Catch me if you can: free-living mice show a highly flexible dodging behaviour suggestive of intentional tactical deception

Abstract

Intentional tactical deception, the employment of a tactic to intentionally deceive another animal, is a complex behaviour based on higher-order cognition, that has rarely been documented outside of primates and corvids. New laboratory-to-field assays, however, provide the opportunity to investigate such behaviour among free-living mice. In the present study, we placed laboratory-style test chambers with a single entrance near a forest outside Warsaw, where we observed the social interactions of two territorial murids, black-striped and yellow-necked mice, under food competition for seven months. Notably, among the social interactions, we video-recorded 21 instances of deceptive pursuer evasion. In the most obvious cases, an individual inside the chamber, to avoid an incoming mouse, hid by the chamber opening (the only means to enter or exit), paused until the pursuer entered and passed by, and then exploited the distraction of the back-turned pursuer by fleeing through the opening in a direction opposite to the one the pursuer came from. This deceptive dodging is the first evidence of a behaviour suggestive of intentional tactical deception among mice. As such, this deceptive behaviour may be of interest not only for rodent psychology but also, more generally, for the fields of non-human intentionality and theory of mind.

Keywords: Apodemus agrarius; cognition; cognitive ethology; intentionality; naturalistic behavioral studies; tactical deception.

Figure 1.

Subject species and test equipment. (a) Black-striped mouse (A. agrarius). (b) Yellow-necked mouse (A. flavicollis). (c,d) External view of the test chambers. (e) Schematic representation of the test chambers. Motion-activated video cameras record the behaviour of free-ranging mice outside and inside the test chambers. The brown circle at the chamber’s centre represents the bait (chocolate cream presented in a dish). The brown rectangle represents a piece of wood. The floors of the chambers are covered with sand. Photographers: Dmitry Potashkin (a), Rudmer Zwerver (b) and Rafal Stryjek (c,d).

Figure 2.

Graphical representation of the essential stages common to both types of deceptive dodge. Actions performed by the chased mouse and the chasing mouse are represented in red and blue, respectively. (1) Hiding: one mouse is inside the chamber, in front of the tube, and, upon hearing an incoming second mouse, it moves away from the interception trajectory, reaching a safe spot lateral to the tube. (2) Concealment through immobility and silence: after the chaser enters the chamber and is deceived by finding the chamber seemingly empty, the chased mouse remains immobile, avoiding producing sounds that could reveal its position, in a hideout zone, while the chaser is looking for it. (3) Exploitation of the target’s distraction: the chased mouse exploits the chaser mouse’s distraction and the entrance tube’s availability to escape, avoiding a fight.

Figure 3.

Dynamics of a type A deceptive dodge. (a–h) Sequential snapshots depicting the dynamics of a type of deceptive dodge performed by a black-striped mouse. Actions performed by the chased mouse and the chasing mouse are represented in red and blue, respectively. The integral video is shown in electronic supplementary material, video S1.

Figure 4.

Dynamics of a type B deceptive dodge. (a–f) Sequential snapshots depicting the dynamics of a type B deceptive dodge performed by a black-striped mouse. Actions performed by the chased mouse and the chasing mouse are represented in red and blue, respectively. The integral video is shown in electronic supplementary material, video S2.

Figure 5.

Categorization of behavioural deception. The graph shows the subdivisions of behavioural deception, with the corresponding Mitchell’s levels of deception.