Need to take a break from the Vulgar Army for a while. Regular updates probably won’t occur until I get back from Europe. Reasons for this are: 1) I am finding it very difficult to maintain interest in it over a long period of time, 2) I want to use media apart from pen and ink in it. Pen and ink just isn’t suitable for depicting a luscious attack of giant killer octopus of divers. It needs to be painted, not drawn. I have a list of various aspects of the octopus in media that have yet to be covered, so it will return!
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:
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)