The piglet case: commensalism as a new category of intraspecific animal relationships
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Ecology, Zoology
- Keywords
- suckling behaviour, commensalism, intraspecific relationship
- Copyright
- © 2016 Skok
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. The piglet case: commensalism as a new category of intraspecific animal relationships. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2563v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2563v1
Abstract
Relationships among organisms are separated into two main categories: interspecific (between species) and intraspecific (within species). Interspecific relationships, termed symbiosis, are considered very diverse, and include protocooperation (+/+; facultative, not obligatory, cooperation) and mutualism (+/+) – both represent cooperative relationships, antagonism (-/-), agonism (+/-; including parasitism and predation), amensalism (0/-), neutralism (0/0; if it exists in nature at all), and commensalism (+/0). Intraspecific relationships have just two categories: cooperation (+/+) and competition (+/-). Supporting my latest findings on the suckling behaviour of piglets, I propose an extension of the classification for existing intraspecific relationships by adding a new category: commensalism. The present classification fails to define all interactions among members of the same species, as demonstrated by observations of suckling behaviour in domestic pigs.
Author Comment
This is the first, not peer-reviewed version of short opinion/perspective article.