Male mice have a method for escaping aggressive encounters
Edward Berthelot/Getty Pictures
In male-on-male mouse squabbles, the victims of aggression typically cover behind a feminine mouse to divert their attacker’s consideration.
“Think back to a time when you were confronted by a bully or found yourself in another challenging situation – you either confronted the issue directly or looked for ways to escape it,” says Joshua Neunuebel on the College of Delaware. “Animals often deal with similar struggles.”
Fights between male mice could be vicious, typically involving biting, wrestling or rolling over one another if an encounter escalates. Neunuebel and his colleagues recorded greater than 3000 aggressive altercations between male mice within the lab after which used machine studying to analyse the interactions. The AI realized to recognise sure behaviours robotically primarily based on video examples that the researchers had manually labelled, akin to footage of 1 male mouse aggressor intently chasing a second male.
The evaluation revealed a diversion technique during which a male mouse ran away from an aggressor male to method a feminine mouse. That usually prompted the aggressor to work together with the identical feminine mouse, taking the warmth off the sufferer of aggression, which then moved away. This sequence of occasions performed out greater than half the time following aggressive encounters between males.
“I believe one reason we were able to discover this bait-and-switch strategy was that we studied group dynamics by recording multiple mice together, which is much less common than studying pairs of mice,” says Neunuebel.
However Markus Meister on the California Institute of Expertise described the results of the aggressive behaviours on mice social interactions as “small and barely significant”. Earlier than investigating any underlying mechanisms, “one would really like to see a more reproducible behaviour first”, he says.
Subsequent, the crew plans to increase its analysis by investigating how feminine mice reply to undesirable consideration from aggressive males.
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