Social buffering of stress in a group-living fish

Culbert, Brett M.; Gilmour, Kathleen M.; Balshine, Sigal

doi:10.1098/rspb.2019.1626

Cited by 45 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…Guppies live in groups and establish complex and long‐lasting social relationships which confer numerous benefits such as improved food acquisition and increased vigilance (Magurran, 2005). To diminish the adverse effects of stress associated with social isolation (Culbert et al ., 2019; Shams et al ., 2017) and a new physical environment (Stevens et al ., 2017) the subjects were habituated to their novel experimental conditions during 5 days and underwent a step‐by‐step procedure to reinforce the target behaviour. On day one, two groups of four fish were randomly selected from the maintenance tanks and released in the start zone of the two experimental tanks to which we had added an opaque cylinder with the food ring positioned at one of the entrances of the cylinder.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intraspecific variation in inhibitory motor control in guppies, Poecilia reticulata

Macario

Darden

Verbruggen

et al. 2020

Journal of Fish Biology

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Inhibitory control (IC) is the ability to overcome impulsive or prepotent but ineffective responses in favour of more appropriate behaviours. The ability to inhibit internal predispositions or external temptations is vital in coping with a complex and variable world. Traditionally viewed as cognitively demanding and a main component of executive functioning and self‐control, IC was historically examined in only a few species of birds and mammals but recently a number of studies has shown that a much wider range of taxa rely on IC. Furthermore, there is growing evidence that inhibitory abilities may vary within species at the population and individual levels owing to genetic and environmental factors. Here we use a detour‐reaching task, a standard paradigm to measure motor inhibition in nonhuman animals, to quantify patterns of interindividual variation in IC in wild‐descendant female guppies, Poecilia reticulata. We found that female guppies displayed inhibitory performances that were, on average, half as successful as the performances reported previously for other strains of guppies tested in similar experimental conditions. Moreover, we showed consistent individual variation in the ability to inhibit inappropriate behaviours. Our results contribute to the understanding of the evolution of fish cognition and suggest that IC may show considerable variation among populations within a species. Such variation in IC abilities might contribute to individual differences in other cognitive functions such as spatial learning, quantity discrimination or reversal learning.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intraspecific variation in inhibitory motor control in guppies, Poecilia reticulata

Macario

Darden

Verbruggen

et al. 2020

Journal of Fish Biology

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“…It is not known whether bronze corydoras form social hierarchies in the wild or if they display differences in personality traits such as dominance, but a social network approach could help us understand whether these traits can modulate air-breathing behaviour in this species. In addition, social stimuli may affect individual oxygen demand via effects on endocrine pathways or stress responses, in a manner that over-rides any influence of SMR on air breathing among individual fish ( Culbert et al, 2019 ; Nadler et al, 2016 ). It is also possible that exposure to hypoxia during the trials at 25°C may have affected individual air-breathing tendency when later tested at 30°C.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social dynamics obscure the effect of temperature on air breathing in Corydoras catfish

Pineda

Aragao

McKenzie

et al. 2020

Journal of Experimental Biology

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In some fishes, the ability to breathe air has evolved to overcome constraints in hypoxic environments but comes at a cost of increased predation. To reduce this risk, some species perform group air breathing. Temperature may also affect the frequency of air breathing in fishes, but this topic has received relatively little research attention. This study examined how acclimation temperature and acute exposure to hypoxia affected the air-breathing behaviour of a social catfish, the bronze corydoras Corydoras aeneus, to determine whether individual oxygen demand influenced the behaviour of entire groups. Groups of seven fish were observed in an arena to measure air-breathing frequency of individuals and consequent group air-breathing behaviour, under three oxygen concentrations (100%, 60%, 20% air saturation) and two acclimation temperatures (25°C & 30°C). Intermittent flow respirometry was used to estimate oxygen demand of individuals. Increasingly severe hypoxia increased air-breathing at the individual and group levels. While there were minimal differences in air-breathing frequency among individuals in response to an increase in temperature, the effect of temperature that did exist manifested as an increase in group air-breathing frequency at 30°C. Groups that were more socially cohesive during routine activity took more breaths but, in most cases, air-breathing among individuals this was not temporally clustered. There was no association between an individual's oxygen demand and its air-breathing frequency in a group. For Corydoras aeneus, while air-breathing frequency is influenced by hypoxia, behavioural variation among groups could explain the small overall effect of temperature on group air-breathing frequency.

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“…However, direct physical interaction between focal and conspecific fish in Experiment 2 was not allowed because the close size and sex matching would promote potentially deadly aggression in the pair. For future comparative learning studies, the two aspects of being in a group, reduced stress due to social buffering (for group-living species; Culbert, Gilmour, & Balshine, 2019 ) and the ability to acquire information efficiently, should be decoupled.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning performance is influenced by the social environment in cichlid fishes.

Stanbrook¹,

Jodoin²,

Culbert³

et al. 2020

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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It has been hypothesised that some specialised cognitive abilities may have evolved because of the challenges of living in complex social environments. Therefore, more-social species might be able to learn faster than less-social species. The aim of this study was to develop a learning framework to test how more- and less-social Lamprologine cichlid fishes perform across associative learning tasks. These cichlids are a group of closely related species with similar ecologies and life histories but varying degrees of sociality, making them an ideal group for comparative learning studies. We found that three nongrouping cichlids ( Telmatochromis temporalis, Lamprologus meleagris , and Neolamprologus tretocephalus ) outperformed three closely related highly social, cooperatively breeding cichlids ( N. pulcher, N. multifasciatus , and Julidochromis dickfeldi ) on an associative learning task based on food rewards. However, we hypothesised that these differences may be caused by the social environment during testing and might not reflect true cognitive differences. Indeed, when we drilled down and compared just two species across four different social conditions, we found that the social environment during learning trials affected the performance of the highly social N. pulcher and the less-social T. temporalis differently. We then performed further experiments with both N. pulcher and T. temporalis under more natural social settings. Under these more natural social conditions, we found that N. pulcher learned to differentiate accessible and inaccessible shelters faster than T. temporalis . These findings highlight the potential for expanding comparative experiments investigating the relationship between sociality and cognition and emphasise the crucial role social environment plays in learning outcomes.

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Social buffering of stress in a group-living fish

Cited by 45 publications

References 79 publications

Intraspecific variation in inhibitory motor control in guppies, Poecilia reticulata

Intraspecific variation in inhibitory motor control in guppies, Poecilia reticulata

Social dynamics obscure the effect of temperature on air breathing in Corydoras catfish

Learning performance is influenced by the social environment in cichlid fishes.

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