I worked for a while in a dairy, and the following question always bothered me. Why do (female) cows mount other (female) cows who are in estrus (heat)?
You can find a brief description of the process here: http://www.heatwatch.com/html/what%20does%20it%20do_.htm
I know that female-to-female mounting is very helpful for dairy farmers, but what attracts them to each other?
Their admiration for k d lang.
No-one’s taught them the udder way.
They’re just attracted to their own kine.
They are planning to evolve like those fish that have one of them turn male when there’s no regular males around.
Anyone have any serious answers? Even Gary Larson didn’t make any cow mounting cartoons.
They smell the same thing the bull smells.
I’m assuming they smell the clear stringy mucus that accompanies estrus. Estrogen levels are quite high during this period. I’ll see if I can dig up exactly what they smell being emitted from their nethers. Both females and males will mount a cow during estrus. The cow will only stand during a certain time period though, 12 hours or so. The other cows may still try to mount her before and after the time she will stand leading to some interesting running acrobatics, if cows were in the least bit acrobatic anyway.
Pheromones apparantly.
According to this research it is…
“Almost unbelievably, this compound, (Z)-7-dodecenyl acetate, is the same compound that the females of many species of insects, especially Lepidoptera, use as part of their pheromone blends to attract insect males (Rasmussen et al., 1996. The structure is identical in insects and elephants, even its configuration in space. I am currently investigating whether elephants require pheromonal blends (of several closely related compounds) as insects do.”
This is elephant research but since it involves the same reactions to estrus in cattle and several other sites list the olfactory stimilus in cattle as pheromone I included this because it is much more detailed in describing the specific pheromone. The explanation of the research at that site is very interesting, check it out if you have time.
That’s really interesting. I wonder if elephants experience the same female-female mounting phenomenon.
The same researcher as above (Rasmussen) studied this in ‘Elucidating the chemical signals involved with female detection of estrus by urinary chemical signals’ but I can’t find any information other than the title of the research on the web so I can’t suppose a result.