Juvenile rough-and-tumble play predicts adult sexual behavior in American mink
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The existence of play, a form of behaviour without obvious benefits to survival or reproduction, is a long-standing ethological mystery. Experiments in which socially deprived juvenile male mammals develop into sexually incompetent adults, along with widespread sexual dimorphism in rough-and-tumble play (R and T), suggest that R and T may prepare juvenile males for adult sexual behaviour. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a longitudinal study of American mink (Neovison vison) on two farms, w ith two cohorts each. For males (n = 121), we predicted that individuals with the highest frequencies of rough-and-tumble play as juveniles (10-20 weeks old) would, as adults, show shorter latencies to bite females' necks and to begin copulating, and copulate for longer durations. On one farm, we conducted a pilot study of females (n = 10) as a preliminary test of the hypothesis that R and T also prepares females for adult sexual behaviour. Here, our predictions were the opposite of those for males, since abilities to limit the number or duration of copulations could allow females to exercise pre- or post-copulatory mate choice. In total, we observed 1669 male-female encounters, and 1004 separate copulations. As predicted, frequent juvenile R and T predicted long-lasting copulations in adult males, and also longer latencies to copulate in adult females. This was true specifically of rough-and-tumble play itself, independently of general activity levels and, among a subset of 32 males reared in environmentally enriched housing, also independently of solitary object play. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that juvenile rough-and-tumble play predicts adult sexual behaviour in any species. Further research is required to test whether our female results can be replicated, and, importantly, to determine whether play truly has a causal role in either of these correlational relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".