Fifty years ago at a small state college I was pursuing a BSc in Biology. A requirement for graduation was completion and writeup on a research project. I chose to try to duplicate a study in one of our library’s science journals. Plowing through a bunch of studies, I selected one that fit my fancy: a study which sought to characterize the interaction between a native mouse and an introduced one, the hypothesis being that the non-native mouse was more aggressive and was displacing the native mouse from its habitat.
Many weeks were spent learning how better to do live trapping; I’d already done that in previous classes (awww, look at the cute Kangaroo rat! Oooh, Antelope Valley Ground Squirrel!) but now I needed to go full-out to trap enough mice to have a statistically-viable study. The non-native mice were pretty easy (Mus musculus, the common house mouse) as they are in predictable places near dwellings & trash, often at high concentrations (ewww!) But the native mice, White-footed Deer Mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) were much more challenging to find habitats where they hung out. I kept trapping Kangaroo rats! Setting the live traps was delicate, which is why I was getting K-rats (they’re a lot heavier.) Finding a good bait was a bit of a puzzle too; I started with cheese, but meh, deer mice don’t seem nearly as enthused over that as house mice. Peanut butter, and setting the traps to be on a finely-balaced hair trigger setting, finally started to yield some deer mice.
Maintaining 10 or so mice of each species in the bio lab was also quite the challenge. The end of the quarter was nearing; I was getting almost no sleep. Finally, I had enough healthy mice to start the experiments: place one of each species in a large cage, and note their interactions. The paper I had chosen to duplicate described notable aggressions of M. musculus towards the deer mice, which included jumping vertically (to appear big and strong?), and especially back-flips done as a display of energy and power.
So mouse 3 & mouse 12: an hour of them ignoring each other and sniffing around inside the cage. Mouse 2 and mouse 16: same as the previous pair. Next pair, same result. Next pair: SAME RESULT. I was not seeing ANY of the behaviours described in the paper I had chosen to duplicate!
Perhaps they were doing these rapid backflips so rapidly I was missing them? I was awfully tired. Yawn, what time is it, 3 AM! Aaack!
Several days of trials, with the same results. Now it was the end of the quarter. I released all the mice back into their habitats. Write a paper on… what? I felt like a complete failure.
In retrospect I had PLENTY for a good paper; it would have documented the large amount of work it took to trap and house ~20 wild mice, and the complete lack of interest they had in each other, thus calling into question the original paper. We called such fraudulent products “dry-labbing”, where someone made up numbers that looked plausible and which could yield statistically-significant results.
A week or so after the end of the quarter, my senior advisor was frantically trying to get me to write up my project, but I got a summer job in my field using my lab skills, working at a fruit dehydrator plant. One of the other lab techs quit, and now I was on 12-hour shifts seven days a week; the dehydrator was a 24 x 7 operation in the summer, and my boss was the only other tech. By the end of the summer, the farming company hired me on full-time as an assistant horticulturist, as good or better of a job as I would have had with my BSc. Thoughts of trying to finish my Bachelor’s faded into insignificance; the lack of same never really impacted me, as I was always one of those guys who would take on a crap job and boost myself up by doing.
no subject
Many weeks were spent learning how better to do live trapping; I’d already done that in previous classes (awww, look at the cute Kangaroo rat! Oooh, Antelope Valley Ground Squirrel!) but now I needed to go full-out to trap enough mice to have a statistically-viable study. The non-native mice were pretty easy (Mus musculus, the common house mouse) as they are in predictable places near dwellings & trash, often at high concentrations (ewww!) But the native mice, White-footed Deer Mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) were much more challenging to find habitats where they hung out. I kept trapping Kangaroo rats! Setting the live traps was delicate, which is why I was getting K-rats (they’re a lot heavier.) Finding a good bait was a bit of a puzzle too; I started with cheese, but meh, deer mice don’t seem nearly as enthused over that as house mice. Peanut butter, and setting the traps to be on a finely-balaced hair trigger setting, finally started to yield some deer mice.
Maintaining 10 or so mice of each species in the bio lab was also quite the challenge. The end of the quarter was nearing; I was getting almost no sleep. Finally, I had enough healthy mice to start the experiments: place one of each species in a large cage, and note their interactions. The paper I had chosen to duplicate described notable aggressions of M. musculus towards the deer mice, which included jumping vertically (to appear big and strong?), and especially back-flips done as a display of energy and power.
So mouse 3 & mouse 12: an hour of them ignoring each other and sniffing around inside the cage. Mouse 2 and mouse 16: same as the previous pair. Next pair, same result. Next pair: SAME RESULT. I was not seeing ANY of the behaviours described in the paper I had chosen to duplicate!
Perhaps they were doing these rapid backflips so rapidly I was missing them? I was awfully tired. Yawn, what time is it, 3 AM! Aaack!
Several days of trials, with the same results. Now it was the end of the quarter. I released all the mice back into their habitats. Write a paper on… what? I felt like a complete failure.
In retrospect I had PLENTY for a good paper; it would have documented the large amount of work it took to trap and house ~20 wild mice, and the complete lack of interest they had in each other, thus calling into question the original paper. We called such fraudulent products “dry-labbing”, where someone made up numbers that looked plausible and which could yield statistically-significant results.
A week or so after the end of the quarter, my senior advisor was frantically trying to get me to write up my project, but I got a summer job in my field using my lab skills, working at a fruit dehydrator plant. One of the other lab techs quit, and now I was on 12-hour shifts seven days a week; the dehydrator was a 24 x 7 operation in the summer, and my boss was the only other tech. By the end of the summer, the farming company hired me on full-time as an assistant horticulturist, as good or better of a job as I would have had with my BSc. Thoughts of trying to finish my Bachelor’s faded into insignificance; the lack of same never really impacted me, as I was always one of those guys who would take on a crap job and boost myself up by doing.