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:
Another photo dump. This time from photos taken on two trips to Canberra and surrounds last year. There are heaps more photos below the fold including beach photos (from a day trip down to the coast), buildings (mostly that weird one on the foreshore that houses somesort of musical instrument) and photos of the burnt out husk of the observatory.
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)
