 |
 |
Pheremones and Brain
Name: Abby D.
Status: N/A
Age: 16
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: 2002
Question:
What chemicals in the brain are responsible for the
physiological responses to attraction? For instance, what allows a female
bullfrog to choose one male over another. This is related to
pheromones.
Replies:
Interestingly, there has been quite a bit of research on mate choice in
frogs,
and it does not point towards pheromones. Researchers put individual males in
a soundproof room and measured their calls, in terms of the frequency and
amplitude, etc. Based on this, they labelled the males as either "strong" or
"weak" callers. Then they put a female in the middle of two males -- one, a
strong caller, and the other, a weak caller. In the great majority of cases,
the female made a beeline to the "strong-calling" male, i.e., the one that
was putting more energy into his call. They concluded that females preferred
the strong callers.
To test their theory, they put a female between a male frog and a speaker.
When they played male calls on the speaker that were similar to "high output"
calls from a real male, the female happily climbed up on the speaker and made
googoo eyes at it, ignoring the real (weakly-calling) male. Not a good case
for pheromones.
One interpretation of this data, favored by the authors of the study, is that
all the males need energy for essential things, like eating and avoiding
predators..... and only the strongest, "fittest" potential mate will have the
extra energy to spare for the loudest, most boisterous calls ("gosh, he MUST
have good genes to have all that spare energy for wooing me").
Cynics might conclude that the loud-calling frogs are the amphibian
counterpart to the guys who drape themselves in large gold necklaces and
drive expensive cars. Not to imply that the females are consciously making
this decision (errr, the female frogs, that is)... :-)
Paul Mahoney, Ph.D.
Click here to return to the Zoology Archives
| |
Update: June 2012
|
|
