Adaptive shaping of the behavioural and neuroendocrine phenotype during adolescence.

ABSTRACT: Environmental conditions during early life can adaptively shape the phenotype for the prevailing environment. Recently, it has been suggested that adolescence represents an additional temporal window for adaptive developmental plasticity, though supporting evidence is scarce. Previous work has shown that male guinea pigs living in large mixed-sex colonies develop a low-aggressive phenotype as part of a queuing strategy that is adaptive for integrating into large unfamiliar colonies. By contrast, males living in pairs during adolescence become highly aggressive towards strangers. Here, we tested whether the high-aggressive phenotype is adaptive under conditions of low population density, namely when directly competing with a single opponent for access to females. For that purpose, we establ

SUBMITTER: Zimmermann TD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5326539 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature