Journal
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
Volume 4, Issue 5, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.170350
Keywords
nonapeptide; oxytocin; vasopressin; vasotocin; sociality; cooperative breeding
Categories
Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) [05772, 249685, 170363]
- Journal of Experimental Biology Travelling Fellowship
- McMaster School of Graduate Studies
- Canadian Society of Zoologists
- Margo Wilson and Martin Daly Ontario Graduate Scholarship
- NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Tomlinson Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship
- E.B. Eastburn Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Ohio State University Fish Systematics Endowment
- SciFund Challenge
- Ohio State University Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship
- Ohio State Presidential Fellowship
- National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology [1612271]
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Div Of Biological Infrastructure [1612271] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Social living has evolved numerous times across a diverse array of animal taxa. An open question is how the transition to a social lifestyle has shaped, and been shaped by, the underlying neurohormonal machinery of social behaviour. The nonapeptide neurohormones, implicated in the regulation of social behaviours, are prime candidates for the neuroendocrine substrates of social evolution. Here, we examined the brains of eight cichlid fish species with divergent social systems, comparing the number and size of preoptic neurons that express the nonapeptides isotocin and vasotocin. While controlling for the influence of phylogeny and body size, we found that the highly social cooperatively breeding species (n= 4) had fewer parvocellular isotocin neurons than the less social independently breeding species (n= 4), suggesting that the evolutionary transition to group living and cooperative breeding was associated with a reduction in the number of these neurons. In a complementary analysis, we found that the size and number of isotocin neurons significantly differentiated the cooperatively breeding from the independently breeding species. Our results suggest that isotocin is related to sociality in cichlids and may provide a mechanistic substrate for the evolution of sociality.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available