Mice bite and pull out their tongues in an attempt to rescue unconscious friends
If you encounter an unconscious person, someone with first aid training can try to help them by administering artificial respiration and cardiac massage. A new study has confirmed that mice will also try to help their unconscious friends by biting them and sticking out their tongues.
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Lee Chang, a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Southern California, and his team noticed that when they put an anesthetized mouse back into a cage with other mice, the other mouse started sniffing and biting the area around the face of the unconscious mouse, which seemed to Chang like the mouse was trying to administer first aid to help the unconscious mouse.
'This behavior has already been observed in other mammals, such as elephants and dolphins, and other mouse researchers have noticed similar behavior, but it had never been studied closely until now. So Chan and his team decided to put unconscious mice in the same cage as other mice and see how they would react,' said Zhang.
The video below gives a good idea of how the mice reacted to their unconscious peers.
Mice seen giving 'first aid' to unconscious companions - YouTube
An unconscious mouse is lying on its back in a cage.
Other mice noticed this and came over to sniff the mouse and start touching its body and hands.
Eventually, the mouse forces open the unconscious mouse's mouth and places its own mouth inside it.
The researchers grabbed the mouse's tongue and pulled it out. The mice spent significantly more time interacting with their unconscious peers, and their behavior escalated over time. In 50% of all experiments, the unconscious mouse's tongue was pulled out, and in 80% of cases, the object was removed. The mice whose tongues were pulled out recovered from anesthesia and started walking much faster than the mice that didn't receive the procedure.
It is believed that pulling the tongue of an unconscious mouse has the benefit of removing objects in the mouth that may be impeding breathing and expanding the airway to ensure breathing. Another study also reported that pulling the tongue of a mouse stimulates the neural circuit connecting the tongue to the brain, promoting awakening from anesthesia.
Of course, the mice had no prior first aid training, so the behavior was likely instinctive, but the fact that the mice continued to treat their unconscious companions over five consecutive days of the same experiment suggests that this behavior was likely not just based on curiosity.
'The mice appear to be able to perform this sequence of actions intentionally. This is the first time that such an emergency response has been reported in animals,' said Wijeong Tao , co-author of the paper.
In this study, the researchers observed that the brains of mice performing rescue activities showed increased secretion of oxytocin in the paraventricular nucleus, a part of the thalamus . Since oxytocin is involved in various helping behaviors, it is possible that a similar mechanism is at work here.
Furthermore, another paper on the same topic showed that helping behavior toward unconscious mice was observed regardless of gender, that humans tended to groom the face rather than the body of unconscious mice, and that looking at an unconscious mouse activated an area called the medial amygdala.
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