Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
Biol Lett. 2012 Aug 23;8(4):523-5. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.1217. Epub 2012 Feb 22.
Research on social behaviour has largely concentrated on birds and mammals in visually active, cooperatively breeding groups (although such systems are relatively rare) and focused much less on species that rarely interact other than for mating and parental care. We used microsatellite markers to characterize relatedness among aggregations of timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus), a putatively solitary reptile that relies heavily on chemical cues, and found that juveniles and pregnant females preferentially aggregate with kin under certain conditions. The ability to recognize kin and enhance indirect fitness thus might be far more widespread than implied by studies of animals whose behaviour is primarily visually and/or acoustically mediated, and we predict that molecular markers will reveal many additional examples of 'cryptic' sociality.
社会行为的研究主要集中在视觉活跃、合作繁殖的鸟类和哺乳动物群体上（尽管这种系统相对较少），而对那些除了交配和育雏之外很少相互作用的物种关注较少。我们使用微卫星标记来描述响尾蛇（Crotalus horridus）聚集的亲缘关系，响尾蛇是一种假定的独居爬行动物，它严重依赖化学线索，我们发现，在某些条件下，幼体和怀孕的雌性优先与亲属聚集在一起。因此，识别亲属并增强间接适应能力的能力可能比主要通过视觉和/或听觉介导的动物行为研究所暗示的更为广泛，我们预测分子标记将揭示许多其他“隐蔽”社会性的例子。
