strange behavior in mouse when handling - (Aug/10/2006 )
i'm doing holeboard testing with our mice, the first ten days of which consist of just handling the animal: holding it on my palm for one minute and letting it explore the holeboard for three. on the third day with a particular group, i picked up a mouse by her tail (gently) and set her on my palm. she started moving and sniffing a little, then suddenly froze, made awful squeaking noises, and tipped over onto her right side with her paws and tail curled, and blowing spit bubbles (and evacuating her bladder on my hand - yay for gloves!). when i set her on the board, she snapped out of it, but then started turning in tight clockwise circles while "kissing" the ground, for almost the entire three minutes. this exact same thing happened with this mouse 5 out of 10 days; the other days she acted just like the others. i wouldn't expect this behavior from her genotype, and our lab manager said he'd seen the same behavior in another mouse with a different genotype but didn't know what caused it. has anyone else seen something similar, or have any ideas as to what was going on? i don't even know what search terms to enter for a literature or google search. 
some sort of seizure maybe?
I've never seen that behavior exactly. However, I do work with a lot of mice and rats with brain tumors and one set of mice that are huntington's disease models. I have had several of those ones go into seizures while handling them. Some of what you described sounds like that. I wonder if maybe your mouse had a stroke or something like that. It definately sounds like some form of brain damage (at least that would be my guess).
Was ur mouse a transgenic of any kind? Was this mice a seizure model ?
I'm naive in this field, but it looks like epilepsy.
Do mice suffer of epilepsy?
Do mice suffer of epilepsy?
U could induce seizure in mice just by administering some drugs. I have seen seizures after anesthetising.
I'm naive in this field, but it looks like epilepsy.
Do mice suffer of epilepsy?
U could induce seizure in mice just by administering some drugs. I have seen seizures after anesthetising.
I've had that happen with my mice as well (both when I was putting them under and also when they were coming out of it).
one mouse was a transgenic alzheimer's model, the other is a parkinson's model, but they have different backgrounds (as far as i understand, i nearly failed genetics). the first two were older when this was first noticed (my pd mouse is 15months); this week i started a new group, 3month-old double transgenetic ad models, and i'm seeing it in one of them now. when i put her back in the cage after handling, she freezes, and falls over. i don't think it's stroke, because it happens multiple times...maybe some sort of epilepsy, but where does it come from? no drugs or anathesia are involved. it almost looks like narcolepsy, except for the stiffness! our institute's veterinarian is out of town 
Or just extremly nervous mice that get a seizure from the handling stress? Some livestock races have this problem as a result of neglecting the "character" in favour of e.g developmental time etc. in breeding programs. Some pig races had this problem, they got heart attacks when they experienced too much stress.
i hope i'm not causing them so much stress that they're having seizures! i'm trying to be nice to the little buggers
Probably their genetics make them more vulnerabel that even a little bit of stress could induce such behaviour. And as ur mice r models for neurodegenerative diseases, stress is exaggerated in these mice.
U could add this as a phenotype. 