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Researcher Rodent - TV Tropes

  • ️Wed Sep 25 2024

Researcher Rodent (trope)

Some rodents bring diseases. This one works to find cures for them.

Mice and rats are popular subject animals in Animal Testing — their unfussy diets, hardiness, rapid reproduction, and ease of finding and catching made them popular early subjects for medical or behavioral tests, and by the present day entire specialized strains and breeds have been created for testing purposes. This has led to a strong association of these rodents with science and medical research. One way in which this manifests is for the rodents to be associated with science not as subjects, but rather as scientists and experimenters in their own right.

Mice and mouse-themed characters often appear as scientists or stereotypes thereof, especially as more comedic variants such as the Absent-Minded Professor and the Mad Scientist. Physically, they are often, although not exclusively, based on the white-furred albino mice used in testing. While this is especially common in Funny Animal settings where mice or rats are just scientists by inclination, a common variant depicts "traditional" laboratory rats or mice who gain intelligence as a result of experimentation and develop an interest in the process themselves.

Occasionally, other rodents like hamsters, gerbils or guinea pigs will be used instead of murines, as they are also common test subjects in laboratories for many of the same reasons as mice are. They tend to be more buffoonish or eccentric, however. Even squirrel scientists are not unheard of.

Subtrope of Animal Occupation Stereotypes. Compare Resourceful Rodent, which refers to rodents using wits and wiles to compensate for their small size and weakness, and The Lab Rat, which describes characters that perform scientific analysis. Not to be confused with Professor Guinea Pig, which discusses scientists that use themselves as testing subjects, although individual characters may end up being examples of both tropes.

Examples:

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Film — Animation 

  • The Great Mouse Detective: The mouse Basil, being based on Sherlock Holmes, is a master detective and an amateur chemist who has a laboratory in his house.
  • Ratatouille: Remy is a variant; he's highly intelligent for a common rat (to the point that he taught himself to read). At the start of the movie, he reveals to his brother that he regularly sneaks into the farm house of an elderly woman to study her cookbook and teach himself to cook. He's capable of understanding human speech note  and able to study human behavior to the point that he's able to think his way out of numerous situations.
  • The Secret of NIMH: The National Institute of Mental Health performed genetic experiments on rats and mice to increase their intelligence. Several of the rats and two mice managed to escape and establish their own hidden society. The rats consider themselves a Proud Scholar Race but steal most of their technology from humans, with one of the conflicts of the movie occurring between those who want to maintain that lifestyle and others who want to move far away from humanity and develop their own technology. Mr. Ages, one of the mice, has an extensive laboratory built from an abandoned grain thresher and acts as a doctor for many of the local non-NIMH rodents.

Literature 

  • Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH: The eponymous rats were given humanlike intelligence by experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health. They later escaped from the lab and established a technologically advanced civilization on the edge of a human farm. Mrs. Frisby, a field mouse, seeks them out for medicine for her sickly son.
  • The scientifically-minded white rodent girl is something of a stock character in Pauli Kidd's furry novels:
    • The Fangs of K'aath: Itbit's fur was dyed permanently green but in the second book she's a bit of a teenage prodigy in Osra's developing sciences, and dabbles in magic despite the Court Mage's refusal to teach her yet.
    • Red Sails in the Fallout (a licensed Gamma World novel): Shaani the mutant white rat fancies herself a scientist, inspired by pre-apocalypse articles she found that mentioned lab rats and made her think that they were assistants to human scientists. The villain, a Knight of Genetic Purity, shows her the truth in order to break her.

Live-Action TV 

  • Beakman's World: One of Beakman's science assistants is Lester the Rat — not a real rat, but a man in a rat suit. At first he was a Classically-Trained Extra bemoaning having to play a rat but in later seasons, he acts like "man-in-a-rat-suit" is his species.
  • Farscape: Namtar is an alien variant — a rodent-like alien who was subjected to intelligence-enhancing experiments by scientists. He became an Uplifted Animal, quickly surpassing the intelligence of the scientists experimenting on him, and developed an obsession with using genetic engineering to turn himself into a perfect lifeform.

Radio 

  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: In the original radio series and in the book, TV, and movie versions, white lab mice are actually the most intelligent creatures on Earth, with dolphins second and humans third. However, that is because these "mice" are actually three-dimensional projections of an ancient, powerful multidimensional race (depicted as human-looking in some versions). They're highly philosophical and built the supercomputer Deep Thought in a bid to determine the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When the answer was determined to be "42", they commissioned the creation of planet Earth, which was actually an even more powerful computer, to determine what the question was. They then manifested on Earth as mice to control and fine-tune its operations. Running the wrong way in mazes or unexpectedly dropping dead at the right moment could have vast knock-on effects, after all.

Tabletop Games 

  • Pugmire: The rats and mice have a cultural fascination with the ancient, lost art of Science that Mankind wielded. They have an unsavory reputation among dogs and cats in this regard, not helped by some of their extremist groups such as the Cult of Labor Tor, rodentine Mad Scientists who view cruel experimentation as an act of worship of man. Squeaks in the Deep expands on their culture and views, depicting them as a Proud Scholar Race who view Science as a way to a way to learn and gain power through study, observation, and experimentation, and who tirelessly study the relics of ancient humanity to learn how to emulate their ways.
  • Warhammer: The Skaven, an underground civilization of evil Rat Men, have a number of these, and all of them are Mad Scientists by nature. The Warlock-Engineers of Clan Skryre, such as the infamous Ikit Claw, specialize in mechanical engineering, with particular focus on things such as giant lasers, "ratling guns", and nuclear bombs. The monster-makers of Clan Moulder, such as Throt the Unclean, instead focus on the creation of horrific creatures through selective breeding, surgery, and alchemical manipulation. The Skaven in general are infamous for a number of contraptions and constructions that are as potent as they are hazardous.

Video Games 

  • Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Petri — named Rika ("Science") in Japanese — is a mouse villager with a scientist/medical theme. She wears a labcoat and large glasses, periodically stops while walking around to inspect objects with a magnifying glass, and lives in a house decorated like a medical laboratory or examination room, with furniture such as a medical bed, a microscope, a medicine cabinet, and a floating animal figure in a fluid-filled tube.
  • EverQuest II: The Ratonga are particularly adept at being mages, and show much interest and skill with tinkering up contraptions just like the gnomes, but they're not nearly as obsessed with it.
  • Inherit the Earth: The Rat Tribe are a Proud Scholar Race who have converted much of their warren (an old human-built sewer system) into the biggest library in the known world. Even rats that aren't directly involved with running the library or doing research prize education and knowledge to a degree far beyond the rest of their medieval-ish world.
  • Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire: One of Cosplay Pikachu's costumes is "Pikachu, Ph.D.", which represents the Smart/Clever Contest stat by dressing her up with a labcoat and mortarboard.
  • Przygody Reksia:
    • Spielmauster is a very creative mouse. He single-handedly designed and built the province of Piklibia and everything in it, including the dungeons. He also created mechanical knights to take part in role-playing games.
    • Al-Chomik is an alchemist hamster.
    • Professor Dr. Jones and his son Tomasz are a pair of archaeologist rats.
  • Sly Cooper features Penelope, a mouse from Holland, who is a talented machinist and inventor, capable of creating and piloting a wide variety of inventions. This leads her to form a bond and eventual romance with Bentley which eventually drives her to villainy in Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time where she comes to feel Bentley is being held back by Sly and his friends.
  • Small Saga: Plaguemaster Aquila is a rat scientist working for the King of Rodentia. They're deeply frustrated that, being a member of a much shorter-lived species, none of their research can measure up to what humans can accomplish in just one lifetime.

Web Animation 

  • Kid Vampire: Dr. D has an animal companion named Stubert, a hyper-intelligent lab rat who works as his assistant in many of his experiments.
  • Phase-Connect: Eimi Isami is a hamster girl who was once an ordinary lab hamster, until an experiment turned her into a Little Bit Beastly humanoid, and is now a scientist running her own experiments.

Webcomics 

  • In Our Shadow: The rats are by far the most technologically advanced species in the post-human world, having access to Humongous Mecha, Disintegrator Ray weaponry and Artificial Gravity. The first rats to enter the story are also all scientists, on an expedition to find human artifacts. This is subverted when it turns out that the rats didn't actually invent their own technology but gained it through their leader accidentally activating a device containing the sum total of knowledge held by the vanished hyper-advanced human civilization, and said leader is still the only one who knows how all their fancy tech actually works.
  • Las Lindas: Tootsie is a genius mouse who specializes in robotics.

Web Original 

  • Rats SMP: Among the rat protagonists, Owen is a tinkerer who specializes in engineering and is generally willing to investigate dangerous substances — such as a Festering Fungus — For Science!.
  • Vermin, a YouTube puppet series, features as its main character Ralph T. Raight, who was promoted to "Associate Rat Researcher" at Placeholder Labs, which puts him at odds with his fellow rats as he's now the "Coat" in charge of overseeing the experiments being conducted on them.

Western Animation