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Rationale Early life social rearing has profound consequences on offspring behavior and resilience. Yet, most studies examining early life development in rodents use species whose young are born immobile and do not produce complex social behavior until later in development. Furthermore, models of rearing under increased social complexity, rather than deprivation, are needed to provide alternative insight into the development of social neural circuitry. Objectives To understand precocial offspring social development, we manipulated early life social complexity in the communal spiny mouse Acomys cahirinus and assessed long-term consequences on offspring social behavior, exploration, and neural responses to novel social stimuli. Methods Spiny mouse pups were raised in the presence or absence of a non-kin breeding group. Upon adulthood, subjects underwent social interaction tests, an open field test, and a novel object test. Subjects were then exposed to a novel conspecific and novel group and neural responses were quantified via immunohistochemical staining in brain regions associated with social behavior. Results Early life social experience did not influence behavior in the test battery, but it did influence social processing. In animals exposed to non-kin during development, adult lateral septal neural responses toward a novel conspecific were weaker and hypothalamic neural responses toward a mixed-sex group were stronger. Conclusions Communal species may exhibit robust behavioral resilience to the early life social environment. But the early life environment can affect how novel social information is processed in the brain during adulthood, with long-term consequences that are likely to shape their behavioral trajectory.
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The persistence of long facts: truth and consequence in Costa Rica’s aquifers
At the center of decades-long water conflicts in northwest Costa Rica, a particular fact has had a contentious status: whether the aquifers supplying the area hold sufficient water for collective life. I refer to this as the sufficiency fact, which has been established, debunked, and reestablished multiple times. To understand this peculiar dynamic, I zoom into discussions among community and business representatives about the future of these aquifers. There, in the density of social life, I show how as place-specific formations, facts are “long” entities that remain tied to their interpretations and, crucially, to their potential consequences. As opposed to the ideal of short facts that characterizes modern science, long facts reveal the rich social life that facticity takes in the twenty-first century. Long facts are always contested, explicitly political, and unable to be separated from their potential consequences. In contrast to scholarship that diagnoses the loss of the value of truth within the contemporary moment, I suggest it is critical to understand the abundance of regimes of facticity that surround us and what they make possible leaving behind assumptions of deficit and lack.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2153960
- PAR ID:
- 10580419
- Publisher / Repository:
- Taylor & Francis
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2572-9861
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- water science quantification
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2024.2395734
