Behavioral Interactions Between Juvenile Nine-banded Armadillos (Dasypus novemcinctus) in Staged Encounters

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Juvenile nine-banded armadillos (Dasypus novemcinctus) discriminate between the scents of siblings and nonsiblings, spending more time near and investigating more often the scent of a sibling. In the present experiment we examined whether the ability to make such distinctions generates behavioral differences in how juveniles interact with one another. Two juveniles (siblings or nonsiblings) were placed in an arena and the ensuing interactions were videotaped. Contrary to expectation, juvenile armadillos showed no evidence of behavioral discrimination between siblings and nonsiblings. All interactions were highly amicable and aggressive behavior was almost completely absent. The absence of behavioral discrimination between juvenile armadillos may be due to (1) the lack of an appropriate context for discrimination in our experiments; (2) ontogenetic considerations such that only older animals actually exhibit discrimination, or (3) low genetic variability in our population that makes discrimination less important.