Mouse set ‘first aid’ to unconscious companions

When they find another mouse unconsto, some mice seem to try to revive their companion by clapping them, biting and even pulling their tongue aside to clear their airways. The finding suggests that care behavior may be more common in the animal kingdom than we were thousanding.

There are rare reports of large, social mammals trying to help incapacitated members of their species, such as wild ripple touching and licking wounded comrades, dolphins trying to push an distressed poddic to the surface so it can breathe and elephants makes similar relative.

Now Li Zhang at the University of Southern California (USC) and Hans Colleugues has filmed what happened when they presented laboratory mouse with a well -known cage that was EITH ACTIVE or anesthetized and not responding.

Over a number of tests, on average, the animals dedicated approx. 47 percent of a 13-minute observation window for interaction with the unconstarted partner showing three kinds of behavior.

“They start with sniff and then care for and then with a very intensive or physical interaction,” says Zhang. “They really open the mouth of this animal and pull out its tongue.”

These more physical interactions also involved licking the eyes and biting the mouth area. After focusing on her mouth, Miche pulled on the tongue of their non -reacting partner in more than 50 percent of the boxes.

In a separate test, researchers gently placed a non-toxic plastic ball in the mouth of the unconscious mouse. In 80 per. A hundred boxes removed the helping mice successfully the object.

“If we expand the window observation, the success rate may be even higher,” says team member Huizhong Tao, also at the USC.

Mice that we waited to wake up and started going again faster than unclear to mice, and there had been react to moving by moving, slowing down the care mouse, and the registry stopped their caring behavior.

The nurse also spent more time trending to unconscious mice if they were familiar with them if they had not previously laid.

The recovery behavior is not an analog of cardiopulmonal resuscitation or CPR, which requires special education, says Zhang. It’s more like using strong smelling salts or a flap to wake someone or perform basic first aid to make sure an unconscious person can breathe. Placing an anesthetized patient’s tongue so that it does not block their airway is also important bold surgery, he says.

Zhang and his colleagues found that behavior was driven by oxytocin-releasing neurons in the amygdala and the hypothalamus regions of the brain. The hormone oxytocin is involved in other caring behaviorors across a wide rage of greenbrat species.

Similar behavior is postponed in laboratory mice in an accompanying research document by another team and was also described by a third team last month.

“I have never observed these types of behavior when we drive experience in the laboratory, but we have never placed a praying animal with a partner they were fully awake,” says Cristina Márquez at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology in Coimbra, Portugal. “The fact that three independent laboratories have observed similar behavior indicates that this is a robust finding. However, we should be really careful with anthropomorphization too much, what we observe in non -human species or the attribute intentions that go beyond what is observed.

Zhang and his colleagues think that the behavior is congenital rather than learned, partly because all the animals tested were only 2 to 3 months old and did not have this behavior or anesthetized burkams before.

He suggests that such instinctive behavior plays apart in improving the group’s Consultation and may be more widespread among social animals than we have seen so far.

Seeing this behavior in wild mice can be tough, says Márquez. “Mice are prey that often do not live in large groups, and thus they will hide quite well from us humans. Aim [the fact] That we don’t see it doesn’t mean they do.