Elevated prolactin levels immediately precede decisions to babysit by male meerkat helpers

Hormones and Behavior
Anne A CarlsonTim H Clutton-Brock

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that decisions to care for the offspring of others in societies of cooperative vertebrates may have a hormonal basis. The crucial question of whether changes in hormone levels immediately precede or merely follow bouts of offspring care, however, remains largely unanswered. Here, we show that in wild groups of cooperatively breeding meerkats, male helpers that decided to babysit for the day had significantly higher levels of prolactin, coupled with lower levels of cortisol, before initiating a babysitting session compared with similarly aged individuals that decided to forage. In addition, these hormonal differences disappeared over the course of the day, suggesting that hormone levels changed in a fundamentally different way in meerkats that babysat versus those that foraged. In contrast, long-term contributions to babysitting were not significantly associated with plasma levels of prolactin, cortisol, or testosterone in individual male helpers. Our results show, for the first time, that elevated levels of prolactin may immediately precede bouts of helping behavior but differ from recent findings on the same study population in which plasma levels of cortisol, but not prolactin, were significantly and po...Continue Reading

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Citations

Aug 4, 2010·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Marta C SoaresRui F Oliveira
Oct 12, 2010·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Joah R Madden, Tim H Clutton-Brock
Aug 9, 2015·Hormones and Behavior·Anne E Storey, Toni E Ziegler
Nov 8, 2015·Hormones and Behavior·Javier delBarco-TrilloChristine M Drea
Mar 1, 2012·American Journal of Primatology·Michelle L RafaczRachel M Santymire
Jul 20, 2011·Hormones and Behavior·Anne E StoreyDonald W McKay
Mar 19, 2015·Frontiers in Neuroscience·Cheryl S Rosenfeld
Jun 9, 2016·Animal Reproduction Science·Boonyarit KamkrathokYupaporn Chaiseha
Nov 3, 2016·Developmental Neurobiology·William M KenkelC Sue Carter
Oct 28, 2015·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Katherine McAuliffeAndrew F Russell
Dec 15, 2017·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Judith M BurkartMichael Griesser
Aug 24, 2018·International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health·Deybbi Cuéllar-MolinaAna M Lucia-Casademunt
May 26, 2010·Nature Neuroscience·Margaret M McCarthy
Sep 22, 2017·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Ben DantzerTim H Clutton-Brock
Jul 19, 2016·Journal of Postgraduate Medicine·F HashemianE Roohi
May 10, 2017·Royal Society Open Science·Katy ScottEmma I K Vitikainen
Aug 3, 2017·Animal Cognition·Federica AmiciNereida Bueno-Guerra
Apr 17, 2021·General and Comparative Endocrinology·Filipa Cunha-SaraivaFranziska C Schaedelin

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