Abstract
For an infant mammal in the nest, the principal environmental variables are those provided by the parents. A series of studies has been made on parental influences on the development of house mice, especially in relation to cold adaptation1,2. During this work the role of the father has usually been ignored. Here we present evidence that such inverted sexism is unjustified. Mated pairs, of which the male was from the tenth generation of a stock of wild-type mice kept in a cold environment, reared a higher proportion of their young than did pairs of which the male was from a control stock. The influence of the male on variance in survival in the nest was greater than that of the female.
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Barnett, S., Dickson, R. A paternal influence on survival of wild mice in the nest. Nature 317, 617–618 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1038/317617a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/317617a0
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