Inbreeding and high developmental temperatures affect cognition and boldness in guppies (Poecilia reticulata)

2025 · doi:10.32942/x2kh02
preprint OA: closed
Full text JSON View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-24 · read from full text ⓘ

The study examined whether experimentally increased inbreeding (f = 0.25 vs outbred) and higher developmental temperature (30°C vs 26°C) affect cognition and boldness in guppies (Poecilia reticulata). Using a detour test to measure inhibitory control and behavioral assays for boldness, the authors found that inbreeding reduced inhibitory control only in fish raised at the higher temperature, while inbred fish were also less bold overall. Male fish but not females showed reduced inhibitory control when raised at the higher temperature, and temperature did not change boldness for either sex. The paper concludes that both inbreeding and developmental thermal stress can influence behavior and cognitive abilities in this non-domesticated vertebrate model. The paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

Inbreeding impairs the cognitive abilities of humans, but its impact on cognition in other animals is poorly studied. For example, environmental stress (e.g. food limitation and extreme temperatures) often amplifies inbreeding depression in morphological traits, but whether cognition is similarly affected is unclear. We, therefore, tested if a higher temperature (30°C versus 26°C) during development exacerbates any difference in inhibitory control between inbred (f = 0.25) and outbred guppies (Poecilia reticulata). Inhibitory control is an aspect of cognition that is often measured in vertebrates using a detour test, in which animals have to navigate around a transparent barrier to reach a reward. We also tested if inbreeding and temperature affect ‘boldness’, which is a putative personality trait in guppies. Inbreeding lowered inhibitory control of guppies raised at the higher temperature but not those raised at the control temperature. Inbred fish were significantly less bold than outbred fish. In addition, males, but not females, raised at the higher temperature had significantly lower inhibitory control. There was no effect of temperature on the boldness of either sex. Our study is among the first to test if experimentally induced inbreeding impairs cognition in a non-domesticated vertebrate. We show that both inbreeding and higher temperatures during development can affect the behaviour and cognitive abilities of fish. These findings are noteworthy given the twin threats of rising global temperatures and more frequent inbreeding as habitat fragmentation reduces population sizes.
Full text 2,403 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · 2 sections · click to expand

Abstract

Inbreeding impairs the cognitive abilities of humans, but its impact on cognition in other animals is poorly studied. For example, environmental stress (e.g. food limitation and extreme temperatures) often amplifies inbreeding depression in morphological traits, but whether cognition is similarly affected is unclear. We, therefore, tested if a higher temperature (30°C versus 26°C) during development exacerbates any difference in inhibitory control between inbred (f = 0.25) and outbred guppies (Poecilia reticulata). Inhibitory control is an aspect of cognition that is often measured in vertebrates using a detour test, in which animals have to navigate around a transparent barrier to reach a reward. We also tested if inbreeding and temperature affect ‘boldness’, which is a putative personality trait in guppies. Inbreeding lowered inhibitory control of guppies raised at the higher temperature but not those raised at the control temperature. Inbred fish were significantly less bold than outbred fish. In addition, males, but not females, raised at the higher temperature had significantly lower inhibitory control. There was no effect of temperature on the boldness of either sex. Our study is among the first to test if experimentally induced inbreeding impairs cognition in a non-domesticated vertebrate. We show that both inbreeding and higher temperatures during development can affect the behaviour and cognitive abilities of fish. These findings are noteworthy given the twin threats of rising global temperatures and more frequent inbreeding as habitat fragmentation reduces population sizes. DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X2KH02 Subjects Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Keywords

Fish cognition, inhibitory control, inbreeding depression, thermal stress, Poecilia reticulata, Inhibitory control, inbreeding depression, Thermal Stress, Poecilia reticulata Dates Published: 2025-03-21 08:00 Last Updated: 2025-03-21 08:00 License CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Additional Metadata Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: RMarkdown files with the original code and the accompanying data tables are provided with the manuscript. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.0785 Language: English

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2025) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00