The Page 99 Test: Lee Alan Dugatkin's "Dr. Calhoun's Mousery"

Lee Alan Dugatkin is an animal behaviorist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. He is the

author of more than one hundred and fifty papers and the author or coauthor of many books, including The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness.

Dugatkin applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Dr. Calhoun's Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity, and reported the following:

From page 99:
“These females simply piled the strips of paper in a heap,” Calhoun wrote, “sometimes trampling them into a pad that showed little sign of cup formation.” Worse yet, if they encountered another rat as they were gathering up nesting material, these females would simply drop the shredded paper and start interacting with the other rat. Some females in the crowded neighborhoods stopped building nests altogether and just gave birth in the sawdust that was at the bottom of the nest boxes, something that never happened in a dominant male’s far less crowded neighborhood.

Mothers in crowded neighborhoods nursed their pups less often than females in less crowded neighborhoods. These females also showed little of the defensive behavior that mother’s typically display. In the less crowded neighborhoods, “if any situation arose that a mother considered a danger to her pups,” Calhoun wrote, “she would pick up the young, one at a time and take them somewhere safer and nothing will distract her from this task until the entire litter has been moved.” If females in crowded neighborhoods picked up their pups to take them to safety—and many times they did not—they often dropped them on the way and left them on the floor. Such pups rarely, if ever, survived. In a dominant male’s neighborhood, where mothers built good nests and nursed and defended their pups, 50 percent of the pups survived: Calhoun called these neighborhoods “brood pens.” In the crowded neighborhoods, where pathological togetherness reigned, pup mortality reached as high as a devasting 96 percent, the result of a combination of poor nesting and mothering skills, as well physiological deformities of the mother’s uterus. Calhoun sent the bodies of eleven females that died in the crowded neighborhoods to a colleague, Katherine C. Snell at the National Cancer Institute. Snell’s necropsy report listed severe uterine problems, including endometritis, as well as inflammation of the kidneys, some of which may have been the result of very high levels of vitamin A in the rat chow that all the rats were eating.
I’d give this a grade of B on the Page 99 Ttest. It fares well enough in capturing a snapshot of the experimental work that the book’s main protagonist, Dr. John Calhoun, undertook, and it also touches in on some important findings he made.

Page 99 only hints at the important, but utterly bizarre, experiments John Calhoun did to understand overpopulation in mice and rats, and how to potentially defuse population bombs in rodents. But there is so much more to the story, captured succinctly in an opening statement Calhoun made when he was invited to present the results of his experiments to The Royal Society in London: “I shall largely speak of mice,” Calhoun began, “but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution.” In time, Calhoun came to think that his work might be used to help we humans from overpopulating ourselves to extinction. “Of course, we realize that rats are not men,” Calhoun once said, “but they do have remarkable similarities in both physiology and social relations.... [W]e can at least hope to develop ideas that will provide a spring forward for attaining insights into human social relations and the consequent state of mental health.” The media and more latched on to all this and turned Calhoun into a scientific pop icon. He was work covered, over in over, in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday and more. Page after page of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Pump House Gang spoke of Calhoun’s experiment. His work led one of the writers of Catwoman to introduce the character Ratcatcher, who speaks of Calhoun’s experiments to his legions of rat followers. The best-selling children’s book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH likely had its origin in a visit by the author, Robert Conly (who wrote under the pseudonym Robert C. O’Brien), to Calhoun’s lab at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).