Abstract
The evolution of sociality and traits that correlate with, or predict, sociality, have been the focus of considerable recent study. In order to reduce the social conflict that ultimately comes with group living, and foster social tolerance, individuals need reliable information about group members and potential rivals. Chemical signals are one such source of information and are widely used in many animal taxa, including lizards. Here, we take a phylogenetic comparative approach to test the hypothesis that social grouping correlates with investment in chemical signalling. We used the presence of epidermal glands as a proxy of chemical investment and considered social grouping as the occurrence of social groups containing both adults and juveniles. Based on a dataset of 911 lizard species, our models strongly supported correlated evolution between social grouping and chemical signalling glands. The rate of transition towards social grouping from a background of ‘epidermal glands present’ was an order of a magnitude higher than from a background of ‘no epidermal glands’. Our results highlight the potential importance of chemical signalling during the evolution of sociality and the need for more focused studies on the role of chemical communication in facilitating information transfer about individual and group identity, and ameliorating social conflict.
Highlights
Amoebas, slime mould, ants, snapping shrimp, meerkats, chimpanzees and wolves all have one thing in common—they cooperate [1]
Basic Markov models strongly supported the scenario of correlated evolution between social grouping and epidermal glands, in which the evolution of social grouping depends on the presence of epidermal glands
The ‘unconstrained model’ of the MuSSE analysis was favoured over the ‘constrained model’ indicating that transitions to social grouping occurred at different rates in lineages with and without epidermal glands (ΔAIC = 8.80, χ2 = 10.77, p = 0.001; table 2)
Summary
Slime mould, ants, snapping shrimp, meerkats, chimpanzees and wolves all have one thing in common—they cooperate [1]. We still have a poor understanding of the role of information transfer in driving social evolution, in vertebrates This is remarkable because all forms of social aggregations are reliant upon efficient communication for social recognition (e.g. individual and kin recognition) and the coordination of group behaviour or collective action [5,14]. While there is some evidence that cloacal exudates and faecal pellets may contain socially relevant information, the skin and the epidermal glands (generation and follicular) are considered important sources of chemical signals in lizard communication, enabling mate assessment, individual recognition, species recognition and sex identification (reviewed in [35,36,37,38,39]). Intergenerational social grouping (hereafter social grouping) is here (as in [13]) defined as the occurrence of social groupings containing both juveniles and adults
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