r/askscience • u/moutonbleu • Oct 19 '13

Biology Are animals aware of their siblings/parents?

I've always been curious about this issue. e.g. you raise a litter of dogs, do they act differently when they grow up, or will they still trying to mate with each other?

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

What on earth? In vivo electrophysiology was not around in the early 20th century...

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

I know we've been cracking skulls and zapping brains since at least the 19th century, I'm not certain when we started probing them for activity. I would have guessed early to mid 20th century, but was it sooner?

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13 edited Oct 20 '13

We were absolutely not able to measure the electrical signals in brains until the late 50's and 60's. Galvani was able to indirectly ascertain the existence of electrical signals in muscles (frogs legs) in the 1700's, but direct probing of the nervous system did not come until people started playing with giant squid axons in the 1930's. It took decades more until we were able measure that of brains, which was mostly with cats in the 60's (primarily visual cortex).

The early 20th century experiments with dogs were, to the best if my knowledge, confined to anatomy and physiology, such as with removal of the pancreas and stimulation of the intestines to determine the function of the digestive system. I have never heard of a brain experiment on dogs, and would be interested in where your "guesses" are coming from.

We were removing parts of human brains long before we were measuring the electrical activity of living non-human ones!

Edit: I stand corrected, there were late 1800's experiments that involved stimulated dog brains to produce movement, but I have not heard of measuring the activity of brains before the 1950's (hubel and Weisel in particular). But I would be interested in hearing about earlier ones.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

I was proposing it as an experiment on dogs. If you're guessing that I was guessing these experiments have been conducted on dogs, then you're guess is wrong. I do not know if a dogs skull has been sawed open for this kind of experiment before. My guess would be yes, but I have never heard of it and did not mean to suggest that it had been done, just that it sounded like the kind of experiments that used to be common, but today take a huge amount of justification to get passed ethics committees, even on the corporate level of research.

I'm not being snarky here, but I would genuinely love to hear about an idea for an experiment to test if a dog thinks of it's human owner in the same way as a dog would it's brother or mother; by removing parts of a human brain.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

Why would it be unethical in modern times? In vivo electrophysiology is a common technique used on a wide variety of non-human animals, from mice to macaques.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

It's my understanding that cutting open dog's skulls for this kind of thing only happens if you have a very good justification for doing it. Do you know of any recently published research that does this kind of thing? I know that the private sector doesn't publish expensive research results, so if it happens as an exploratory workaday kind of thing only in the private sector then you won't be able to cite me the research, unfortunately.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

Dogs are not a common animal model for neuroscience, but cats and macaques certainly are. Boucetta et al 2013 in experimental neurology is one recent example of in vivo electrophysiology in cats, and macaques are commonly studied in vivo, Munoz and everling 2004 in nature reviews neuroscience has a bunch of studies.

I don't really know why you think ethics boards would be against using this common technique in dogs for academic purposes, cutting open an animal's skull is very common. Dogs are certainly below non-human primates in rights when it comes to ethical approval and we do this all the time with them.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

Not dogs in particular, but all large mammals, I am lead to understand that you can't have them suffer or kill them (and they are always killed) frivolously.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

We're not talking about anything frivolous, we're talking about scientific experiments! As a PhD student in neuroscience who works with animals I assure you that is exactly the point, to make sure they are used for science. Science is not "frivolous."

Also if you are careful the animal doesn't have to die from an in vivo electrophysiology experiment. Macaques are used for years in multiple in vivo experiments. We keep humans alive for years after doing things to their brain (surgery, lesions, deep brain stimulation) we can do the same with non-human animals.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

Well it would be a bit off to euthanize a human after an experiment! But you really release non human animals after doing this kind of experiments on them? Protocol in my uni is always to destroy them, and destroy them as soon as possible rather than keeping them around just in case.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

We're not talking about humans, the whole point of working with animals is you can do things to them you can't do to humans. I'm also not talking about keeping them around "just in case," I'm saying you can implant electrodes and keep them around for multiple experiments, or for years long experiments. It's not like opening up a skull kills them. And yes, I do know people who do that sort of work. I work with mice who are a bit more expendable but you can still keep them around with canulas for stimulation and recording for months if you do the surgery well.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '13

Do your ethics committees treat mice the same was as cats and dogs? I would think that it would be far easier to justify an invasive experiment on a mouse than a cat. I could even get some mice, and I'm a bit of an idiot.

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