A possible function of the preference for hind nipples in prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster)

B McGuire1

  • 1Department of Biological Sciences, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts 01063, USA. bmcguire@science.smith.edu

Related Concept Videos

Mate Choice01:20

Mate Choice

Mate choice—the decision about whom to mate with—is a type of natural selection, since animals must reproduce to pass down their genes. Mate choice is also called intersexual selection because the behavior occurs between the sexes.
Optimal Foraging00:48

Optimal Foraging

How animals obtain and eat their food is called foraging behavior. Foraging can include searching for plants and hunting for prey and depends on the species and environment.
Parental Care00:55

Parental Care

Many animals exhibit parental care behavior, including feeding, grooming, and protecting young offspring. Parental care is universal in mammals and birds, which often have young that are born relatively helpless. Several species of insects and fish, as well as some amphibians, also care for their young.
Testing a Claim about Mean: Unknown Population SD01:21

Testing a Claim about Mean: Unknown Population SD

A complete procedure of testing a hypothesis about a population mean when the population standard deviation is unknown is explained here.
Estimating a population mean requires the samples to be approximately normally distributed. The data should be collected from the randomly selected samples having no sampling bias. There is no specific requirement for sample size. But if the sample size is less than 30, and we don't know the population standard deviation, a different approach is used; instead...
Natural Selection and Mating Preferences01:06

Natural Selection and Mating Preferences

The principle of natural selection posits that organisms better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. This principle is closely intertwined with mating preferences, a key aspect of sexual selection, which evolutionary psychologists believe is driven by instincts to propagate one's genes. Such instincts significantly influence mating behaviors and preferences between genders.
Females, due to their biological roles in conception, pregnancy, and nursing, inherently...
Instinctive Drift01:05

Instinctive Drift

Instinctive drift refers to the tendency of animals to revert to their innate behaviors despite repeated reinforcement. Breland and Breland demonstrated this concept in an experiment with a raccoon. The raccoon was trained to pick up two coins and place them in a container in exchange for food. Initially, the raccoon learned to associate the coins with food, making them a conditioned stimulus or a substitute for food. However, over time, the raccoon became less willing to put the coins into the...