So we tickled some rats, did some science stuff and got some cool results!

#rats #phdchat #ticklingRatsForScience

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eth.13075

I've been visiting Betty Zimmerbergs lab at @WilliamsCollege a while back and together with Betty and two students, Andrea Orozco and Maggie Shilling, we set out to tickle some rats and make them laugh.

Rats are just the most perfect and fascinating little creatures. They appear so quiet, but there is a whole realm of (ultrasonic) sounds they produce that us humans just can't hear because they're above our hearing range. One part of these ultrasonic sounds is their laughter.

Here is some rat laughter slowed down so we can actually hear it:

The rats in Bettys lab have been bred for over 20 years based on the number of ultrasonic calls they produce as babies. This breeding process led to two rat lines, one that produces lots of ultrasonic calls as babies and one that produces barely any.

We were curious if the line breeding for baby vocalisations would change the adult rats vocalisations and it turned out it did! Just not in the way we thought it would.

Back home at the @univienna in @TecumsehFitch lab I looked at the audio recordings we got from the tickling sessions: While the adult ultrasonic calls (like the laughter) remained unchanged the line breeding changed the low frequency squeaks that have never been selected for.

Conclusion: I love rats!