Diet

Mice prefer seeds of various plants, succulent green parts of herbs, roots, also eat fruit, more rarely insects. If there is enough food, they make small stocks. When living indoors, mice are omnivorous - the food includes absolutely everything that people and their pets eat, and many other things, such as soap and dead animals (remains of other mice when faced with hunger). They do not need much drinking water, because tend to take in water with food as much as possible.

Habitat

In Latvia, the house mouse is now widespread and can be seen in a variety of places.

Various voids under the floor, behind the plaster, above the ceiling, unused furniture, piles of old cloth, etc. are useful for nesting mice in buildings. If necessary, the animals carve out or widen the entrance to a hiding place themselves, thus creating a hole about 3 cm in diameter. House mice use the most unimaginable materials for their nests shredding them beforehand.

When living outside the house, they live in various natural voids or other rodents’ caves, less often they dig their own caves for nests. Nests are usually made of finely chopped dry grass, leaves and moss, spread with a variety of soft materials.

Important and interesting facts

Mice are good jumpers.

They use a wide variety of materials for making nests, thus damaging homes and equipment. Their most serious natural enemies: various predators (mainly martens, foxes, domestic cats), rats, birds of prey, crows, gulls.

They do harm to agriculture. Mice eat, destroy, contaminate food. When infesting homes, house mice may pose a risk of damaging and compromising the structure of furniture and the building itself. House mice can sometimes transmit diseases, contaminate food, and damage food packaging. Those mice that have been living outside for a long time bring ectoparasites on their bodies.

White, black and mottled laboratory mice were bred from domestic mice and are widely used by mankind to fight various diseases, mainly in their diagnosis, including in experiments with pharmacological agents.

Information sources: latvijasdaba.lv, Wikipedia

Photo: Ralfs Punans