 Hi, I'm Caroline and this is Jamie, and we're both senior animal technologists here at The Crick. We're going to take you on a tour of one of the units here and tell you a little bit about what we do. So yes, the ferrets are in the box, they're very excited because they want to get out. So before we open the boxes, we put masks on because we don't want to pass anything on to the ferrets. Plus we need them to be healthy, ready for the influenza infection in a week's time. Because we don't know the chance for one of these ferrets, we need to make sure that we're protected because they can bite. So when you take a ferret out, you need to make sure that you support it's ramp. So you will come in here for about half an hour in the morning and then another half an hour in the afternoon. Once they've settled in for the first day, before they get infected, we get the ferrets out so they can exercise and be social because they are social animals, they like to interact with us and also they interact with each other as they go up and down. So this one's just having a little sniffing explore, so we're just checking that their water bottle level has gone down, that they're eating their food, this one's completely chucked all this food out. And we're just making sure that they are urinating and defocating, obviously to make sure they're healthy and functioning correctly. Yes I know. Hello. Hello. So these are our nude mice. So these mice are immunocompromised. Nude mice a lot of the time are used for tumour experiments because they have no immune system. So the tumours are allowed to grow subcutaneously and then we can measure them and it's easier to see on nude mice than on fairy mice. Because they don't have any eyelashes, they don't have any fur, they don't have whiskers, well they have a few whiskers. So cleaning themselves sometimes is more difficult, so sometimes you just need to bathe their eyes and clean them so they don't get a build up of dust in their eyes. The mice inside this room have pathogens that we don't want spreading to the other colonies. So we need to protect those mice from whatever we've got inside this room. So by donning an extra set of PPEs, we've got an extra lab coat, hair net and overshoes. Those will get dirty when we go in the room and when we come back out we'll dispose of this outside layer and leave those pathogens inside the room. So this mouse here has a subcutaneous tumour which we're going to measure. So the tumours that this mouse has are spontaneous growing tumours because they have a genotype for this and you can see just below the surface of the skin there are these bumps here. For these mice we will monitor them closely and we will palpate for tumours twice a week and once a tumour is palpable we'll then move on to measuring the tumours twice a week so that we can monitor the size of the tumours. Once the tumours reach a specific size or before the experiment will be ended so that the mouse doesn't undergo any unnecessary suffering. So these guys have got head implants, so all of these mice had surgery on the same day. They are used for various reasons so that they could be looking at sleep patterns. So they've got the probe into the brain and they can read it on a computer. So we don't perform the surgery ourselves, it's the scientists that perform the surgery. Afterwards we need to look after the mice. So when they've finished surgery the mice are put into a recovery chamber. They get checks of every half an hour after their surgery and they're also given analgesic. So in a petri dish they are given basically it's a little bit of custard mixed with analgesic which is metacam and they all eat that. They normally like it because custard is a little bit sweeter so they don't waste their custard. So this is the process of ear snipping. Ear snipping is so you take a small piece of tissue from the mouse's ear. They are testing the genetics of the mice so to work out if they are carrying the correct gene of interest for the scientists. It's done at two weeks of age so the mice are taken out and they are scruffed and you can see a small ear notch is taken from each mouse. The small ear piece is then placed into a well plate which is sent off for genetic testing and the results take about five days to get back so then the mice can be used quite early if they are required at a young age for the experiments. Of course the opossums are a tropical species. We've raised the temperature to between 26 and 28 degrees Celsius. This can make it quite hard for the technicians that work in this room and so we do expect that they take regular breaks. We will check the opossums once every day in the morning. So we're looking at the opossum from nose tip to tail making sure that the fur is nice and bright, that the eyes are bright, that the behaviour is generally okay. They are quite timid animals so most of them we'll be hiding right about now. The life expectancy of opossums is around about five years. Over the course of a year we will set up a mating every month and we will rotate the males and the females so that we aren't using the same ones over and over again. So you will see that we have given the opossums a cage with two levels and this is because they are a semi arboreal species. They are also given a tube, a house with some nesting material and a small crawl ball which they will use as a house sometimes too. So to pick the opossum up you can grab near the base of the tail and let them hold on to you with their back paws and place them straight into the jug to be weighed. This female weighs 60g which is fine for a female of her age. So now that she's been weighed you can take her back out. You'll see in the cage that they have the pellets in the middle and then when we give them the health checks in the morning they will be given a meal one. So we give them a variety of foods and this is representative of the variety that they would get in the wild. So because of their dentition they don't actually chew their food they just bite chunks out of it and swallow. All of our opossums are singly housed whether they are male or female and that is because they are aggressive to everyone else. The only time they generally come together is during mating or when the mum has a litter of joeys.