SCENT COUNTER MARKS - SELECTIVE MEMORY FOR THE TOP SCENT BY GOLDEN-HAMSTERS

Animals often scent mark where other conspecifics have marked, a patte rn of behaviour called counter marking. Despite the generality of this behaviour, little is known about the functions or perception of count er marks. A series of experiments using an habituation technique was c onducted to investigate what information male golden hamsters, Mesocri cetus auratus, remember after they investigate partially overlapping s cents of two other individuals. Five experiments were carried out usin g vaginal secretions of female hamsters as the stimuli and one experim ent used male flank gland scents as stimuli. Counter to expectations, all experiments indicated that hamsters remembered the top and/or most recent individual scent and did not remember the bottom and/or older scent. These results indicate that hamsters selectively remember just one of the two scents, the top one, and imply that hamsters have previ ously unsuspected mechanisms for determining which individual scent is on top. The strategy of remembering the top or most recent individual scent may be an adaptive means of dealing with a complex array of soc ial scents.