Social Behaviors In Newly-Hatched Tortoises
We thought it would be very interesting to check whether social recognition is available to non-social species. Are non-social animals able to recognize familiar conspecifics at the onset of life, when they haven’t had repeated interactions with different conspecifics? Are social abilities spontaneously available also to non-social animals? The solution to address this issue (see Versace et al., 2018) was located a few kilometers from the city center at Sperimentarea. This is a field station of the Rovereto Civic Museum (Italy), that is becoming a sanctuary for tortoises, especially those endangered and protected exemplars that the local rangers (Guardia Forestale) find when they get lost from local private gardens.
Tortoises are the perfect subjects to understand the origins of social behavior for many reasons. On the one hand, when housed with other tortoises in captivity, they show the ability to learn from the actions of conspecifics (Wilkinson et al., 2010). This tells us that tortoises possess the ability to interact with social partners, but not whether these abilities are spontaneous (the 1973 Nobel prize Konrad Lorenz would say “innate”) or result from learning through repeated social interactions. On the other hand, in the wild, tortoise behavior is solitary, namely, they do not form cohesive social groups, and live mostly on their own except for courtship and mating… so observing social abilities at the onset of life would show that learning is not necessary to perform specific social behaviors.
Click the link to read the conclusion…
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