Do Herd Animals Mate With Their Offspring

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How practise animals recognise their progeny? Are they conscious that they reproduce? Male person lions impale the cubs of other males, but not their own, notwithstanding cuckoos get away with it. How?

Garry Trethewey Cherryville, South Australia

Some animals, similar many fish and reptiles, don't recognise their offspring at all, eating them or after mating with them. Only fifty-fifty amongst those that appear to recognise their offspring, I suspect that what they recognise is contempo proximity – an infant that they were caring for lately, for example.

Then there is the issue of the machinery of recognition. Does this happen by smell, sound, sight or in some other style? Exceptions to the rule are illustrative. If a lamb dies, and the mother of another lamb dies, a farmer can get the ewe to prefer the orphan by skinning the dead lamb and tying the pare around the live ane. It appears that the mother then smells her own lamb and allows suckling. It looks tentative at first. She appears to be thinking: "Are y'all really my baby?" But after the kickoff feed, she seems to bond with it.

When it comes to male lions killing the cubs of other males, but not their own, I am inclined to say that a male person lion doesn't actually recognise his own or another cub. What drives him is the time since acquisition of a new harem. If he has recently moved in, he will tend to impale whatever cubs, but after a while, he won't kill new cubs.

Researchers have studied how we humans recognise our offspring, particularly with regard to incest avoidance. We really don't recognise genetic relationships. It turns out that if two adults lived in shut proximity equally children, then sexual attraction is diminished. Unrelated children brought upwards together in collective communities such every bit kibbutzes later tend to seek sexual partners exterior that group, for instance.

So how practice cuckoos become away with leaving other birds to raise their young? Cuckoo chicks do all the things that their adoptive parents recognise: their open beaks are the correct shape and colour, and they make the correct sounds. And, of grade, they are sitting in the right nest.

What does this tell us about whether animals are conscious that they reproduce? Information technology is reasonable to say that animals live in the "at present". Some mating deed from a month or more than ago is forgotten. A baby has arrived? Feed information technology. You fed it yesterday, so keep feeding information technology.

From a slightly more philosophical bending, we don't demand to be conscious of something, or fifty-fifty to recognise it, for it to modify our behaviour. When I am hungry, my behaviour changes, even if I am non conscious of the feeling and don't "recognise" that I am hungry.

Mike Follows Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK

Most mammals use scent to recognise their young, whereas birds tend to use sound. Other factors can also play a role, including location and timing.

Males of some species – notably big cats – volition kill their mates' young if they are born too presently after they arrived on the scene. Female panthers and primates can go into pseudo-estrus (false heat) so that a new male will mate with them, hoodwinking him into believing that he is the begetter when the offspring are born.

Aroma is much less important for recognition among birds, which makes it easier for the common cuckoo to trick other bird species into raising their young. The colour of the cuckoo egg matches that of the host bird, but why doesn't the host bird reject the cuckoo chick? It seems that the parents imprint on, or bail with, any hatchling that appears in their nest.

"The parents can't recognise their chick by sight, sound or smell, then it is doomed if it falls from the nest and can't get back in"

Indeed, the grey-headed albatross relies on the fact that its chick is in the nest. The parents can't recognise their hatchling past sight, sound or smell, so a chick is doomed if it falls out of the nest and can't climb back in.

Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel laureate famous for studying bird behaviour, observed that greylag goose goslings imprint on the first moving stimulus that looks a chip like a bird. Incubator-hatched geese would imprint on his boots and follow him.

This strategy is fine when the parent is leading its young to food, but it wouldn't work for birds like penguins, where one parent has to leave to provender for food. In this instance, sound is more than important for recognition – penguins can discern the phone call of family members against the background din of a colony.

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