What does utopia look like for mice? According to a researcher who did most of his work in the 1950s through 1970s, it might include limitless food (of course!), multiple levels and secluded little rodent condos. These were all part of John Calhoun’s experiments to study the effects of population density on behavior. But what looked like rat utopias and mouse paradises at first quickly spiraled into out-of-control overcrowding, eventual population collapse and seemingly sinister behavior patterns.
The mice were not nice.
For io9, Esther Inglis-Arkell writes about Calhoun’s twenty-fifth habitat and the experiment that followed:
“At the peak population, most mice spent every living second in the company of hundreds of other mice. They gathered in the main squares, waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other. Few females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did seemed to simply forget about their babies. They’d move half their litter away from danger and forget the rest. Sometimes they’d drop and abandon a baby while they were carrying it.
The few secluded spaces housed a population Calhoun called, “the beautiful ones.” Generally guarded by one male, the females—and few males—inside the space didn’t breed or fight or do anything but eat and groom and sleep. When the population started declining the beautiful ones were spared from violence and death, but had completely lost touch with social behaviors, including having sex or caring for their young.”
Calhoun’s experiments, which started with rats an outdoor pen and moved on to mice at the National Institute of Mental Health during the early 1960s, were interpreted at the time as evidence of what could happen in an overpopulated world. The unusual behaviors he observed he dubbed “behavioral sinks.”
After Calhoun wrote about his findings in a 1962 issue of Scientific American, that term caught on in popular culture, according to a paper published in the Journal of Social History. The work tapped into the era’s feeling of dread that crowded urban areas heralded the risk of moral decay — and events like the murder of Kitty Genovese (though it was misreported) only served to intensify the worry. A host of science fiction works — books like Soylent Green, comics like 2000AD — played on Calhoun’s ideas and those of his contemporaries. The work also inspired the 1971 children’s book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which was also made into a 1982 film The Secret of NIMH, notes the National Institutes of Health.
Now, interpretations of Calhoun’s work has changed.[…]
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/#XSgssJ4WKtaGgPBD.99
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Source: How 1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of Humanity
msamba 
We can watch ourselves how behaviour changes in densely populated towns, can’t we? It is not healthy to stack people on top of each other like that.
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Dependent on which stage they are in their lives (some small groups of mice found a survival strategy). But we aren’t mice but a different type of mammal…
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But didn’t they all die in the end? Because the beautiful survivors did not reproduce at all? Or did I misunderstand that?
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Yes the mice did, but perhaps it called for some intervention prior to that point (learning from inhabitants lived experience and trying again with a different design and better building standards if we’re dealing with people)?
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Yes definitely, with possibilities to escape for a moment, when needed.
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