A video showing a mouse making movements similar to those of a person taking a shower has gone viral on Twitter. The video, posted on June 22, had 190,000 likes as of the weekend.
In it, it is possible to see a rodent passing its paws on its head, next to an open manhole, under a rain. “It’s not like the mouse intends to ‘take a shower’ when it sees rain or anything like that”, explains Rafael Lomazi, a biologist trained at Unifesp (Federal University of São Paulo) and a high school and pre-university teacher.
“But the rodent has a common habit of cleaning these movements of passing the paws over the body, through the snout and vibrissae, the ‘whiskers’, over the head and ears. They do it to remove something unwanted, or as a usual self-cleansing, using their own saliva,” he says.
“This little mouse in the video took advantage of the rainwater to clean it up, but it doesn’t mean that it’s always intentional when it rains,” says Lomazi.
Little rodent having a wash in the rain.. 😊 pic.twitter.com/QJLH83zdaf
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) July 22, 2023
According to biologist João Arthur, it may be that the mouse is also making these movements to remove excess water.
“As you can see the manhole on the side, maybe he was expelled from some hiding place because of the flood, and outside, he started trying to clean himself or even remove excess water from his fur”, he says.
This isn’t the first time a video like this has gone viral. In 2018, a rodent famously appeared in a sink all soapy, appearing to be taking a shower.
“The movements are quite strange,” said Tuomas Aivelo, a researcher in urban rat biology at the University of Helsinki, Finland, to the “Gizmodo” website, at the time the video went viral.
“A rat wouldn’t do that unless there was something it really wanted to get rid of. I think it’s all soapy. This is probably a problem for the mouse. He just wants to get rid of the soap.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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