Mouse tales

Mice are kind of ubiquitous, and it's easy to think of them as all being pretty much the same, but the family they comprise -- Muridae -- contains no fewer than 870 different species.

And new ones are being discovered all the time, including the Sulawesi snouter, Hyorhinomys stuempkei.  It's a peculiar-looking little thing, with a pointy nose and incisors long even for a rodent, and is (as far as we know) only found in one location on the slopes of Mount Daro in northern Sulawesi.

Hyorhinomys stuempkei [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kevin C Rowe and Museum Victoria, Hyorhinomys07, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But the reason the topic comes up isn't mice, nor even anything about this particular mouse's evolutionary history, behavior, or physiology.  

It's about its name.

Both its common name of "snouter" and the species name, stuempkei, come from zoologist Harald Stümpke and his most famous work, The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, an exhaustive study of Order Rhinogradentia.  The members of the order lived on a small archipelago in the Pacific Ocean which had no human occupants.  However, the island chain was known to the natives of nearby islands, who gave each of the eighteen islands their names (Annoorussawubbissy, Awkoavussa, Hiddudify, Koavussa, Lowlukha, Lownunnoia, Mara, Miroovilly, Mittuddinna, Naty, Nawissy, Noorubbissy, Osovitissy, Ownavussa, Owsuddowsa, Shanelukha, Towteng-Awko, and Vinsy; the entire chain was called Hyiyiyi).  Other than occasional visits from Polynesians, the first person to go there and do a thorough mapping of the archipelago was Swedish explorer Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist in the 1940s, but it fell to Stümpke to do a biological survey.

Unfortunately, the story doesn't end well.  Stümpke's book is the only remnant of them that survives.  Stümpke and his assistants, along with all the snouters they studied, were wiped out by nuclear bomb testing on a nearby atoll.  Fortunately, before his death he'd mailed a proof copy of his manuscript to German zoologist Gerolf Steiner, or we might not know anything about these unique mammals at all.

Sad story, yes?

However, if by now you are -- pardon the expression -- smelling a rat, you're not alone.

Some questions you might be asking yourself:

1. If all the "rhinogrades" were wiped out, where did the "Sulawesi snouter" come from?
2. And how can one be from Sulawesi if they all lived on the archipelago of Hyiyiyi?
3. Those island names don't sound very Polynesian.  ("Annoorussawubbissy"?  Really?)
4. Then there's "Hyiyiyi," which is the noise an elderly family friend used to make when he was annoyed.
5. How come you never hear anything about an entire group of zoologists being killed in the bomb testing?
6. Aren't all mice in Order Rodentia?  Where the hell did Order Rhinogradentia come from?
7. I mean seriously, what the fuck?

The truth is that the entire thing -- the mysterious island chain of Hyiyiyi, both Harald Stümpke and the intrepid Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist, Order Rhinogradentia and the book detailing their biology, and the tragic bomb test that wiped all of 'em out -- were the invention of Gerolf Steiner (who was a very real biologist with a puckish sense of humor).  However, not only were some people taken in by the joke at the time, Order Rhinogradentia (and the fictitious Harald Stümpke) still occasionally find their way into real publications -- sometimes without any notes making it clear that neither one exists.

Fortunately, by now most zoologists know about Steiner's role in the story, so it's unlikely anyone these days is really taken in by it.

However, in celebration of one of the most elaborate pranks in the history of biology, a recently-discovered (real) mouse species on Sulawesi was named by its discoverer, zoologist Jacob Esselstyn, not after Steiner, but after the fictitious Stümpke!  And even its common name -- the Sulawesi snouter -- is an hommage to Steiner and his masterful monograph.

Keep this story in mind if you ever are inclined to think of scientists as humorless, dry-as-dust pedants.

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Bishop Hatto and the mice

To round out our week of looking at odd and creepy tales, today we're going to consider one of the most famous: the story of the evil Bishop Hatto.

Hatto was a real person, and was Archbishop of Mainz in the late tenth century C. E.  He had a reputation for being a dreadful human being, grasping, greedy, and cruel, and in fact had a tower built on a small island in the Rhine (near present day Bingen am Rhein) to control shipping traffic.  The top of the tower had a platform for crossbowmen, and ships were forced to pay tolls to pass the island -- or risk having his bowmen pick off the sailors from their high vantage point.

So Bishop Hatto got richer and the poor got poorer (as they are wont to do).  Things reached a peak in the mid-970s, when a famine struck central Europe.  Rather than use his considerable wealth to ease the suffering of the peasants, he took this as another opportunity to fatten his own coffers, storing up what grain there was and jacking up the prices to wring as much cash as he could from the desperate.  Finally, the peasants had had enough, and according to the best-known version of the legend, plotted to rebel against and depose Bishop Hatto.  But they didn't take into account the bishop's cunning, nor the fact that he had paid informants to keep him apprised of what was going on.  Well aware of what was being planned, he put forth a proclamation that he'd relented and would give away the grain to anyone who needed it.

Relieved, the peasants showed up at Hatto's massive grain storage barn -- only to find that it was empty.

And the doors were barred behind them.

Hatto then had his soldiers set fire to the barn, and as the peasants died screaming, the bishop laughed and said, "Listen to the mice squeak."

Hearing his words, one of the poor unfortunates in the burning barn came to a gap in the wood and shouted, "Mice?  You'll rue your words, Hatto... before this night is over, the mice will come to take their vengeance on you!"

Undaunted, Hatto returned to his residence, and what the legend says happened next is hardly a surprise.  He was settling down for the night, and heard rustling and squeaking -- hordes of rats and mice, swarming up the stairs.  He fled, but they followed him, and eventually he made his way across the Rhine to his tower.  But the mice swam after him... and there was nowhere for him to go.  He was cornered and eaten alive.  And ever since then, the tower on the little island has been called the Mäuseturm -- "Mouse Tower," in German.

Bishop Hatto about to meet his fate (from The Nuremberg Chronicles, 1493) [Image is in the Public Domain]

There are four problems with this legend.

The first is that there's no contemporaneous historical record indicating that Hatto was nibbled to death by mice.  However, given the dearth of any records at all from the tenth century, perhaps we can set that one aside.

A more troubling issue is that the original name of the tower wasn't Mäuseturm -- it was Mautturm (which, more prosaically, means "toll tower").  The renaming of the tower to Mäuseturm seems to have happened much later, and as a sort of play on words that works way better in German than it does in English.

Third, there is no historically credible source documenting Hatto being all that much worse than any other medieval religious or secular leader.  After all, this was a time when being nasty to peasants was right up there with fox hunting and falconry as the favorite sport of the nobility.  There had been an earlier Archbishop of Mainz -- also, confusingly, named Hatto -- whose reputation for being an unmitigated asshole was much better documented.  (Among many other things, he promised Count Adalbert of Babenburg safe passage through his lands, then captured him and had him beheaded, and later plotted unsuccessfully to murder Henry, Duke of Saxony.)  This Hatto's nasty reputation may have besmirched the later Hatto's -- and for what it's worth, Hatto I is also reputed to have come to a bad end, having died after being struck by lightning.

Fourth, the whole eaten-by-mice thing is the punchline of the stories of two other allegedly nasty medieval rulers -- Popiel of Gopło and the Count of Wörthschlössl, each of whom has his own "Mouse Tower" (still standing to this day) where he allegedly met his grisly fate.  To judge by the legends, German mice did nothing but run around all the time looking for cruel peasant-abusers to eat:

Mouse 1: Hey, bro, we gotta get going.  We're supposed to go eat the Count von Wienerschnitzel tonight.

Mouse 2: Seriously?  I've still got indigestion from the archbishop we ate last night.  Can't we find, like, a nice salad bar or something?

Mouse 1: Dude.  Get your ass up.  We're mice, and we eat evil German magnates.  I don't make the rules.

Mouse 2 (*sighs heavily*): Fine.  But I'm fucking well taking tomorrow off.

So for those of you who like tales of divine and/or rodent-mediated vengeance, the whole Bishop Hatto story is kind of a non-starter.  Kind of a shame, really.  It'd be nice if evil people got such a swift comeuppance.  I can think of a few who would be good candidates, if any modern mice who read Skeptophilia are casting about for victims to devour.

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The origins of empathy

When I was a graduate student at the University of Washington, I took a course in Anatomy & Physiology.  The anatomy part turned out to be easier than I'd anticipated, because I've got a decent memory for names of things and also because my friends and I learned the various organs and tissues using acronyms that ranged from vulgar to outright obscene.  (One of the more printable ones: for the nerve branches of the face -- temporal, zygomatic, buccal, mandibular, and cervical -- "Tommy Zimmerman's bowels move constantly."  Okay, it's gross, but y'know what?  Writing this, thirty years later, I still remembered them without looking 'em up.)

The physiology part was more of a challenge, but however hard the course was, learning about the complexity of what was going on inside my own body was downright fascinating.

The topic comes up, though, not because of the content but because of the attitude of the professor.  In one of the labs, we were to do a dissection of a recently-killed mouse, and the professor demonstrated how to kill one humanely.  I'm not saying I was unaware that lab animals are routinely killed, nor that learning how to dispatch one humanely if you must isn't a good idea.  What bothered me was that the professor was downright callous about the whole thing, laughing as he picked up the mouse he was about to kill, saying, "Oh, well, life's tough, buddy.  Any last words?  No?  Okay, then."

I was pretty appalled.  I went into biology in large part because I have a tremendous respect for the living world.  Again, I'm not naïve; "nature is red in tooth and claw," and all that sort of thing.  I eat meat and wear leather shoes and am fully in support of (responsible) hunting, and am aware that I'm just another animal occupying his position in the food chain.

But for me, the focus is respect.  Okay, sometimes animals will die, to provide food or other resources, or to support laboratory research.  But every effort should be made to treat them kindly and humanely, to hold their lives and well-being with respect insofar as you can.  There is no excuse for a cavalier attitude toward life -- toward any life.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rama, Lab mouse mg 3157, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR]

When I voiced my opinion to the professor -- saying something like, "I know you have to kill the mice sometimes, but do you have to laugh about it?" -- his laughter grew louder, but directed toward me now. "What does it matter?" he said.  "The mouse dies either way."

I said, "That attitude makes you less sensitive to reducing the fear and suffering it experiences."

Now his laughter turned to incredulity.  "You're not going to have a very long career in biology if you think animals have emotions.  You start anthropomorphizing mice, you're going to have a rough time of it."

I decided to choose my battles (not least because he was going to be giving me my grades), and didn't argue further.  But I said to a friend later that day, "If that guy thinks animals don't have emotions, he must never have owned a pet in his life."  The bond between me and my dogs is not just because I pet them and give them dog kibble; in fact, experiments have shown that when a dog sees its beloved owner, it experiences a spike of the hormone oxytocin -- same as humans do when they're with their friends.  I've seen dogs grieve; when our lovable, hyper, eccentric border collie, Doolin, died at the ripe old age of 13, our other dog, Grendel, went into a positive decline.  He hardly ate or played.  All he wanted to do was sleep, curled up with one of Doolin's favorite toys, for several weeks before he began to get over losing his friend.

But even if I'd brought that kind of thing up, I'm sure the professor would have called it "anecdotal," if not something even more dismissive; and at that point, the oxytocin experiments were still in the future.  But this week a paper in Science by Monique Smith, Naoyuki Asada, and Robert Malenka of Stanford University has conclusively demonstrated that not only do animals experience fear and suffering, they are acutely aware of the fear and suffering of other animals.

In other words: they experience empathy, just as humans do.  And if my professor from long ago is still around, I want you to note: the experiment was done on...

...mice.

In a paper titled "Anterior Cingulate Inputs to Nucleus Accumbens Control the Social Transfer of Pain and Analgesia," Smith et al. show that exposing a mouse to another mouse who is showing overt signs of distress causes a response in the part of the brain that regulates emotional state.  The authors write, "In mice, both pain and fear can be transferred by short social contact from one animal to a bystander.  Neurons in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex in the bystander animal mediate these transfers.  However, the specific anterior cingulate projections involved in such empathy-related behaviors are unknown."

I've never really understood how a biologist could honestly believe non-human animals don't have emotions, given that (1) we're animals, and (2) damn near everything about us from our intelligence on down exists along some kind of spectrum in other animal species.  It's really just a vestige of the old "human/animal" dichotomy, that there was some kind of qualitative difference between us and the rest of the living world -- be it a spirit, a soul, or (in the case of my professor) some undefinable something that makes our suffering relevant and theirs not.  

But the Smith et al. paper puts that to rest, hopefully once and for all.  I can only hope that it will lead to more humane treatment of animals in general.  They feel emotions -- perhaps not with the sophistication we do, but that's a far cry from claiming they have no emotions at all.

And if that doesn't alter the perceptions and behaviors of the scientists, they are discounting the results of science because it's inconvenient -- meaning they hardly merit the title "scientist."

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What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Mice, rats, and sunk costs

One of the most difficult-to-fight biases in human nature is the sunk-cost fallacy.

The idea is the more time, effort, and/or money we've put into a decision, the less likely we are to abandon it -- even after it has been proven a bad choice.  It's what makes people stick with cars that are lemons, investments that are financial disasters, marriages that are horrible, and politicians who have proven themselves to be unethical and self-serving, long after cut-and-run would, all things considered, be the most logical course of action.

The tendency is so ubiquitous that it's often taken for granted.  You even see it in far less logical scenarios than the ones I mentioned above, where there could be at least some rational reason for sticking with the original choice.  A good example is games of pure chance, where gamblers will keep on wasting money because they are certain that a losing streak is bound to end.  "I'm already a thousand dollars in the hole," they'll say.  "I can risk five hundred more."  Here, sunk-cost makes no sense whatsoever; the lost thousand is not an investment that could pay off in any sense of the word, and losing streaks in games of pure chance are not bound to do anything.

That's why they're called "games of pure chance."

So the ubiquity of the sunk-cost fallacy is undeniable, but what's less obvious is why we do it.  Sticking with a bad choice is rarely ever advantageous.  But despite its dubious benefits to survival, what seems certain is that it's a very old behavior, evolutionarily speaking.  Because researchers at the University of Minnesota have just shown that sunk-cost decision making not only occurs in humans, but in...

... mice and rats.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rasbak, Apodemus sylvaticus bosmuis, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In a paper entitled "Sensitivity to 'Sunk Costs' in Mice, Rats, and Humans" that appeared last week in the journal Science, neuropsychologists Brian M. Sweis, Samantha V. Abram, Brandy J. Schmidt, Kelsey D. Seeland, Angus W. MacDonald III, Mark J. Thomas, and A. David Redish showed that even our very distant relatives engage in sunk-cost errors.  The authors write:

Sunk costs are irrecoverable investments that should not influence decisions, because decisions should be made on the basis of expected future consequences.  Both human and nonhuman animals can show sensitivity to sunk costs, but reports from across species are inconsistent.  In a temporal context, a sensitivity to sunk costs arises when an individual resists ending an activity, even if it seems unproductive, because of the time already invested.  In two parallel foraging tasks that we designed, we found that mice, rats, and humans show similar sensitivities to sunk costs in their decision-making.  Unexpectedly, sensitivity to time invested accrued only after an initial decision had been made.  These findings suggest that sensitivity to temporal sunk costs lies in a vulnerability distinct from deliberation processes and that this distinction is present across species.

In both the experiments with humans and rodents, the setup was the same -- the subject navigates a maze looking for rewards (a food pellet for the mice, and hilariously, a video of kittens playing for the humans, showing that cat videos really are an incentive for us) which are scattered randomly through the maze.  Each time a reward is encountered, the subject is told how long it will take for the reward to be delivered (a tone the mice and rats are trained to associate with wait time, and a countdown timer for the humans).  Because the rewards are plentiful and some of the waits are long, what would make logical sense is to abandon a reward if the wait time is too long, so more time could be spent searching for rewards with short wait times.

But that's not what happened.  Both the rodents and the humans would often stick with rewards with very long wait times -- and the ones who said, "Screw it, this is too long to sit here twiddling my thumbs" all gave up early on.  The longer the test subject stuck with the wait, the more likely they were to hang on to the very end, even at the cost of a considerable amount of time that could have been spent foraging more productively.

"Obviously, the best thing is as quick as possible to get into the wait zone," said David Redish, who co-authored the study.  "But nobody does that.  Somehow, all three species know that if you get into the wait zone, you’re going to pay this sunk cost, and they actually spend extra time deliberating in the offer zone so that they don’t end up getting stuck."

What this research doesn't indicate though, its why we all do this.  Behaviors that are common throughout groups of related species -- what are called evolutionarily-conserved behaviors -- are thought to have some kind of significant survival advantage.  (Just as evolutionarily-conserved genes are thought to be essential, even if we don't know for certain what they do.)  "Evolution by natural selection would not promote any behavior unless it had some — perhaps obscure — net overall benefit," said Alex Kacelnik, a professor of behavioral ecology at Oxford, who was not part of the study, but praised its design and rigor.  "If everybody does it, the reasoning goes, there must be a reason."

But what that reason is remains unclear.  We have to leave it at "we're not as logical as we like to think, and our motivation for decision-making not as based in solid fact as you might expect," however unsatisfying that might be.

But it is something to consider next time we're weighing the benefits of sticking with a decision we already made -- whether it's the wait time for downloading a kitten video, or continuing our support for a politician.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.

Mouse talk

Being a linguistics geek, I've always been fascinated with the mechanisms of communication.  My interests span such topics as the evolution of human language, how one language (or culture) influences another (the topic of my master's thesis), the question of how we would understand language in a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence, and whether vocal communication in other species is actually language.

The conventional answer to the last question has usually been "no."  Language, as defined by linguistics, is "arbitrary symbolic communication."  The arbitrary part is because except in certain rare cases, such as onomatopoeic words ("pop," "splat," "bang," etc.), there is no logical connection between the sound of a word and its referent.  Except in our minds, there is nothing especially doggy about the sound of the word "dog."

So is vocal communication in other animals language?  The singing of songbirds is clearly communication, but it lacks one important characteristics of human language; the flexible productive ability of language to communicate different concepts in different contexts.  Birdsong is for the most part (within a species) limited in range to a few different sounds, and once learned, never changes.

Some species, however, get closer to language than that.  Some birds, notably corvids, have a wide range of vocalizations, and are also some of the most intelligent birds.  Dogs vary their tones depending on context -- I can tell from the tone of my dog's barks whether he's seen a squirrel, someone's knocked on the front door, he wants to be let in, he's hungry, or my wife's just come home.  One step closer are whales and dolphins, whose vocal communication appears to be complex and responsive -- but whether it qualifies as true language is an unsettled question.

However, a new study, which appeared this week in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, suggests that human language may not be as far removed from vocalizations in other animals as we may have thought.  The paper, entitled "A FOX-P2 Mutation Implicated in Human Speech Deficits Alters Sequencing of Ultrasonic Vocalizations in Adult Male Mice," by Jonathan Chabout, Erich D. Jarvis et al., has shown that mice have the "Forkhead Box Protein 2" (FOX-P2) gene, just as humans do -- and a mutation in that gene impairs vocal communication in mice, just as it does in humans.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

"This study supports the ‘continuum hypothesis,’ which is that FOX-P2 affects the vocal production of all mammals, and not just humans," Jarvis said.  "Mice do not have the complex vocal learning behavior of humans and song-learning birds.  Nonetheless, we find that the same FOX-P2 mutation in mice and in humans leads to overlapping effects on sequencing of vocalizations. In particular, against a background of preserved syllable acoustic structure, we see reductions in the length and complexity of syllable sequences."

I find this fascinating, because I've always been of the opinion that there's a lot more going on inside the brains of non-human animals than we've typically been willing to acknowledge, and a great deal more similarity than difference between human cognition and cognition in other mammals.  So in a way, I find this result unsurprising.

But still, what was drilled into me in my college linguistics classes -- that humans were the only animals that had language, and that there was a hard-and-fast divide between the vocalizations of humans and those in other species -- was a surprisingly deep-seated bias.  It's one I'm glad to jettison, however.  My other geeky passion is evolutionary biology, so the idea that there is an unbroken continuum in the animal world in terms of what we have to say, and the genetic underpinning thereof, is pretty damn cool.