Creel S R, Monfort S L, Wildt D E, Waser P M
Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907.
Nature. 1991 Jun 20;351(6328):660-2. doi: 10.1038/351660a0.
Lactation is almost exclusively associated with pregnancy and giving birth. Although lactation can be induced without a preceding pregnancy in some species, this requires exogenous hormones, artificially intense or extended suckling or both. Spontaneous lactation, lactation by females that have neither been pregnant nor experimentally manipulated, is extremely unusual among eutherians. Among nondomesticated animals, spontaneous lactation has been observed repeatedly only in the dwarf mongoose Helogale parvula. We report here spontaneous lactation by free-living dwarf mongooses using data on urinary oestrogen conjugate concentrations (n = 560, 65 females) and body weight (n = 3,096, 25 females) from a population in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. We use demographic data from this population to demonstrate that spontaneous lactation, and thus the endocrine phenomena that induce it, increase the evolutionary fitness of lactating females.
泌乳几乎完全与怀孕和分娩相关。虽然在某些物种中，没有先前的怀孕也能诱导泌乳，但这需要外源激素、人为强烈或延长的哺乳行为或两者兼而有之。自发泌乳，即既未怀孕也未经过实验操作的雌性的泌乳，在真兽类中极为罕见。在非家养动物中，仅在矮獴（Helogale parvula）中反复观察到自发泌乳。我们在此报告坦桑尼亚塞伦盖蒂国家公园一个种群中自由生活的矮獴的自发泌乳情况，数据来自尿雌激素结合物浓度（n = 560，65只雌性）和体重（n = 3096，25只雌性）。我们利用该种群的人口统计学数据来证明自发泌乳以及诱导它的内分泌现象会提高泌乳雌性的进化适应性。
