Oh brother, where art thou? Sticklebacks prefer to be with relatives
Friday, June 7, 2013 - 07:30
in Psychology & Sociology
Many animals are able to discriminate between related and unrelated individuals but how they do so has proven remarkably difficult to understand. Joachim Frommen and colleagues at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna have investigated the issue using the three-spined stickleback and its shoaling preferences as a model system. It turns out that the fish prefer kin to unrelated conspecifics, regardless of how familiar they are with individual shoal members. The results indicate that level of familiarity does not affect the stickleback's ability to recognize kin. Recognition based on phenotype matching or innate recognition thus seems to be the overruling mechanism when it comes to choosing members of a peer group.