Enriched Laboratory Housing Increases Sensitivity to Social Stress in Female California Mice ()

Domesticated mice and rats have shown to be powerful model systems for biomedical research, but there are cases in which the biology of species is a poor match for the hypotheses under study. The California mouse () has unique traits that make it an ideal model for studying biological mechanisms underlying human-relevant behaviors such as intra-female aggression, biparental care, and monogamy. Indeed, peer-reviewed scientific publications using California mouse as a model for behavioral research have more than doubled in the past decade. Critically, behavioral outcomes in captive animals can be profoundly affected by housing conditions, but there is very limited knowledge regarding species-specific housing needs in California mice. Currently, California mouse investigators have to rely on guidelines aimed for more common laboratory species that show vastly different physiology, behavior, and/or ecological niche. This not only could be suboptimal for animals' welfare, but also result in lack of standardization that could potentially compromise experimental reproducibility and replicability across laboratories. With the aim of assessing how different housing systems can affect California mouse behavior both in the home cage as well as the open field and social interaction tests before and after social defeat stress, here we tested three different caging systems: 1. Standard mouse cage, 2. Large cage, and 3. Large cage + environmental enrichment (EE), which focused on increasing vertical complexity based on observations that California mice are semiarboreal in the wild. We found that the effects of housing were largely sex specific: compared to standard cages, in females large + EE reduced home cage stereotypic-like backflipping and rearing behaviors, while large cage increased social interactions. In males, the large+EE cage reduced rearing and digging but did not significantly affect backflipping behavior. Interestingly, while there were no significant differences in the open field and social interaction pre-stress behaviors, large and large+EE housing increased the sensitivity of these tests to detect stress induced phenotypes in females. Together, these results suggest that increasing social and environmental complexity affects home cage behaviors in male and female California mice without interfering with, but rather increasing the magnitude of, the effects of defeat stress on the open field and social interaction tests.