Julia Zichello
speaker
30 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Julia Zichello’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So we bought him a little toy that was the shape of a rat because I knew that he would be lonely. It was a cat toy. He was not interested in the cat toy. And then he died less than a week later. This is typical of rats because they're so social. They really like to have other rats around.
I think maybe, yeah. We knew that the lifespan of domestic rats is around two years and they were two and a half years old. So, you know, they lived a good life. We certainly appreciated them and learned a lot.
I will never see a squashed rat in New York City again and not think about our pet rats. I know that they are different. The rats in the wild are more aggressive. It wouldn't be the same thing as the pet rats that I experienced. But I mean, of course, you'd think about your pet.
Definitely not. I'm definitely not getting pet rats again.
It's too heartbreaking. Their lifespan is too short. And the relationship between their charm and their lifespan is too asymmetrical.
There are many studies across neuroscience and pharmaceuticals and psychology that used rats for decades. The rats that are lab rats are more genetically homogenous than wild rats. Rats and humans shared a common ancestor 90 million years ago. That's not super close, but it's close enough to have revealed things about the brain and behavior and genetics that have ultimately helped humans.
So I wonder about how many people have technically been helped by that versus the number of people who have been harmed by diseases they may have acquired from a rat.
The common ancestor was an animal that lived in the late Cretaceous around the time of the dinosaurs. There's not a specific name, but we use genetics to understand how far back these common ancestors lived. The anatomy and behavior of that common ancestor was much more rat-like than it is human-like. They were likely nocturnal. Some of them may have been insectivores.
And their basic anatomy was much more rat-like than humans.
Yeah, so that makes rats good model organisms because you can have many offspring within your human life as a scientist studying them. So you can see how things translate from one generation to the next. One rat female can have up to 72 pups per year. Wow. Wow.
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