Leptin regulates song effort in Neotropical singing mice (Scotinomys teguina)
Section snippets
Animals
We trapped singing mice (S. teguina) from the wild in the San Gerardo de Dota valley of Costa Rica. These animals were shipped to Austin, Texas, U.S.A. and maintained in an outbred laboratory colony. Mice were housed in hamster cages and provided with wheels with dome hideaways (Sterile Red InnoWheels and InnoDomes, Lab Supply, Ft Worth, TX, U.S.A.), pieces of PVC pipe to hide in, sphagnum moss and squares of cotton to be shredded for bedding. During experimental trials, mice were housed for 5
Effects of Leptin on Song Production
Our GLM revealed that song rate increased as a function of drug treatment (saline: 0.78 ± 0.94, N = 12 males; leptin: 1.46 ± 1.48, N = 12 males; Wald test: t2 = 2.67, P = 0.008; all values presented as means ± SD for each treatment; see Fig. 3). Males also sang more often after song playback, although not quite significantly so (presong: 0.77 ± 0.92, N = 22 trials, 17 songs; postsong: 1.27 ± 1.40, N = 48 trials, 61 songs; t2 = 1.81, P = 0.07). The effect of the random intercepts assigned to individual males was strong (P
Discussion
Leptin injections resulted in increased song effort and motivation to sing. First, leptin increased rates of song, as well as the related measure of latency to sing (Figure 3, Figure 4). Second, leptin also increased a composite measure of song effort based on a wide range of acoustic variables (see Fig. 6); this measure is derived from a PCA of natural song variation among wild-caught males (Burkhard et al., 2018). Prior work from our laboratory demonstrated that natural variation in leptin
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by a Departmental Startup grant from the University of Texas Austin Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Program, as well as by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF IOS-1457350) and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH 19-A0-00-1002501) awarded to Steven M. Phelps. We thank the Phelps lab as a whole, Jon Sakata, Andrea Gore and two anonymous referees for commentary and suggestions that greatly improved this piece.
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