"By 2030, 56 countries will have more people aged 65+ than children under 15"
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/min
"The one thing that the rats lacked was space. And as the population grew there were soon too many rats for each to have its own territory and this led to an increasing number of fights. Unable to control the frequency of social contact, the rats became increasingly stressed"
"But there was no scarcity of food and water in Calhoun’s universe. The only thing that was in short supply was space. This was, after all, “heaven”—a title Calhoun deliberately used with pitch-black irony. The point was that crowding itself could destroy a society before famine even got a chance. In Calhoun’s heaven, hell was other mice."
"Other males, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex and never fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection."
"Calhoun consistently found that those animals better able to handle high numbers of social interactions fared comparatively well. “High social velocity” mice were the winners in hell."
"The mortality rate among females was extremely high. A large proportion of the population became bisexual, then increasingly homosexual, and finally asexual."
"It was also noticed that food was being consumed more in certain areas, despite the fact that all of the compartments were identical. The mice began to associate eating and drinking with being with others, rarely if ever eating alone, and the population started to gravitate towards certain compartments where all of the eating took place. This made some apartments and compartments crowded well beyond their intended capacity while others remained sparsely populated or even empty. The enclosure wasn’t truly overcrowded, as it had been designed for up to 3,000 mice, but rather, it had developed a very unbalanced distribution of individuals."
"The female mice were not having much more luck. In the absence of any males willing to protect their nests, mothers began to become highly aggressive towards trespassers, essentially taking on the role typically reserved for the males."
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4
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