I had a mouse in my attic this fall, so I placed a trap up there. The mouse sounds stopped, so I forgot about it. Until today. I crawl up there, and the trap has been sprung, and there is a fine outline of fur where the mouse would have been, and a tail. That’s it. Fur and a tail. It looked like the mouse disappeared, but I’m satisfied that it died. But where did the mouse parts go? There was nothing other than the fur outline and tail. No skin, no bones, nothing.
First I thought something else must have eaten it, but that doesn’t make sense. What could eat it and leave a police outline of fur and the tail? Could it have been too hot up in the attic? The trap was put up there during the end of July, and it was roasting. Would the heat be all that was needed to first dehydrate the mouse and then eventually reduce it to dust? Or would insects have had the opportunity to eat the mouse, bones and all?
I think insects would be required. No clue what happened to the bones. The gecko in Johnny L.A.'s link left bones behind. If you want to see fur left behind, there’s a time lapse of a rabbit, too. Less detail, just more fur.
It could have been eaten by other mice. Or the flesh and skin could have been eaten by insects, while the mice ate the bones. Rodents typically will gnaw on bones for the calcium. Note, however, that in the gecko video the ants carried away most of the smaller bones, leaving only the skull and spine and a few others. It would be odd, however, for the tail to be left.
You dehydrate a mouse and there is little left. With all that heat up there, I bet that’s all it is. Some insects may have eaten some meat along the way too. Be glad you don’t have dead mice rotting in your living area. Myself, I wouldn’t even bother with a mouse in the attic because they can probably come and go as they wish through some openings.
Mice will definitely eat other mice. And if you had one mouse in your attic, then you definitely had multiple mice. So now you have mice in the attic who have developed the taste for flesh. Enjoy.
I wouldn’t doubt it. I half expected to see some drawn wanted posters of me taped to the walls up there.
I always figured I had more than one mouse up there, so if they polished off the dead mouse, so be it. I should have taken a picture of it, though. The trap had a perfect outline of the mouse (the metal bar was right over the neck of the fur outline, and the tail was exactly where it would have been if the rest of the mouse were there.
I agree for the most part. The fact is, I wouldn’t even know the mouse was up there if he wasn’t hanging out next to the AC duct right above my head. I could here him walking around at night, usually. If he was anywhere else, I would have been blissfully ignorant of his presence. I know there are things living in my house with me. I don’t like it, but I’m not going to obsess about it either. That is, if I don’t have to. Now that I may have flesh-eating mice up there, I suspect I’ll be listening for any kind of mouse-like activity.
decomposition. Such a tiny thing as a mouse takes very little time to decompose, heat will speed this process. Even bone will eventually decompose, though rodents do eat bone for the minerals. As for the tail, it’s basically skin and bone, much much less enzymes, acids and what-have-you, so it may decay much slower, being out of the ‘soup’ of the body’s decay.
Adding to the cannabalism consesus. It’s just what a lot of small animals do. No point in letting all that good protein and minerals just go to waste you know.
I have found carcasses like this in traps in my basement that have not been checked recently. On occasion, if the carcass is old but not too old, if I disturb it, I find live insects inhabiting it (yet my basement is relatively free of insects otherwise). So I imagine what isn’t eaten by other rodents or processed by bacteria is taken care of by necro-insects. The bones and hair are all that’s left, apparently matterial that nothing can use.