If love is life’s greatest mystery, then perhaps its second-greatest mystery is whether humans are alone in experiencing it. We talk about lovebirds and puppy love, but biologists are cautioned against anthropomorphizing their animal subjects and assigning human traits and meaning where they don’t belong. Instead, scientists scan brains, measure hormone production and conduct “speed dating for pandas,” all of which could help answer the question, “Do animals fall in love?” And if so, how, and why?

Meghan Martin.
Martin

When creating breeding programs for endangered animals, scientists “need to figure out how to make them fall in love, and it’s not as easy as turning on Marvin Gaye,” says Meghan Martin, an adjunct biology professor at Washington State University-Vancouver and director of the nonprofit PDX Wildlife. “We have to break their specific code.”

“The general assumption is that if given the chance to breed with the last panda on Earth, which is theoretically what’s happening, that all animals would do that,” says Martin. “But that is not the case. I have seen species go almost into extinction in the conservation breeding world” because the researchers tried to pair uninterested animals together.

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