Experiment with small rodents called degus with interesting
but not surprising results. German biologist Anna Katharina Braun and others are conducting research on animals that are typically raised by two parents, in the hopes of better understanding the impact on humans of being raised by a single parent. Dr. Braun's work focuses on degus, small rodents related to guinea pigs and chinchillas, because mother and father degus naturally raise their babies together.
When deprived of their father, the degu pups exhibit both short- and long-term changes in nerve-cell growth in different regions of the brain. Dr. Braun, director of the Institute of Biology at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, and her colleagues are also looking at how these physical changes affect offspring behavior.
Their preliminary analysis indicates that fatherless degu pups exhibit more aggressive and impulsive behavior than pups raised by two parents.
Dr. Braun and her colleagues found that in the two-parent families, the degu mothers and fathers cared for their pups in similar ways, including sleeping next to or crouching over them, licking and grooming them, and playing with them. The fathers even exhibited a "nursing-type" position.
When the mother was a single parent, the frequency of her interactions with her pups didn't change much, which means that those pups experienced significantly less touching and interaction than those with two parents.
The researchers then looked at the neurons—cells that send and receive messages between the brain and the body—of some pups at day 21, around the time they were weaned from their mothers, and others at day 90, which is considered adulthood for the species.
Neurons have branches, known as dendrites, that conduct electrical signals received from other nerve cells to the body, or trunk, of the neuron. The leaves of the dendrites are protrusions called dendritic spines that receive messages and serve as the contact between neurons.
Dr. Braun's group found that at 21 days, the fatherless animals had less dense dendritic spines compared to animals raised by both parents, though they "caught up" by day 90. However, the length of some types of dendrites was significantly shorter in some parts of the brain, even in adulthood, in fatherless animals.
"It just shows that parents are leaving footprints on the brain of their kids," says Dr. Braun, 54 years old. |
This brings to mind a little over a decade ago the stories of the murdering young elephants who were grown up orphans because of a cull to bring down the elephant population in Pilanesberg National Park. There was a documentary about it that showed the effects of bringing in older bull elephants kept the youngsters in line.
The mystery was soon solved: the rhinos had been murdered, all right, but the perpetrators were not poachers but pachyderms--young, aggressive bull elephants that did in the rhinos by knocking them over, kneeling on them and goring them.
What drives the elephants to do it is not clear. Game wardens and animal-behavior experts have a theory, however, and while they stress that it is speculative, the idea is compelling. The elephants may be depraved, the experts say, because as children they were deprived. The troublemakers are apparently all orphans, taken as calves from their slaughtered parents during culling operations in the huge Kruger National Park and relocated to establish elephant populations in parks and private reserves throughout the country.
One positive result of the operation was that it helped preserve a threatened species. But because elephants in the wild live in tight-knit groups, the relocation was also a major experiment in social engineering--and like so many such experiments, it has had unexpected consequences. Since 1978, almost 1,500 orphan calves, 600 of them males, have been moved to unfamiliar locations and raised with no exposure to adult elephants or the hierarchical social structure that defines elephant life.
The long-term effect of this isolation appears to be a generation of juvenile delinquents. "The whole thing has much to do with the setup of elephant society," says zoologist Marian Garai, a Swiss-born South African who has been studying the relocation. Under normal circumstances, she says, a dominant older male elephant is around to keep young bulls in line. For the newly arrived youngsters, however, no such role models were provided, and Garai believes this may have had a profound effect on the elephants' psychology. |
This will also apply to people where a loving two parent household will be better for children than a single parent most of the time. Lets bring it closer to home where the black community is seeing the effects of broken homes and young black children growing up in communities where the traditional parental and even societal structure has been destroyed. It has resulted in a lost generation that are more likely to being in jail than college.
