The effects of group versus single housing on home cage behaviour in two strains of laboratory mice

Abstract

Studying the behavioural patterns of animals in their house may help to understand their needs, but there has been a little investigation of home-cage behaviours in commonly used inbred strains of mice such as C57BL/6 and DBA/2. Therefore, understanding behavioural patterns in these mice is important for neuroscience research. For the first time, this experiment was carried out to investigate the long-term effects of housing conditions (single vs. group) on home cage behaviour of C57BL/6 and DBA/2 mice, in order to reveal differences between C57BL/6 and DBA/2 in home-cage behaviours and in response to single-housing. Sixty-four mice (32 mice/strain) were housed either singly (SH) (n= 32) or in four groups, each group contained 8 animals. Home cage behavioural patterns were recorded weekly using ethogram-based instantaneous sampling for 5 consecutive weeks. Regardless of strain, single housed (SH) mice displayed higher levels of grooming and bedding directed-behaviours and were more frequently seen in-the-crawl ball, and had lower levels of feeding behaviour compared to their group housed (GH) conspecifics. There were significant strain differences in anxiety-related behaviours with the DBA/2 strain demonstrating higher levels of sleep, feeding and grooming behaviour and frequent presence in-the-crawl ball, and lower levels of exploration, locomotion andbedding-directed behaviour compared to the C57BL/6 strain. The results therefore suggest that different housing systems influence home cage behaviours of laboratory mice with the mice of the DBA/2 strain appearing more anxious. These findings may also have great implications for researchers to decide the most appropriate phenotype to use in measuring neural response-relevant behaviours in novel animal/human models.