![]() There was no lack of food or water, and no disease emerged. In the end, the colony completely died off. A few even attacked their own young amid the violence or abandoned them while fleeing to different apartments, leaving the pups to die of neglect. Many stressed-out mothers booted their pups from the nest early, before the pups were ready. The utopian mice had no access to abortions, but many females killed or refused to care for their pups : Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.” And yet, even while obsessing over their appearance, these males had zero interest in courting females, zero interest in sex. Maladjusted males, meanwhile, took to grooming all day-preening and licking themselves hour after hour. Maladjusted females began isolating themselves like hermits in empty apartments-unusual behavior among mice. Mice who had been raised improperly or kicked out of the nest early often failed to develop healthy social bonds, and therefore struggled in adulthood with social interactions. ![]() Social bonds suffered!Įventually other deviant behavior emerged. Frustrated lonely alpha males, involuntarily celibate mice, and female mice isolating themselves proliferated. However, the unusual initial success soon turned into problems. Eventually this torrid growth slowed, but the population continued to climb, peaking at 2,200 mice during the 19th month. Following an adjustment period, the first pups were born 3½ months later, and the population doubled every 55 days afterward. introduced eight albino mice into the 4½-foot cube. The eight mice who started this colony lived worry-free until they multiplied to a staggering population of 2,200. F ree from predators and other worries, a mouse could theoretically live to an extraordinarily old age there, without a single worry. Calhoun also screened the mice to eliminate disease. It was a large pen-a 4½-foot cube-with everything a mouse could ever desire: plenty of food and water a perfect climate reams of paper to make cozy nests and 256 separate apartments, accessible via mesh tubes bolted to the walls. Unofficially, it was called mouse heaven.īiologist John Calhoun built the colony at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland in 1968. Officially, the colony was called the Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice. It turned out that, at first, mice loved it. Calhoun asked: what happens if, instead of endangered living, mice are placed in an equivalent of a modern 15-minute city, with unlimited food, mouse housing, and absence of disease and predation? Yet, under these predations, their population seems to be indestructible!ĭr. They are exposed to cold, predators, diseases, and discomforts.
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