Science & Technology Story Nursing gerbils unravel benefit of
multiple mothers in collective mammals Posted January 10, 2013;
03:39 p.m. In mammals such as rodents that raise their young as
a group, infants will nurse from their mother as well as other
females, a dynamic known as allosuckling. Ecologists have long
hypothesized that allosuckling lets newborns stockpile
antibodies to various diseases, but the experimental proof has
been lacking until now. An in-press report in the journal
Mammalian Biology found that infant Mongolian gerbils that
suckled from females given separate vaccines for two different
diseases wound up with antibodies for both illnesses. The
findings not only demonstrate the potential purpose of
allosuckling, but also provide the first framework for further
studying it in the wild by using traceable antibodies, said
first author Romain Garnier, a postdoctoral researcher in
Princeton University's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary
Biology. Garnier conducted the research with Sylvain G