BROADCASTS.com

b"Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo!\\n\\nThanks to Ella and Jack for this week's topic suggestion, animals that mate for life or develop pair bonds! Happy Valentine's Day!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nWisdom the albatross, now 70, hatches yet another chick\\n\\nThe prairie vole mates for life:\\n\\n\\n\\nSwans mate for life:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe black vulture also mates for life:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe Laysan albatross:\\n\\n\\n\\nWisdom the Laysan albatross with her 2021 chick (pic from the link listed above). I hope I look that good at 70:\\n\\n\\n\\nDik-diks!\\n\\n \\n\\nThe dik-dik nose is somewhat prehensile:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe pileated gibbon (and other gibbons) forms pair bonds:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\nLast February Ella and her son Jack suggested a Valentine\\u2019s Day topic. I already had the February episodes finished last year, but this year Valentine\\u2019s Day falls on a Monday and that just seems too perfect to pass up. So thanks to Ella and Jack, we\\u2019re going to learn about some animals that are monogamous.\\nValentine\\u2019s Day falls on February 14th and in many European cultures is a day celebrating love and romance. It also falls at the very beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere, when many animals start finding mates.\\nDifferent species of animal have different relationships. Some animals are social, some are solitary. Every species is different because every species has slightly different requirements for reproducing due to different habitats, foods, how much care the babies need, and so forth.\\nThere are different types of monogamy among animals and it can get complicated, just as it\\u2019s often complicated in people, so I\\u2019m going to simplify it for this episode into two categories: animals that mate for life and animals that form pair bonds. Animals that mate for life, meaning the male and female seek each other out every mating season to have babies together, don\\u2019t necessarily spend all their time together outside of mating season. Animals in pair bonds spend a lot of their time together, but they don\\u2019t always exclusively mate with each other. But some animals do both.\\nFor instance, the prairie vole. This is a little rodent that lives in dry grasslands in central North America, in parts of the United States and Canada. It\\u2019s about the size of a mouse with a short tail although it\\u2019s more chonky than a mouse, like a small dark brown hamster. It spends most of its time either in a shallow burrow it digs among grass roots or out finding the plant material and insects it eats by traveling through aboveground tunnels it makes through densely packed plant stems. It lives in colonies and is a social animal most of the time, and the male in particular is devoted to his mate. He\\u2019s so devoted that once he\\u2019s found a mate, he will even drive away other females who approach him.\\nThe only time the prairie vole isn\\u2019t social is during mating season, which is usually twice a year, in fall and in spring. At that time, mated pairs leave the colony and find a small territory to have their babies. The pair spends almost all their time together, grooming each other, finding and sharing food, and building a nest for the babies. When the babies are born, both parents help care for them.\\nThe male prairie vole mates for life. Most of the time \\u201cmating for life\\u201d means that if one of a pair dies, the other will then find a new mate. But for the male prairie vole, if his mate dies, he stays single for the rest of his life. He also shows behaviors that are similar to grief in humans. The female prairie vole is a little more practical and although she also grieves if her mate dies, she\\u2019ll eventually find another mate. Researchers who study prairie voles have discovered that the hormones found in mated pairs are the same as those in humans who are in love.\\nThat\\u2019s so sweet, and I wish I didn\\u2019t have to talk about the voles dying. I think the opposite of love isn\\u2019t hate; the opposite of love is grie..."