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Relatedness does not predict vigilance in a population of the social rodent Octodon degus

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Abstract

The possibility that social foragers adjust and coordinate their scanning activity when in the presence of close relatives to attain inclusive fitness benefits remains controversial and scarcely examined. To this aim, we first tested the null hypothesis of no association between foraging individuals of the diurnal rodent, Octodon degus and their pairwise relatedness (six microsatellite loci), under natural conditions. Secondly, we examined the influence of relatedness on scan effort (percent overlapping) and temporal distribution of scanning using linear regression. Finally, we evaluated whether temporal distributions of scanning were significantly lower (coordination) or higher (synchrony) than random expectations using bootstrapping. We found that pairwise relatedness between focal degus and their foraging partner did not influence the scan effort or the temporal distribution of scanning. These original, field-based findings imply that vigilance behavior in socially foraging degus is unlikely to be kin-selected and adds to results from previous lab studies in that kinship remains a poor predictor of social behavior in these animals. Overall, our study adds to others revealing that kin selection may not have had an impact on aspects of social behavior such as vigilance during social foraging.

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Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the Universidad de Chile, particularly to J. D. García (former) and to M. Orellana Reyes (current) Field Station Administrators, for providing the facilities during field work at Rinconada. V. Quirici was supported by Dirección de Investigación y Postgrado-Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (DIPUC), Program of Mejoramiento de la Calidad y la Equidad de la Educación Superior (MECESUP) and Program of Comisión Nacional Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT) PhD fellowships. This study was funded by the grants Program of Comisión Nacional Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT 2408003 to V. Q.); Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (FONDECTY 1060499 to L. A. E.) and by the Center for the Advanced Studies in Ecology and Biodiversity (CASEB Program 1 and 7).

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  1. Verónica Quirici

    Present address: Departamento de Ciencias Ecológicas, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Casilla 653, Santiago, Chile

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  1. Departamento de Ecología, Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Casilla 114-D, Santiago, Chile

    Verónica Quirici, Macarena Palma, Raúl Sobrero, Sylvain Faugeron & Luis A. Ebensperger

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  1. Verónica Quirici
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Correspondence to Verónica Quirici.

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Quirici, V., Palma, M., Sobrero, R. et al. Relatedness does not predict vigilance in a population of the social rodent Octodon degus . acta ethol 16, 1–8 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-012-0131-3

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