Newborn Lizards Exhibit Mothers' Fears
NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY 1999 May / Jun VOL VIII NO 3.
By Bob Holmes
News item in Times of India, May 99.
THE OLD wives' tale that a new born baby will be scared of the things that frightened its mother during pregnancy may actually be true-at least for some lizards.
Newborn Australian skinks react more strongly to their first whiff of a lizard-eating snake's odor if their mother has smelled that snake during pregnancy.
"It certainly surprised the hell out of us" says Richard Shine, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney.
Shine had intended to study how a female lizard's food supply and basking opportunities affected its offspring. To do this he used a small skink, Pseudemoia pagenstecheri, that, like mammals, bears live young that have been nourished through a placenta.
Shine happened to have surplus pregnant females. He and graduate student Sharon Downes decided to expose20 of them to the odor of a skink- eating snake by dragging live snakes near their cages twice weekly.
To their surprise, Shine and Downes found that the offspring of such females flicked their tongues more and were more likely to flee when first exposed to snake scent. They were also heavier and had longer tails than those whose mothers had not been exposed to the scent. The researchers are not sure what causes these changes. They could be just an accidental consequence of maternal stress, which can affect developmental patterns in mammals. Or the mothers could be priming their offspring by activating genes that are likely to prove helpful in snake-filled habitats.
No one knows whether these traits actually make the lizards more likely to evade snakes. Shine hopes to address this question in experiments later this year.
Editor: So what else is new? We won't say we told you so, but we Homoeopaths knew this all along and have been treating babies on the basis of the mother's state in pregnancy. Pregnancy is an immense clue to the understanding of the child's mind and his remedy and of course, the mothers' remedy too.
