Evolution and development of sex differences in cooperative behavior in meerkats

In cooperatively breeding birds, where helpers of both sexes assist with the provisioning and upbringing of offspring who are not their own, males tend to contribute more than females to rearing young. This sex difference has been attributed to paternity uncertainty, but could also occur because males contribute more where they are likely to remain and breed in their group of origin. In contrast to most birds, female meerkats (Suricata suricatta) are more likely to breed in their natal group than males. We show that female meerkat helpers contribute more to rearing young than males and that female helpers feed female pups more frequently than males. Our results suggest that sex differences in cooperative behavior are generated by sex differences in philopatry and occur because females derive greater direct benefits than males from raising recruits to their natal group. These findings support the view that direct, mutualistic benefits are important in the evolution of specialized cooperative behavior.     

Sexual difference theory: mormon crickets show role reversal in mate choice

Male Mormon crickets produce a large spermatophore that the female eats. Spermatophore proteins are important to female reproduction, and females compete for access to singing males. Males reject most receptive females as mates, and those accepted are more fecund than rejected individuals. This role reversal in courtship is in contrast to the behavior of the sexes in katydid species in which the males produce small spermatophores.     

长臂猿的鸣叫行为研究进展简

长臂猿（Hylobetidae）是现生猿类中体型最小的类群,现主要生活在东南亚热带、亚热带森林中,由于栖息地被破坏,长臂猿的数量急剧减少。对长臂猿的呜叫行为研究进展进行了综述,分析了长臂猿呜叫的时间、结构和声谱特征以及呜叫的主要功能和假说,总结了影响呜叫的因素,并对今后长臂猿呜叫行为的研究进行了展望。     

Cooperation, control, and concession in meerkat groups

"Limited control" models of reproductive skew in cooperative societies suggest that the frequency of breeding by subordinates is determined by the outcome of power struggles with dominants. In contrast, "optimal skew" models suggest that dominants have full control of subordinate reproduction and allow subordinates to breed only when this serves to retain subordinates' assistance with rearing dominants' own litters. The results of our 7-year field study of cooperative meerkats, Suricata suricatta, support the predictions of limited control models and provide no indication that dominant females grant reproductive concessions to subordinates to retain their assistance with future breeding attempts.     

Song replay during sleep and computational rules for sensorimotor vocal learning

Songbirds learn a correspondence between vocal-motor output and auditory feedback during development. For neurons in a motor cortex analog of adult zebra finches, we show that the timing and structure of activity elicited by the playback of song during sleep matches activity during daytime singing. The motor activity leads syllables, and the matching sensory response depends on a sequence of typically up to three of the preceding syllables. Thus, sensorimotor correspondence is reflected in temporally precise activity patterns of single neurons that use long sensory memories to predict syllable sequences. Additionally, "spontaneous" activity of these neurons during sleep matches their sensorimotor activity, a form of song "replay." These data suggest a model whereby sensorimotor correspondences are stored during singing but do not modify behavior, and off-line comparison (e.g., during sleep) of rehearsed motor output and predicted sensory feedback is used to adaptively shape motor output.     

乡村旅游中的产权与投融资关系研究——以南宁市“美丽南方”忠良景区为例

在产权制度理论的基础上,分析了政府主导投资模式和企业投融资模式所产生的＂公地悲剧＂和利益冲突的问题,通过调研＂美丽南方＂忠良景区各个阶段的投融资方式,提出大力发展股份合作制,以协调各方的利益,实现乡村旅游可持续发展的策略。     

Discounting and reciprocity in an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma

The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) is a central paradigm in the study of animal cooperation. According to the IPD framework, repeated play (repetition) and reciprocity combine to maintain a cooperative equilibrium. However, experimental studies with animals suggest that cooperative behavior in IPDs is unstable, and some have suggested that strong preferences for immediate benefits (that is, temporal discounting) might explain the fragility of cooperative equilibria. We studied the effects of discounting and strategic reciprocity on cooperation in captive blue jays. Our results demonstrate an interaction between discounting and reciprocity. Blue jays show high stable levels of cooperation in treatments with reduced discounting when their opponent reciprocates, but their levels of cooperation decline in all other treatment combinations. This suggests that stable cooperation requires both reduced discounting and reciprocity, and it offers an explanation of earlier failures to find cooperation in controlled payoff games.     

Reproductive development in a female songbird: differential stimulation by quality of male song

Female canaries exposed to playback of large repertoires of male songs built nests faster and laid more eggs than did those females exposed to smaller song repertoires: females are attentive to attributes of male song, and their choices have played a role in the evolution of oscine singing behaviors.     

Cooperative solution of constraint satisfaction problems

It is widely believed that a group of cooperating agents engaged in problem solving can solve a task faster than either a single agent or the same group of agents working in isolation from each other. Nevertheless, little is known about the quantitative improvements that result from cooperation. A number of experimental results are presented on constraint satisfaction that both test the predictions of a theory of cooperative problem solving and assess the value of cooperation for this class of problems. These experiments suggest an alternative methodology to existing techniques for solving constraint satisfaction problems in computer science and distributed artificial intelligence.     

Breeding together: kin selection and mutualism in cooperative vertebrates

In cooperatively breeding vertebrates, nonbreeding helpers raise young produced by dominant breeders. Although the evolution of cooperative breeding has often been attributed primarily to kin selection (whereby individuals gain "indirect" benefits to their fitness by assisting collateral relatives), there is increasing evidence that helpers can be unrelated to the young they are raising. Recent studies also suggest that the indirect benefits of cooperative behavior may often have been overestimated while the direct benefits of helping to the helper's own fitness have probably been underestimated. It now seems likely that the evolutionary mechanisms maintaining cooperative breeding are diverse and that, in some species, the direct benefits of helping may be sufficient to maintain cooperative societies. The benefits of cooperation in vertebrate societies may consequently show parallels with those in human societies, where cooperation between unrelated individuals is frequent and social institutions are often maintained by generalized reciprocity.     

Transmammary infection of newborn by larval trematodes

Newborn cats and mice became infected with Alaria marcianae if they nursed from females that had been experimentally infected with the parasite. All lactating females showed mesocercarial stages in their mammary glands. This may be the first trematode found to undergo transmission through the mammary glands under experimental conditions. Similarities in the behavior of mesocercariae in humans and in the mouse suggest that an infected human female might infect her infant if she elected to nurse it.     

Sex-specific UV and fluorescence signals in jumping spiders

No animals are known to possess both ultraviolet (UV) reflectance and fluorescence that are sex-specific. We provide evidence for this separation in the jumping spider Cosmophasis umbratica, which has UV reflectance and UV-induced green fluorescence restricted to males and females, respectively. During courtship, many of the studied pairs failed to show typical display posturing when UV light was blocked. Occluding the UV component of sunlight to only one of each pair also caused atypical behavior: Females showed no interest in non-UV-reflective courting males, and males either ignored or were lackluster in courting nonfluorescing females. These results demonstrate the importance of both sex-specific hues as sexual signals for effective intraspecific communication.     

Diversity of G proteins in signal transduction

The heterotrimeric guanine nucleotide-binding proteins (G proteins) act as switches that regulate information processing circuits connecting cell surface receptors to a variety of effectors. The G proteins are present in all eukaryotic cells, and they control metabolic, humoral, neural, and developmental functions. More than a hundred different kinds of receptors and many different effectors have been described. The G proteins that coordinate receptor-effector activity are derived from a large gene family. At present, the family is known to contain at least sixteen different genes that encode the alpha subunit of the heterotrimer, four that encode beta subunits, and multiple genes encoding gamma subunits. Specific transient interactions between these components generate the pathways that modulate cellular responses to complex chemical signals.     

丹顶鹤与白枕鹤语图结构分析及比较

采用Avisoft SAS-Lab软件对采自哈尔滨北方森林动物园和扎龙自然保护区的笼养丹顶鹤(Grusjaponensis)和白枕鹤(Grus vipio)的鸣声,即繁殖期对鸣、日常短鸣及幼鸟鸣声进行了语图结构分析,对丹顶鹤和白枕鹤的同源声音进行比较发现,它们的对鸣、日常短鸣及幼鸟的鸣声都具有显著的差异:白枕鹤对鸣的单音节持续时间较丹顶鹤短;丹顶鹤日常短鸣的持续时间较长,频率较高。对于幼鸟鸣声,则是白枕鹤幼鸟鸣声持续的时间更长,频率更高。     

Mutagenesis of odorant coreceptor Orco reveals the distinct role of olfaction between sexes in Spodoptera frugiperda

Odorant receptor (OR) is crucial for insects to detect and recognize external chemical cues closely related to their survival. The insect OR forms a heteromeric complex composed of a ligand-specific receptor and a ubiquitously odorant receptor coreceptor (Orco). This study used the CRISPR/Cas9 technique to knock out (KO) Orco and reveal its essential role in acting on OR-meditated olfactory behavior in a critical invasive agricultural pest, the fall armyworm (FAW), Spodoptera frugiperda. Electroantennogram (EAG) results suggested that the Orco mutants of both male and female moths severely reduced their electrophysiological responses to the eight tested plant volatiles and two sex pheromones. However, the Orco gene played distinct roles in mating behavior between sexes: the mating behavior was fully disrupted in mutated males but not in mutated females. The oviposition result indicated that the Orco KO females displayed reduced egg laying by 24.1% compared with the mated wild type (WT) females. Overall, these results strongly suggest that Orco is an excellent target for disrupting FAW’s normal behavior and provides a feasible pest control approach.     

Via freedom to coercion: the emergence of costly punishment

In human societies, cooperative behavior in joint enterprises is often enforced through institutions that impose sanctions on defectors. Many experiments on so-called public goods games have shown that in the absence of such institutions, individuals are willing to punish defectors, even at a cost to themselves. Theoretical models confirm that social norms prescribing the punishment of uncooperative behavior are stable-once established, they prevent dissident minorities from spreading. But how can such costly punishing behavior gain a foothold in the population? A surprisingly simple model shows that if individuals have the option to stand aside and abstain from the joint endeavor, this paves the way for the emergence and establishment of cooperative behavior based on the punishment of defectors. Paradoxically, the freedom to withdraw from the common enterprise leads to enforcement of social norms. Joint enterprises that are compulsory rather than voluntary are less likely to lead to cooperation.     

Prolactin stimulation of maternal behavior in female rats

Inexperienced, hypophysectomized female rats treated with steroids were used in experiments to investigate the roles of the pituitary gland and prolactin in the expression of maternal behavior. Administration of ovine prolactin or treatment with ectopic pituitary grafts, which release prolactin into the circulation, stimulated maternal care in these females toward rat young. Steroid treatment alone, while stimulating maternal behavior in rats with intact pituitary glands, did not facilitate maternal responsiveness in hypophysectomized females. These findings indicate a stimulatory behavioral role for pituitary prolactin in the establishment of maternal care and suggest that exposure to prolactin during pregnancy helps to stimulate the immediate onset of maternal behavior at parturition.     

The cellular basis of a corollary discharge

How do animals discriminate self-generated from external stimuli during behavior and prevent desensitization of their sensory pathways? A fundamental concept in neuroscience states that neural signals, termed corollary discharges or efference copies, are forwarded from motor to sensory areas. Neurons mediating these signals have proved difficult to identify. We show that a single, multisegmental interneuron is responsible for the pre- and postsynaptic inhibition of auditory neurons in singing crickets (Gryllus bimaculatus). Therefore, this neuron represents a corollary discharge interneuron that provides a neuronal basis for the central control of sensory responses.     

中年ICR小鼠和昆明小鼠种属型行为改变及其性别差异

探讨中年ICR小鼠和昆明小鼠种属行为的改变及其性别差异。结果表明,两品系中年小鼠的储藏行为没有改变。ICR小鼠的挖掘行为下降,且主要归因于雌鼠。两品系中年小鼠的作窝能力下降;ICR小鼠主要归因于雌性,昆明小鼠雌雄性均下降。这些结果提示在ICR和昆明小鼠,作窝能力的下降出现较早,可较好地反映衰老效应。挖掘和储藏行为对衰老效应的判定意义不大。     

A test for responsiveness to song structure and programming in female sparrows

Female song sparrows, primed with implants of estradiol, gave the solicitation display for copulation in response to acoustic stimulation with song. This technique demonstrated that female song sparrows respond more strongly to conspecific song than to alien songs, that they discriminate on the basis of both overall temporal pattern and syllabic structure, that they respond more to several song types than to repetitions of one song, and that they are most responsive to several song types if the songs are organized in bouts of a single type, as they are normally delivered by a male song sparrow. These results demonstrate a substantial correspondence between the structure and programming of the singing behavior of male birds and female responsiveness to song.