Group and individual regulation of physiology and behavior: a behavioral, thermographic, and acoustic study of mouse development

The traditional approach to the study of thermoregulation in young animals focuses on the regulatory capacities of individuals, which, for multiparous species, risks ignoring critical aspects of the early developmental niche. Here, we examined the ontogeny of regulatory behavior in C57BL/6 mice, employing simultaneous behavioral, thermographic, and acoustic measures of groups and individual pups. Litters of mice were placed in a chamber on Postnatal Day (PND) 2, 4, or 8, in which the ambient temperature (T(a)) gradually cycled (over 50 min) from warm (36.5°C) to cool (20°C) and back (to 36.5°C). Litters of all three ages displayed "group regulatory behavior," whereby group size varied with changes in T(a). This coupling, moreover, improved with age. Infrared thermography was used to monitor skin temperature of pups' interscapular (T(IS)) and rump (T(rump)) areas, and to estimate brown adipose tissue (BAT) thermogenesis (T(IS)-T(rump)) in PND4 and PND8 individuals and huddles. Huddling was found to significantly reduce heat loss in pups subject to thermal challenge as groups, compared to pups challenged as individuals. Additionally, females were found to display significantly warmer T(IS) and T(rump) values than male huddlemates. Huddling did not have a consistent effect on emissions of ultrasonic vocalizations, which were generally correlated with ambient temperature and BAT activation. Our results indicate that simultaneous measures of behavioral and physiological response to cooling may prove useful for a variety of applications, including the phenotyping of social dysfunction.