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Thursday, May 15, 2003
Mice Yesterday was a great day in the history of my office: the spiny mice arrived. My spiny mice, specifically. When three of my female spinies had babies, I asked if my boss—who's previously said he likes spiny mice—if he wanted any; he said we could actually have them in the office. (Like a fish tank, but, um, spinier.) I wanted to make sure we had a tank of all one gender, so as to avoid further spiny generations, but it's really hard to sex them. For one thing, their genitalia aren't very easy to distinguish; and for another, their tails are extremely fragile, so you can't use the usual mouse-sexing method of picking them up by the tail and looking. Anyway, on Tuesday J. and I finally made our best attempt at separating them by gender and prepared a tank of six probable males. Yesterday my manager and I drove to my house and conveyed the tank to the office in the trunk of his car, and put it on top of a bookcase next to my desk. The spinies were notably underwhelming; they mostly just sat there, like, as J. put it, soft rocks. (Or, as I put it, spiny mushrooms, with their feet tucked under them.) I assured everyone that they would become more interesting when they got over being traumatized by being put into a new cage and carried around and put in the trunk of a car. (Today they're starting to poke their heads out and move around more.) One thing that was particularly amusing: there were three toilet paper tubes for them to hide in, and they all wanted to go in one, so each of them wound up halfway in a tube, nose to nose with the mouse trying to go in the other side. Which meant there were mouse butts sticking out either end of each tube. Like little spiny dumbbells. Now my house contains only, let's see, fourteen mice. (Domestic mice, anyway.) That's almost a reasonable number. (The most mice we ever had at one time was 27. The largest litter one of our mice ever had was something like 19 [it was hard to count, and they didn't all survive]. When you're the potato chip of the animal kingdom, you have to reproduce pretty darn comprehensively.) [ at 12:25 PM • by Abby • permalink • ] |
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