I have raised multiple 100s of mice and have an active ongoing interest in this idea. I have wondered mightily about the cleanliness of the mouse experiment. If you have tried to raise mice, you know that cleanliness is imperative. The question and answer at the end was helpful for me.
>>The Chairman thought Dr Calhoun had not mentioned
pollution and asked what remains the animals left and
how these affected the situation?
>>Dr Calhoun said that they (the investigators) were not
very sanitary in their husbandry, if that was the kind
of pollution inferred. The environment was cleaned,
most fices and soiled bedding removed, every six
weeks or two months, but nothing was ever sterilized.
He did not consider this necessary in such a closed
system and the mice had better survival than in most
laboratory colonies. Dead bodies were eventually
removed for examinations, but the major pollution
was the excess of living bodies; this was the essential
factor. The pollution was social in that there were too
many interacting elements, exceeding the social
system's capacity for incorporation of new individuals.
Capacities were genetically determined and situation-
ally modified.
>>The Chairman thought the point had been made very
clearly, but there must be a pollution factor. There
were the remains, frces, urine and dead bodies. Those
must surely be a factor.
>>Dr Calhoun thought these were minor factors. They
needed to maintain a situation in which there was not
continuous waste accumulation, but beyond that the
environment mirrored certain normal, external
ecological settings.
I thought that they got sloppy with cleaning and I don't see that my hunch was incorrect. In my opinion, that much poop and dead bodies will stress a mouse colony out and I would like to replicate this experiment myself and see what happens when you keep the colony super clean as it ought to be.
The concept of behavioral sink is very interesting, and while the conclusions are easy to relate to human societies I have always thought it abit shaky taking mice and rats for a complete models of human interactions. While animals, like mice, are very social I still feel humans are much much more complicated in our social behaviors. It would probably be hard to get permission from the ethics board to do the same experiments on primates.
>>The Chairman thought Dr Calhoun had not mentioned pollution and asked what remains the animals left and how these affected the situation?
>>Dr Calhoun said that they (the investigators) were not very sanitary in their husbandry, if that was the kind of pollution inferred. The environment was cleaned, most fices and soiled bedding removed, every six weeks or two months, but nothing was ever sterilized. He did not consider this necessary in such a closed system and the mice had better survival than in most laboratory colonies. Dead bodies were eventually removed for examinations, but the major pollution was the excess of living bodies; this was the essential factor. The pollution was social in that there were too many interacting elements, exceeding the social system's capacity for incorporation of new individuals. Capacities were genetically determined and situation- ally modified.
>>The Chairman thought the point had been made very clearly, but there must be a pollution factor. There were the remains, frces, urine and dead bodies. Those must surely be a factor.
>>Dr Calhoun thought these were minor factors. They needed to maintain a situation in which there was not continuous waste accumulation, but beyond that the environment mirrored certain normal, external ecological settings.
I thought that they got sloppy with cleaning and I don't see that my hunch was incorrect. In my opinion, that much poop and dead bodies will stress a mouse colony out and I would like to replicate this experiment myself and see what happens when you keep the colony super clean as it ought to be.