Rat colonies(warning Educational content)

Konrad Lorenz was a famous German who studied the behaviours of animals.

Besides doing the typical stuff like swimming in a lake with a gaggle of geese following him because they imprinted him as their mother,

He studied RATS.

Rats, you see, behave a little bit like humans.

He saw that if there was some good space to start a colony,

Man Wife rat couples, seeking to own this territory,  

would fight to the death all other contending couples,

until only one beaten, limping couple was left standing.

They won all rights to the territory

By simple hard fact that they were the last ones standing

They would make babies,
They would grow up and make more babies,
living communally,  
building living quarters in  tunnels underground  
  
Konrad, the curious researcher, removed a rat,

let it live separately in a cage.  
Being separated, and fed different food,
developed a different smell.  
Then he put the rat back in the colony, and that rat felt right back at home.
 
But the other rats, thought he was a stranger,
because he smelled differently.  
When a rat bumped into him, it went into a feisty battle alarm mood.
This mood, was highly transferable.
The next rat he bumped into, he would grab first,
then then let go, after sensing he had grabbed a freindly cousin.

But that put the grabbed rat into the same highly transferable fighting mode.

 then those two rats bumped into two more, making four feisty rats.  in exonential fashion, the whole colony is up in arms,
ready to stalk and kill the invader, even though only one rat had actually bumped into the villain.

That poor rat that smelled a bit off,
 would not have known what hit him,
had Konrad  left him in there.  
He took the poor rat out,
before he was torn apart
limb from limb