Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

sciencehistory.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 175 posts

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#81

Post by jjoonathan »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #69
mlatu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when was the last time you had to fight with someone using just words and how do you think would that interaction have been if you and your counterpart had not used words but teeth, fists and fingernails instead? assuming you had the same standing to each other prior to the fight, would you two be able to interact the same afterwards, regardless who won? it doesnt make more room, but it allows for compromises

Humans haven't had a good track record. I don't imagine mice would do any better.

Humans have a poor track record compared to what? An ideal zero-conflict state? Sure. Animals that kill each other because they cross paths during breeding season? Not at all. Compared to them, we are masters of negotiation and compromise.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#82

Post by thehappypm »

Take a species that’s got a high reproductive rate due to high infant mortality

Jam them into a small enclosure that dramatically changes the infant mortality rate

Watch with glee as overpopulation makes the ecosystem a toxic hell

Great science /s

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#84

Post by Alop3x »

jklinger410 wrote: post #71
h2odragon wrote: post #49

One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done. One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy…

I'm not vegan but I think about it all the time.

No post body was provided.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#85

Post by taylodl »

albrewer wrote: post #75
h2odragon wrote: post #49

One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done. One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy…

Why not suffocate them with nitrogen or co2 or something?

My daughter got an internship at a research lab this summer - where they have thousands and thousands of research mice and they kill several mice every day. She said CO2 works on adults and therefore that's what they use. But CO2 doesn't work on baby mice and is considered inhumane. Instead they use scissors and cut off the baby mice's heads. It's to be done swiftly so it's like a guillotine. The labs are continually monitored to ensure the animals are stressed as little as possible.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#86

Post by peoplefromibiza »

nephrite wrote: post #29

So it wasn't an utopia. The mice had enough water and food, but they ran out of living space. It's so obvious I can't understand nobody pointed it out yet.

there's never gonna be "enough space" for animals that do not understand the concept of overcrowding and planned parenthood.

That's the point of the experiment: in a food rich environment with no predators and no diseases, without human intervention (or intelligent planning if you prefer) everything is gonna deteriorate to the point of no return.

Nature is all about balance and we humans do nothing to follow that predicament, so if we are not careful and let things go by themselves, we risk of giving birth to hell on Earth.

Take the Yellowstone example.

Yellowstone is not a small and confined space and yet when wolves disappeared, herbivores, moose in particular, started growing in number exponentially, posing a threat to the ecosystem because, with no predators around, young moose could freely walk all over the park and started eating too-young trees, basically preventing them from growing.

Then wolves were re-introduced, and even though it's still unclear if the damages caused by moose can be undone, they at least stopped things from getting worse, cause wolves mainly prey on moose.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/yellowsto...

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#87

Post by badRNG »

jklinger410 wrote: post #71
h2odragon wrote: post #49

One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done. One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy…

I'm not vegan but I think about it all the time.

Same boat.

I'm not a vegan, and I try my absolute best to avoid thinking about what we put animals through. It certainly sits in a specific category of intrusive thoughts. The only real analog to this in my mind is being aware of my own mortality; I just avoid that thought and shove it out of my mind. Occasionally my comparatively relaxed life is harshly interrupted by an awareness of these facts and I'm ripped back to these realities for just a short, terrifying moment. Graciously, a distraction is always readily available.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#88

Post by themanmaran »

taylodl wrote: post #85
albrewer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not suffocate them with nitrogen or co2 or something?

My daughter got an internship at a research lab this summer - where they have thousands and thousands of research mice and they kill several mice every day. She said CO2 works on adults and therefore that's what they use. But CO2 doesn't work on baby mice and is considered inhumane. Instead they use scissors and cut off the baby mice's heads. It's to be done swiftly so it's like a guillotine. The labs are continually…

I'm curious why the CO2 doesn't work on the babies. Is their rate of breathing just much slower?

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#89

Post by gwern »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #47
dalbasal wrote: post #45

One of those topics where the meta is richer than the actual science. I remember my Dad mentioning as a child. The public interest is interesting in itself. Not the the science isn't interesting. Population/behavioural studies like this are quite interesting. Animal behaviour is interesting, especially group behaviours where dynamics can play out. That said, what was he actually trying to learn? If you take the same…

It’s interesting to me at least that the group’s population crashed completely to zero and not to just a low number that then began climbing again. This is undoubtably a consequence of mice not being able to escape from the chaos due to the small size of the territory, but I do wonder what the minimum viable size would be to allow for a full boom-bust-boom cycle to occur.

The population didn't crash to zero, Calhoun merely claimed it was going to. But despite researching it for decades while being well-funded, what wound up happening (in that, as in almost all of the mouse experiments) remains a mystery because Calhoun published bizarrely little.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#90

Post by bell-cot »

dymk wrote: post #79
albrewer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not suffocate them with nitrogen or co2 or something?

$5 Home Depot bucket $189 nitrogen gas tank

Plus any regulatory, liability, etc. issues that go along with having & regularly using stuff that could also suffocate your employees.
Post reply on HN