Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Rats
Rats
Introduction
Ultraviolet light
Scent marks
Rats under a black light
Black light photography
Introduction
Rats dot their environment with tiny drops of urine, called urine marking, or scent marking. Urine
marking is a form of chemical communication. Urine is full of information about the rat who produced
it: its species, sex, age, reproductive status, sexual availability, social status, individual identity, and
current stress level, as well as the age of the scent mark itself.
Urine marking serves several functions. It acts as a sexual attractant and advertisement to rats of the
opposite sex. Urine marking may also serve as a habitat labeling system. Rats may urine mark their
environment in order to maintain an optimum odor field, a sort of olfactory landscape, which may help
them maintain a sense of familiarity with an area. Urine marking of the environment may be serve as an
index of spatial knowledge.
We humans can barely perceive scent marks ourselves, because once a scent mark dries it becomes
invisible to us. We may be able to detect some of them through touch, as a scent mark on a hard surface
may attract a thin layer of dust and may feel rough to the touch, but this is a far cry from the rat's
awareness of his scentscape.
Ultraviolet light
Technology comes to the rescue, however. Rat urine fluoresces yellow
under ultraviolet light. And urine isn't the only substance that glows
under a black light. Porphyrin, a component of rat tears, glows bright
pink or magenta under a black light as well. Porphyrin and other
secretions coat the eye, drain down into the nose through a small duct
and may appear around the nostrils.
With this knowledge in mind, I purchased a fluorescent black light at my local hardware store. For those
of you who want to try this yourselves, make sure to get a fluorescent black light, the kind with a
fluorescence tube, and not an incandescent black light, which is a regular light bulb with a special
coating. Incandescent bulbs aren't fluorescent and therefore don't work (I've tried).
Scent marks
First, I turned the black light onto the rats' environment to see if I could detect urine marks (a pursuit
known as peeseekery). I took one of the rats' metal shelves out of their cage and photographed it under
normal and black light:
Photograph of a cage shelf under normal light (left) and ultraviolet light (right). The
rats' urine marks, faintly visible under normal lighting conditions, glow under the
black light.
Then I took a look at the rats' nestbox. I give the rats a new cardboard nestbox every week, so the marks
below were all made in less than seven days:
Photograph of the rats' nestbox under normal light (left) and ultraviolet light (right). The urine marks are visible
under normal light as a faint mottling, but become more apparent under a fluorescent black light.
As you can see from the marks on the nestbox, the rats prefer to sit on the front left quadrant of the box
(the other areas are overhung with a shelf and ramp). From the photograph, it looks like the rats deposit
scent marks in several ways. They deposit a scent mark as they step on the box, dragging their urogenital
area over the box's edge, thus depositing a small drip on the front panel and a smear along the top. The
smear points in the direction they were moving at the time. Next, the rats deposit rounder, less smeared
scent marks on the top of the box itself. Lastly, the rats scent mark the "sill" or "threshold" of the
doorways as they go in and out.
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Rats under a black light 2/14/11 10:15 AM
Lastly, here are photographs of a plastic tool chest that the rats climbed on:
As I examined the rats further I found that other body parts looked pink or purple, too, particularly areas
with thin, delicate skin. The rats' ears looked purple or violet:
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Rats under a black light 2/14/11 10:15 AM
Snip's ears are a normal tan color under normal light (left),
but under a fluorescent black light (right) they look violet.
The eyes and the skin around them looked dark purple:
Cricket's ears and eyelids, normally a pale tan (left), look purple
under a black light (right). A little mucus around his nostrils looks
clear and colorless under normal light, but fluoresces dark pink
under ultraviolet light, probably from porphyrin.
The tops of the rats' paws looked pink under the black light, and the soles of their feet looked purple (my
own skin was purple too).
Constraints: My camera does not do well in low light conditions, and the black light doesn't put out
much visible light. This had three important consequences: (1) I could only take close-up photographs.
Any pictures taken far away turned out completely black. (2) Even with the close-ups, many of the
photos turned out very dark with glaring whites. These required tweaking to make them presentable. (3)
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My camera had trouble focusing under low light, making many of the black light photos blurry, so I
shrank the images and kept them small to increase their sharpness.
More black lights would help address these constraints, but at $17 per light I didn't want to buy more
than one.
Photo tweaking: Using the advice of a photographer friend, I used the following procedure in Adobe
Photoshop to brighten the dark areas of the photographs and tone down the whites. This procedure is
more subtle than tinkering with the overall brightness and contrast of the image:
Ultraviolet light and safety: The ultraviolet light spectrum is artibrarily divided into three ranges that
have different health risks: UVA (low risk), UVB (medium risk) and UVC (high risk). Black lights emit
UVA. Brief exposure to UVA isn't a big problem, but prolonged UVA exposure can irritate or damage
the eyes and skin. So, if you try this yourself, don't stare right into the light and don't expose your rats to
the light for long.
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