Figure 2 - uploaded by Grasiela Porfirio
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A yellow armadillo photographed in November 2014 at Fazenda Palestina presumably nosing the trail roughly four hours past the initial chasing observation.
Citations
... As a general rule, armadillos are solitary and asocial (except in the breeding season); nonetheless, they present a wide range of social behaviors that have a low probability of observation (McDonough & Loughry 2008). Chasing behavior of a female by males of E. sexcinctus has been previously reported in Brazil (Desbiez et al. 2006;Tomas et al. 2013;Porfirio et al. 2015). During a seven-year study Tomas et al. (2013) observed only three instances of mounting, each associated with running or chasing. ...
... We found similarities between our observations and the behaviors reported by Tomas et al. (2013) in Brazil. The behaviors observed could be: (1) reproductive behaviors, events preceding or following the chasing behavior, as described by other authors (Desbiez et al. 2006;Tomas et al. 2013;Porfirio et al. 2015), and multiple individuals in proximity to a mounting attempt by a resident male with a nonresident female; or (2) exploratory behaviors, frenetic digging in three entrances (e 1 , e 2 and e 3 ) of the burrow by resident armadillos (B, C and D) among which there was very little or no physical interactions. Our assumption is that these individuals were male, coinciding with comments of Tomas et al. (2013), which they observed in the southern Brazilian Pantanal (19° 08' 36" S, 56° 50' 50" W), when one female of E. sexcinctus entered a burrow and one male started digging and filled the entrance with sand, as well as the other males involved in the chasing event. ...
In this note we describe for the f rst time in Argentina, an event that involved social (tolerance, proximity and sniff ng), reproductive (mounting and chasing) and exploratory (sniff ng entrances, digging and f lling) behaviors of f ve individuals of Euphractus sexcinctus Linnaeus, 1758 in a mesophile forest of Mburucuyá National Park, Corrientes Province. These behaviors were observed at f ve entrances
of a possible common burrow, a new trait for this species. For this region, observations suggest a mating period from August to November. All these observations contribute with new knowledge to
the natural history of the species in Argentina.
