Sailer Lindsay L, Finton Caitlyn J, Patel Pooja P, Bogdanowicz Steven M, Ophir Alexander G
Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States.
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2024 Feb 26;18:1355807. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2024.1355807. eCollection 2024.
Alternative mating tactics within mating systems are characterized by discrete patterns of spatio-temporal overlap with same-and opposite-sex conspecifics and mating-relevant outcomes. Socially monogamous "residents" maintain relatively small home range sizes, have territories that almost exclusively overlap with their mating partners, and are more likely to produce offspring than non-bonded "wandering" conspecifics. Because mating tactics appear to be so closely tied to patterns of space use, differences in spatial cognitive abilities might differentially impact individual males' decisions to adopt a particular mating tactic and/or how efficient they are within their chosen mating tactic. Yet few studies have considered how the hippocampus, a brain region important for encoding cognitive maps and for processing contextual information, might impact how individuals adopt mating tactics or the spatio-temporal behaviors closely associated with them. We assessed the impact of lesions to the dorsal CA1 (dCA1) region of the hippocampus on male prairie vole space use, reproductive success, and mating tactics in semi-natural outdoor field conditions. Interestingly, dCA1 lesions did not impact the proportion of males that adopted resident or wandering mating tactics, and dCA1 lesions did not impact a male's ability to form a pair bond in the lab. In contrast, we found that lesioning the dCA1 shifted the home range size of reproductively successful and unsuccessful males. Furthermore, we found that patterns of space use among residents were unaffected by dCA1 lesions, whereas wanderers with dCA1 lesions showed pronounced reductions of their space use habits and resembled non-lesioned residents. Collectively, our study supports the hypothesis that wanderer male prairie voles rely on dCA1-mediated spatial cognition to navigate their world in a way that resident males do not. Such differences might have implications for how individuals efficiently attract and defend mates, obtain resources, defend territories, and outcompete rivals.
交配系统中的替代交配策略具有与同性和异性同种个体在时空上离散的重叠模式以及与交配相关的结果。社会一夫一妻制的“定居者”维持相对较小的家域面积，其领地几乎完全与它们的交配伙伴重叠，并且比无配偶的“游荡”同种个体更有可能繁殖后代。由于交配策略似乎与空间利用模式紧密相关，空间认知能力的差异可能会不同程度地影响个体雄性采用特定交配策略的决定和/或它们在所选交配策略中的效率。然而，很少有研究考虑海马体（一个对编码认知地图和处理情境信息很重要的脑区）如何影响个体采用交配策略或与这些策略紧密相关的时空行为。我们评估了海马体背侧CA1（dCA1）区域损伤对半自然户外条件下雄性草原田鼠空间利用、繁殖成功率和交配策略的影响。有趣的是，dCA1损伤并未影响采用定居或游荡交配策略的雄性比例，并且dCA1损伤也未影响雄性在实验室中形成配偶关系的能力。相比之下，我们发现损伤dCA1会改变繁殖成功和不成功的雄性的家域大小。此外，我们发现定居者的空间利用模式不受dCA1损伤的影响，而dCA1损伤的游荡者则表现出其空间利用习惯明显减少，类似于未损伤的定居者。总体而言，我们的研究支持这样一种假设，即游荡的雄性草原田鼠依靠dCA1介导的空间认知来以定居雄性所不具备的方式在其世界中导航。这种差异可能对个体如何有效地吸引和保卫配偶、获取资源、保卫领地以及战胜竞争对手产生影响。
