Welcome to Why Mice Sing. A morass of science, the grotesquery, art, and other randomness that generally results when you give a pen to a pillock.
Past and Present Projects:
A few photos (well, I am not going to show the hundreds of photos I took of rock core) from a couple of trips out to the Cosmos mine site so I could collect data for my honours project. I had the opportunity to go down in the mine when I first went there in Jan 2007, and again in June/July. Can’t say I am hugely fond of working underground. It is muggy, dark, dusty and very hot. And when a truck or bogger starts up it is incredibly loud.
There are more photos below the fold.
MiceSong
"Mouse songs are sung at ultrasonic frequencies, which is why no one has noticed their complexity before, nor indeed been moved to celebrate the tunes in romantic poetry" (Hooper, 2005)
A paper in PLoS Biology by (Holy & Guo, 2005) demonstrated that male mice vocalise within a range of over 30 to 110 kHz (ultrasonic) in the presence of females, or female urine. The vocalisations have the characteristics of song with "several different syllable types, whose temporal sequencing includes the utterance of repeated phrases" the complexity of which, approaches "that of many songbirds".
Holy TE, Guo Z (2005), Ultrasonic Songs of Male Mice. PLoS Biol 3(12): e386
Hooper, R. (2005), Romantic rodents give secret serenades, New Scientist News Service, (Acc: 21/04/06)
