Prairie Voles Essay

Prairie voles are known for forming long-lasting bonds with a single mate. Because of this feature, it is important to understand how the sex of the social partner could affect a vole’s drinking behavior when two animals are housed together. Hostetler and colleagues (2012) focused on the effect of a partner’s sex on the relationship between social interaction and alcohol consumption in this species. One experiment focused on the effect of social housing on alcohol consumption in male-female pairs. To avoid potential changes in results caused by pregnancy and the presence of pups, males in this experiment were castrated two weeks before the beginning of the experiment. Following exposure to a novel animal of the opposite sex for five days, animals …show more content…
Gonadally intact animals were isolated for four days with access to ethanol and classified as “high” or “low” drinkers similar to previous studies. They were then housed with an opposite-sex animal of the same or opposite drinking group. After a period of four days, they were isolated a second time. The data suggests that there was little effect of the opposite-sex partner on an animal’s drinking intake. Unlike previous studies with same-sex partners, “high” drinkers did not reduce their ethanol intake to match the opposite-sex “low drinker.” While voles that were housed with a partner did have higher rates of alcohol consumption than isolated animals, the sex of the social partner appeared to have no effect on an animal’s preference or intake of alcohol. Both experiments in the study indicate that the effect of social interaction on ethanol consumption in this species depends on the sex of the social partner: if an animal is partnered with an animal of the same sex, then the partner could influence an animal’s drinking behavior. Opposite-sex partners, on the other hand, do not appear to have an