Pheromone in baby mouse tears makes females less interested in sex (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Pheromone in baby mouse tears makes females less interested in sex (2018)

researchgate.net

50 pointspvaldes59 comments

I can confirm anecdotally that having a baby crying at all hours of the day and the night also makes humans less interested.

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

So when is kid #4 coming?

9 months after kid #3 stops crying.

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

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.

> 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?

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...

Couldn't that invalidate research results

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.

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.

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

I suspect that will be counterproductive, yet sell well.

Anecdotally, about half the women I know have shared with me stories of men being various levels of inappropriate.

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

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.

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.

Of course this works, but most people who want to prepare their teenagers for the consequences of a sex life will push for condoms and possibly additional birth control.

Pregnancy is just one consequence, obviously.

Culturally, a lot of people still would rather use tactics intended (with whatever level of efficacy) to prevent teenagers from being sexually active altogether.

This is all true but unfortunately in our society we seem to have decided that no one could possibly be responsible enough to follow such a self-monitored schedule and instead the responsible thing to do is just tell people it doesn't work.

Like our gov and the WHO telling us not to wear masks recently.

Most women in my experience are pretty regular and you can trivially avoid having sex for an exta few days out of the month. Coupled with "external finishes" i have a feeling this is actually a valid method of birth control for responsible couples.

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

Are you sure neither of you is sterile?

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.

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

Well, there is one way. It's called abortion. But most people still agree that prevention is a better option.

I wouldn't call surgical intervention and long-term emotional cost a very effective "shield," would you? It's an unfortunate mitigation at best.

In the 1960s they invented something called "the pill". Look it up.

For most women abortion has no serious lasting negative psychological consequences.

This is an incredible statement to make without any evidence. Although I would also ask you for evidence if you claimed abortion led to trauma for "most women".

This is a good review. Note that I am not saying that no women experience serious negative psychological consequences. Some do.

https://www.sexualwellbeing.ie/for-professionals/research/re...

No, but some people think it is.

The consequences for a young boy saddled with the long term consequences of fatherhood or child support are serious.

Secondly, if parents were truly concerned about this they would provide condoms, support, and healthcare rather than stern (and ultimately useless) admonitions and, even worse, sexist jokes. It's not a coincidence that states with a reactionary attitude to sex and sexism see the highest rate of teen pregnancies.

I think the implication is that it's easier for young boys to get out of their parental responsibilities than for young girls.

I've seen, a number of times, friends & family & random Internet advice-givers of teenage fathers say "Get a paternity test!" or "Don't sign anything". Particularly if they're close with the father but don't like the mother. Sometimes even if the dad-to-be is excited about having a kid. It's a very marked contrast to how we treat adult males (and what we claim to value as a society), where the advice is usually "Time to man up, get a job, and be a dad."

No such thing as a maternity test, and we tend to excoriate young mothers who might want to shirk their maternal responsibilities.

There's probably something revealing there about self-interest and who we identify with in a situation.

No such thing as a maternity test? Isn’t it kind of obvious?

That was the point. Everybody knows who the mother of a baby is; fathers have plausible deniability.

Usually. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild

Linked case wasn’t even the one I was looking for, but the cause was the same. Still the mother, but surprisingly non-obvious.

Sometimes you just have to accept that there is a reason why these "jokes" exist and, if you are interested in it, you should try to figure out why rather than fight against the accepted wisdom.

Yes, it's a shame to see this kind of thing on HN. But perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised.

> preventing their daughters from having premarital sex

And it's because being a young single mom sucks.

It's a lifestyle choice for many.

Parents of pregnant daughters are probably more likely to end up raising their grandkid than parents whose sons get others’ daughters pregnant. The various stressful situations and financial strain that result can wreck people.

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 (possibly NSFL)

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..)

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.

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.

Why do mice have tears?

Lubrication and cleaning, like all mammals.

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

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.

>>"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?

... as a cause for crying. Not overall.

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.

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

I wonder if there is a similar mechanism in humans.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21212322/

Sort of...

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.

> 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

There's also some evidence to support crying-induced arousal, called "dacryphilia"

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201601/can...

https://www.google.com/search?q=crying+boner+site:www.reddit...

There is an old army rumour that South African infantry men were fed copper sulphate ("blouvitrioel" in Afrikaans) to decrease their libido, but it's not true: https://samilhistory.com/2017/10/17/blue-stone-debunked/

So this is how Children of Men becomes more of a documentary...

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

The cure? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GkVhgIeGJQ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com