In 2013 a groundbreaking study found that pre- and postnatal exposure to FM550 was associated with increased anxiety, obesity, and early-onset puberty in rats, raising concern over the continued use of these chemicals.
Numerous chemicals, including naphthalene (Plopper et al. 1992), trichloroethylene (Odum et al. 1992), and styrene (Green et al. 2001), cause differential toxicity in two common rodent models, mice and rats, raising the question of relevance of these rodent models for human risk assessment.
You might imagine that rats raised in the presence of a predator learn to be shrewder.
In a series of experiments, Dr. Rosenzweig and a team including Edward L. Bennett, a biochemist, and David Krech, a psychologist, compared rats raised in two environments.
In 2004, a team of researchers at McGill University noticed that rats raised by low-nurturing mothers were likely to be notably stressed as young adults.
Diamond placed a cat outside a cage of rats, and found that rats raised in this condition did worse on rat-friendly cognitive tests — running complicated mazes and the like — than did rats kept away from the sight of cats.
But this seems not to be true of rats raised in the presence of a predator whom they can do nothing to avoid or outwit — rats that feel helpless in the face of, so to speak, a cat wave.
The rats, raised in captivity, are all descended from animals captured in the Uluguru Mountains in Tanzania, or on the outskirts of Morogoro, a city of about 200,000 people in the nearby Tanzanian highlands.
The scantiness of the historical records bearing on the demise of the Christmas Island rats raises several questions.
Rats raised in small size litters showed similar IPGTT responses as those raised in normal size litters within the same maternal group (Fig. 3A,B).
