Australia's feral pigs have smaller brains than their piggy cousins

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-09-18 09:01

Australia; NSW

CSIRO, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Australia's feral pigs have smaller brains than their wild and domestic relatives, according to Australian and international research. Domestic pigs are known to have smaller brains than their wild relatives, and the researchers had thought that going feral might have increased the size of the piggy brains. Instead, they found the reverse was true and the feral pigs' brains were even smaller than both their wild and domestic cousins. The researchers say that having a smaller body and brain size is probably an adaptation to food scarcity and drought.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

How domestication, feralization and experience-dependent plasticity affect brain size variation in Sus scrofa.

Royal Society Open Science

Among domestic species, pigs experienced the greatest brain size reduction, but the extent and factors of this reduction remain unclear. Here, we used the brain endocast volume computed from skulls’ CT scans to explore how domestication, feralization and captivity influenced brain size variation in Sus scrofa. The brain size reduction we observed in pigs (18%) is smaller than the one usually reported (30-40%). Feralization in Australia led to brain size reduction rather than a reversal to larger wild ancestral brain size. Finally, captivity induced a slight brain size increase, potentially due to high-quality food supply and new allospecific interactions.

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Research The Royal Society, Web page Please link to the article in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends).

Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The University of New England, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle CNRS, France

Funder: This research has been funded by the ANR, through the DOMEXP project (ANR-13-JSH3-0003-01); LabEx ANR-10-LABX-0003-BCDiv, in the ‘Investissements d'avenir’ programme ANR-11-IDEX-0004-02 and project Emergence SU-19-3-EMRG-02.

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