Wild mice and rats like their time on the running wheel,along with slugs

January 31, 2017 9:31 AM

According to research it seems that wild mice ,rats,frogs and slugs enjoy a run on the wheel regardless of whether they are caged or not. Snails not so much.
posted by boilermonster (15 comments total)

Wild mice and rats like their time on the running wheel, along with slugs

It's nice that they're sharing.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:13 AM on January 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

Gym memberships for rodents.
posted by Jode at 10:15 AM on January 31, 2017

Summary for those of you not quite interested enough in this One Weird Study to actually read it: 1. 88% of the runners were juvenile mice. Slugs, the closest runner-up (heh) accounted for just .07% of the voluntary participants. Interestingly, other rodents (big rats and tiny shrews) didn't much care for wheel-running at all. 2. Homo sapiens were not part of the study, but the number of gym rats (heh, again) among our population would indicate that we might enjoy running on the thing more than slugs, if less than teen mice. (Arghh: you beat me to it by seconds, Jode!)
posted by kozad at 10:15 AM on January 31, 2017

Slugs participation may be limited by travel times.
posted by boilermonster at 10:35 AM on January 31, 2017

I've always wondered why mice find the wheels so attractive. This doesn't really shed any light on that but it does indicate that both captive and non-captive mice do it by choice rather than out of boredom. So that's nice.
posted by doctor_negative at 11:04 AM on January 31, 2017

If one of these animals dies while running on the wheel, it should definitely be included in the exhibit.
posted by cubby at 11:09 AM on January 31, 2017

"Sherwin CM. 1998 Voluntary wheel running: a review and novel interpretation. Anim. Behav. 56, 11–27"

Checked specifically to see if they cited the above (they did). It's one of my favorite articles. God knows I spent enough time watching rodents run on wheels in grad school...
posted by caution live frogs at 11:45 AM on January 31, 2017 [3 favorites]

I have it on good authority that Ukrainians, in particular, love running in wheels.
posted by zebra at 11:50 AM on January 31, 2017

Back when my household used to have rodents, one of our mice adored her wheel to the point where we had to take it away from them at night to keep the noise down. Well one morning we forgot to put it back, and she got impatient, popped out the cover on an unused habitrail port, and went looking for her wheel. But since their cage was on a dresser that was little bigger than the cage itself, her search was initially limited to doing circles just outside of the cage.

When I found her I was all like "What are you doing out?" and she just stopped and looked up at me with an intense stare that clearly conveyed the concept of "WHERE'S MY WHEEL, MOTHERFUCKER?" We put her and the wheel back in the cage, and after we had screwed the portcover back in, we sealed it up with duct tape to avoid a repeat incident.
posted by radwolf76 at 11:59 AM on January 31, 2017 [14 favorites]

My last job involved collecting running wheel data from mice -- we were using voluntary running activity as a way of monitoring ALS/MND progression -- and I was amazed how far and fast they run. Most ran at least a couple of kilometres every night, and some had nights where they ran nearly 20km, averaging 3-5km/h. Females tend to run more than males, for some reason, and how much they run varies a bit with their oestrus cycle. Regardless of the details, it makes me feel very bad for mice living in cages without wheels.

This paper was heartening when I found it, because obviously the more of a natural behaviour wheel running turns out to be, the more believable quite a lot of research based on it as a readout becomes.
posted by metaBugs at 1:20 PM on January 31, 2017 [5 favorites]

I have recently gotten into the habit of trapping mice in my kitchen, in humane no-kill traps. When you let them out, man, they are fast! (I have to add that I'm feeling less humane then when I'd drive them down to a local creek in the summertime. Now that it's winter in Colorado, I'm letting them either run into someone else's warm home or die of hypothermia. Having heard that hypothermia is not a bad way to die, my idea was to just put the trap out in the cold and let it freeze to death, but my wife and daughter weren't having it.)
posted by kozad at 1:30 PM on January 31, 2017

I guess I am a snail then.

I hate treadmills so much I'll run outside until it is around -15C and I've had cold/exercise asthma problems in the past.
posted by srboisvert at 1:53 PM on January 31, 2017

Females tend to run more than males, for some reason, and how much they run varies a bit with their oestrus cycle. Regardless of the details, it makes me feel very bad for mice living in cages without wheels.

Were they running to get away from the males?

"NOT NOW! I'm running!" [keeps running forever]
posted by srboisvert at 1:54 PM on January 31, 2017

srboisvert: given that mice and rats have repeatedly shown pet owners that they'll successfully mate through cage bars, I'd imagine that a (caged) female mouse in heat was likely running to try and find males.
posted by nobeagle at 8:57 AM on February 1, 2017

I had never thought of this before, and now it's all I'm thinking of.
posted by lagomorphius at 12:21 PM on February 1, 2017