Last week I was chatting with a source for a story on gene editing. He happened to be on a Greek Island, which I found very distracting. It was a Zoom interview, and I kept craning my neck around trying to get a glimpse out the window behind him. I could see an astonishingly blue sky, and what I think may have been the wine dark waters of the Aegean. (Or maybe that was just the stain on the deck outside his beach house.)

So when, at the very end of our chat, he made an offhand comment about mouse song, I was momentarily confused. We’d been talking about DNA, and now we were talking about singing mice? As soon as we closed the meeting, I hopped online to see what the heck I’d missed (besides a decent glimpse of Greece). And wow, I found something very cool!

You may have heard of Alston’s singing mouse, a species that lives in the cloud forests of Central America (which I hope one day to glimpse in the background of a Zoom meeting). These tiny mice produce complex songs, loud enough for humans to hear. But what’s really cool is that these mice don’t just belt out arias; they sing in lively duets, rapidly trading the melody back and forth like humans having a spirited conversation. And that resemblance to humans may not be just metaphorical.

It turns out that a mutation in the mice’s brains that tweaked their neural wiring made it possible for them to sing this way. And that mutation is the same one thought to have led to humans’ ability to speak.

Obviously, the mutation is not exactly the same, because the mice are very polite about taking turns; even though their exchanges are quite rapid, they rarely sing over on another. Maybe after a few more years of evolution, we’ll develop that trait, too.

’til next time,

Avery