Jourjine Nicholas, Goedecker Caspar, König Barbara, Lindholm Anna K
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Proc Biol Sci. 2025 Jun;292(2049):20250995. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2025.0995. Epub 2025 Jun 18.
House mice () are among the most widely studied laboratory models of mammalian social behaviour, yet we know relatively little about the ecology of their behaviours in natural environments. Here, we address this gap using radiotelemetry to track social interactions in a population of wild mice over 10 years, from 2013 to 2023, and interpret these interactions in the context of passive acoustic monitoring data collected from August 2022 to November 2023. Using automated vocal detection, we identify 1.3 million individual vocalizations and align them in time with continuously collected telemetry data recording social interactions between individually identifiable mice. We find that vocalization is seasonal and correlated with long-term dynamics in features of social groups. In addition, we find that vocalization is closely associated in time with entrances to and exits from those groups, occurs most often in the presence of pups, and is correlated with how much time pairs of mice spend together. This work identifies seasonal patterns in the vocalizations of wild mice and lays a foundation to investigate the social role of acoustic communication in wild populations of an important laboratory model organism.
家鼠()是研究最为广泛的哺乳动物社会行为实验室模型之一,但我们对它们在自然环境中的行为生态学了解相对较少。在这里,我们利用无线电遥测技术,对2013年至2023年期间的一群野生小鼠的社会互动进行了长达10年的跟踪,以填补这一空白,并结合2022年8月至2023年11月期间收集的被动声学监测数据来解读这些互动。通过自动语音检测,我们识别出了130万个个体发声,并将它们与连续收集的遥测数据在时间上对齐,这些数据记录了个体可识别的小鼠之间的社会互动。我们发现,发声具有季节性,并且与社会群体特征的长期动态相关。此外,我们发现发声在时间上与小鼠进出群体密切相关,最常发生在有幼崽在场的情况下,并且与小鼠成对相处的时间长短相关。这项工作确定了野生小鼠发声的季节性模式,并为研究声学通讯在一种重要的实验室模式生物的野生种群中的社会作用奠定了基础。