Cross-fostering

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Cross-fostering or foreign Care designated in the field of experimental behavioral genetics a certain type of the rearing of unrelated juveniles. Here, for example, the offspring of two mothers are swapped immediately after birth.

But the transfer of an embryo from one uterus to another, the so-called embryo transfer , is sometimes referred to as cross-fostering . Accordingly, a distinction can be made between prenatal and postnatal cross-fostering.

If, for example, the offspring of a wild house mouse from the field are reared by a white laboratory mouse and - conversely - the offspring of the laboratory mouse from a wild caught, ideally, u. a. With the help of behavioral protocols , innate behavior can be distinguished from socially acquired behavior. This is always the case when certain behaviors of the two groups of test animals differ significantly from one another. If the young animals grown up with the “wrong” mother show the behavior of their group of origin without ever having had direct contact with an animal in this group, this behavior cannot be learned, it must be innate.

Extensive cross-fostering experiments have been carried out on chimpanzees since the 1960s (see Washoe (female chimpanzee) ). In these experiments, among other things, newborn chimpanzees were raised in a controlled experimental setup by humans who only communicated with the chimpanzees using the ASL sign language . The analysis should be used to draw conclusions about the genetic component of “language” learning. The majority of these studies came to the conclusion that language learning in chimpanzees and humans is essentially behavioral (and not genetically determined).

For horses there are organizations that mediate nurse mares.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael D. Breed, Janice Moore: Animal Behavior. Elsevier (Academic Press) 2012, p. 81, ISBN 978-0123725813
  2. ↑ See for example: Takefumi Kikusui et al .: Cross Fostering Experiments Suggest That Mice Songs Are Innate. In: PLoS ONE 6 (3): e17721, doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0017721
    Marc Haug, B. Pallaud: Effect of reciprocal cross-fostering on aggression of female mice toward lactating strangers. In: Developmental Psychobiology , Volume 14, No. 3, 1981, pp. 177-180, DOI: 10.1002 / dev.420140305
  3. ↑ See Allen Gardner , Beatrix Gardner: A cross-fostering laboratory. In: Allen Gardner, Beatrix Gardner, Thomas Van Cantfort (eds.): Teaching Sign Language to Chinpanzees. State University of New York, Albany / NY 1989, ISBN 978-0887069666 .
  4. ↑ See the overview of the results in: Valerie Chalcraft, Allen Gardner: Cross-fostered chimpanzees modulate signs of American Sign Language. In: Katja Liebal, Cornelia Müller, Simone Pika (Eds.): Gestural Communication in Nonhuman and Human Primates . John Benjamin Publishing Co, Amsterdam 2007, ISBN 978-9027222404 .
  5. ↑ Example of a nurse mare placement