Animal · Germany, France, United Kingdom
House mouse
Mus musculus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The house mouse came out of Asia and followed people to nearly every corner of the world, living wherever there is food and a gap to hide in.
Picture credit: Dion Art (CC BY-SA 4.0) · DiegoDiegoDiego555 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the house mouse live?
Home: Houses, sheds and fields almost everywhere on Earth.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, India, China, Australia, South Africa.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 7.5–10 cm long. It weighs about 0.02 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
A mouse runs along a wall in the dark, and it is not doing it by sight. Its whiskers pick up surfaces and even movements of the air, and they are the reason it keeps touching the skirting board as it goes — biologists call that hugging of edges thigmotaxis. The whiskers are so central that when a mouse is born blind, they grow longer than normal, as if the body were compensating for the missing sense. Think of the world of a mouse as a map made of touch: the width of a gap, the roughness of a floor, the draught from an open door. That is also why a mouse finds the one hole in a room you had forgotten about. It does not need to see it. It only needs to feel that its whiskers fit.
Find it on the globe
House mouse is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
What are a mouse's whiskers for?
To feel surfaces and even air movements, which is how a mouse gets around in the dark. Mice born blind grow longer whiskers than usual, as if making up for the missing sense.
Why do mice run along walls?
Because touching an edge tells them where they are and keeps them out of open space, where anything can see them. The habit has a name: thigmotaxis.
Is a mouse the same as a rat?
No. A house mouse weighs between eleven and thirty grams; a brown rat can weigh ten times that. They are relatives, but not the same animal.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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