Are Rats the French Man's Next Best
Friend?
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Webcast/story?id=3838459&page=1
Disney's
"Ratatouille" boosts demand for pet rats
Forget the gutter: Bring a rat
inside your home
Ryn Gargulinski/Tuscon Citizen
Published: 08.10.2007
Rats are finally getting some of the good rap they deserve, and it
would make my whiskers twitter if I had any.
They are finally sloughing off some
of their negative image of only being good for chewing through grain
sacks in impoverished India or disguising themselves as fast-food
fried chicken.
Some of this fine attention is coming
from the movie "Ratatouille," which I heard is cool even though it's
Disney.
But that may not be enough to break
through the "Eek! a rat!" barrier. Even Mickey Mouse didn't have the
power to fill every household with a pet mouse.
Rats, however, are special. They are
cuddly, cute, smart, affectionate, and I even saw one trained to
play basketball (with a miniature ball, of course).
I've had rats as far back as you can
toss that miniature basketball. I even created an illustrated rat
dictionary, "Rats Incredible."
I'm convinced if people read about
them more, they'd appreciate them more.
It would be hard not to appreciate an
animal ensconced in so many fascinating facts.
Their tails are as long as their
bodies, which gives them great balance. Their tails are also
disposable, like a candy wrapper, and they can squirm out of its
sheath if caught in a trap.
If a rat's head fits through an
opening, it can stretch out even the chunkiest body to fit through
the hole. They are also unable to vomit, which is why they are so
easy to poison.
Now what other type of animal can
compete with that?
Rats also rule the small animal roost
because they are less stinky than mice, less hyper than gerbils and
nowhere near the biting, cruel specimen of a creature as the
hamster.
I recall a beastly hamster I named
Gretel that escaped to live in the wall, destroying thousands of
dollars worth of electrical wires.
Another plus for rats is the often
little-known organizations supporting them. A recent write-up lauded
Glendale's Therese Hitesman for running Any Rat Rescue.
I used to head the New York chapter
of the Northeast Rat and Mouse Club, which has since turned into a
mouse organization. It used to have fun events where we'd sit around
in New Jersey judging which was the coolest, friendliest or
best-looking rodent.
We'd also meet up with a West Coast
rat and mouse club and argue, just because the two coasts always
argue, about things such as which rodent markings were superior. The
Californians always voted for the beige-blond critters while New
Yorkers preferred the rats all clad in black.
Yes, rats have come a long way since
their days of merely chomping through grain.
Although judging from the look on my
friend's face when my own rat gave me "kissy kiss" recently, I don't
think rats will be fully accepted anytime soon.
But he did agree to rat-sit while I'm
away. And perhaps even teach my rat to play basketball.
Study: Rats Dream About Running Mazes
B O S T O N, Jan. 24 Some rats apparently can't ever
escape the rat race, even when they're sound asleep.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
say they've entered the dreams of rats and found them busily working their way through the
same lab mazes they negotiated during the day. It's evidence not just that animals dream
— most pet owners know that — but that they have complex dreams, replaying
events much the way humans do, researchers said. And they may use their dreams to learn or
memorize. The discovery, announced today, could eventually help researchers understand how
the human mind works in the murky world of the subconscious. "It's really opening a
new door into the study of dreams," said Matt Wilson, associate professor at MIT's
Center for Learning and Memory, and lead researcher of the study, reported in Friday's
issue of the journal Neuron. "It's not just a step forward, it's a step into a new
domain."
Right Results, Wrong Specifics?
But Robert Stickgold, assistant professor of psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School, said that while Wilson's research provides important evidence of
sleep's role in memory, there's no way to prove MIT researchers were seeing rats dream.
That's because the link between the rats' brain patterns and actual dreaming can't proved,
he said. "He's got the right results, he's just got the wrong species,"
Stickgold said. "If the rat would tell us, 'Yes, I was dreaming about running around
the track,' then we'd have it nailed down." "This is a good as it can get at
this point," he added. The four-year study initially focused on memory, with
researchers measuring brain activity of rats during various tasks. But after Wilson
checked the rats' brain activity while sleeping, he found nearly identical brain patterns
in dreaming and waking states. "At that point, it was kind of like a lightning
bolt," he said.
Dreaming About the Rat Race?
For the next two years, researchers worked to prove the
implications of the initial observation — that the rats were dreaming about their
daily experiences. The rats were hooked up to a device that measured the pattern of
neurons firing in the hippocampus, an area of the brain known to be involved in memory.
The scientists had the rats perform specific tasks in a maze which produced very
distinctive brain patterns. When they repeatedly saw almost exactly the same patterns
reproduced during sleep, they concluded the rats were dreaming about running through the
maze. The correlation was so great that scientists said they could place where in the maze
the rat was dreaming it was — and even if it was dreaming of running or walking. The
discovery of similarities between human and animal dreams enables scientists to use the
rats to learn more about the human mind, Wilson said. Scientists can manipulate the rats'
experiences in a way that's not permissible with people, and shed light on old theories,
he said. For instance, some scientists believe people solve problems during sleep by
synthesizing related experiences in a single dream, then learning from what the
experiences have in common. The theory could be tested by exposing rats to multiple
related experiences, he said.
Sleep’s Role in Memory
Scientists also believe that dreams help form and reinforce
long-term memories. Stickgold said the fact the MIT rats were replaying memories in their
minds — whether they were dreaming or not — proves how important sleep is to
memory. "This is exciting because we're just starting to crack the nugget of sleep's
role in memory," he said. Wilson said it's a long way from watching rats dream about
mazes to arriving at elusive conclusions about how the mind works during sleep. "It
will definitely be a challenge," he said. "But we have a pretty good idea of
what is possible." Wilson's research is funded by the National Institutes of Health
and the RIKEN-MIT Neuroscience Research Center.
Rats 'Born to Run' Show How Fitness Extends Live
WASHINGTON (Reuters), Jan 20, 2005 - Rats that were
"born to run" not only outpaced their less-talented cousins but also were
naturally less prone to heart disease, a finding that may help explain why exercise
prevents heart death, researchers said on Thursday.
The study may be bad news for people who hate to exercise,
suggesting that not only laziness but also their genes may put them at higher risk of
heart disease.
"The reality of having a genetic determinant of our
existence is that there are some people who are born with less ability to take up oxygen
and transfer energy than others," said Steven Britton of the University of Michigan.
"These people may have to work harder and will never
reach the level of a professional athlete, but almost everyone can improve their aerobic
capacity and health status with regular exercise."
Britton and colleagues bred rats for 11 generations to be
good or poor runners.
Then they tested their ability to exercise, without
training them first, so that differences could not be attributed to practice.
Their high-capacity runners can exercise on a little rodent
treadmill for 42 minutes on average before becoming exhausted, while the low-capacity
runners average only 14 minutes. It is a 347 percent difference in capacity, they report
in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Colleagues in Norway examined the rats for heart health
factors.
"We found that rats with low aerobic capacity scored
higher on risk factors linked to cardiovascular disease -- including high blood pressure
and vascular dysfunction," said Ulrik Wisloff, a professor of exercise physiology at
the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
Vascular dysfunction means abnormalities of the blood
vessels.
"Rats with low aerobic capacity also had higher levels
of blood fat disorders (such as high cholesterol), insulin resistance (a pre-diabetic
condition) and more abdominal fat than high-capacity rats," added Sonia Najjar, of
the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo.
It looked like the mitochondria, the powerhouses in each
individual cell, were involved, the researchers said.
"Compared to high-capacity rats, the low-capacity rats
had lower levels of oxidative enzymes and proteins used by mitochondria to generate energy
in skeletal muscle," Najjar said in a statement.
Many experts point out that it is possible to be fit and
fat, or to be thin and to die of heart disease.
Studies have shown that a poor ability to exercise
aerobically -- the kind that makes for heavy breathing -- is a very strong predictor of
heart disease, the researchers noted.
Study: Rats re multilingual, too
By Rob Stein, The Washington Post, January 16, 2004
The ability to recognize patterns in the sound of
speech is considered fundamental to the development of spoken language. Only two species
of mammals, humans and tamarin monkeys, were known to possess this ability -- until now.
New research has identified a surprising third
-- rats.
Juan Toro, of the Parc Cientific of Barcelona
in Spain, and his colleagues studied 16 rats, training them to press a lever when they
heard a synthesized five-second sentence in Dutch or Japanese.
The rats could differentiate between sentences
in Dutch or Japanese, pressing the lever only when they were played a sentence in the
language in which they had been trained. The rats trained in Japanese, for example, did
not press the lever when played the same sentence in Dutch.
In addition, the animals appeared able to
transfer their familiarity with the patterns of the language they had been trained in to
new sentences -- pressing the lever when they were played sentences in that language even
if they had never heard them before.
"It was striking to find that rats can
track certain information that seems to be so important in language development in
humans," Toro said.
The rats were, however, not as adept as
humans, who are able to discern the same sentence when spoken by different individuals,
something rats were less able to do.
The research shows which abilities that humans
use for language are shared with other animals and which are uniquely human.
Giant African Rats Used to
Sniff Landmines
Maryann Mott for National Geographic News
February 10, 2004
APOPO came up with the idea of using rats while searching
for a cheap and efficient way to detect mines. A trained rat costs about U.S.
$2,000—about $10,000 less than a mine-sniffing dog. Other advantages include the
rats' relatively small size (15 inches/40 centimeters), which make them easy to maintain
and transport; their resistance to most tropical diseases; and their highly developed
sense of smell.
"Rats are able to detect most types of mines,"
said Weetjens. "In principle they could detect all mines because of the explosive
content, if it weren't that some devices have been manufactured with accurate sealing,
which leaves no escape for explosive trace vapors. But these can easily be found with a
metal detector."
Rats conditioned to TNT odors are trained to walk on a
leash, which is attached to a bar that moves forward into a suspected field. When the
animals smell explosive material they scratch or bite at the location. The rat's light
weight—one-and-a-half to three pounds (0.7 to 1.5 kilograms)—does not trigger
the mine.
A rat and handler can search 180 square yards (150 square
meters) in about half an hour.
"After that, reliability of concentration for rats as
well as trainers goes down," Weetjens said. This isn't a problem, he notes, since
well-rested, replacement rats are available.
Currently the company has more than 100 rats in different
stages of training at its facility in Tanzania, north of Mozambique.
Rats begin training at the age of five weeks when juveniles
are weaned from their mothers. A positive reinforcement method known as clicker training
is used. When the animal does something right, the trainer clicks a small, handheld
noisemaker before giving the rat a piece of banana or peanut as a reward. (The same method
is often used in America to train dogs in obedience schools.)
The company says the rats learn the desired task relatively
quickly—between six to ten months.
"We now have some fourth-generation domestic animals.
And generation after generation, the animals learn faster," said Weetjens. "It
is too early, though, to conclude if this is due to selective breeding or to a more
established training method and [increased] skills of the trainers."
After an animal has been fully trained, a series of blind
tests are conducted during a six-week period. If the rat passes, it is then licensed for
de-mining operations.
APOPO plans to use its trained rats elsewhere, including
Angola, Cambodia, and Bosnia.
Hardwired Rats to Sniff Out Survivors
Sept. 24, 2004 — Rats fitted with radio
backpacks may soon help rescue teams locate earthquake survivors who are buried under
rubble, the British weekly New Scientist reports in Saturday's issue.
Researchers at the University of Florida in
Gainesville and the State University of New York in Brooklyn have fitted rats
with electrode implants in their brains, hooked up to a tiny radio transmitter
that transmits a signal of their cerebral activity.
Trained over months to get a reward when they find a target
smell such as a human odor, the rats send back a characteristic "aha!" neural
pattern when they reach their goal.
At that point, by tracking the rat's position by
triangulating the radio signals, the rescue team will know exactly where to dig.
"The team hopes to create a working system within nine
months," the report says.
Other approaches in this field have looked at robots that
can trundle or slither into wrecked buildings, or "artificial noses" programmed
to sniff out the molecular signature of a human smell.
But rats may be the best solution because they are small
and agile, able to squeeze into confined spaces and surmount unexpected obstacles —
nor do they need an electricity supply, says New Scientist.
Journey into a rat's world-
by Anne of
anne_rats (Excellent piece! A must read!!)
For more information on Rattie Express or any of our animals, please email me
(Tara) atrattie.express@comcast.net
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