Oct 25 2009
Fun Science Fact: Prairie Voles Learn to Love
Any animal with a brain can learn. You might say that that is what a brain is for. If learning wasn’t necessary, all behavior could be “hard-wired.”
What type of things do animals learn? You name it. Where food is, how to collect it and prepare it . . . which type of environments/situations to flee from . . . which you can risk . . . what type of novel twist to your kind’s mating dance best attracts the ladies . . . etc.
Earlier this year, research into the behavior of prairie voles revealed that the experience of young voles influences their later bonding behavior.
(Did I take too great a poetic license by referring to bonding as love in my title?)
In Yerkes researchers show early life nurturing impacts later life relationships I learned of an experiment performed on voles. The researchers controlled the social experiences of the pup voles this way: one group was raised by just the mother. The other by both parents. The results: the pups experienced different levels of attention/care, and these experiences translated into altered social bonding in their adulthood. Co-author Todd Ahern spells out the particulars -
SM-raised ["single mother"] pups were slower to make life-long partnerships, and they showed less interest in nurturing pups in their communal families.
Oh-oh. I can hear the fundamentalists rushing to apply this finding to humans. See, Murphy Brown and all single mothers are doing their children a disservice! (Of course, when it comes to human beings there are likely many more variables involved. One question I have is what the difference would be between being raised by a happier single mother and a less-happy mother bonded with a male of unknown characteristics.)
Nonetheless, this is a fascinating finding. Yes, when understanding animal behavior, genes certainly play an essential role. Yet there is more to behavior than genes.
