Fig. 3

Female mice preferred a higher ambient temperature, especially in the inactive phase. a Both male and female mice preferred the TMN over the lower T _a (26 °C) while female but not male mice preferred the higher T _a (32 °C) over TMN. The thermal preference in the c dark (active) phase and e light (inactive) phase showed distinct patterns. The percentage of time that mice spent in each cage is represented on the y-axis as an angular transformed scale. Zero means the mice equally spent time in both cages. A positive value means preference to the TMN cage while a negative value means a preference to the experimental cage, of which the temperature is indicated on the x-axis. b, d, f Box-and-whisker plots (box indicates interquartile range and whisker is plotted using Tukey method) show the time-weighted average T _a that the mice were exposed to. The gray area indicates a temperature range of 28.5–29.5 °C. Two-way ANOVA: ^$ p _S < .05, ^$$$ p _S < .001, ^# p _G < .05, ⁺ p _S×G < .05, ⁺⁺ p _S×G < .01, and Tukey test: *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001. Error bar indicates SEM, n = 7–8 per group