What happens to animals if they are born autistic?

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like say a deer, or a lion, or some sort of bug, or fish

I don't know...have they even discovered an autistic animal before? Some conditions are endemic to one species alone. I don't know if autism is, but it could be.

How does the term Autistic apply to a non-human animal?

ruveyn

hypothetically what would happen to them

Animals aren't going to be born autistic. It's simply not possible. That assumes that autism is completely natural. It's about as natural as being homosexual. (In other words, it's not a genetic thing) But if it were, they would die pretty soon. The only way I can think of to have an autistic animal is to have a premature birth with a stressed mother, along with some sort of intense stimuli, like bright flashing lights. Something like that. Since animals don't innovate, the main strength of being on the autism spectrum goes out the window, and it comes down to being "socially adjusted" If you aren't socially adjusted, chances are you get eaten. But the whole reason you don't have that problem is because animals don't have a society. They have social interaction, but not a formal society that adds more unnecessary pressure to a young mind.

If an animal happened to be autistic, it would probably not survive in the wild. Though, its chances of survival may depend on the species. I'm by no means an expert though, this is just my uneducated opinion.

Autism is a neurological disorder, meaning that it effects the brain. What other species actually uses their brain as much as us humans? Animals act mostly on instinct. If an animal had autism, it probably wouldn't make much of a difference, but I could be wrong.

What about Teco.

https://sfari.org/blog/-/journal_conten ... OBO-AUTISM

I know the evidence is far from conclusive. I just find it funny.

Yup. And homosexuality itself has a strongly genetic component. Not as strong as autism, but pretty strong. The rest is probably prenatal, especially having to do with hormones and birth order--something about how it makes sense for the younger sons in a family to be gay (no word yet on the daughters) because the older sons can have the kids, and then the younger sons, who are ideally with other men and not having their own kids, can help raise their older brothers' children--a very nice arrangement that helps increase a child's health and chance of survival. And of course, since their straight brothers all have about 50% of the gay younger brother's DNA, they'll pass that on indirectly through those children, whom the gay brother has helped support. As far as I can tell, that's probably why homosexuality is still around--because it increases everybody's chance of survival, even though the individual is not as likely to reproduce as often.

Wikipedia article. Check the references for the papers.

It's actually a very interesting subject; go do some research and you'll see what I mean. (But stay away from the dogmatic cause-oriented types on both sides; their views will be biased, and you don't want a biased viewpoint when you are trying to learn something, even when the conclusion happens to be correct, because it will be too based on emotion to be relevant to someone just doing academic study.) And yes, homosexual animals definitely do exist; that's one of the reasons they decided to remove homosexuality from the DSM; they used to think it was a mental disorder until everybody pretty much went, "Hey, wait a minute; we only want to diagnose stuff that causes distress and/or dysfunction; why's this in here?"

Anyways, yes, animals can have an analogue of autism. So far, what we have is a model of Rett syndrome in a mouse. The mouse is basically a knockout mouse in which the MECP2 gene has been deactivated, and it shows the neurological signs of Rett syndrome, including stereotypies, neurological problems, rear-leg paralysis, and autism. This is Rett syndrome, though; there's no mouse model for autism in general because we don't really know what genes are involved. So far the mouse models we have are all centered around single genes or groups of genes--autism is far too complex to artificially manufacture that way. But there is the Rett mouse, because that's one type of autism (or anyway, neurological disorder that causes autism among other things) which is related to one gene.

BTW, back to the gay thing--I wouldn't be surprised if there's a similarly odd arrangement with autism. A "dash of autism" allows for obsessive engineers and other innovators, as well as organizers and those capable of long-term repetition and/or solitude; that's a good thing to have in the gene pool, and the decreased reproduction for the individual is again made up for by the increased chances his siblings have.

Sounds like it'd look much the same as in humans, then.

There's a chance that autism is exclusive to people. Animals might not have the applicable neurology to even have autism, just like they can't have dyslexia.

Here's what happens to rats:

"Behaviorally, prenatal exposure to VPA on ED12.5 produces the two cardinal symptoms of autism in the rat offspring: decreased social interactions and increased repetitive behaviors (Schneider and Przewlocki, 2005; Markram et al., 2008). In the emotional domain, the offspring also exhibit enhanced anxiety (Schneider and Przewlocki, 2005; Schneider et al., 2007; Markram et al., 2008), in the motor domain, locomotor hyperactivity (Schneider and Przewlocki, 2005), in the nociception domain, lower sensitivity to pain (Schneider et al., 2001; Schneider and Przewlocki, 2005; Markram et al., 2008), in the sensory domain, hyper-sensitivity to non-painful sensory stimulation and impaired pre-pulse inhibition (Schneider and Przewlocki, 2005; Markram et al., 2008), and in the memory domain, enhanced eye-blink conditioning (Stanton et al., 2007) – all of which are common features of autism described in the DSM-IV and/or in the autism literature (Sears et al., 1994; Muris et al., 1998; American Psychiatric Association, 2000; McAlonan et al., 2002; Perry et al., 2007).

It is often argued that “autism is a human disorder” which is based on the higher cognitive symptoms that are most commonly associated with autism such a theory of mind and language deficits as well as unusual human talents. Albeit in a far more rudimentary form, many of the high-level cognitive functions can also be observed and measured in much lower mammals such as rats and mice. The common thread is the neocortex, which is the source of mammalian higher brain functions. The microcircuitry of the mammalian neocortex is remarkably similar from mouse to man in terms of layering, types of neurons, interconnections, and long-range connectivity principles (Silberberg et al., 2002). It would be very difficult to argue that insults and predispositions are exclusive to human neocortex."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... -00224.pdf