Kin discrimination via odour in the cooperatively breeding banded mongoose
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Date
2018
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Royal Society open science
Abstract
Kin discrimination is often beneficial for group-living animals
as it aids in inbreeding avoidance and providing nepotistic
help. In mammals, the use of olfactory cues in kin
discrimination is widespread and may occur through learning
the scents of individuals that are likely to be relatives, or by
assessing genetic relatedness directly through assessing odour
similarity (phenotype matching). We use scent presentations
to investigate these possibilities in a wild population
of the banded mongoose Mungos mungo, a cooperative
breeder in which inbreeding risk is high and females breed
communally, disrupting behavioural cues to kinship. We
find that adults show heightened behavioural responses to
unfamiliar (extra-group) scents than to familiar (within-group)
scents. Interestingly, we found that responses to familiar
odours, but not unfamiliar odours, varied with relatedness.
This suggests that banded mongooses are either able to use
an effective behavioural rule to identify likely relatives from
within their group, or that phenotype matching is used in the
context of within-group kin recognition but not extra-group
kin recognition. In other cooperative breeders, familiarity is
used within the group and phenotype matching may be used
to identify unfamiliar kin. However, for the banded mongoose
this pattern may be reversed, most likely due to their unusual
breeding systemwhich disrupts within-group behavioural cues
to kinship.
Description
Keywords
Inbreeding avoidance, Scent communication, Kin recognition, Cooperative breeder, Relatedness
Citation
Mitchell J, Kyabulima S, Businge R, Cant MA, Nichols HJ. 2018 Kin discrimination via odour in the cooperatively breeding banded mongoose. R. Soc. open sci. 5: 171798. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171798