CALHOUN MOUSE UTOPIA TRIAL

Instead, rats would organize themselves into discrete social units with 12-13 members. In addition to the surprisingly low population density, the distribution of the rats through the enclosure wasn’t uniform. During the two years that he monitored his colony, he found some oddities - the number of rats in the population never exceeded 200 - despite his earlier calculations of a 5,000 rat carrying capacity. To find out, je seeded the pen with five pregnant females and sat back.įor 28 months, he tracked the rodent populations in the pen, noting any behavioral and social changes. He estimated that the enclosure was large enough to house 5,000 rats, but he was unsure of where the population would stabilize, or what phases it would transition through on its way there. He stocked it with ample food, water, and material for building shelters, and dubbed it “Rat Utopia” - the kind of place where a rat would never want for anything.

On it, he constructed a 10,000 square foot pen that was open to the elements. Inspired by what he was discovering at the university, he convinced a neighbor to let him borrow a 1/4 acre plot of unused, forested land. His first foray into large-scale explorations of rodent behavior took place shortly after his appointment to the Rodent Ecology Project at Johns Hopkins University in 1948. Whatever he found in these studies was enough to keep his attention for the rest of his life, trudging ever-deeper into the complex world of rodent social behavior.

During his summers at the university, he continued his ornithology work with the Alexander Wetmore, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.ĭuring his PhD his attention shifted closer to Earth, when he began his studies of the 24hr rhythms of the Norway rat. He published his first paper on animal behavior at the age of 15, and then continued his study of animal behavior as a student of ethology, animal behavior, at the University of Virginia. Laskey of the Tennessee Ornithological Society taught him to band birds. Calhoun’s interest in animal behavior when Mrs. After more than a year, he emerged a man certain about the fact that human society was driving people to the brink of madness. He provided food, water, shelter, and the rats to enjoy it. In a large barn on his property, he built an enclosure capable of housing thousands of rats. Whatever the case, Calhoun did something extraordinary. It seems like Calhoun may have been the only person who was capable of carrying out the experiments - and the lack of reproducibility comes down to the fact that no one except for him was interested in babysitting a quarter acre of rats for nearly a year and a half. They were enormously time-consuming, and seem like a unique result of a man who had spent his entire life working on progressively larger behavioral studies. There is also the fact that these studies were never repeated. Mice are mice, rats are rats, humans are humans. Though the parallels are tantalizing, it is important to remember that we can’t draw clear parallels between humans and experiments done with rodents under even the best conditions. The mad-scientist experiment thought up by Calhoun allows us to take a step back and consider what one might be able to say about the human condition, and the ways that our environments affect our psychology.

CALHOUN MOUSE UTOPIA TRIAL

I want to look at this paper because the experiments within - an extended trial of rodents in confined conditions - seems to offer perspective on the ways in which a multicellular animal - such as a mouse or rat - functions in the context of a greater whole. Calhoun called Population Density and Social Pathology . To do this, we are going to take a closer look at a paper by John B. This week, we’ll look at another aspect of multicellularity, one that manifests on a community level, rather than the individual level.

So far, we have discussed the origins of multicellularity, the many paths to multicellularity, and circled back to ask the question - what is life?

Calhoun mouse utopia