The team chose to study pair - bonding in prairie voles because they are one of the few species that mate for life. (newscientist.com)
Several years later, Tom Insel, a former colleague of Carter's who is now president of the National Institute of Mental Health, began a comparative study analyzing the brains of prairie voles and their less monogamous cousins, the montane voles. (discovermagazine.com)
For example, the overexpression of the V1aR in the ventral pallidum results in a strong partner preference formation in male prairie voles even in the absence of mating (Pitkow et al., 2001). (frontiersin.org)