Meeting Abstract
Finding reproductively available mates is an important part of reproductive behavior for animals. For female rodents, signals of reproductive receptivity are often scent-based, enabling perception by males when the female is not present. In African giant pouched rats (Cricteomys ansorgei), females have variable vaginal patency and can exhibit no vaginal opening in adulthood even though by other metrics they appear sexually mature. Males can perceive signals of patency through female urine, but we do not know if females are also changing their behavior to alter their signaling rate. We hypothesized that patency would influence sexual ‘advertizing’ by females. We predicted that non-patent (i.e. reproductively unreceptive) females would advertise via scent marking less often than patent females. We exposed females in a novel arena to artificially placed male urine marks and observed their scent marking behavior. Both types of females investigated the male scent, and scent marked using urine and anogenital rubbing. Notably, we observed a ‘hop-skip’ behavior reported in C. gambianus, which is only elicited in females with contact to non-volatile components of male urine. We detected no statistical difference between patent and non-patent females’ behavior, although a small preliminary sample limits our statistical power. Potentially, non-patent females might scent mark to signal to other females in addition to males. Taken together, our data show that pouched rat females advertize via scent marking irrespective of their reproductive state.
