PhD defence: Christina Lehmkuhl Noer

Animal Personality & Mate Preference in the American Mink (Neovison vison) – improving breeding success in captive solitary species

Scientific supervisor
Professor Torben Dabelsteen, Behavioural Ecology Group, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Company supervisor
Zoologist Mikkel Stelvig, Research & Conservation, Copenhagen Zoo, Frederiksberg, Denmark

Evaluation committee
Associate Professor Michael Thomas-Poulsen (BIO)
Junior Research Fellow Alecia Carter, Churchill College, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Vice President of Wellness and Animal Behavior Jason Watters, San Francisco Zoological Society, San Francisco, California, United States.

Abstract
Conservation-breeding programs in zoos are essential for the management of threatened species. Yet many breeding programs are unsustainable because prescribed pairs of animals are reproductively unsuccessful. A solution to this problem may be to investigate, which male cues and signals the females use to assess mate quality before making their mate choice, and then introduce these cues and signals from different males to the female to test her preference prior to introduction of a mate.

This thesis used captive mink as a model organism. We developed and tested a method to assess female preference when presented to male urine and faeces and the males themselves. Successively we investigated if these preferences translated into actual mate choice, i.e. paternity. We were able to measure a female preference for male urine and faeces as well as for the males. However, these preferences were not necessarily correlated with each other or with paternity. This indicates that mate preference and actual choice as shown by paternity are highly complex and rely on multiple cues. Animal personality and how this affects animal behaviour may be one such important cue. Prior to the preference tests we therefore investigated and found that individual mink did in fact show consistency in shyness measures across different contexts and across time and therefore have different personalities. These differences in personality, however, did not correlate with any of the preference measures, nor with paternity. Overall the tendencies in this study are promising and suggest that using olfactory cues to measure female preference for mates prior to introduction has a potential for improving breeding success of endangered zoo species.