This was all during the first phase of the downfall of the "utopia". This aggression spilled over, and the mothers would regularly kill their young. Infant mortality in some territories of the utopia reached 90 percent. The mother mice also became aggressive towards trespassers to their nests, with males that would normally fill this role banished to other parts of the utopia. Violent encounters sometimes ended in mouse-on-mouse cannibalism.ĭespite – or perhaps because – their every need was being catered for, mothers would abandon their young or merely just forget about them entirely, leaving them to fend for themselves. The "alpha male" mice became extremely aggressive, attacking others with no motivation or gain for themselves, and regularly raped both males and females. The breakdown of usual mouse behavior wasn't just limited to the outsiders. Due to this they had excellent fur coats, and were dubbed, somewhat disconcertingly, the "beautiful ones". The female counterparts of these isolated males withdrew as well. Some mice spent their days preening themselves, shunning mating, and never engaging in fighting. Later on, they would attack others in the same pattern. The withdrawn males would not respond during attacks, lying there immobile. Extreme precautions were taken to stop any disease from entering the universe. The mice were chosen for their health, obtained from the National Institutes of Health breeding colony. The weather was kept at 68☏ (20☌), which for those of you who aren't mice is the perfect mouse temperature. They could access limitless food via 16 food hoppers, accessed via tunnels, which would feed up to 25 mice at a time, as well as water bottles just above. The environment was designed to eliminate problems that would lead to mortality in the wild. In this study, he took four breeding pairs of mice and placed them inside a "utopia". The most infamous of the experiments was named, quite dramatically, Universe 25.
#Rat utopia series#
John B Calhoun set about creating a series of experiments that would essentially cater to every need of rodents, and then track the effect on the population over time. As we use our resources and the climate crisis worsens, this could all change – but for now, we have always been able to produce more food than we need, even if we have lacked the will or ability to distribute it to those that need it.īut while everyone was worried about a lack of resources, one behavioral researcher in the 1970s sought to answer a different question: what happens to society if all our appetites are catered for, and all our needs are met? The answer – according to his study – was an awful lot of cannibalism shortly followed by an apocalypse. As it happens, advances in farming, changes in farming practices, and new farming technology have given us enough food to feed 10 billion people, and it's how the food is distributed which has caused mass famines and starvation. Some – the Malthusians – even took the view that as resources ran out, the population would "control" itself through mass deaths until a sustainable population was reached.
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