Scientists at Georgia State University were trying to study how to turn hamsters into socially nonaggressive, but the result was the exact opposite. They turned into hyper aggressive demons.
This sounds like the start of many horror movies in the 70s.
Is this the overarching plot of Firefly except with hamsters?
Stranger
Great. Scientists have learned how to make Reavers. Did they learn nothing from Serenity?
Joking aside, the opposite of what’s expected sounds like an important result. It shows that the gene is involved in the pathway they are seeking to target, and working out why it does the opposite of what they expect is likely to improve their model for how the pathway operates. It might be more interesting than the expected result, and it’s certainly more interesting than nothing happening.
Maybe they should target the genes that control size. A bigger hamster is likely to be a calmer hamster.
Huh. Sort of like what happened in Firefly and Serenity where an attempt to make very passive people resulted in some of them turning into monsters that would kill you, rape you, and turn your skin into clothing. And if you were very lucky they would do it in that order.
… and… ninja’d. Multiple times.
Have you never seen The Killer Shrews ? or Night of the Lepus?
Are you saying that trick never works?
Meanwhile when I hear about gene splicing in rodents, the first thing I think is “So, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?”
It wasn’t ethical but it was the only way to save the SDMB servers…
That would make for a Rodent Of Unusual Size. Not really known for calmness, either.
I’ve seen video of those. They look much more like shrews than hamsters.
Are you sure about that?:
Stranger
That’s an oversize guinea pig, not a hamster. Besides, it looks like it’s playing.
Every species loves capybaras, it is known. And I’m questioning whether or not these mad scientists had ever previously met a hamster because those little fuckers are mean as shit just as they are. How the hell one would be able to tell you made them any meaner I do not know.
Do these guys look like they’re playing?
Stranger
From the comments, it sounds like the dog was the aggressor.
A number of outlets of…variable quality (including the N.Y. Post and Business Insider) have run with the hamster story as creating “hyper-aggressive” hamsters, but the actual report from Georgia State University researchers is a bit more nuanced. Basic conclusions:
“…the hamsters without the receptor showed much higher levels of social communication behavior than did their counterparts with intact receptors. Even more interesting, the typical sex differences observed in aggressiveness were eliminated with both male and female hamsters displaying high levels of aggression towards other same-sex individuals.”
I’m not seeing the “super-bully” hamster meme confirmed there, but that sex-related differences in aggressive behavior were considered to be eliminated in these hamsters. Whether that made the rodents super-aggressive overall is unclear from the news release.
On the other hand, if the secret C.I.A. lab working on creating a race of violent capybaras is successful, they could be deployed in Ukraine, causing a panicked stampede of Russian troops.