That annoying sound coming from the insulation in the laundry room isn't just mice squeaking, it's a song. A team of researchers at Washington University med school in St. Louis have determined that male mice vocalize in a particular way when exposed to female mouse pheromones. They're singing. (Read the press release here.)
What's the difference between just squeaking and a mouse song? According to the study, the male mice were using "distinct syllable types arranged in nonrandom, repeated temporal sequences." The mice produce identifiable "syllables" and group them into characteristic patterns. (It even appears that there are rules determining what syllables follow other syllable types.) Different male mice apparently have different songs, as well. This is a surprising result. According to the researchers, "Song has only rarely been documented in mammals, and to our knowledge only in humans, whales, and bats."
In birds, a lot of song is learned rather than innate, and that certainly seems to be true for humans and whales, as well. Since the study concentrated on laboratory mice, which are pretty inbred and isolated, this raises the possibility that wild mice may have a much wider repertoire of songs. For all we know, the fields and attics are full of ultrasonic arias and seductive ballads. Maybe someday we'll see mouse music CDs, suitably stepped-down into the human hearing range.
The song of the mouse went undiscovered for so long because the frequencies are mostly ultrasonic, far too high for humans to hear. It took centuries for people to discover that elephants used low-frequency infrasound to communicate over long distances, too. We really are mostly blind and deaf, just catching glimpses and whispers of the world around us.
What's interesting is that most fictional treatments of this theme are horror. Roald Dahl's short story "The Sound Machine" has its inventor protagonist end badly after hearing ultrasonic sounds, and the film X -- The Man With the X-Ray Eyes has a similar fate for a scientist who tries to augment his vision. I think this is just "sour grapes," along with all the Dreadful Warning stories about how people wouldn't really enjoy immortality, or Utopias of material abundance, or other things that we almost certainly would enjoy a lot, but can't have right now. And now it turns out being able to listen to ultrasonic mouse music is pretty cool.
Of course, it should be pointed out that mouse songs have been documented as far back as 1928.
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