Scheiber Isabella B R, Weiß Brigitte M, Kingma Sjouke A, Komdeur Jan
The University of Groningen, Behavioural and Physiological Ecology, Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences (GELIFES), Nijenborgh 7, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands.
Behavioural Ecology Research Group, University of Leipzig, Faculty of Bioscience, Pharmacy and Psychology, Institute of Biology, Talstraße 33, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Front Zool. 2017 Jan 18;14:3. doi: 10.1186/s12983-016-0185-6. eCollection 2017.
Various types of long-term stable relationships that individuals uphold, including cooperation and competition between group members, define social complexity in vertebrates. Numerous life history, physiological and cognitive traits have been shown to affect, or to be affected by, such social relationships. As such, differences in developmental modes, the 'altricial-precocial' spectrum, may play an important role in understanding the interspecific variation in occurrence of social interactions, but to what extent this is the case is unclear because the role of the developmental mode has not been studied directly in across-species studies of sociality. In other words, although there are studies on the effects of developmental mode on brain size, on the effects of brain size on cognition, and on the effects of cognition on social complexity, there are no studies directly investigating the link between developmental mode and social complexity. This is surprising because developmental differences play a significant role in the evolution of, for example, brain size, which is in turn considered an essential building block with respect to social complexity. Here, we compiled an overview of studies on various aspects of the complexity of social systems in altricial and precocial mammals and birds. Although systematic studies are scarce and do not allow for a quantitative comparison, we show that several forms of social relationships and cognitive abilities occur in species along the entire developmental spectrum. Based on the existing evidence it seems that differences in developmental modes play a minor role in whether or not individuals or species are able to meet the cognitive capabilities and requirements for maintaining complex social relationships. Given the scarcity of comparative studies and potential subtle differences, however, we suggest that future studies should consider developmental differences to determine whether our finding is general or whether some of the vast variation in social complexity across species can be explained by developmental mode. This would allow a more detailed assessment of the relative importance of developmental mode in the evolution of vertebrate social systems.
个体所维持的各种长期稳定关系，包括群体成员之间的合作与竞争，定义了脊椎动物的社会复杂性。许多生活史、生理和认知特征已被证明会影响此类社会关系，或受其影响。因此，发育模式的差异，即“晚成-早成”谱系，可能在理解社会互动发生的种间差异中发挥重要作用，但具体程度尚不清楚，因为发育模式的作用在跨物种社会性研究中尚未得到直接研究。换句话说，虽然有关于发育模式对脑容量的影响、脑容量对认知的影响以及认知对社会复杂性的影响的研究，但没有直接研究发育模式与社会复杂性之间联系的研究。这令人惊讶，因为发育差异在例如脑容量的进化中起着重要作用，而脑容量又被认为是社会复杂性的一个基本组成部分。在这里，我们汇编了关于晚成和早成哺乳动物及鸟类社会系统复杂性各个方面的研究综述。尽管系统研究稀缺且无法进行定量比较，但我们表明，沿着整个发育谱系的物种中都存在几种社会关系和认知能力形式。基于现有证据，发育模式的差异似乎在个体或物种是否能够满足维持复杂社会关系的认知能力和要求方面作用较小。然而，鉴于比较研究稀缺以及可能存在的细微差异，我们建议未来的研究应考虑发育差异，以确定我们的发现是否具有普遍性，或者物种间社会复杂性的巨大差异是否部分可以由发育模式来解释。这将有助于更详细地评估发育模式在脊椎动物社会系统进化中的相对重要性。
