My Brain Makes Painful Noises @the-phloop - Tumblr Blog

jaybird-rising

FINALLY A POLL THAT MATTERS

Do Werewolves Have Tails???

Yes (I am a furry)

Yes (I am not a furry)

No (I am a furry)

No (I am not a furry)

Voting ended onSep 28, 2023

Leave your reasoning in the tags! Reblog for optimal sample sizes.

the-phloop

Important science here.

What a classic.

#vhs #horror #classic horror #80s films

I don't make the rules.

#weird deer shit

star01007

the-phloop

Take me back there, I don’t like it here.

I hear PHLOOP is nice this time of year.

#postcard

titanomancy

UNLEASH your WRATH upon the ENEMIES OF THE IMPERIUM

the-phloop

#warhammer 40k #boltgun #my body is ready #warhammer 40000 #w40k #warhammer boltgun #boomer shooter #retro

The Moth Joke

With apologies to Norm Macdonald.

A moth walks into a doctor’s office one evening, just before closing. A man-sized moth. 6-foot tall, his off-white wings folded tightly to his body to avoid knocking over the pharmaceutical company branded knick-knacks from the shelves. “Ah, Mr Cossula, please sit down.” The doctor tries his best to hide his revulsion at the sight of the giant insect. To his credit, he does better than most. “My secretary tells me it’s urgent, what seems to be the problem?” The moth looks at the doctor, his compound eyes shining with tears. He sighs, chokes back a sob. His proboscis starts vibrating and forms some sort of unholy parody of words. “I am without work now for many months. My drinking is getting worse. My body aches and shivers if I am without the treacherous booze for longer than a few hours. I cannot face going to job interviews in this state, thus my situation does not improve.” The moth takes a tissue from the doctor’s table, blows into it hard enough to send a cloud of gossamer raining down around him like snow in the moonlight. It would be beautiful, were it not so revolting. “I am sure that my wife, Helena Cossula, is cheating on me. She leaves for long periods of time during the day and will not tell me where she goes. Our marriage bed is dead. She flinches at my touch. At night, I hear her quietly sob into her pillow. More than once, she has told me that her mother was right about me.” The doctor, now finding his disgust has been replaced with pity, puts a hand on the moth’s segmented leg. “My god, man. That’s awful-“ “Please doctor!” the moth interrupts. “My daughter, Lucia Cossula, was taken from us last winter. It was all my fault! I asked her to go to the corner store to buy me cigarettes when I was too drunk to walk. She never made it back. She crossed the street in front of a distracted driver and died on impact.” At this point, the words and the sobs have become one. “And I have not yet told you the worst of it! My son, Dimitri Cossula, I cannot stand to look at him! He stays out all night, he sleeps all day, he hangs out with ruffians and lunatics down by the riverside. And the very worst part is, all I see when I look at him is a mirror image. A life wasted, not lived! Doomed to exist in a world that despises him, that beats him down at every turn!” The moth finally falls silent, save for his chair lightly scraping the floor with every movement of his soundless sobbing. The doctor clears his throat, looks around the room helplessly for some sort of escape, but realises that he will need to power through. “Mr Cossula, my heart breaks for you. But this is not my field, I am but a humble podiatrist! You should go see a psychologist, why did you come to me?” The moth looks up. “Because your light was on.”

#writing practice #dumb joke #moth joke #moth #mothman #joke #norm macdonald #sorry

mityenka

fanonical

so here's your regular reminder to not spend any money on this woman or her garbage franchise -- that means no videogame, no books, no movies, no direct-to-hulu specials -- even pirating the content gives her hatespeech more of a platform & exposes more people to her fascist propaganda.

consider, instead, donating a couple dollars to a trans woman in need, or a charity aimed at supporting trans youth.

ordinaryschmuck

I reblogged a similar post, but I’m reblogging this one for the links to actually HELP trans people, not tear them down like she wants you to.

asking-the-death

melaniefairhurst-blog

Mouse wheel running in the wild

I have pet rats (Poppy and Sesame) and we have a large wheel in their cage. We bought the wheel with the hope that it would provide some outlet for Poppy who gets very antsy when she’s in heat. Poppy uses it fairly often and Sesame has been spotted on it exactly once. We had about the wheel for about a month when I saw this article, so it was still very much on my mind. I also think it’s important to explain why some researcher chose to spend their time doing a study on whether or not wild rodents will run on a wheel, as it may seem nonsensical to some.

This article is written in fairly accessible, but still academic, language. I had to look up the definition for one or two words to make sure I understood them in context. There is one claim the authors make that I think I understand, but I will point that out when we get to it.

Wheel running in the wild by Johanna H. Meijer and Yuri Robbers

Rodents, particularly rats and mice are used in research all the time, of importance to this is that they are often used in research relating to exercise.For example, some studies have show that physical activity stimulates neurogenesis. In these types of studies, wheel running is used in different scientific fields as a way to measure physical activity.

If researchers are going to be using a particular behaviour as a tool it is important that they understand the behaviour. In the case of wheel running, researchers also need to know if this is a ‘natural’ behaviour or if it is a symptom of the rodents being in an unhealthy (mental & physical) captive environment. Some researchers have labelled wheel running as “unnatural … a stereotypy or neurosis that develops only in captivity”. Allow me to explain why this is important with an example. You are doing a study to see how physical activity can change the neurogenesis in region X of the brain; this could have impacts on the way doctors treat Alzheimer’s. You have two sets of mice, one set with a wheel that they use, and one set without a wheel. When you look at region X of the two groups you see that there is a distinct difference between then. If wheel running is a neurotic behaviour that the mice develop because they feel unsafe in captivity, you cannot make the clear claim that “physical activity created more growth in region X and therefore Alzheimer’s patients should try to walk more”. What if region X was bigger due some element of the neurosis developed due to being in captivity? So, at first glance, the study of wheel running in the wild may seem silly but it provides a foundation that validates much ‘bigger’ research. With that explained, let’s move onto how the researchers went about studying wild wheel running.

Experiment set-up

Here are pictures of the two wheel-setups. It reminds me of a small rabbit hutch, but in this case the sides are open. The reason the ‘cage’ is so big is because it had to house the wheel (diameter of 24cm) and all of the recording equipment. The equipment included a video-camera with night vision, an infrared motion sensor, a tray of food to attract animals, and the running wheel that had been modified with an automatic movement sensor. The ‘cage’ was big enough for animals up to the size of rats to get in.

Two of these cages were set up in areas known to have feral mice. The one area was a spacious, green, urban area and the second was a dune area that was not accessible to the public. This study was done through Leinden University which is located in South Holland; we can assume that both of the locations are near the university or at least around the city of Leiden. The article does not note how often researchers went out to the sites to refill the food and collect the recordings, but at the urban location they collected data from October 2009 to February 2013 and at the dune location they collected data from June 2011 to January 2013.

Over the three years the researchers recorded more than 200 00 visits to the ‘cages’. However, they only went through the video recordings of when there had been movement of the running wheel; which meant analysing “more then 12 000 video fragments”. Observers were trained so that they could go through these recording and identify what species of animal used the wheel.

Findings

There was wheel running in both locations. There were two types of wheel movement that the researchers excluded from their analysis because they did not consider it to be wheel running. The first was any wheel movement caused by snails (as the movement is too directionless) and the second is movement caused by animals when outside of the wheel.

The movement sensor on the wheel not only recorded when the wheel moved but also how many rotations it moved and when it stopped moving. This allowed the researchers to build a more detailed understanding of the wild wheel running behaviour. The most common users of the wheel were wild mice, but other animals also made use of them. In the first 24 months of observations at the urban site there were 1 011 incidences of wheel running recorded; of these 734 were mice. In the 20 months at the dune site there were 254 incidences, of which 232 were mice. The wild mice made use of both wheels throughout the year, but at the urban site the use peaked in summer while peaking during autumn at the dunes site. Most of the mice who used the wheels seemed to be young. The remaining wheel running was done by shrews, rats, slugs or frogs. For your enjoyment here are three videos that the journal uploaded to YouTube that show a mouse, a frog and a slug ‘wheel running’. Two of the videos were taken at night so the footage is not great, but here you can see the wheel running break down by speceices and some stills. The authors say that some animals seemed to use the wheel unintentionally (I’m willing to bet that they’re talking about the slugs) but that mice and some shrews, rats and frogs would get off the wheel and then get back on “within minutes” to run some more.

Wild vs. captive mice wheel running

In the comparison the researchers wanted to see if the wheel running behaviour of wild and captive mice is similar. If very different then we know that the captive wheel running behaviour is not natural.

In 20% of the cases the wild mice ran for more than 1 minute and the longest run was 18 minutes. When compared to the recorded times for captive mice, these times are similar to 200 day old laboratory mice. The researchers also looked at the speeds of the mice. The median running speed of the wild mice was 1.3 km/h, which is less than that of the captive mice at 2.3 km/h; but the wild mice did have a higher maximum running speed (5.7 km/h vs. 5.1). Considering the size of mice, I thought that the difference in median running speed was actually quite a lot, but the researchers only noted that it was less without making a comment that it was worth considering as special.

The other thing the researchers looked at in their analysis was circadian patterns in wheel running. A circadian rhythm is the natural rhythms that a body goes through in a 24 hour period (24 hours is the average, it does vary slightly). Here is an example of the human circadian rhythm so that you can understand the concept a little more fully. This rhythm is driven by your internal clock, but we all know that external factors are starting to ‘confuse’ that clock. For example, exposure to blue light (cell phone and computer screens) after the sun has set can negatively affect your sleep.

So how did wheel running fit into the circadian rhythm of the mice in the two locations? If you just looked at the number of cases of wheel running, more of them occurred at night than during the day; this is to be expected. The researchers also looked at the number of visits to the ‘cages’ that resulted in wheel running. Remember here that the camera would start recording for any movement and that the wheel had a separate sensor, hence the researchers had over 200 00 recordings of animals visiting the cages and more than 12 000 videos of wheel running. At the dune site significantly more visits resulted in wheel running at night. What is interesting is that at the urban site the difference was not significantly different. In other words, whether the mice visited during the day or at night they were equally as likely to run on the wheel. The researchers suggest that this may be because of the light pollution in the urban area disturbing the natural circadian pattern/rhythm of the mice.

All scientists know that questions will be asked of their research, so it is important to address any ‘big’ questions that could potentially invalidate their work. These researchers knew that they would be challenged on the fact that they used food to attract animals to the sites; how could they completely rule out that these mice did not see the wheel running and food as an exercise and reward relationship. Of course, if the mice did form this connection then the research would no longer be able to show that the wheel running is natural behaviour. In order to prevent this, the researchers stopped providing food at the urban site from October 2011 to February 2013; the rest of the set up stayed the same. As you would expect, the number of visits to the site dropped but over that period there were 78 recordings of wheel running and of those recording 62 were mice. Importantly, 36 of the mice were identified as being too young to have visited the site when the food was still there. Even though the total number of visits dropped, the comparative number of visits that resulted in wheel running actually increased. In other words, before more mice visit the site just for the food and some of them ran, but now that the food was gone more mice visited and ended up wheel running or visited for the wheel running.

Conclusion

Wheel running in captivity does have some traits of stereotypic behaviour; repetitive, invariant and devoid of obvious goal and or function. There are, however, two traits that captive wheel running does not have; occurring at higher rates and for longer periods than in the wild and only partially, or not at all, dependent on external stimuli. The other thing to remember about stereotypic behaviour is that it (according to these authors) only occurs in captivity. Wheel running cannot therefore be classified as stereotypic behaviour because it happens in captivity and the wild at similar rates, and the wild behaviour is dependent on external stimuli.

So the all important question (to us anyway), why do mice run on wheels? There have been several suggested answers to this questions. Some scientist say that mice are satisfying a behavioural need such as ‘play’ or ‘escape’, while others have suggested that some stimulus reminds the mice of their foraging behaviour and so they run to satisfy that. The authors of this paper believe that they disproved wheel running as foraging behaviour because of the findings once they removed the food from the urban location. The authors say that obviously for these mice, wheel running is rewarding even without being associated with food. In the simplest terms, when there is no food as reward, mice run on wheels because they enjoy it.