
Pheromone in baby mouse tears makes females less interested in sex (2018) - pvaldes
https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/pheromone-in-baby-mouse-tears-makes-females-less-interested-in-sex
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beobab
I can confirm anecdotally that having a baby crying at all hours of the day
and the night also makes humans less interested.

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throwaway9980
I can second this anecdata as extremely accurate. Actually I can second this
anecdata three times. But never again, never again.

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ashtonkem
I feel like having repeat anecdotes in this area kind of undermines them.

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organsnyder
I feel there is a mechanism (sleep deprivation?) that causes amnesia of the
most difficult months of raising a newborn. By the time the baby is a year old
or so, the pain is forgotten, the baby is cuter (and interactive!), and the
parents start to think, "Maybe we want to do this again..."

I'm glad I got my vasectomy done when our youngest was still in that first
stage.

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mikevm
> The pheromone is called exocrine gland-secreting peptide 22 (ESP22), and
> researchers say it could one day be added to drinking water to control
> rodent populations.

Ugh... how about, no?

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pvaldes
They had in mind probably drinking water in mice cages or lab animal
facilities. Reducing the male mice drive to fight would increase the wellbeing
of the lab animals, thus could be useful in some cases. Human lab rats will
not have typically a lot of sex in any case ;-) so...

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sesuximo
Couldn't that invalidate research results

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pvaldes
Maybe. A good design could take care of this effect. The pool of mice in
reproductive facilities are not necessarily used in research at the same
moment.

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karaterobot
I wonder what the role of this pheromone is in species where females can also
get pregnant 24 hours after giving birth, and have 15 litters a year.

And how how effective is this pheromone at population control, in practice?
The researcher quoted in the article says it might be useful in natural
environments to keep resource competition and overpopulation down, but
(anecdotally) I do not associate mice with conservation of resources and
population control: they're infamous for devouring all available resources and
breeding without any obvious signs of, umm, demureness.

Needless to say, I'm no biologist.

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collyw
I bet a human equivalent would sell well to fathers of teenage girls.

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croissants
The standard cultural joke that fathers are really into preventing their
daughters (but not sons) from having sex is messed up.

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chongli
Due to their youth and inexperience, we generally try to shield teenagers from
the most serious consequences of their actions. Unfortunately, we can't do
this with the biological consequences of pregnancy. That's why it's natural to
put more effort into preventing daughters from having sex.

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magic_beans
Instead of trying to prevent daughters from having sex, parents need to
educate their daughters on fertility cycles.

Women are only fertile for a limited amount of time during each cycle. Sympto-
thermal fertility tracking methods, as described in the book "Taking Charge of
Your Fertility" by Toni Weschler, empower women to understand exactly when in
their cycles they are fertile.

Understanding your personal cycle of fertility means you can accurately
predict your period, understand precisely when you have ovulated, know when
you are fertile and infertile in your cycle, and avoid the side effects of
hormonal birth control.

I have personally used sympto-thermal fertility tracking as my exclusive
method of birth control within a relationship for 2 years.

~~~
daxorid
This method, while effective, is likely to be a significant frustration for
the woman in this situation, given that cyclical high fertility usually
coincides with high sex drive.

~~~
magic_beans
On fertile days you use a condom. Simple as that.

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unixhero
God this is awful. Tears of animals used to control populations of lab
animals.

What is it with Hacker News and some fascination of this topic.

Here is from an earlier post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867382](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867382)
(possibly NSFL)

~~~
pvaldes
It is assumed that they are trying to mass produce the peptid in a laboratory,
not making the babies suffer. Wouldn't be animal tears anymore.

(I wonder of the mice could enter in a depressed state at a middle term by
that. Not directly related, but most humans (visual animals) would get
depressed, or emotionally touched at least, if forced to work in a room full
of posters of crying children. Maybe mice would have developped a similar
response with olfactive signals..)

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unixhero
Yes. I agree, and you're right of course.

My comment was meant more metaphorically, when it's synthesized. It's still a
tragic example of how we humans shape the world. Now featuring synthetic
tears! To me that is a little horrific.

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prostheticvamp
Yes, if you focus on that imagery, sure.

Human tears also have antibacterial properties that have been explored for
antibiotic purposes. The tears of grieving parents used to save future
children from death!

Or, you know, it’s just a protein, and the tear is just the fluid where it was
initially found, and you’re adding all the extra meaning yourself, which is a
reflection strictly on you.

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867-5309
Why do mice have tears?

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detaro
Lubrication and cleaning, like all mammals.

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867-5309
so unlike all mammals, not through crying due to pain or emotional response?

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detaro
Fairly sure (EDIT: crying as a) emotional response is a human-only (or humans
and a short list of others?) thing?

Not sure about pain.

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RobertoG
>>"Fairly sure emotional response is a human-only (or humans and a short list
of others?) thing?"

Why animals do things if they are not motivated by emotions?

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leetbulb
A complex mixture of instinct and conditioning. Generally what they do is
motivated by instinctual needs. How they go about fulfilling is determined
through their environmental conditioning. This applies to humans as well.
Also, certain things animals do that we've yet to understand are often
anthropomorphized.

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ben_w
Is emotion anything other than an instinct? (How would one even tell? Both
serious questions, not rhetorical).

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dempseye
I wonder if there is a similar mechanism in humans.

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limbicsystem
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21212322/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21212322/)

Sort of...

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throwaway0a5e
I can't access the full study but I wonder what they did for control groups.
I'd be very weary of a reverse Pavlov's dog type situation where people
associate sniffing mystery liquids with leaking things and fixing those things
which is not exactly a subject that puts people in the mood.

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EE84M3i
> Emotional tearing is a poorly understood behavior that is considered
> uniquely human. In mice, tears serve as a chemosignal. We therefore
> hypothesized that human tears may similarly serve a chemosignaling function.
> We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears
> obtained from women donors induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by
> men to pictures of women’s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men
> experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological
> measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional
> magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women’s tears selectively
> reduced activity in brain substrates of sexual arousal in men

[https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.1198331](https://sci-
hub.tw/10.1126/science.1198331)

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bilekas
Can't get enough of that picture in the article.

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tunnuz
The cure?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GkVhgIeGJQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GkVhgIeGJQ)

