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Results for “Paternal Behavior”

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At least 505 records · Page 28Linked to original sources
PubMed1983

Left-side preference for holding and carrying newborn infants. Parental holding and carrying during the first week of life.

Four groups of adults were studied: new mothers, new fathers, fathers with older children, and males without children of their own. Nearly 80 per cent of all newly delivered mothers and fathers held their newborn infant against a point to the left of the body midline. Handedness and parity did not influence this preference, nor did the sex of the infant. The present study also demonstrates that new fathers during the neonatal period, as well as fathers with older infants, display a significantly greater preference for holding the infant to the left than males without own children and with or without experience of other children. Individual mother-father pairs held the infant on the same side of the body in the majority of couples studied. The pattern of infant-carrying showed no significant in-between group differences. The possible significance of these observations and their relation to other parental behavior are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Cortisol levels are positively associated with pup-feeding rates in male meerkats.

In societies of cooperative vertebrates, individual differences in contributions to offspring care are commonly substantial. Recent attempts to explain the causes of this variation have focused on correlations between contributions to care and the protein hormone prolactin, or the steroid hormone testosterone. However, such studies have seldom considered the importance of other hormones or controlled for non-hormonal factors that are correlative with both individual hormone levels and contributions to care. Using multivariate statistics, we show that hormone levels explain significant variation in contributions to pup-feeding by male meerkats, even after controlling for non-hormonal effects. However, long-term contributions to pup provisioning were significantly and positively correlated with plasma levels of cortisol rather than prolactin, while plasma levels of testosterone were not related to individual patterns of pup-feeding. Furthermore, a playback experiment that used pup begging calls to increase the feeding rates of male helpers gave rise to parallel increases in plasma cortisol levels, whilst prolactin and testosterone levels remained unchanged. Our findings confirm that hormones can explain significant amounts of variation in contributions to offspring feeding, and that cortisol, not prolactin, is the hormone most strongly associated with pup-feeding in cooperative male meerkats.

Animals↗
PubMed1981

Variation in phenotype due to random intrauterine positioning of male and female fetuses in rodents.

Rodents are polytocous mammals, and male and female fetuses can develop in utero contiguous to fetuses of the same or opposite sex. This paper describes experiments demonstrating that random intrauterine positioning of male and female fetuses results in within-sex variation in phenotype in mice and rats. This phenomenon provides a clear example of the degree to which the intrauterine environment can bias development in terms of effects on morphology, physiology and behaviour. I propose that individual differences in reproductively-related characteristics based on prior intrauterine position may play a role both in the regulation of population size in rodents and in the reproductive success of individuals as changes in population size occur.

Animals↗