CAREER: The behavioral, hormonal, and neural basis of coyote monogamy

After several decades of research on the neuroscience of social bonding, most discoveries have come from studies of monogamous rodents and to a lesser extent in monogamous primates. Monogamous pair bonding is relatively rare in rodents and primates, but all wild canid species studied to date exhibit monogamy. This renders canids particularly suitable for the study of social bond maintenance and loss, especially coyotes (Canis latrans), which exhibit exclusive mating and stable pair bonds across multiple breeding seasons.

Coyotes are highly intelligent mammals that have expanded rapidly across North America and have successfully infiltrated nearly all available ecological niches. Coyotes are often viewed as pests and are frequently hunted, trapped, and killed, often leaving their pair-mate (and any offspring) abandoned. Advancing our understanding of the biological drivers of pair bonding and the impact of pair-mate loss—and translating that knowledge to the public—can increase compassion for their capacity to form life-long pair bonds, which can ultimately lead to increased support for and use of non-lethal management tools in coyotes.

This work can also provide a better understanding of pair bond development and behavior overall. This project will investigate the behavioral, hormonal, and neural basis for coyote pair bonding and will provide ample training opportunities for undergraduate researchers. The educational goals will improve the institution’s undergraduate neuroscience curriculum, will provide mentored summer research opportunities for college students, and will engage with federal researchers specializing in predator management as well as local stakeholders such as ranchers to establish reciprocal partnerships to improve community education and inform future research priorities.

This project will establish a foundation for the neurobiological basis for canid pair bonding by studying a captive research population of coyotes. This work will be the first systematic investigation of coyote pair-bonding behavior and the coyote brain. A modified version of the three-arena partner preference test will be used to describe coyote pair-bond behavior and determine the influence of individual sex, season, and pair-bond duration on partner preference and selective aggression in male-female pairs.

Coyote brain tissue will be used to characterize the receptor distributions for the neurotransmitters involved in pair-bond formation (oxytocin receptors, vasopressin receptors, and mu-opioid receptor) and pair-bond maintenance (corticotropin releasing factor receptors, kappa-opioid receptors) and determine the effect of pair-bond loss on these receptor densities over time. In targeted brain regions informed by receptor binding results, multiplex fluorescence in situ hybridization will be used to visualize and quantify oxytocin receptor and vasopressin receptor gene expression and to co-localize these mRNA transcripts with cell-type specific markers to determine the cellular identity of oxytocin- and vasopressin-sensitive neurons.

These tissues will also be used to generate an open-source coyote brain atlas. Finally, to determine whether central oxytocin signaling is necessary for coyote partner preference, coyotes will be administered a selective oxytocin receptor antagonist prior to partner preference testing. This research will contribute to a more complete understanding of the shared versus unique brain mechanisms underlying complex social behavior across species who display pair bonding behaviors and represents a unique opportunity to investigate the neurobiology of pair bond loss.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.