New research suggests that mothers will respond to the cries of an infant even when the infant is of another species. Susan Lingle (University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) and Tobias Riede (Midwestern University, Glendale, AZ) played recordings of distress calls made by infants from a variety of mammal species through speakers hidden on a cattle ranch to study the responses of mother deer (Odocouleus hemionus). They found that the deer often responded to these calls (Am. Nat. 184, 510–522; 2014. Said Lingle, “These are calls that are generally made in a life-or-death situation. I think the advantage of securing survival for your offspring outweighs the potential for error.”
Interestingly, the mother deer only responded to calls with the same fundamental frequency as the call produced by young of their own species, even if the fundamental frequency of the call had been manipulated to fall within that range. When unmanipulated calls of other species with fundamental frequencies falling below or above the range were played, mother deer alerted to the sound but did not move toward the speaker. The deer did not respond to non-infant calls or to control sounds having the same fundamental frequency but a different structure, suggesting that it is the common structure of infant cries to which the mothers respond. KR
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