Centre for Research in Ecology, Evolution, and Behaviour, University of Roehampton, London, SW15 5PJ, UK.
Centre for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter, Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9FE, UK.
Sci Rep. 2023 Oct 18;13(1):17713. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-44950-6.
Studies across diverse taxa have revealed the importance of early life environment and parenting on characteristics later in life. While some have shown how early life experiences can impact cognitive abilities, very few have turned this around and looked at how the cognitive skills of parents or other carers during early life affect the fitness of young. In this study, we investigate how the characteristics of carers may affect proxies of fitness of pups in the cooperatively breeding banded mongoose (Mungos mungo). We gave adult mongooses a spatial memory test and compared the results to the success of the pups those individuals cared for. Our results show a tradeoff between speed and accuracy in the spatial memory task, with those individuals which were faster to move between cups in the test arena making more erroneous re-visits to cups that they had already checked for food. Furthermore, the accuracy of their carer predicted future survival, but not weight gain of the pups and the effect was contrary to expected, with pups that were cared for by less accurate individuals being more likely to survive to adulthood. Our research also provides evidence that while younger carers were less accurate during the test, the age of the carer did not have an impact on the chance of raising young that live to sexual maturity. Our findings suggest that banded mongoose carers' cognitive traits have fitness consequences for the young they care for, affecting the chance that these young live to maturity.
跨物种的研究表明，早期生活环境和育儿方式对后期生活特征有重要影响。虽然有些研究表明早期生活经历如何影响认知能力，但很少有研究反过来研究父母或其他照顾者在早期生活中的认知技能如何影响幼崽的健康。在这项研究中，我们调查了照顾者的特征如何影响合作繁殖的条纹獴（Mungos mungo）幼崽的健康代表。我们给成年獴进行了空间记忆测试，并将结果与那些个体照顾的幼崽的成功进行了比较。我们的结果显示，在空间记忆任务中存在速度和准确性之间的权衡，那些在测试场地中更快地在杯子之间移动的个体更有可能错误地重新访问他们已经检查过食物的杯子。此外，照顾者的准确性预测了幼崽未来的生存，但不预测幼崽的体重增加，而且效果与预期相反，照顾者准确性较低的幼崽更有可能存活到成年。我们的研究还提供了证据表明，虽然年轻的照顾者在测试中准确性较低，但照顾者的年龄并没有影响抚养能够活到性成熟的幼崽的机会。我们的研究结果表明，条纹獴照顾者的认知特征对他们照顾的幼崽有生存后果，影响了这些幼崽存活到成熟的机会。
