Slashdot Mirror
Singing Mice and Brain Chemistry
Shirlockc writes "The Public Library of Science has a research article on how male mice actually sing in the presence of females. They actually posted some of the audios adjusted for human ears as these songs are ultrasonic. The authors are comparing these warbles to bird songs. The songs are quite complex so do the mice learn them and/or improve on them? This can be a potential model for investigating how brain chemistry works during learning."
This should not be a surprise. Mice are truly the smartest most intelligent species to inhabit the Earth, followed by dolphins, then humans.
I've been emitting high-pitched squeals whenever attractive women come near me for years. Why does nobody call it a "song" then? ;(
"I'm seriously wondering where we manage to get so much money from in order to just waste it on dumb research."
This is why unimaginative people wouldn't be good scientists. From the writeup:
"This can be a potential model for investigating how brain chemistry works during learning."
The study isn't about putting on an all-mouse musical, it's about animal behavior, which has all sorts of other applications. Just because you can't imagine what those might be doesn't make it useless research.
What are we going to do tonight pinky?
We're going to do what we do every night...
1..2..1..2..3..4...
"New York, New York...."
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
David Attenborough, noted naturalist, remarked upon the discovery of a rare night-singing tree mouse found in the Sheba Islands in the south Pacific. The musendrophilus has a very haunting song. Also their webbed paws are highly prized by the natives for the creation of their musical instruments.
It is unknown if they are related to the rare "tree squeaks" that live in the treetops and squeak every time the wind rustles their home's boughs.
So why do the male mice sing to the females, eh? I mean, it's not like they need sound to find each other or tell the pitchers from the catchers -- they can sniff each other out in the total dark, et cetera.
/. and hoping horny girls mod you +5, Insightful Interesting Funny Yes Yes Oh Yes Take Me Now You Utter Stud.
Why would natural selection push male mice to develop this talent?
I sure don't know, but just for amusement I'll propose something along the lines of the OP's comment: suppose we argue an important characteristic of mice is that they are damn clever for their size. Seems likely they're a lot smarter, for example, than snakes or lizards or even birds of equivalent mass. Maybe they need smarts to succeed at a lifetime of scampering and hiding and thieving bits of food from larger predators.
If this is so, maybe it makes sense that the smartest males want to advertise their intelligence, and females are interested in listening to those ads, so that they can pick out good genes for the pups.
Now, clearly it takes brains to learn a complex song, spice it up with a couple of individual flourishes, and memorize it. So maybe what these mice fellas are doing by singing is advertising how smart they are. And maybe the girl mice by listening in are evaluating the sexy braininess of boy mice as it's expressed in their composition.
It would be, in essence, the auditory equivalent of posting clever comments on