As everyone knows, when you move to New York City and sign a lease on an apartment there is a clause at the bottom which requires you to sign away your sanity, patience and wallet to the greater good of NYC herself. Ok, that’s a lie, and if it’s not you should really contact the Public Advocate, but it really isn’t a secret that New York will change you, morph you, and resultantly when you spawn your children will likely be slightly different than they would have been, especially if you choose to raise them here.
Apparently, mice are much the same. According to a new study by a SUNY and a Fordham researcher who caught 48 mice from three different city parks as well as close but rural areas and compared them, the city mice had, “larger livers with more scar tissue,” as well as, “genes linked to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease,” according to a New Scientist article on the study’s findings. While the sample size was admittedly small, the differences were seen as a reflection of the fact that city mice have more diverse and abundant food options than their rural counterparts and have thus evolved to digest it.
“The first thing that we thought of was the ‘cheeseburger hypothesis’: urban mice subsidising their diet on human food waste,” says author Stephen Harris, according to the New Scientist.
In summary, for those of you who couldn’t make it through that summary of a summary, when you’re a mouse in New York, available food includes a lot of human waste which your tiny mouse body is not used to and is not genetically primed to consume. So, wutcha do? You EVOLVE into a New Yawk City mouse fully capable of folding slices in half and eating them in two bites before screaming at a passing human watching on in horror, “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”
And yes, the New Scientist embedded the pizza rat video in their article summing up the report.
[H/t: New Scientist]