Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Savoyenstrasse 1a, 1160, Vienna, Austria.
Department of Biology, University of Utah, 257 S. 1400 E., Salt Lake City, UT, 84112, USA.
Sci Rep. 2023 May 5;13(1):7371. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-34548-3.
Exposing female house mice (Mus musculus) to male urinary scent accelerates their sexual development (Vandenbergh effect). Here, we tested whether exposing juvenile male mice to females' urine similarly influences male growth and size of their sexual organs. We exposed three-week old male house mice to female urine or water (control) for ca. three months. We found that female-exposed males grew significantly faster and gained more body mass than controls, despite all males being reared on a controlled diet, but we detected no differences in males' muscle mass or sexual organs. In contrast, exposing juvenile males to male urine had no effect their growth. We tested whether the males' accelerated growth imposed functional trade-offs on males' immune resistance to an experimental infection. We challenged the same male subjects with an avirulent bacterial pathogen (Salmonella enterica), but found no evidence that faster growth impacted their bacterial clearance, body mass or survival during infection compared to controls. Our results provide the first evidence to our knowledge that juvenile male mice accelerate their growth when exposed to the urine of adult females, though we found no evidence that increased growth had negative trade-offs on immune resistance to infectious disease.
将雌性家鼠（Mus musculus）暴露于雄性尿液气味中会加速其性发育（Vandenbergh 效应）。在这里，我们测试了将幼年雄性小鼠暴露于雌性尿液中是否同样会影响雄性的生长和性器官的大小。我们将三周大的雄性家鼠暴露于雌性尿液或水（对照）中约三个月。我们发现，尽管所有雄性都在受控饮食下饲养，但暴露于雌性尿液中的雄性生长速度明显更快，体重增加更多，而雄性的肌肉质量或性器官没有差异。相比之下，将幼年雄性暴露于雄性尿液中对其生长没有影响。我们测试了雄性的加速生长是否对雄性对实验性感染的免疫抵抗力产生了功能权衡。我们用一种无毒细菌病原体（沙门氏菌）挑战了相同的雄性实验对象，但没有发现证据表明，与对照组相比，生长速度更快会影响其细菌清除率、体重或感染期间的存活率。我们的研究结果首次提供了证据，证明幼年雄性小鼠在暴露于成年雌性尿液时会加速其生长，尽管我们没有发现证据表明生长速度的增加对传染病的免疫抵抗力有负面影响。
