Hotel California ...

 

This pix remind me of the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey as the mice are seemingly content but not.
A tale for the ages awaits as yours truly discovered in this gem on Medium. 

Odysseus removing his men from the company of the lotus-eaters
Template:Theodoor van Thulden - 17th-century French engraving 

In 1968, a scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health created a perfect world — unlimited food, no predators, no disease. He wanted to see what would happen. What happened was extinction.

Eight white mice (four males, four females ) are placed inside a metal enclosure roughly nine feet square, with walls four and a half feet high. Inside are 256 nesting boxes, each capable of housing fifteen mice. Mesh tunnels — sixteen on each wall — run up the sides like stairwells in a tower block. There is food. There is water. There is nesting material. The temperature is controlled. The mice have been screened for disease. There are no predators. There is nothing in this world that can kill them.

The scientist who built it calls it mouse heaven.

Now jump forward. The population has peaked and collapsed. The last survivors sit in their nesting boxes, grooming themselves in silence. Their fur is immaculate. They have never fought. They have never mated. They have never raised young. They have never done anything except eat, sleep, and clean their own coats, over and over, in a world that was designed to give them everything.

They are the remnants of a population that once numbered 2,200. They will not reproduce. None of them will. The paradise is silent now. Most of the nesting boxes are empty. The tunnels are still. The food is untouched.

Every mouse in heaven is going to die.

John B. Calhoun was a biologist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland. He had spent two decades studying what happens to rodent societies when they run out of space. He had built twenty-four experimental enclosures before this one. All had to be ended early due to laboratory constraints.

Universe 25 was the first he ran to completion.

The only constraint was space, and even that was generous. The pen could theoretically support around 3,840 mice. The population never exceeded 2,200.

Instinct rules ...

Dominant males staked out the best territories and defended them with increasing aggression. Subordinate males — the ones who lost the fights — were pushed into the overcrowded central areas of the pen. With nowhere to go and no social role to fill, they withdrew. Some became randomly violent, attacking other mice without provocation. Others stopped interacting entirely.

Females in the overcrowded zones became aggressive. Some abandoned their pups. Others attacked them. Infant mortality soared. Pups that survived were raised in chaos, never learning the social behaviours that normal mouse development requires. They never learned how to court. They never learned how to mate.
They never learned how to parent.

By day 560, the population was in free fall. And a new group had emerged, the most disturbing subjects Calhoun had ever observed.

Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.”

They were mice that had withdrawn from society completely. They did not fight. They did not mate. They did not socialise. They retreated to secluded nesting boxes, often with a single dominant mouse standing guard at the entrance, and they did nothing except eat, sleep, and groom themselves.

Their fur was pristine. They had no scars, no bite marks, no signs of conflict. Physically, they were the healthiest mice in the enclosure. Behaviorally, they were hollow. They had no social function whatsoever. They existed, and that was all.

After day 600, no pup survived more than a few days. New births ceased entirely. The remaining population (mostly beautiful ones) lingered for months, grooming and eating in silence, and then died. By spring 1973, less than five years after the experiment began, the population had fallen from 2,200 to zero.

What is not in dispute is what Calhoun said when he presented his results to the Royal Society of Medicine in London on 22 June 1972. He stood before an audience of physicians and scientists, and he opened
with a sentence that has echoed through every decade since:

“I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man.”

Welcome to the Hotel California

Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)

Such a lovely face

They're livin' it up at the Hotel California

What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)

Bring your alibis

Mirrors on the ceiling

The pink champagne on ice

And she said, "We are all just prisoners here

Of our own device"

And in the master's chambers

They gathered for the feast

They stab it with their steely knives

But they just can't kill the beast

Last thing I remember

I was running for the door

I had to find the passage back

To the place I was before

"Relax, " said the night man

"We are programmed to receive

You can check out any time you like

But you can never leave"