A word about oxytocin

[the-awkward-turt]

It happens a lot in Reptiblr that someone uses “reptiles don’t produce oxytocin” as evidence that reptiles do not experience social bonding or love.

Here’s the thing though: There are some reptiles that do forge cooperative, long-lasting social bonds and they do so in the absence of oxytocin production.

Something is motivating these animals to protect their young (ex. crocodiles), seek out their siblings to bask with (ex. rattlesnakes), stay with one mate for many years or for life (ex. shingleback skinks), or form family groups and adopt unrelated youngsters (ex. monkey tailed skinks) and it isn’t oxytocin.

Essentially oxytocin is not necessary for the formation of all social bonds in the animal kingdom. In fact birds don’t even produce oxytocin, they produce their own homologous “version” of bonding hormone called mesotocin. And reptiles have an equivalent hormone called arginine-vasotocin that regulates things like egg laying (which is why vets sometimes administer oxytocin to egg-bound reptiles to induce laying).

The argument that most reptiles are not social (or at the very least not cooperative) and experience stress when being cohabbed is totally sound and I am not in any way critiquing that argument. Just wanted to point out that using the “they don’t produce oxytocin” as evidence is a bit mammal-centric and not really definitive proof.

[thepearlyboop]

As a zoologist I find this sort of thing fascinating. The concept that oxycytocin is he only bonding chemica out there has never made sense to me. After all, we have thousands of complex phenotypic traits that evolve in parallel; one such example is flight, which has evolved independantly in nearly every animal family! It would therefore make sense that the ability to bond, even temporarily, would have evolved multiple times and using multiple chemical pathways.

That being said, I would argue that the presence of such a chemical pathway is probably lost/not evolved in snakes, which do not display the complex social connections and attachment to young that can be seen in some lizards and crocodilians.

Who knows, though? There is yet to be research done on such a thing.