Elizabeth Kolbert reviews “Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery,” by Lee Alan Dugatkin, and “Rat City,” by Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams.
In 1942, a Johns Hopkins biologist named Curt Richter discovered a new poison that rats apparently couldn’t taste. His breakthrough caught the attention of the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Second World War equivalent of DARPA. The agency, among its many worries, feared that the Axis powers were at work on biological weapons that would use rats as vectors. The O.S.R.D.
” Central-cell females basically gave up on mothering. They built inadequate nests or none at all. When disturbed, they would start to move their babies, only to then abandon them. The pup mortality rate in the crowded cells rose to as high as ninety-six per cent. Calhoun came up with a new term to describe the process he had witnessed. The rats, he said, had fallen into a “behavioral sink.” With the barn experiment, Calhoun again cast his work as a form of sociology.
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