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Chemical Senses Advance Access originally published online on April 10, 2007
Chemical Senses 2007 32(5):463-473; doi:10.1093/chemse/bjm015
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© 2007 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Sex Selectivity of Mouse Ultrasonic Songs

Zhongsheng Guo and Timothy E. Holy

Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, 660 South Euclid Avenue, Campus Box 8108, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO 63110, USA

Correspondence to be sent to: Timothy E. Holy, Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, 660 South Euclid Avenue, Campus Box 8108, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO 63110, USA. e-mail: holy{at}wustl.edu


  Abstract

In many species, reproduction requires detecting, recognizing, and courting a potential mate. Progress through these stages is guided by cues involving a wide range of sensory systems. Here we explore the tasks of detection, recognition, and response in terms of the ultrasonic songs of male mice presented with odor cues contained in urine. We find that the quantity of singing, more so than specific features of the songs, varies depending upon the odor cue. For experienced male mice, responses to female odor cues depend only on the concentration of female cues and are independent of the presence of male cues. However, for naive mice, male cues appear to be synergistic for the response to female cues. We therefore find no direct behavioral evidence for a role of opponent neural processing, such as lateral inhibition, in distinguishing sex by olfactory cues. However, modeling demonstrates that lateral inhibition could be one possible mechanism to account for the switch from synergy to independence.

Key words: lateral inhibition, olfaction, opponency, psychophysics, sex recognition

Accepted 23 February 2007


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