RI, MA EHS Pest Control Blog

Alcoholic Mice Live to Drink

A new line of mice, bred to prefer alcohol over all other beverages, is expected to offer insight into the role genetics and lifestyle play in alcoholism. The mice drink more alcohol than other animal models and consume it in a fashion similar to humans: choosing alcohol over other options and binge drinking.

A study published in the journal Addiction Biology reports the mice reach blood-alcohol levels of more than 260 mg/dl of alcohol daily—over three times the equivalent of the human legal driving limit and the approximate consumption level that the severest human alcoholics attain.

“The free-choice drinking demonstrated by the new mouse line provides a unique opportunity to study the excessive intake that often occurs in alcohol-dependent individuals and to explore the predisposing factors for excessive consumption, as well as the development of physiological, behavioral and toxicological outcomes following alcohol exposure,” says senior author Nicholas Grahame, a biopsychologist specializing in alcoholism at Indiana University.

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health, an estimated 17.6 million Americans abuse alcohol or are alcohol dependent. Alcohol abuse and alcoholism can be treated but cannot be cured.

Mice share 80 percent of their genes with humans, so they are an excellent model to study alcoholism, a disease with a strong genetic component. The risk of developing alcoholism is known to be influenced by lifestyle. Animal models allow researchers to employ methods that they are unable to use in humans.

“This line of high-alcohol-seeking mice should be able to give us a better understanding of the basic brain mechanism involved in alcohol consumption as well as greater insight into the toxic effects on the brain, with the goal of developing therapies,” says Grahame, whose research focuses on behavioral genetics and behavioral pharmacology.

As with humans, the mice become intoxicated when the pace of alcohol consumption is faster than the liver can eliminate it. Typically it takes six or seven hours of continuous alcohol drinking for the new strain of mice to reach the highest levels of intoxication.

Doctoral candidate Liana M. Matson is a co-author of the study. She has conducted research focusing on when the mice drink and determined that they are nocturnal drinkers. This knowledge enabled the mice’s blood-alcohol levels to be tested when at their highest level.

Undergraduate School of Science students Amy Buckingham and Nick Villalta assisted in the research by measuring intake and blood-alcohol levels in the new strain of high-alcohol-seeking mice. In a related study, they analyzed how drunk the mice became by testing how the animals performed on a balance beam.

The research was funded by NIAAA and the School of Science at IUPUI.

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA 

click on image to enlarge

Mice are about as adaptable as any animal on the planet! I have seen mice eat things that humans would not even remotely consider tasting let alone eat! Ketchup is certainly an edible food but not exactly a meal…..except for mice. The attached image shows that mice completely cleaned out an individual packet of ketchup. Just this little amount of food is enough to support a mouse infestation.

This packet was found in a soon to open restaurant. Needless to say they needed EHS to protect the facility and their reputation before they even opened their doors. They put their trust in EHS and we take it seriously!

Pat Hagan
Commercial Business Development Manager

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA

The newest deterrent to would-be terrorists at airports might just be mice. An Israeli company, BioExplorers, has created a detector that looks like a full-body scanner, but actually contains three compartments containing eight mice, according to the Telegraph.

The mice will work four-hour shifts and are, according to researchers, more effective than dogs or x-ray machines, according to the Daily Mail. Air is pumped into the mice chamber every four hours so the animals can breathe.

When a mouse picks up a trace of something curious, they are trained to flee to a side chamber, which triggers an alarm (to prevent false positives, more than one mouse has to flee).

Mice take roughly ten days to learn their first smell and unlike dogs, they don't need interaction with trainers or constant attention.

The device was first tested on shoppers last year in Tel Aviv when mice picked out 22 people carrying mock explosives

Source = Huffington Post

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA

Everyone always states that mice need just a 1/4 ” void or the diameter of a dime to get inside a structure. Well, here is some visual proof of that being a fact! The attached image shows a juvenile mouse stuck on an insect monitor. The dime is there for visual reference. Let me just repeat that last part…..The mouse is stuck on an insect monitor, we use those to obviously monitor for insects. It caught a mouse, go figure!

EHS performs expert structural exclusion because we know that keeping pests out is vital to the success of our program. For rodents, if you close off a runway they use it creates stress on the population & forces them to do things they would not ordinarily do.

So next time you hear “mice can not get in through an opening that small” you have this picture to prove them wrong.

Rats are a formidable a foe. They will do just about anything to survive. In this case a new client of ours was having a rat infestation that previous pest control companies could not solve. Since rats were inside the structure using a rodenticide was not an option as they could die inside & cause an awful smell. For this reason we used mechanical traps to crash the problem. The rats were inside wall, ceiling, & floor voids and there was evidence of chewed wires. With the risk of fire high we needed to crash the population fast. After the initial visit we returned three days later to find a trail of blood to a wall void with just a snap trap. It looks like the rat could not pull the trap off him so he chewed his paws off. This is the challenge we are faced with rats, they have a stronger will to survive, even more so than humans. We offer humane control of nuisance pests but with commensal rodents (rats & mice deriving benefits from man) we are forced to use whatever means possible to eliminate the serious health & safety risk they pose to our quality of life.

Boston, MA - Mice, Maggots

I have always said that I should write a book about this industry. I would make 1/2 the book a comedy and the other 1/2 horror stories. I'm not sure that it would be interesting to anyone outside the industry though. I will say that in all my years in this industry I not only learn something new all the time but I also get blown away by the craziness we face.

The call I got was from a property manager who said she needed emergency service because a tenant was infested with maggots on her ceiling & walls. Needless to say maggots (larvae) evoke a pretty emotional reaction for obvious reasons. I explained that until the source is located the maggots will still be there no matter what we do to treat. I said it sounds like something may be dead in the unit or in a wall/ceiling void. She said they are reporting no odors??? She understood the fact that this may be a process but needed us to make an appearance so I sent out Gary, one of our service specialists who was in the area. I told Gary to bring the digital inspection camera scope so he can inspect/see inside voids, walls, ceilings, etc. Gary called me from the apartment & described the maggots and we both agreed they were not fly larva but a stored product pest. Gary found a source inside some expired corn meal in the cabinet but he said it was not that infested. I suggested that it may be a secondary source & to look elsewhere. He probed the property manager for some more information and this led him to inspect the unit below the maggot infested apartment because this tenant had an issue with cleanliness in the past. What did Gary find? The tenant had dozens of pet rats & mice in the apartment! There was spilled "pet" food and the tenant stated that some of the mice had escaped. We determined that the mice were stockpiling food inside the walls/ceiling and this became infested with stored product pests.

See why I never get amazed! I am quite sure that this coming week will somehow give me something that will top this.
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George E. Williams Jr., A.C.E.
General Manager - Staff Entomologist