species; heterospecific brood parasitism; heterospecific aggression in sympatric species that compete for shared resources). At the proximate level, behaviors and cognitive decision-making rules used to interact with other organisms may be shared between intra- and interspecific interactions, and the mechanistic differences between conspecific social behaviors used in distinct functional domains, such as mating, aggression, or parenting, can be more expressive than those found within the same functional domain between conspecific and heterospecific behavior. Therefore, there are neither fundamental conceptual (ultimate) reasons, nor key differences in mechanisms underlying behaviors involved in conspecific vs. heterospecific interactions that support the exclusion of interspecific interactions from the conceptual framework of social behavior

2021Journal article

Open access

Phenotypic architecture of sociality and its associated genetic polymorphisms in zebrafish

Publication . Gonçalves, Claúdia; Kareklas, Kyriacos; Teles, Magda C; Varela, Susana.A.M.; Costa, João; Leite, Ricardo B.; Paixão, Tiago; Oliveira, Rui Filipe

Sociality relies on motivational and cognitive components that may have evolved independently, or may have been linked by phenotypic correlations driven by a shared selective pressure for increased social competence. Furthermore, these components may be domain-specific or of general-domain across social and non-social contexts. Here, we used zebrafish to test if the motivational and cognitive components of social behavior are phenotypically linked and if they are domain specific or of general domain. The behavioral phenotyping of zebrafish in social and equivalent non-social tests shows that the motivational (preference) and cognitive (memory) components of sociality: (1) are independent from each other, hence not supporting the occurrence of a sociality syndrome; and (2) are phenotypically linked to non-social traits, forming two general behavioral modules, suggesting that sociality traits have been co-opted from general-domain motivational and cognitive traits. Moreover, the study of the association between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and each behavioral module further supports this view, since several SNPs from a list of candidate “social” genes, are statistically associated with the motivational, but not with the cognitive, behavioral module. Together, these results support the occurrence of general-domain motivational and cognitive behavioral modules in zebrafish, which have been co-opted for the social domain. © 2022 The Authors. Genes, Brain and Behavior published by International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

2022Journal article

Open access