ArticleFrontiers in zoology2018
Female nursing partner choice in a population of wild house mice (
Article in Frontiers in zoology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Attenuation of social preference and alteration of cortical neurons following adolescent cerebellar nuclei perturbation.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Competitive social feedback amplifies the role of early life contingency in male mice.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Female behavior drives the formation of distinct social structures in C57BL/6J versus wild-derived outbred mice in field enclosures.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Re-wilding model organisms: Opportunities to test causal mechanisms in social determinants of health and aging.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Cryptic kin discrimination during communal lactation in mice favours cooperation between relatives.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Establishment of a social conditioned place preference paradigm for the study of social reward in female mice.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Body language signals for rodent social communication.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2021Review
- Long-term overlap of social and genetic structure in free-ranging house mice reveals dynamic seasonal and group size effects.Current zoology · 2021Article
- A natural catastrophic turnover event: individual sociality matters despite community resilience in wild house mice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- No evidence for kin protection in the expression of sickness behaviors in house mice.Scientific reports · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
abstract
backgroundCommunal nursing in house mice is an example of cooperation where females pool litters in the same nest and indiscriminately nurse own and other offspring despite potential exploitation. The direct fitness benefits associated with communal nursing shown in laboratory studies suggest it to be a selected component of female house mice reproductive behaviour. However, past studies on communal nursing in free-living populations have debated whether it is a consequence of sharing the same nest or an active choice. Here using data from a long-term study of free-living, wild house mice we investigated individual nursing decisions and determined what factors influenced a female's decision to nurse communally.
resultsFemales chose to nurse solitarily more often than expected by chance, but the likelihood of nursing solitarily decreased when females had more partners available. While finding no influence of pairwise relatedness on partner choice, we observed that females shared their social environment with genetically similar individuals, suggesting a female's home area consisted of related females, possibly facilitating the evolution of cooperation. Within such a home area females were more likely to nest communally when the general relatedness of her available options was relatively high. Females formed communal nests with females that were familiar through previous associations and had young pups of usually less than 5 days old.
conclusionsOur findings suggest that communal nursing was not a by-product of sharing the same nesting sites, but females choose communal nursing partners from a group of genetically similar females, and ultimately the decision may then depend on the pool of options available. Social partner choice proved to be an integrated part of cooperation among females, and might allow females to reduce the conflict over number of offspring in a communal nest and milk investment towards own and other offspring. We suggest that social partner choice may be a general mechanism to stabilize costly cooperation.
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