Hide and squeak: scientists reveal the playful lives of rats

WASHINGTON: The next time you come across a rat darting furtively for cover, consider this: It might just want to have a playful game of hide-and-seek.

A group of neuroscientists in Germany spent several weeks hanging out with rodents in a small room filled with boxes, finding the animals were surprisingly adept at the cross-cultural childhood game — even though they weren’t given food treats as a reward. Instead, the rats appeared to genuinely enjoy both finding their sneaky human companions and being caught by them, as shown by their joyful leaps (what the Germans called “freudensprung”) and ultrasonic giggles that previous work has found is a sign of happiness.

The researchers’ paper was published in the influential journal Science on Thursday, and beyond the cuteness factor (or creepiness, depending on one’s perspective), it offers new insight into play behavior, an important evolutionary trait among mammals. “When you work a lot with rats over the years, you see how intelligent these animals are and how social,” co-author Konstantin Hartmann from the Humboldt University of Berlin, where the other members of the team are also based, told AFP. “But it was still very surprising to us to see how well they did,” he said. Working with adolescent male rats in a room of 30 square meters (320 square feet), a scientist would either find a cardboard box to crouch behind in a hiding role, or give the rat a headstart to find cover while the scientist searched.