(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Top Comments: Mothers and Children [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-12 Orcas Here at Top Comments we strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find! Here are two stories about relationships between mothers and their children; first, orcas, followed by humans, both from Science News. It seems that some mother orcas make a life-long effort to feed their adult sons (but not daughters). This observation was made for a “quirky” population that feed off chinook salmon on the Pacific coast of North America. This population does not migrate, For the moms, “it’s a huge, huge cost that they’re taking on,” Weiss says. It “emphasizes kind of the uniqueness and the intensity of this mother-son bond in killer whales.” For creatures that bear their young in a series, he says, this finding is “our first kind of direct evidence of any animal showing lifetime parental investment.” . . . When moms catch a fish, “they do this huge head jerk, and one half of the fish stays in the mouth and the other half kind of trails behind them as they swim on,” Weiss says. A son swimming with her can then grab that other half. “It’s not the son coming up and grabbing the fish out of her mouth,” he says. . . . Weiss doesn’t think the decline in new births after producing a son comes from any lack of opportunity to mate. “These whales are really social,” he says. “They’re usually in quite large groups, and usually with at least one sexually mature male around.” When watching them from drones, “we see that social behavior in these whales often involves a lot of sexual behavior,” he says. Nevertheless, all those halved fishes may not give a mom enough nutrition for the demands of whale pregnancy. The pay-off is that helping her sons will produce far more grandchildren. A genetic study of this population showed that the two oldest males sired more than half of the new calves. Females, on the other hand, have to go through an 18-month pregnancy, and then raise her calf on her own. (Males don’t participate in raising young.) Also, orcas are one of the few other mammalian species beside humans where females experience menopause; they stop reproducing in their 30s or 40s, but can live into their 80s, giving them many years to continue pampering their sons. It’s not known if this behavior occurs in other orca populations. A second study shows that while young children are attuned to their mother’s voices, by the time they reach their teens, they’re much less attentive. “Duh!” you say. This is the quintessential “Dog Bites Man” story. Everybody knows that teenagers don’t listen to their mothers. However, this universal observation is now backed up by analysis of brain activity in response to hearing their mothers’ voices among those of unfamiliar women. Previous experiments by Abrams and his colleagues have shown that certain regions of the brains of kids ages 7 to 12 — particularly those parts involved in detecting rewards and paying attention — respond more strongly to mom’s voice than to a voice of an unknown woman. “In adolescence, we show the exact opposite of that,” Abrams says. In these same brain regions in teens, unfamiliar voices elicited greater responses than the voices of their own dear mothers. The shift from mother to other seems to happen between ages 13 and 14. It’s not that these adolescent brain areas stop responding to mom, Abrams says. Rather, the unfamiliar voices become more rewarding and worthy of attention. And that’s exactly how it should be, Abrams says. Exploring new people and situations is a hallmark of adolescence. “What we’re seeing here is just purely a reflection of this phenomenon.” So there’s a good reason for this, to the dismay of mothers everywhere. (P. S. Is there a football game today?) Comments are below the fold. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/12/2152642/-Top-Comments-Mothers-and-Children Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/