The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal BehaviorYerkes, Robert Mearns
Science
The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal Behavior
Yerkes, Robert Mearns
Animal behavior; Dancing mice
This historical survey of the problem of hearing has brought out a few
important facts. No one of the several investigators of the subject, with
the exception of Cyon, is certain that the dancer can hear, and no one of
them, with the exception of Rawitz, is certain that it cannot hear! Cyon
almost certainly observed two kinds of dancing mice. Those of his dancers
which exhibited exceptional ability to climb in the vertical direction and
which also gave good evidence of hearing certain sounds may have been
hybrids resulting from the crossing of the dancer with a common mouse, or
they may have been exceptional specimens of the true dancer variety. A
third possibility is suggested by Rawitz's belief in the ability of the
young dancer to hear. Cyon's positive results may have been obtained with
immature individuals. I am strongly inclined to believe that Cyon did
observe two types of dancer, and to accept his statement that some of the
mice could hear, whereas others could not. It is evident, in the light of
our examination of the experimental results thus far obtained by other
investigators, that neither the total lack of sensitiveness to sounds in
the adult nor the presence of such sensitiveness in the young dancer has
been satisfactorily proved.
I shall now report in detail the results of my own study of the sense of
hearing in the dancer. As the behavior of the young differs greatly from
that of the adult, by which is meant the sexually mature animal, I shall
present first the results of my experiments with adults and later, in
contrast, the results obtained with mice from one to twenty-eight days
old.
My preliminary tests were made with noises. While carefully guarding
against the interference of visual, tactual, temperature, and olfactory
stimuli, I produced noises of varying degrees of loudness by clapping the
hands together suddenly, by shouting, whistling, exploding pistol caps,
striking steel bars, ringing an electric bell, and causing another mouse
to squeak. To these sounds a common mouse usually responds either by
starting violently, or by trembling and remaining perfectly quiet for a
few seconds, as if frightened. The adult dancers which I have tested, and
I have repeated the experiment scores of times during the last three years
with more than a hundred different individuals, have never given
unmistakable evidence of hearing. Either they are totally deaf or there is
a most surprising lack of motor reactions.
Precisely the same results were obtained in tests made with the Galton
whistle throughout its range of pitches, and with Appuun whistles which,
according to their markings, ranged from 2000 Vs. (C_4) to 48,000 (G_9),
but which undoubtedly did not correspond at all exactly to this range, and
with a series of König tuning forks which gave tones varying in pitch from
1024 to 16,382 complete vibrations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal Behavior — John Shaqi
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