#UNIVERSE 25 MOUSE UTOPIA SERIES#

After several defeats, these males would never attempt to cross the bridge. However, if in the middle rooms after he awoke, subordinate males found it exceedingly difficult to reach their original quarters. Most male rats, therefore, congregated in the middle two rooms.Įarly in the morning, before the dominant males awoke, the subordinate males would roam the various rooms. This became a dominant male’s territory where females were kept. Once they fixed their place in the social hierarchy, they ruled among the two rooms with only one bridge – the end rooms. In the earliest stages, the male rats struggle for status. Inside each room was a drinking and feeding station.ĭetailing the shocking findings in a Scientific American article, Calhoun revealed how the effects of density led to a brutal battle among males.

#UNIVERSE 25 MOUSE UTOPIA SERIES#

Inside the second floor of a huge barn, his team constructed a series of four rooms connected by three bridges, forming a U-shaped space. Like the brutalist architects of the era, Calhoun’s next experiment was bigger and bolder. Surprisingly, the rats congregated in groups of roughly a dozen – the rat’s social limit. In fact, the population never exceeded 200 individuals, stabilizing at 150. Beginning with five females, he predicted an exponential population rise leading to a theoretical 5,000 healthy progeny by the experiment’s end. In the mid-twentieth century, the rampant population growth worried many who feared imminent overcrowding, overpopulation, and societal collapse.Ĭalhoun’s early experiments involved a 28-month study of a colony of Norway rats in a 10,000-square-foot outdoor pen. It was the stuff of nightmares – at least to the nervous 1970s audience. He coined the term “behavioral sink” to describe the so-called aberrant behaviors resulting from overcrowded population densities.

Known as the neo-Malthusians (after 18 th-century scholar Thomas Malthus), they predicted a terrifying future if the rollercoaster of human population growth rose ever higher they dared to look down.Įthologist John Calhoun’s Rat Utopia experiments fueled these fears, pointing towards a spiraling degradation of normal social interactions. Short stories like Billennuim warned of a world of box-like apartments and pedestrian congestion lasting days, where every inch of land is devoted to housing or farming. In the mid-twentieth century, the rampant population growth worried many who feared imminent overcrowding, overpopulation, and societal collapse. The soaring trajectory of human population growth over the past two centuries is now an accepted fact – an ascending rollercoaster without any sense of down. Surely, such a startling statistic should be front-page news. That’s more people than have ever existed! In fact, a jaw-dropping 7pc of people who have ever lived are alive today. Global population estimates exceeded 8 billion people in November 2022. John Calhoun Inside Universe 25 – The Biggest Mouse Utopia.

Universe 25 mouse utopia