The mice population decreased quite steadily until the whole population died.ġ1. The evidence of violence increased to the point of which some individuals had had their tales bitten to some degree.ġ0. Animal’s became less aware of it’s associates, the mice could not effectively deal with the repeated contact of so many individuals.ĩ. The mice used certain food/drink sections more than other sections which caused overcrowding in these areas.Ĩ. Male mice showed lack of interest in life (Youtube, 2015)ħ. The male mice, no longer needed to fight for women nor territory and just cleaned themselves and stopped striving for sex while not becoming used to stimuli.
The female mice gave up wanting to have childrenĦ. The population of the mice began to steadily level off and strange behaviours occurred:ĥ. The original mice established territories for them and their families.Ĥ.
The mice were given equal living sections with equal amounts of sustenance in each section.ģ. The 200 original mice did not agree to changing location at first but eventually grew exponentially to a population of around 2000 in a cage that could fill easily 3000Ģ. In Calhoun’s experiment, there are some important parts I would like to make clear as the major learning points from the video.ġ. So after watching online a video analysing Calhoun’s experiment I was keen to somehow undertake the same task, only with weasel balls. As Dr Calhoun investigated using live mice, as were to I, only with Weasel balls instead as part homage to his research and part satirical undertaking. I mainly wanted to reference the experiment undertaken by Dr Calhoun in the 60’s concerning population overgrowth. It was interesting to see if some kind of deep research could come out of this fun piece. I had analysed them during the Contextual Enquiry Service and had sufficed that some coloured weasel balls seemed to react with other specific ones. How could I turn so many weasel balls into a serious subject? During my exhibition in the Library, I found the best way to use these weasels for a secondary purpose rather than enjoyment was to use them for experiments. In a 2011 article, Ramsden writes that Calhoun’s studies were brandished by others to justify population control efforts largely targeted at poor and marginalized communities.Mouse Utopia Box (Youtube, 2015) Mouse Utopia Experiment (Youtube, 2015)Īfter Elbow Room, I was left with many questions about my own work. Population growth in the 1970s was swelling, and films such as Soylent Green tapped into growing fears of overpopulation and urban violence.
“There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to ,” says Ramsden.Ĭalhoun wasn’t shy about anthropomorphizing his findings, binning rodents into categories such as “juvenile delinquents” and “social dropouts,” and others seized on these human parallels. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves females stopped getting pregnant. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. This iteration, dubbed Universe 25, was the first crowding experiment he ran to completion.Įventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn.
The only scarce resource in this microcosm was physical space, and Calhoun suspected that it was only a matter of time before this caused trouble in paradise.Ĭalhoun had been running similar experiments with rodents for decades but had always had to end them prematurely, ironically because of laboratory space constraints, says Edmund Ramsden, a science historian at Queen Mary University of London. In 1968, Calhoun had started the experiment by introducing four mouse couples into a specially designed pen-a veritable rodent Garden of Eden-with numerous “apartments,” abundant nesting supplies, and unlimited food and water. The results, laid bare at his feet, had taken years to play out. Calhoun wasn’t the survivor of a natural disaster or nuclear meltdown rather, he was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health conducting an experiment into the effects of overcrowding on mouse behavior.
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