Chemical fingerprints encode mother-offspring similarity, colony membership, relatedness, and genetic quality in fur seals.

ABSTRACT: Chemical communication underpins virtually all aspects of vertebrate social life, yet remains poorly understood because of its highly complex mechanistic basis. We therefore used chemical fingerprinting of skin swabs and genetic analysis to explore the chemical cues that may underlie mother-offspring recognition in colonially breeding Antarctic fur seals. By sampling mother-offspring pairs from two different colonies, using a variety of statistical approaches and genotyping a large panel of microsatellite loci, we show that colony membership, mother-offspring similarity, heterozygosity, and genetic relatedness are all chemically encoded. Moreover, chemical similarity between mothers and offspring reflects a combination of genetic and environmental influences, the former partly encoded by s

SUBMITTER: Stoffel MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4568685 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature