Pioneering ecologists such as William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn were cautioning that the growing population was putting pressure on food and other natural resources as early as 1948, and both published bestsellers on the subject. They were a warning, made in a postwar society already rife with alarm over the soaring population of the United States and the world. He had been building utopian environments for rats and mice since the 1940s, with thoroughly consistent results. As the name Universe 25 suggests, it was not the first time Calhoun had built a world for rodents. But its downfall was already certain-not just stagnation, but total and inevitable destruction.Ĭalhoun’s concern was the problem of abundance: overpopulation. To its members, the mouse civilization of Universe 25 must have seemed prosperous indeed. Those were the good times, as the mice feasted on the fruited plain. In their fully catered paradise, the population increased exponentially, doubling every fifty-five days. After 104 days of upheaval as they familiarized themselves with their new world, they started to reproduce.
Heaven.įour breeding pairs of mice were moved in on day one. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68☏, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice.
Four horizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nesting boxes. Each wall had sixteen vertical mesh tunnels-call them stairwells-soldered to it. The first 37 inches of wall was structured so the mice could climb up, but they were prevented from escaping by 17 inches of bare wall above. The Universe took the form of a tank, 101 inches square, enclosed by walls 54 inches high. Every aspect of Universe 25-as this particular model was called-was pitched to cater for the well-being of its rodent residents and increase their lifespan. Calhoun detailed the specifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. It's clear to see that many of the social issues that humans faced from the early 19th century to today are similar to those faced by the mice in the Mouse Utopia.How do you design a utopia? In 1972, John B. Some of them, called the beautiful ones would groom themselves quietly from the corners of the habitat and observe the collapse of their society. Mice had issues with sexuality as many mice started trying to mate with both males and females. Some mice roamed around the environment in gangs biting the tales of other mice, while female mice started becoming hostile towards their own offspring. Calhoun created many other mouse and rat utopias but no matter what he did and no matter how he set the parameters for his experiments the populations of mice became hostile towards each other as soon as their populations reached a high point. Food is cheaper and more plentiful then ever, oil is still relatively cheap when compared to historical standards before the 1920s and 1930s. We assume that people are having less children on a conscious level, but I don't believe that's the case. It worked for a while but now the populations that have living in such types of housing for multiple generations are now starting to have less children. Looking at these experiments in a new way I see Suburbia as an attempt to keep economic growth going by reducing the density of housing in the twentieth century.
Calhoun created the first mouse universe experiment in 1963 with four breeding pairs and the population expanded into multiple hundreds of mice. The idea behind the experiments was to see if the data could be translated over to major cities that were rapidly growing in population in the 1950s and 1960s as the baby boomer generation was born in overcrowded cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angles. The only limiting factor to the expansion of the mouse population was space and overcrowded conditions. The idea was to see how rodent populations expanded in an environment without natural predators and plenty of food available to them. These particular experiments were done with mice and rats. As promised here is my video on the Mouse Utopia Experiments by John B.
0 kommentar(er)
