Data for: The costs and benefits of larger brains in fishes

The astonishing diversity of brain sizes observed across the animal kingdom is typically explained in the context of trade-offs: the benefits of a larger brain, such as enhanced cognitive ability, are balanced against potential costs, such as increased energetic demands. Several hypotheses have been formulated in this framework, placing different emphasis on ecological, behavioural, or physiological aspects of trade-offs in brain size evolution. Within this body of work, there exists considerable taxonomic bias towards studies of birds and mammals, leaving some uncertainty about the generality of the respective arguments. Here, we test three of the most prominent such hypotheses, the ´expensive tissue´, ´social brain´, and ´cognitive buffer´ hypotheses, in a large dataset of fishes, derived from a publicly available resource (FishBase). In accordance with predictions from the ´expensive tissue´ and the ´social brain´ hypothesis, larger brains co-occur with reduced fecundity and increase...

动物界中观察到的脑容量惊人多样性通常从权衡的角度来解释：更大脑容量的益处（如增强的认知能力）与潜在代价（如更高的能量需求）相互平衡。在此框架下已提出若干假说，分别侧重脑容量进化权衡中的生态、行为或生理层面。在这些研究中，存在显著的分类学偏向——多聚焦于鸟类和哺乳动物，这使得各论点的普遍性尚存不确定性。在此，我们利用一个源自公开资源（FishBase）的大型鱼类数据集，对其中三个最具影响力的假说——昂贵组织假说（'expensive tissue' hypothesis）、社会脑假说（'social brain' hypothesis）和认知缓冲假说（'cognitive buffer' hypothesis）——进行验证。与昂贵组织假说和社会脑假说的预测一致，更大的脑容量与繁殖力降低及……同时出现。