House Mice Serenade Mates with 'Bird' Song

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a pair of dometic mice
Male mice serenade potential mates with distinct songs, much like many bird species do. (Image credit: Emilia Stasiak | Shutterstock)

Most people are familiar with the telltale squeak of a mouse scurrying out of their pantry, but scientists have long known that these aren’t the only noises house mice make. During courtship, the rodents also communicate in the ultrasonic frequency range, which sits beyond human hearing. Now, new research shows that these mating vocalizations are more than just your typical squeaks — they’re songs, not unlike those you’d expect to hear from courting birds.

“It seems as though house mice might provide a new model organism for the study of song in animals," lead researcher Dustin Penn, an evolutionary biologist at the Veterinary University of Vienna in Austria, said in a statement. "Who would have thought that?"

They found that most of the male mice would start their ultrasonic callsthe moment they caught the urine scent of a sexually mature female. When the researchers played these calls back to the females, they learned that the females could somehow tell the difference between the calls of their siblings and the calls of unrelated males — the females showed little interest in the squeaks of their brothers.

More recently, the researchers began analyzing several audio parameters, including duration, pitch and frequency, of the mating calls of wild-caught house mice. To their surprise, they found that the squeaks are quite complex and contain several features seen in bird songs, such as variations in duration and frequency of call syllables (units of sounds separated by silence).

When they compared the songs with one another, they saw that the vocalizations contained signatures of individuality and kinship. They also found that the songs of siblings were more similar to one anther than the songs of unrelated males.

The researchers now plan to look at how song quality affects mate choice— in some bird species, males with the most complex songs win all the females. Future studies will also focus on figuring out how related mice have such similar songs.

"The familial effects we found might be explained by imprinting (social learning), as with bird song, genetic differences, or both," they write in their most recent study, published in the January issue of the journal Physiology & Behavior.

Joseph Castro
Joseph Castro
Live Science Contributor
Joseph Bennington-Castro is a Hawaii-based contributing writer for Live Science and Space.com. He holds a master's degree in science journalism from New York University, and a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Hawaii. His work covers all areas of science, from the quirky mating behaviors of different animals, to the drug and alcohol habits of ancient cultures, to new advances in solar cell technology. On a more personal note, Joseph has had a near-obsession with video games for as long as he can remember, and is probably playing a game at this very moment.