Can mice really sing?

A male house mouse, captured in Detroit in 1925, had an extraordinary ability; it could sing. Normal mice produce high-pitched squeaks but this one warbled like a bird. Was its talent inherited or acquired?

Scientists at the University of Michigan bred it with laboratory mice but none of the resulting offspring sang. How a mouse managed to produce such extraordinary sounds also defied explanation but, with the technology available back then, that problem couldn’t be solved either.

Reports of musically talented rodents surfaced from time to time and a scientific paper appeared in 1932, but the case of the singing mouse was largely forgotten. Then, in 2004, ecologist Matina Kalcounis- Rueppell began studying animal sounds in a forest at night. The noises she heard were mostly bat clicks, frog croaks and insect chattering but there were mysterious high-pitched sequences occasionally. One sounded suspiciously like whalesong. Was it produced by a singing rodent?