mice.can they be murderers?? - this is sad (Jan/07/2011 )
That's cool pito,
I wish I can get octopus to predict numbers for me so that I can win a fortune in gambling...
If I got become a Billionaire then I got no need to thought about my financial problems and focus in my research... lols
p/s: is that the octopus which predicts for the world cup?
lol,no it was another octopus..
Mice are generally socially oriented animals. If you are experiencing a high rate of cannibalization, you probably aren't housing them right. If they are bored or stressed (remember, boredom causes stress!) they are likely to fight, injure, kill, or eat each other. When raising lab mice (or any other species) it is important to include Environmental Enrichment in their cages....nesting material, crawl tubes, huts, lab-grade treats, etc..... At the very least, a proper rodent habitat should have a hiding area and nesting material. And if you're trying to breed, make damn sure your cages aren't overcrowded and your females are given Nestlets or a similar product.
http://www.bio-serv.com/category/Rodent_Enrichment_Devices.html
http://www.bio-serv.com/category/Rodent_Enrichment_Treats.html
Do a literature search. It is beyond well established at this point that "enriched" cages greatly increase the quality of laboratory animal care & welfare.
Fungus_Dreams on Mon Jan 24 00:50:22 2011 said:
Mice are generally socially oriented animals. If you are experiencing a high rate of cannibalization, you probably aren't housing them right. If they are bored or stressed (remember, boredom causes stress!) they are likely to fight, injure, kill, or eat each other. When raising lab mice (or any other species) it is important to include Environmental Enrichment in their cages....nesting material, crawl tubes, huts, lab-grade treats, etc..... At the very least, a proper rodent habitat should have a hiding area and nesting material. And if you're trying to breed, make damn sure your cages aren't overcrowded and your females are given Nestlets or a similar product.
http://www.bio-serv.com/category/Rodent_Enrichment_Devices.html
http://www.bio-serv.com/category/Rodent_Enrichment_Treats.html
Do a literature search. It is beyond well established at this point that "enriched" cages greatly increase the quality of laboratory animal care & welfare.
Hmn, interesting... we are taking care the welfare of mice, but who is taking care of ours (postgraduate)?
We are social oriented as well, we do fight with each other, sometimes. There is no environment enrichment in our lab, and there is never a "nesting" place for us in lab... no chill out place either.
Perhaps this explain the reason of us not being productive in our work... lolx...
Read this interesting article, I guess it's not a solution but might help explaining a bit..And perhaps somewhen lab rodents with a silenced VMHvl-region are reared...
Just to go back to the original question about housing mice. If you put male mice that are not familiar with each other together, especially if they have had the opportunity to establish themselves in a cage, you will get a lot of fighting. Ideally, when mice are weaned, you would put them with brothers. However, a dominance hierarchy eventually develops, and can sometimes lead to very aggressive mice. If you get mice shipped in, this can also happen. We have had times when there is an increased incidence of biters that we got from Jackson Labs for whatever reason. It's so hard to know with animals. But once cages are established I would strongly advise against mixing males from different cages as they will likely fight and attempt to establish dominance (even with enrichment).