A study co-led by master’s student Mizuki Shibamiya and Assistant Professor Kseniia Prokofeva with major contributions from master’s student Rin Kawata has been published in Scientific Reports.

 In this work, we:

• established a novel behavioral paradigm to study pup rescue under scalable adversity by varying water depth in a pool,
• developed a DeepLabCut-assisted analysis pipeline to quantify mice’s aversion to water,
• unexpectedly found that virgin female mice outperform mothers in pup rescue under adverse conditions, likely due to mothers’ higher aversion to water,
• identified multiple brain regions activated during adversity-overcoming pup rescue in virgin females using c-Fos mapping.

 Because virgin females are genetically unrelated to the pups they rescue, these findings provide a basis for future studies on the neural mechanisms underlying not only adversity-overcoming pup care, but also prosocial (altruistic) behavior.

Prokofeva K*, Shibamiya M*, Kawata R, et al.
Neural correlates of adversity-overcoming pup rescue behavior in female mice
Scientific Reports (2026)

 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-35639-7