But not all female squirrels have these "super mom" capabilities whose genes are wired with these traits--there are "dud moms" in the population as well, report Dr. Stan Boutin and Dr. Andrew McAdam in the current edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B. The research team addressed how much influence a mother has on her babies' well-being verus the role the environment plays.

"Everybody knew that the care a mother provides was important," said McAdam, who conducted the work in Boutin's lab at the U of A before moving to the University of California. "But no one has been able to actually show proof of this in the wild before this. We now know which specific traits are contributing to evolution."

The understanding of how characteristics evolve or change is often limited because measuring inheritance in the wild is difficult. Boutin was able to address this issue because he has been monitoring a large squirrel population--approximately 400 adults--since 1989 and because he was able to take some squirrels away from one mother and give them to another (cross-foster).

"We found that the growth rates in young squirrels are determined partly by genes in the offspring--nature--but mostly by the quality of care provided by their mother--nurture," said Boutin, from the Faculty of Science. "We also found that the ability of mothers to care for their offspring is also determined partly by genes. As such, we have quantified the nature of nurture."

Boutin likens what is happening with the red squirrel to the familiar saying that a child is born with a silver spoon in her mouth, suggesting the child is blessed with special conditio
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Contact: Phoebe Dey
phoebe.dey@ualberta.ca
780-492-0437
University of Alberta
12-Nov-2003