Mice Sing to Attract Mates, Study Finds
While mice may not sing to beg for food, they certainly sing to win over potential mates. Researchers at the University of Washington in the United States discovered this while eavesdropping on male mice in a laboratory setting.
“Initially, we recorded the sounds to assess the factors that help male mice recognize the pheromones of female mice, but what we heard turned out to be more complex and interesting than we expected,” said Timothy E. Holy, the study’s author. “However, it is still unclear whether singing gives male mice an advantage in courting, as it does in birds.”
Humans have long enjoyed the love songs of birds and whales, while the melodies of mice have remained overlooked due to their pitches being beyond the human hearing range. When Holy and co-author Zhongsheng Guo began recording the high-pitched sounds of 45 male mice, they quickly discovered that these sounds had regular repeating segments, known as motifs, that changed over time. In other words, these sounds can be considered songs.
When the mice’s songs were lowered by several octaves to make them more audible to humans, they sounded remarkably similar to bird songs, although Holy noted that they still lacked the sophistication of avian melodies. “You could compare the songs of mice to the chirps of juvenile birds, producing only simple motifs.”
Although the romantic prowess of mice may not compare to that of a mature canary, this new finding also aids research into the genetics of song learning, especially if mice learn from a “tutor,” similar to birds. Additionally, wild mice may possess a broader innate talent for singing.
“Captivity has altered many factors in the behavior of mice. It would be fascinating to find out whether the songs of wild mice are more similar to birds than those of laboratory mice,” Holy concluded.
M.T. (according to Sciam)
