Meeting Abstract
Social monogamy is often associated with increased within-pair social behaviors, but little is known about associations between mating system and behaviors in non-mating contexts. Behaviors across ecological contexts are often correlated due to shared selective pressures or underlying mechanisms. We hypothesized that monogamous species would exhibit both different average behaviors and different behavioral syndromes from non-monogamous species. We compared multiple behaviors of monogamous and non-monogamous Peromyscus species using lab-reared wild-type stocks. We predicted that monogamous species would show both greater social attraction (to same-sex conspecifics) and greater attraction to novelty in general (exploration), whereas we did not expect activity or boldness (response to risk) to differ by mating system. We further predicted that the direction or strength of behavioral correlations would differ by mating system, due to differing selective pressures on social behaviors. As predicted, monogamy was associated with increased social attraction and attraction to novelty, but not with activity or boldness. Social attraction was correlated with exploration and boldness correlated with activity, but these correlations did not differ with mating system. Thus, mating system variation in Peromyscus appears to be also associated with average differences in non-mating behaviors; monogamous species were more attracted to novel conspecifics and to novelty in general. The mechanisms underlying these behaviors seem to be conserved across species, as the correlation structure did not differ with mating system. Notably, we still found significant behavioral variation between species with the same mating system and among individuals within species.
