How Do Mice See the World? Scientists Developed Open-Source Camera to Capture Habitats as Rodents See It

Mice are often used as models for scientific research. However, scientists are still unable to understand how they see the world. That is why researchers from Munich and Tuebingen have developed a new device that will tell how mice see their natural environment.

This open-source camera will help scientists understand how rodents draw inferences from limited information to adapt to the demands of their local environments that increase their chances of survival and reproduction.

Understanding the Mice Perspective

Evolution has let mice develop sensory systems that help them perceive their surroundings, Science Daily reported. For instance, their visual system has shaped their physical features, like the position of the eyes and the relative acuity of different regions of the retina.

But the knowledge on the function of visual evolution has remained relatively sparse even after decades of using mice as a favored model for scientific experiments. Neuroscience News previously reported that a study from UC Berkeley showed that mice navigate their world using their whiskers. But this does not tell how color vision helps them survive like other mammals that use it to collect food, evade predators, and choose partners.

Professor Laura Busse of the Department of Biology II at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich said that this was when they realized that studying how the world looks from the rodent's perspective is not well explored.

Busse decided to conduct a study on the visual input and processing of neural signals in mice in collaboration with Professor Thomas Euler of Tuebingen University.

Open-Source Camera Mimics How Mice See the World

According to the news outlet, mice are dichromate animals. That means they have two separate types of cone cells, the photoreceptors that are responsible for color vision, inside their retinas.

These cone cells can detect electromagnetic radiation in the green and ultraviolet spectrum, which is about 510 nanometers (nm) and 350 nm in wavelengths.

The study, "Natural environment statistics in the upper and lower visual field are reflected in mouse retinal specializations," published in Current Biology, aims to know the range of color information the mice could see in their natural habitats and whether these colors could explain the functional characteristics of the neural circuits in their retina.

The open-source camera was designed to cover the spectral regions in the green and ultraviolet to which the retina is sensitive, according to News Medical Life Sciences. It is also equipped with a gimbal that automatically orients the picture frame to avoid sudden and unintentional shifts in position.

The team captured the environment where the presence of mice was detected as it would have appeared in the perspective of a mouse at different times of the day.

Busse said that through the open-source camera, they confirmed that the upper part of the house's retina is sensitive to UV light, while the half of it that is oriented downwards is sensitive to green light. These two spectral ranges closely match the color statistics of their natural environment, where they are usually seen. Researchers believe that it could be the product of evolution.