Communication is key: Mother-offspring signaling can affect behavioral responses and offspring survival in feral horses (Equus caballus)

Abstract

Acoustic signaling plays an important role in mother-offspring recognition and subsequent bond-formation. It remains unclear, however, if mothers and offspring use acoustic signaling in the same ways and for the same reasons throughout the juvenile stage, particularly after mutual recognition has been adequately established. Moreover, despite its critical role in mother-offspring bond formation, research explicitly linking mother-infant communication strategies to offspring survival are lacking. We examined the communicative patterns of mothers and offspring in the feral horse (Equus caballus) to better understand 1) the nature of mother-offspring communication throughout the first year of development; 2) the function (s) of mother-vs. offspring-initiated communication and; 3) the importance of mare and foal communication to offspring survival. We found that 1) mares and foals differ in when and how they initiate communication; 2) the outcomes of mare-vs. foal-initiated communication events consistently differ; and 3) the communicative patterns between mares and their foals can be important for offspring survival to one year of age. Moreover, given the importance of maternal activity to offspring behavior and subsequent survival, we submit that our data are uniquely positioned to address the long-debated question: do the behaviors exhibited during the juvenile stage (by both mothers and their young) confer delayed or immediate benefits to offspring? In summary, we aimed to better understand 1) the dynamics of mother-offspring communication, 2) whether mother-offspring communicative patterns were important to offspring survival, and 3) the implications of our research regarding the function of the mammalian juvenile stage. Our results demonstrate that we have achieved those aims.

Out of the stable: Social disruption and concurrent shifts in the feral mare (Equus caballus) fecal microbiota

“…Historically, the bands on Shackleford Banks were stable with most changes to group membership involving the dispersal of immature individuals (Nuñez, 2000; Rubenstein, 1981). Females did leave their males/groups to join others, primarily in response to band stallion quality (Rubenstein, 1994; Rutberg, 1990), but at a low rate (10.8% of females; Rubenstein, 1981).…”

“…Horses were identified individually by color, sex, physical condition, and other distinguishing markings, including scars and freeze brands. Ages of the horses are known from long‐term records (Nuñez, 2000; Rubenstein & Nuñez, 2009) and from NPS data (S. Stuska, unpublished data).…”

Giant panda mothers can discriminate own neonates from others based on their squalls

“…如种群密度、幼仔的扩散能力 (Sébe et al, 2008;Martin et al, 2022)。 研究表明, 群居哺乳动物具有母 幼识别的机制 (Volodin et al, 2017;Sibiryakova et al, 2018;Nuñez & Rubenstein, 2020;Martin et al, 2022), 因其具有较高的种群密度 (Masataka, 1985;Torriani et al, 2006;Blank & Yang, 2017;Charrier et al, 2017), 并且部分物种的幼仔具有较强的扩散能力 (Sébe et al, 2008;Martin et al, 2022) 野外, 大熊猫母兽产后立即进入2-3周的禁食期 (Lü et al, 1994;Zhu et al, 2001), 并将主要精力用于照顾 幼仔 (Zhu et al, 2001) 和个体间变异系数(CV b ), 计算公式如下:…”