Who knew that mice can sing? I certainly did not know that! Apparently, male mice sing to attract females or to express aggression. Unfortunately, the sounds are too high for humans to hear, but when taped and slowed down, scientists were able to analyze the notes and rhythms mice sing. Mice can sing a variety of notes and often sing repeating verses when trying to charm females. They are also very good at mimicking sounds and can be taught to sing certain notes. Scientists believe that they can study speech disorders by observing mice and their singing abilities.
NOS Themes
1. Role of motivation. Scientists want to learn more about speech disorders by studying mice.
2. Science is collaborative. Many different scientists have tried to analyze mice's note ranges.
3. Science is tentative. I believe that mice's singing abilities could be studied for further information regarding vocal capacities.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121017-singing-mice-songs-animals-science-weird/
Another NOS theme if found in this article is curiosity. The researchers must have been curious to look into an obscure topic like this. Without there curiosity we would not know how mice communicate.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting how we just recently found out this new way of mice to communicate and i wonder how other species communicate among themselves in ways we haven't found out yet and how this can affect us.
ReplyDeleteLike the video we watched in class about the way bacteria commuicate through chemical signals, to know how many of each are around them and then they can start acting and how this can help us find a new type of antibiotics, i think there are still many things to find out about this world and we should keep looking and finding new things because this can in the long run help us better the human race too.
Since mice are so similar to humans n many ways (though this is surprising) studying this can help us with speech disorders in humans, like this study here
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20579107
where they talk about proteins and speech