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Posted: 21st October 2013

Wild mice opt out of clean living
Mice choose to eat and sleep near droppings, study finds

Whilst pets and other domesticated animals tend to opt for clean eating and sleeping areas, their wild cousins are not so choosy, new research has found.

A study of wild mice found that they prefer to sleep and eat near used nesting material and droppings left by other mice.

This may put them at increased risk of disease, but researchers believe this is outweighed by the need to find a safe place to sleep and eat.

Domestic animals, by contrast, tend to develop an aversion to dirt, according to scientists from the universities of Edinburgh and California Santa Cruz, who studied two types of wild  mice in Virginia.

It is believed this is due to the fact that pets have a more plentiful food supply and are less at risk from predators. This allows them to be choosy about where they eat and sleep.

Scientists carrying out the research collected animals from woodland and placed them in a box for a few hours, giving them the option of being close to mouse droppings or not. Another, similar experiment was carried out using new and soiled nesting material.

The research team found that the mice preferred being near droppings and second-hand nest material, even if this increased the risk of contracting parasites.

One of the researchers, Dr Patrick Walsh of the University of Edinburgh, said: "Domesticated animals generally avoid faeces to reduce the chance of parasitic infection, but this study shows that wild animals are more concerned with the risk of starvation than with table manners, taking any opportunity to feed.

"They may even associate faeces with safety – a spot where a mouse has lived long enough to nest and poo is probably pretty safe – and that is worth the risk of disease. This helps us learn more about how diseases spread in the natural world."



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