Pre-birth sense of smell in the wild boar: the ontogeny of the olfactory mucosa

Fetal Alcohol Programming of Subsequent Alcohol Affinity: A Review Based on Preclinical, Clinical and Epidemiological Studies

“…Fetal and neonatal sensory discrimination capabilities have been described in different altricial species (rabbits, sheep, rats) including humans (Lecanuet et al, 1995;Schaal et al, 2002Schaal et al, , 2004Clark-Gambelunghe and Clark, 2015;Fulgione et al, 2017). Neuroethological studies indicate that chemosensory systems rapidly become functional in the uterus (Molina et al, 1999(Molina et al, , 2007aSchaal et al, 2004;Bloomfield et al, 2017).…”

Population genomic, olfactory, dietary, and gut microbiota analyses demonstrate the unique evolutionary trajectory of feral pigs

“…In wild boar, food selection is largely affected by both innate physiological responses to olfactory information and learned behaviours. In fact, it has been demonstrated that flavour learning takes place during the prenatal stage (Fulgione et al, 2017; Oostindjer et al, 2011), when the foetus is exposed to the mother's amniotic fluid and the ability to discern food and develop trophic preferences is acquired (Fulgione et al, 2017). Wild boars are gregarious in nature, with young piglets following their mothers for about a year, which enables them to learn olfactory traces and feeding areas (Allwin et al, 2016).…”

The Boar War: Five Hot Factors Unleashing Boar Expansion and Related Emergency

“…The wild boar shows adaptive abilities that make it prone to the environment it is about to invade, suggesting a sort of pre-adaptation, meaning advance knowledge of niches before they are explored. As a case in point, the sense of smell, linked to many vital activities such as food search and intraspecific communication [240][241][242][243], if early developed in the prenatal stage, could be interpreted as a kind of prenatal learning [29,34]. In [29], we showed that the sense of smell in the wild boar is already developed at about 44% of the gestation period, an early stage compared to the rat (93% of the gestation period) [244] or humans (77% of the gestation period) [245,246].…”

“…Further investigation of these dynamics, to understand if they can also apply to other traits, could add new insights to the understanding of the speed of the adaptation. This peculiarity, combined with the k reproductive strategy, is the basis of the extraordinary adaptability to new colonising environments [29,34,254].…”

“…This selective breeding and crossbreeding for specific traits resulted in a huge diversity of wild, domestic and feral forms, manifesting a variety of combinations of both naturally and artificially selected phenotypic patterns [24][25][26][27][28]. The relationship between these different Sus scrofa forms living sympatrically in several regions around the world is a tangled one, and many studies have explored the related evolutionary and management implications [29][30][31][32][33][34][35].…”