mice.can they be murderers?? - this is sad (Jan/07/2011 )

my teacher told me a story about how when she did a science experiment,
she left 4 mice alone in the same cage overnight.
when she got up to look at them the sides of the cage was covered in blood!!
when she looked in the cage there was 3 mice,
one was perfectly fine,
one was missing an ear,
and one was scared to death in a corner
all that was left of the 4th mouse was a tail
do mice usually kill each other??

Yes, sometimes they do. And they eat each other, so sometimes you just notice some are missing.

sometimes observed similar with rats also.

thats sad

One of my coworkers told me another interesting bit today. We usually feed females that breast feed their pups a high fat diet because breast feeding supposedly exhausts them so they need a richer diet. However, if the pups start eating it too, they become sexually mature much earlier than normal and start mating with their mothers before we can put them in their own cages. Therefore, we have to be careful to feed only the mothers and not the pups.
How, 'bout that...

wow... what a strange encounter... I never do animal work before... I guess this had discourage me for doing any further.

i had a female mouse that had to be kept alone in a cage after attacking every mouse in her cage. she couldn't be kept with other female mice. she couldn't be kept with a male mouse for breeding either. vicious little thing.
and there is the joy of first finding out that mothers have eaten their pups.

vetticus3 on Thu Jan 13 16:09:05 2011 said:

We had 2 females with pups in the same cage. During colony head count, we were down one female. When we changed the bedding, we found the dead female buried under the nest of (both litters of) pups.

I have an every funnier story about a lab at the local university were they had an octopus for research.

The octopus was kept in a container on a table, the container was not sealed at the top.

At a certain point the lab had a new researchtopic envolved Crustacea (lobsters) and so the lab made a second container, a few meters from the container with the octopus, on the same table.

They started with 15 lobsters..
After a week they noticed they had only 14 left... maybe they miscounted... anyway, when time passed by they released they lost more lobsters.. after a few weeks/months they only had 10 lobsters left.
The researchers didnt understand did and the lobsters kept vanishing... after a while only 5 were left... and the researching got more and more angry and one of them decided to stay at the lab during the entire night... and then it happened: The octopus came out of his container, "walked" over the edge of his container, lowered himself out is container, "walked" a few meters to the second container with the lobsters and entered that container... and ate 1 of the lobsters .. and he returned to his container after eating..
The scientist that stayed at night was to shocked, suprised to tape it, he just watched and enjoyed.. His co-workers didnt believe his story and the following nights they all stayed and after a few days (week) they withnessed it all toghether how the octopus did it...