Scientists have found that rats are capable of mutual help
Source:People have been avoiding the rats always. Moreover, associating them with a variety of dangerous diseases, man has tried to place their home away from these thieving animals. Only in the end of 19th century man looked at his young neighbor with respect and it is only because the rats were used for scientific purposes. So, thanks to the rats at the disposal of mankind appeared antibiotics; it rats helped us determine how and why we are affected by alcohol, drugs and radiation, and that helped mankind to come closer to unraveling the human genome. A new study conducted by experts from the University of St. Andrews and the University of Bern in Switzerland, has allowed us to learn that rats have a number of social qualities, in particular, these incredibly intelligent animals were capable of mutual help.
Rat intelligence
As you know, most animals prefer to remain within their places of birth throughout life. This seemingly universal rule of survival not only applies to two representatives of our planet — in humans and rats, which often previously unknown to them places thanks to his insatiable curiosity. In addition to this constant thirst for adventure, the human and the rat brings another ability — the ability to language. It is known that rats have an incredible intelligence, allowing them to use up to 5 thousand different sounds when communicating with other felines. In addition, rodents are happy to help each other in difficult situations, but as it turned out, only in the case if you first help them the other rat.
The Presence of rats in such an interesting quality can be explained by the fact that animals use this trick to reduce the information load during communication, according to the portal . Literally doing favors to each other, animals cooperate with relatives, remembering individual, which will need to reciprocate in the future. Dr. Manon Schweinfurt from the School of psychology and neuroscience at St Andrews, who led the study also noted that compared with human, rat only remember the last episode of the meeting with a partner and combining together one or more previous events.
High intelligence of rats and excellent analytical skills helped the rats to survive for millennia.
In order to understand why rats help based on the last meeting, the scientists decided to test the memory of rats by associating them with a unique quality with a lack of memory. As a result of a curious experiment, researchers found that can still remember what happened in the distant past, but when interacting with other people, they use only the most recent data on meeting with the partner. Thus, the behavior of rats even closer to these animals, since, according to the scientists, we interact with society the same way in the case when we, for whatever reason, it is difficult to remember the exact behavior of the partner after several interactions with him. Given that the described study was the first of its kind, scientists believe that they further research is needed to understand how prevalent this behavior in nature.
rats are comparable in their size with the human genome
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