Even in the Wild, Mice Run on Wheels

[n2doc]

In 2009, neurophysiologist Johanna Meijer set up an unusual experiment in her backyard. In an ivy-tangled corner of her garden, she and her colleagues at Leiden University in the Netherlands placed a rodent running wheel inside an open cage and trained a motion-detecting infrared camera on the scene. Then they put out a dish of food pellets and chocolate crumbs to attract animals to the wheel and waited.

Wild house mice discovered the food in short order, then scampered into the wheel and started to run. Rats, shrews, and even frogs found their way to the wheel—more than 200,000 animals over 3 years. The creatures seemed to relish the feeling of running without going anywhere.

The study "puts a nail in the coffin" of the debate over whether mice and rats will run on wheels in a natural setting, says Ted Garland, an evolutionary physiologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the work. More importantly, he says, 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, he adds.

Even before Meijer got creative in her yard, researchers knew that captive mice are exercise maniacs. In laboratories and bedrooms, they frequently log more than 5 km per night on stationary running wheels. But scientists didn’t know why the animals did it.

more

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/05/even-wild-mice-run-wheels?rss=1

[dem in texas]

1. We had a hamster who ran on his wheel at night

My kids once had a hamster and every night he'd run, you could hear the wheel going round and round all night long. He had a sad ending, we went from our home in Anchorage down to visit family in Texas. A little boy down the street baby sat the hamster and he got sick and died. The little boy kept the body in the freezer until we got back and the kids had a pet funeral out in our garden. That was the last hamster we owned, but they had many more rodent pets, namely white rats, chinchillas and guinea pigs. The guinea pigs were the most fun.

[wandy]

2. Not unlike congressional Teapublicans..........

The creatures seemed to relish the feeling of running without going anywhere.

Except the rodents do far less damage.

[Javaman]

3. "The creatures seemed to relish the feeling of running without going anywhere. "

we are talking about rodents, right?