A mouse draws his tongue and leads to an unconscious colleague
Venjian Sun et al. 2025
When they find another rat unconscious, some mice feel that their partner tries to revive and revive his partner, even to clean his airways Let’s pull. This suggests that careful behavior can be more common in the animal empire as we thought.
There are rare reports of large, social mammals that are trying to help members of their species, such as Wild chimpanzee touching and licking injured companions, Dolphins are trying to push a distressed pod friend to the surface so that it can breathe And Elephants helping sick relatives,
Now, Lee Zhang The Southern California University (USC) and his colleagues have been filmed when he presented the laboratory mice along with a familiar cage partner who was either active or anesthetic and unique.
On a series of tests, an average animals dedicated approximately 47 percent of the 13 -minute observation window to interact with the unconscious partner, showing three types of behavior.
“They start with sniffing, and then groge, and then with a very intensive or physical interaction,” Zhang says. “They actually open the mouth of this animal and take out their tongue.”
These more physical interactions also included the eyes lick and cutting the area of ​​the mouth. After focusing on the mouth, the mice pulled up on the tongue of their irresponsible partner in more than 50 percent of cases.
In a separate trial, the researchers gently placed a non-types of plastic ball in the mouth of the unconscious mouse. In 80 percent of cases, mice helping successfully removed the object.
“If we increase the observation window, perhaps the success rate may be even higher,” the team members say Hijong taoAlso in USC.
Rats that were present to wake up and started walking faster than the unaccounted for mice, and once their allegations responded to moving forward, careful mice slowed down and then their care Stopped the behavior.
Careful mice also spent more time for unconscious mice, if they were familiar with them, they did not meet in advance.
Zhang says that recurrence is not an analog of cardiopulmonary revival, or CPR, which requires specialist training. It is like using a strong smell or slap to awaken someone or an unconscious person to breathe basic first aid. They say that the tongue of an anesthetic patient is to be brought into position, so it does not block their airways during surgery.
Zhang and his colleagues found that the behavior was operated by oxytocin-relief neurons in the migdala and hypothalamus regions of the brain. A wide range of hormone oxytocin vertebral species includes other care behaviors.
A similar behavior is mentioned in laboratory mice Simultaneous research paper Another team was also described by another team Last month by a third team,
“I have never seen these types of behaviors when we conduct experiments in the laboratory, but we have never put a recovering animal with a partner until they woke up completely,” Christina Mirkez At the center for neuroscience and cell biology at Coimbra, Portugal. “The fact is that three independent laboratories have seen similar behaviors, it indicates that it is a strong discovery. However, we should really be careful about too much anthropomorphing that we see in non-human species or blame the intentions that have been seen. ,
Zhang and his colleagues feel that behavior is congenital rather than learning, partly because all the tested animals were just 2 to 3 months old and did not see the companions of this behavior or anestheted cage earlier.
He suggests that such a spontaneous behavior plays a role in enhancing the group harmony and may be more widely present among social animals as we have seen so far.
Mirkez says, it can be difficult to see this behavior in wild mice. “Rats are hunting animals that often do not live in large groups, thus they will usually hide quite well from American humans. But (fact) that we do not see that this does not mean that they do not do so. ,
Subject:
(Tagstotransite) animals
