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Even In the Wild Mice Run In Wheels
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Scientists have found that if they place a running wheel outside, wild animals will flock to it. The researchers observed more than 200,000 mice, rats, and even frogs using the apparatus over a three year period. The findings suggest that like (some) humans, mice and other animals may simply exercise because they like to. Figuring out why certain strains of mice are more sedentary than others could help shed light on genetic differences between more active and sedentary people."
Most of the time I'm sedentary it's because my job has me sit at a desk typing code(or slashdot comments) all day. This is exacerbated for most people, because they attach an hour or more of sedentary driving onto each end.
And being sedentary is mentally exhausting compared to light exercise. It's no surprise that there's an obesity epidemic.
Robot Mouse Jx115T2 Please step up and take your place in the workers factory. There will be a wheel of opportunity to allow your mind to enjoy the effort of striving while others make off with the cheese. Leaving your worn out chassis and gears as your own financial responsibility while we deny you repair funds because we need more cheese. You will be able to sue us for the difference though, hopefully you will live long enough to get it through the legal factory system.
A colleague of mine ( who has an animal nickname BTW, we call him "Bokito", you may wanna google that ) has a great poster on his whiteboard, with a picture of a treadmill on it: "This is what a career ladder looks like". 'Nuf said.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
mice ... may simply exercise because they like to.
Hence the term, "Gym Rats".
Thank you, thank you. Remember to tip the waitstaff, I'll be here all week.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
They discounted animals setting the wheel in motion from the outside.
Random anecdote time.
I knew someone who had a hamster that would climb on to the outside of the wheel, kind of wedge itself between the wheel and cage and then spend ages using the wheel from the outside. It was also a remarkably stupid animal. Unlike ever other captive rodent I've seen it never figured out how to walk on the bars of the upper floors of the cage without its feet falling through the gaps. And unlike most other hamsters it was not a very clean animal either.
Sometimes the wheel would get moved. In which case there was no cage wall nearby for it to wedge itself against. In that case it would get to the top then the wheel would start to rotatetaking the hapless rodent with it and it would get splatted off onto the floor which was pretty funny.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Slugs apprently frequent this thing (hard to call it a running wheel when's a slug).
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The story itself is interesting enough, opening it up to all kinds of hypothesis. Don't ruin it by adding the typically inane verbiage:
"Figuring out why certain strains of mice are more sedentary than others could help shed light on genetic differences between more active and sedentary people."
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It seems a stretch to jump from "wild mice run in a treadmill" to "mice like to exercise".
What if the treadmill is similiar to what laser pointers are to cats or video games are to humans?
It could be that the mice thinks it's accomplishing something or has some other reason that
it uses the treadmill other than because it likes to exercise.
Just because they exercise doesn't mean that is what it is... they may have been brought into the wheel because of curiosity, and are trying to escape by running away.
We have IR cameras set up to watch the back yard at night. There's a fox that spends a lot of time there, and she seems to have brought a toy (a tennis ball) with her. She plays with it a lot.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Scatter Human-sized wheel farms around urban centers. If you build them, they will come.
I'm going to set up an array of training wheels with generators outside my garage, and harvest free power to charge my Tesla S! Or a flashlight. A small one..
So, maybe someone needs to design a mouse trap knowing this.
Put it in the middle of your kitchen, when the mice stop by and go "oooh, shiny wheel" ... blamo.
I'm not sure what exact mechanism of blamo would work within a wheel, but that's an exercise for whoever gets to the patent office first. ;-)
But if they're drawn to it, it sounds like it would be effective.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Maybe they aren't exercising.. perhaps they are climbing in to investigate what it is, start to walk/run and just can't get out as they don't yet understand it? I'd buy that more than an animal exercising because it wants to. Sure animals can be very smart.. but I don't see them being vain as some humans, or worried about their figure.
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
Literally.
Amusement park rides are fun.
Like, if you'd put a swing somewhere near a human inhabited area, enough people would swing on it. (adult specimen for some reason only when they don't feel watched)
Or a sign "Wet paint". Another mystery of the universe why nobody believes such signs without checking for themselves.
bickerdyke
This wheel produced a constant stream of wildlife. Based on 200 000 animals, over 3 years, that works out to 7 animals an hour, or one every 8 minutes and 30 seconds, assuming it is in use 24 hours a day.
So why don't exterminators use a wheel to get rid of mice infestations? Create a box, which has a upper container for the wheel, when the wheel does a full rotation, the wheel floor drops away dropping the mouse into a lower level. Which can then be removed with the trapped mice.
Link found on 94.5FM the Buzz under Links & Guests:
Rodents on Turntables
attache a generator, hook it up to the grid and fix the energy crisis and global warming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
In a way i can totally relate to this - i'm a fairly high-level bike racer, and if i don't ride for 2-3 days, i find i start to get moody and restless, and it's *always* cured by getting out and getting my heart going a bit. Even a walk will make the difference. I wasn't active as a kid, only really started in my 20's, but ever since i started, i need to keep active to keep in a good headspace...and i know of several other riders who say the same thing. Their partners actually tell them to get out and ride because they get in a state when they're inactive. Maybe in a way other species are responding to some kind of natural need to keep active....?
Did they observe any lemmings using the wheel?
They got me with that one.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This is stupid. The bottom line here is wheel-like devices are pretty uncommon in nature. Rodent brains didn't evolve to deal with random wheel-toys being around. If wheels were part of their environment on an evolutionary timescale, the ones who wasted energy playing in a wheel would've lost out to the ones who got on with the business of finding food and mating. What's happening here is you're introducing a novel element into their world that their evolutionary "psychology" isn't equipped to handle. We have no idea what's really happening in their tiny brains while running on that wheel, but most likely neural circuits that developed for other, functional reasons are simply being tricked by the novel situation and don't know how to handle it in a manner that's more useful.
Step 3: some mats in front of the wheel for the girl mice to stretch on for half their visit.
We can finally prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that treadmill in gym >>> running around in boring outdoors.
At least one study says NSAIDs Interfere with Proper Training. Surprisingly, so does ice!
Here's an interesting page with a small study(search for "McMaster" of a group of 11 subjects that seems to indicate massage is very useful (even better than exercise?) - Weird! Also it has a note on ibuprofen and NSAIDs.
Massage helps recovery, even without exercise!
Put a human-size mouse wheel in every Walmart, and watch 'em flock to it.
I got a squirrel that does stomach crunches and works the speedbag.
First its the mice, next it will be the lice...when will this fevered madness end....stop it.....exercisemeggedom is coming !!!
They don't like it because they love to exercise.
They like it because it's something, a technology, that's new to them that does not exist in nature.
What this tells me is that animals will explore whatever technology they have access to that they can interact with.
To me that's far more fascinating and profound than merely concluding they like to exercise.
I think they should get more funding to put a great big running wheel on a busy Manhattan street corner.
Bob Stein, http://bobste.in
"The study "puts a nail in the coffin" of the debate over whether mice and rats will run on wheels in a natural setting..."
And the next thing to do is hook up a micro generator to the wheel and have the wildlife power our lives...