ArticleBiology letters2018
Evidence for contrasting roles for prolactin in eusocial naked mole-rats,
Article in Biology letters, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Article
- Lactate as a key energy source facilitating cooperative behaviour in helper Damaraland mole-rats.Biology letters · 2025Article
- The dissection of a despotic society: exploration, dominance and hormonal traits.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Phylogenetic modeling of enhancer shifts in African mole-rats reveals regulatory changes associated with tissue-specific traits.Genome research · 2023Article
- The best of both worlds: no apparent trade-off between immunity and reproduction in two group-living African mole-rat species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The Evolution and Ecology of Oxidative and Antioxidant Status: A Comparative Approach in African Mole-Rats.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Tissue Oxidative Ecology along an Aridity Gradient in a Mammalian Subterranean Species.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Socially Induced Infertility in Naked and Damaraland Mole-Rats: A Tale of Two Mechanisms of Social Suppression.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
- Social stress is unlikely to play a major role in reproductive suppression of female subordinate naked mole-rats and Damaraland mole-rats.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Plasma oxidative stress in reproduction of two eusocial African mole-rat species, the naked mole-rat and the Damaraland mole-rat.Frontiers in zoology · 2021Article
- The Cost of Reproduction in a Cooperatively Breeding Mammal: Consequences of Seasonal Variation in Rainfall, Reproduction, and Reproductive Suppression.Frontiers in physiology · 2021Article
- Changes in prolactin, cortisol and testosterone concentrations during queen succession in a colony of naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber): a case study.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2019Article
- Not just a cousin of the naked mole-rat: Damaraland mole-rats offer unique insights into biomedicine.Comparative biochemistry and physiology. Part B, Biochemistry & molecular biologyReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Elevated prolactin (PRL) has been associated with the expression of social and cooperative behaviours in a number of vertebrate species, as well as suppression of reproduction. As social mole-rats exhibit both of these traits, PRL is a prime candidate in mediating their social phenotype. While naked and Damaraland mole-rats (NMRs and DMRs) have evolved eusociality independently within their family, both species exhibit an extreme skew in lifetime reproductive success, with breeding restricted to a single female and one or two males. Non-breeding NMRs of both sexes are physiologically inhibited from reproducing, while in DMRs only the non-breeding females are physiologically suppressed. Newly emerging work has implicated the dopamine system and PRL as a component in socially induced reproductive suppression and eusociality in NMR, but the DMR remains unstudied in this context. To investigate evolutionary convergence in the role of PRL in shaping African mole-rat eusociality, we determined plasma PRL concentrations in breeders and non-breeders of both sexes, comparing DMRs with NMRs. Among samples from non-breeding NMRs 80% had detectable plasma PRL concentrations. As a benchmark, these often (37%) exceeding those considered clinically hyperprolactinaemic (25 ng ml
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