Wild genius - domestic fool? Spatial learning abilities of wild and domestic guinea pigs

Abstract

BackgroundDomestic animals and their wild relatives differ in a wide variety of aspects. The process of domestication of the domestic guinea pig (Cavia aperea f. porcellus), starting at least 4500 years ago, led to changes in the anatomy, physiology, and behaviour compared with their wild relative, the wild cavy, Cavia aperea. Although domestic guinea pigs are widely used as a laboratory animal, learning and memory capabilities are often disregarded as being very scarce. Even less is known about learning and memory of wild cavies. In this regard, one striking domestic trait is a reduction in relative brain size, which in the domesticated form of the guinea pig amounts to 13%. However, the common belief, that such a reduction of brain size in the course of domestication of different species is accomplished by less learning capabilities is not at all very well established in the literature. Indeed, domestic animals might also even outperform their wild conspecifics taking advantage of their adaptation to a man-made environment.In our study we compared the spatial learning abilities of wild and domestic guinea pigs. We expected that the two forms are different regarding their learning performance possibly related to the process of domestication. Therefore wild cavies as well as domestic guinea pigs of both sexes, aged 35 to 45 days, were tested in the Morris water maze to investigate their ability of spatial learning.ResultsBoth, wild cavies and domestic guinea pigs were able to learn the task, proving the water maze to be a suitable test also for wild cavies. Regarding the speed of learning, male as well as female domestic guinea pigs outperformed their wild conspecifics significantly. Interestingly, only domestic guinea pigs showed a significant spatial association of the platform position, while other effective search strategies were used by wild cavies.ConclusionThe results demonstrate that domestic guinea pigs do not at all perform worse than their wild relatives in tests of spatial learning abilities. Yet, the contrary seems to be true. Hence, artificial selection and breeding did not lead to a cognitive decline but rather to an adaptation to man-made environment that allows solving the task more efficiently.

Domestication effects on behavioural synchronization and individual distances in chickens (Gallus gallus)

“…This has been found in many other domesticated animals as well, for example in pigs (Jensen 1988(Jensen , 1993 ducks (Desforges and Wood-Gush 1975), and guinea pigs (Kunzl 1997;Lewejohann et al). Even though this is largely an expected finding, it is remarkable that the intense selection for increased production, which has more than doubled the growth and increased the egg production many-fold compared to the ancestor (Rauw et al 1998), has left fundamental behaviour rather unaffected.…”

Galantamine counteracts development of learning impairment in guinea pigs exposed to the organophosphorus poison soman: Clinical significance

“…Thus, studying the guinea pigs four days and three months after the initial soman challenge is essential to delineate the contribution of AChE inhibition to behavioral deficits induced by the nerve agent. The MWM, which was originally developed to assess spatial learning in rats (Morris, 1984), has proven to be a valuable task to assess spatial behavior, learning, and memory processes in guinea pigs (Byrnes et al, 2004; de Groot et al, 2001; Dringenberg et al, 2001; Filliat et al, 2002; Lewejohann et al, 2010). The results presented here strongly support the hypothesis and demonstrate that galantamine is a highly effective medical countermeasure to prevent the delayed learning impairment that develops as a result of an acute exposure to soman.…”

Mice selected for large and small brain weight: The preservation of trait differences after the selection was discontinued

“…At the same time there are not many literature sources in which cognitive abilities across two forms of one species (differing in brain weight) were compared. Those papers in which such parallels were analyzed concerned mainly rodent species [37][38][39], and it is obvious that numerous factors, other than brain weight exist, which influence behavior traits under comparison. At the same time the reasoning ability values in wild red foxes versus domesticated silver foxes and in wild brown rats versus domesticated laboratory rats were significantly higher [11].…”