Of Mice and Men

Here's an interesting story, mice sing! Check out the sound clip at the bottom of the page. Apparently during courtship male mice sing. This was discovered when researchers let male mice sniff on female or male mice urine, and though the original intention was to see how the male brain differentiates the pheromones, they noticed a rather complex ultrasound pattern erupted when hetero (whether there are homo mice is a question) male mice smelled female pheromones. This places mice in the same league as some other complex singing beings such as birds and dolphins! This is interesting for many reasons, but one I can think of is since mice are relatively easy to manipulate genetically, and the fact that they utilize complicated vocal patterns to court mates means perhaps mice have some simple language abilities. So we may be able to understand how language and vocal abilities develop and play such a crucial role (obviously as in birds better singers get to procreate!) in animals. We already know humans are not alone in utilizing language, though we are certainly the most sophisticated.

I wonder how the female mice reacts to the male singing. What makes them determine whether the male mice is a good mate---is it like with birds the better song? So what constitutes a better song? Surely physical attributes also factor significantly. Perhaps more pressing a matter I wonder what human women think of as a good human man! You know it's pretty obvious when someone's is or isn't interested in you, and if not, all you can do is accept it with a smile and move on. I wonder whether mice smile? Are they physically capable of doing so...I mean are there muscles that can lift the ends of their mouths to form a smiling shape?

What is also interesting is that at least in birds only males sing. Though the researchers have not verified this, they suspect only the male mice sing as well. This would suggest singing as a sexual thing. It is basically similar with humans; typically the male has to woo the female, most likely by spending near infinite amounts of $$$, time and effort. The female really only has to do one simple thing, make a choice. It would be nice to have the female do all the pursuing for a change, given the feminine movement of our times this is reasonable! But it seems that this is not something so easily changed; nature seems to have hardwired courtship to work a certain way! This may have more to do with an imbalance in the male-female ratio, which at least in humans began a long time ago when cultures started to value males over females. The question then is for other animals, does this imbalance also occur? One would think there is no "cultural" or "social" belief in mice that make males preferable to females, but when a batch of mice are born, is it 50/50 chance for male and female? One would think yes, but I don't know.