It’s not the tail, Hurst says it’s stress. When the mice were picked up by the tail and dropped near the stimulus as is commonly accepted practice, however, they were almost totally unwilling to inspect it.
The mice would instead happily sniff the urine stimulus only if they’d crawled toward it through a tunnel. Previous research has indicated that mice find the pee of the opposite sex attractive, but these mice, curiously, weren’t exhibiting this behavior. The researchers stumbled on the problems of the mouse tail grabbing-and-dropping technique when they analyzed mice responses to the urine of the opposite sex. To a mouse, being lifted by the tail and carried backwards feels very much like being caught by a predator.” “The tail technique doesn’t hurt mice, but it does make them anxious. Jane Hurst of the University of Liverpool and a lead author of the study, tells Inverse. “Picking them up by the tail is quick, and people think this will avoid them getting bitten, so this has become the standard method,” Prof.
Holding mice by the tail is a “source of stress that may impair reliability of test responses”, the study says. Mice have been integral to uncovering some major modern scientific mysteries, ranging from PTSD, cocaine addiction, aging reversal, and more.īut a groundbreaking new study in the journal Nature suggests that these study conclusions aren’t necessarily true, thanks to a common tail-holding technique that researchers use when studying mice.
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