Nathan Davidson
If you own some pet mice and you’re planning on another ‘Netlix and Chill’ night tonight, make sure add Starship Troopers and Badasses on the Bayou to your queue before you add Showgirls.
A recent study that presented mice with multiple movies, played on iPods, found that the adorable rodents spent more time watching other mice kicking each others asses than watching them ‘doing the nasty.’
Shigeru Watanabe of Keio University in Japan and his team of super bored scientists tested mice to see if they could tell the difference between mice porn and mice action. They used three scenes – one of mice sniffing each other, another of two mice fighting, and the third of a copulating pair – and played them on a loop on iPods, without sound.
They placed an iPod in each of two side compartments of an enclosure, each playing a different video, and recorded the time spent in each compartment by 40 male virgin mice.
The mice were least interested in the sniffing video, which is horrible news for mice drug dealers. Given a choice between sniffing and copulation clips, 65 percent of the mice spent more time watching copulation. The average mouse spent 41 percent of the time in the copulation clips compartment, and 34 per cent in the other one.
But the fighting video was the favourite. Given a choice of that and watching copulation, the mice spent an average of 40 per cent of their time in the fighting compartment, and 35 per cent in the copulation compartment.
The results may reflect which videos the mice find most socially informative. The fight scene might have been the most interesting as it revealed information about dominance relationships, the team concludes.