House mice (Mus musculus) are omnivores and have an innate predatory instinct for small invertebrates. Our lab is interested in the evolutionary, behavioral, and neural mechanisms underlying hunting in mice. In this talk, I will provide an overview of our work studying feral, re-wilded, and laboratory mice as they forage and hunt. I will discuss unpublished data from our lab work studying mice hunting in the lab. We have built a large, 2m, enclosure where we perform closed-loop behavior challenging our animals to find a hidden cricket based on primarily auditory cues (cricket chirps). We are inspired by the natural statistics of the animal’s experience in the wild; therefore, we only provide information (chirps) when our mice sit still. Animals learn to solve this task almost immediately, but improve over days, and efficient mice predominantly rely on sound to solve the task. I will share how we are dissecting, modeling, and perturbing their sound-seeking behavior in this task and how we hope to extend our work to studying mice outside.
Organizer
Aaron Wong
a.wong@erasmusmc.nl