People have always avoided rats. Moreover, associating them with a variety of dangerous diseases, people tried to place their home away from these thieving animals. It was only at the end of the 19th century that a person looked at his little neighbor with respect, and then only because the rats were used for scientific purposes. Thus, it was thanks to the rats that antibiotics appeared at the disposal of mankind; it was rats that helped us establish how and why alcohol, drugs and radiation affect us, and it was rats that helped humanity get closer to unraveling the human genome. But a new study, conducted by experts from the University of St. Andrews and the University of Bern in Switzerland, allowed us to find out that rats have a number of social qualities, in particular, these incredibly intelligent animals turned out to be capable of mutual assistance.
Rat intelligence
As you know, most animals prefer to stay within their place of birth throughout their lives. This seemingly universal rule of survival does not apply only to two representatives of our planet - humans and rats, who often find themselves in previously unknown places due to their irrepressible curiosity. In addition to the constant thirst for adventure, a person and a rat are united by another ability - the ability to language. It is known that rats are distinguished by incredible intelligence, allowing them to use up to 5 thousand different sounds when communicating with relatives. Among other things, rodents happily help each other in difficult situations, but, as it turned out, only if another rat helps them first.
The presence of such an interesting quality in rats can be explained by the fact that animals use this trick to reduce the information load during communication. Literally doing favors to each other, animals cooperate with relatives, remembering the individual, which will need to reciprocate in the future. Dr. Manon Schweinfurt of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience in St Andrews, which led the study, also noted that, compared to humans, rats remember only the last episode of a meeting with a partner, without combining several previous events.
High intelligence of rats and excellent analytical skills have helped rats survive for millennia
In order to understand why rats provide mutual assistance, based only on the last meeting, scientists decided to test the memory of rats, linking their unique quality with a lack of memory. As a result of an interesting experiment, scientists found that rats can still remember what happened in the distant past, but when interacting with relatives, they use only the most recent data on meeting with a partner. Thus, the behavior of rats brings these animals even closer to humans, since according to scientists, we interact with society in a similar way in the case when, for some reason, it is difficult for us to remember the exact behavior of a partner after several interactions with him. Given that this described study was the first of its kind, scientists are confident that further research is needed to understand how common this behavior is in nature.