A Couple of Interesting New York Times Articles

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Vanessa

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Article #1
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Rat to Rat, Kindness Takes Hold

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: July 10, 2007

Rats may be more caring and selfless than their reputation suggests. Or at least they can be very kind to each other, even to rats they have never met before.

Swiss researchers put pairs of female rats — they were littermates — in a cage, separating them with a wire mesh. In one half of the cage, a rat could pull a lever attached to a baited tray that would deliver food to her sister, but not to herself. Each rat was trained in alternate sessions, first as a recipient of food, then as a provider. The sisters learned to cooperate, and they pulled significantly more often when their littermate was present than when the other half of the cage was empty.

Then the researchers put rats who had recently been assisted by their partners, and rats who had not recently been helped, in with unfamiliar and unrelated rats. Those who had recently been helped were about 21 percent more likely to pull the lever for the new partner.

This was not just ordinary operant conditioning or reinforcement, the researchers maintain, because the rats were never rewarded for their own behavior, only that of others. Because the rats were unfamiliar and unrelated, there was no family interaction involved. The only plausible explanation, they believe, is that the rats had developed what they call generalized reciprocity — that is, they were generous even with an unknown partner because another rat had just been kind to them.

The study’s lead author, Claudia Rutte, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, warned against drawing conclusions about humans from work with rats. “We’re interested in the evolution of cooperation,” she said, “but our research is about animals, really, not people.”

Still, the paper, published in the July issue of PLoS Biology, cites previous research showing that humans act the same way — people who have been helped in some way are more likely to help others immediately afterward.

Incidentally, these rats were not the usual cute, pink-eyed white lab rats. They were bred from wild Rattus norvegicus — the brown or gray Norway rat depressingly familiar to residents of many American cities.

Is it time to stop using the word “rat” as an insult? Maybe. Apparently even a nasty-looking rat can be possessed of sterling character.


Article #2
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Smart, Curious, Ticklish. Rats?

By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: July 24, 2007


Between reading recent news reports about altruistic behavior in rats and watching the slickly adorable antics of Remy the culinary rodent in this summer’s animated blockbuster, “Ratatouille,” I’ve had a change of heart. My normal feeling of extreme revulsion toward rats has softened considerably, into something resembling ... a less extreme form of revulsion.

O.K., I still don’t like rats, and I’ll never forget the sensation of whiskers brushing my ankles when a rat in Central Park scampered over my feet. There are plenty of reasons to fear rats. They carry diseases like typhus, leptospirosis, hanta virus pulmonary syndrome, rat bite fever, salmonella poisoning, and of course bubonic plague, and they are ravenous Remys every one of them, feasting on our grains and meats, chewing our ratatouille and destroying as much as a third of global food supplies each year. “Over the past century alone,” writes Robert Sullivan in “Rats,” his magisterial history of the urban pest, “rats have been responsible for the death of more than 10 million people.”

Yet our ratly transactions are not all woes and buboes. As the first mammals domesticated strictly for research purposes, scientists say, rats in the laboratory may well have saved at least as many human lives through the years as rats in the alley have taken. Rats are the preferred experimental animal for studies of the heart, kidneys, immune system, reproductive system, nervous system and other body sectors, and recent breakthroughs in manipulating the rat genome may soon allow the rat to displace the mouse as the geneticist’s darling, too.

And though rats have yet to produce an Albert Camus or design a better mouse trap, a host of new behavioral studies makes plain that the similarities between us and Rattus extend far beyond gross anatomy. They’re surprisingly self-aware. They laugh when tickled, especially when they’re young, and they have ticklish spots; tickle the nape of a rat pup’s neck and it will squeal ultrasonically in a soundgram pattern like that of a human giggle. Rats dream as we dream, in epic narratives of navigation and thwarted efforts at escape: When scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tracked the neuronal activity of rats in REM sleep, the researchers saw the same firing patterns they had seen in wakeful rats wending their way through those notorious rat mazes.

Rats can learn to crave the same drugs that we do — alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, amphetamine — and they, like us, will sometimes indulge themselves to death. They’re sociable, curious and love to be touched — nicely, that is. If a rat has been trained to associate a certain sound with a mild shock to its tail, and the bell tolls but the shock doesn’t come, the rat will inhale deeply with what can only be called a sigh of relief.

When it comes to sex, the analogies between rats and humans are “profound,” said James G. Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal. “It’s not simply instinctual for them,” he said. “Rats know what good sex is and what bad sex is. And when they have reason to anticipate great sex, they give you every indication they’re looking forward to it.”

They wiggle and paw at their ears, hop and dart, stop and flash a come-hither look backward. “We imbue our desire with words and meaning, they show us through actions,” he said. “The good thing about rats is, they don’t lie.”

There are more than 120 species of rat in the world, but only two have become serious human pests: the black rat notorious for its role in spreading plague, and the larger brown rat, also called the Norway rat because it was mistakenly thought to have entered Europe through Norway. The Norway rat has largely displaced the black rat as prime urban vermin, and it’s the rat you see in trash cans, parks and on subway platforms. The so-called fancy rats that people keep as pets are variants of the Norway rat, usually albino though sometimes mottled like calico cats, and bred to have docile temperaments.

Scientists began using albino Norway rats for research sometime around the turn of the 19th century, and though the rats have been inbred into homogeneous strains with names like Wistar and Sprague-Dawley, they retain enough street credibility that when a scientist recently released a group of lab rats into a wilderness-type habitat and filmed their reactions, the rodents soon began acting like wild rats. They explored every crevice as rats can do so fluidly, by collapsing their rubbery skeleton down to the width of their snout. They found everything edible in the vicinity, and, though they’d been reared in metal enclosures, they began digging, digging, digging, stopping only to check out the opposite sex and maybe waggle an ear.

Rats have personalities, and they can be glum or cheerful depending on their upbringing and circumstances. One study showed that rats accustomed to good times tend to be optimists, while those reared in unstable conditions become pessimists. Both rats will learn to associate one sound with a good event — a gift of food — and another sound with no food, but when exposed to an ambiguous sound, the optimist will run over expecting to be fed and the pessimist will grumble and skulk away, expecting nothing.

In another recent study, Jonathon D. Crystal, a psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, and his colleague Allison Foote were astonished to discover that rats display evidence of metacognition: they know what they know and what they don’t know. Metacognition, a talent previously detected only in primates, is best exemplified by the experience of students scanning the questions on a final exam and having a pretty good sense of what their grade is likely to be. In the Georgia study, rats were asked to show their ability to distinguish between tones lasting about 2 seconds, and sounds of about 8 seconds, by pressing one or another lever. If the rat guessed correctly, it was rewarded with a large meal; if it judged incorrectly, it got nothing.

For each trial, the rat could, after hearing the tone, opt to either take the test and press the short or long lever, or poke its nose through a side of the chamber designated the, “I don’t know” option, at which point it would get a tiny snack. During the trials, the rats made clear they knew their audio limits. The closer the tones were to either 2 or 8 seconds, the likelier the rats were to express confidence in their judgment by indicating they wanted to take the lever test and earn their full-course dinner. But as the tones edged into the ambiguous realms of 4 seconds, the rats began opting ever more often for modest but reliable morsels of the clueless option.

Rats do not lie, and, when the stakes are this high, neither do they gamble.
 
I like the first article it was cute! :D (Of course we all know how caring our rats can be to eachother!)
I didn't like the second article so much. I thought her reasons for not liking rats were pretty lame. "rats have been responsible for the deaths of 10 million people" :roll: So what? Humans have been responsible for the death of millions upon millions of more humans than that, directly and indirectly. How come no one likes humans? We are the problem, not rats or any other animal.
And the diseases they carry. Humans carry our fair share of infectious diseases too, and ones worse than the plague at that. (and the fleas carried the plague, not the damn rat, everyone knows that, yeesh)
And then she only likes rats a little better after she learns their similarities to humans, and what they have done to benifit humans. So typical.
 
I really liked the second article. It is just astounding the level of intelligence that it suggests that rats possess.
I know that it has always been maintained that rats have the intelligence level of about a two and a half year old child, and that is impressive enough, but the decision making that the second article describes is well beyond that. I always thought that we didn't give them enough credit in the brains department, but that level of intelligence even surprises me.
 
That's very true, the actual information in the second article is fascinating.
I guess it was just the author's thrown in personal opinon of rats in the first three paragraphs that made me bristle.
 
I had read the first article before and wasn't surprised by their findings because I've seen it often enough through my rats just how generous they can be.
I truly enjoyed the second one. Of course the writer has to talk about the rat's bad reputation or else non rat lovers wouldn't be attracted to the article.
It was well done and worked the rat up from "gross" to quite intelligent and feeling emotions. If the article would have started with rats are intelligent, I can guarantee you non rat lovers would not have continued reading the article. Society deems rats as dirty vermin and it's going to take a heck of a lot of articles like these ones to change their minds.
 
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