If this discovery is confirmed, it could have big implications for previous studies centered around these vocalizations, while also providing insight into how humans might one day manipulate nanoparticles using just sound.

The life of a mouse isn't an easy one. A mammal squarely at the bottom of the food chain, the existence of these rodents relies almost entirely on its ability to differentiate friend from foe. For decades, scientists have known that rodents use ultrasonic vocalizations, or USVs, both to navigate their world and (possibly) for courtship displays, not unlike the calls of certain types of birds.

However, Eduardo Mercado III -- a bioacoustics expert at the University of Buffalo -- wondered if these inaudible squeaks might have greater utility than we'd previously imagined. With a background in studying the high-pitched melodies of whale song, Mercado found inconsistencies in a rodent's vocal behavior when studied through the lens of a courtship ritual -- primarily, the specimens always appeared to sniff after producing a USV. Instead of just being an elaborate, bird-like mating display, Mercado suggested that these vocalizations might also manipulate particles in the rodents' immediate environments to enhance their senses of smell. The results of the study were published in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.

"This phenomenon has never been observed before, or I believe even suspected, in any animal," Mercado said in a press statement. "They're creating new pathways of information by manipulating their environment and controlling the molecular interactions of particles around them. It's so far off the scale of what we know that it's like we're observing 'Jedi' rats."

Although the word "Jedi" evokes images of some sort of Splinter-meets-Obi-Wan crossover, the word has actually been evoked before. In September of last year, scientists from UCLA successfully demonstrated that rats could move a digital object using just their brain. It really seems like the force is strong with these rodent padawans.

And while this phenomenon hasn't been previously witnessed in the wild, the technique is a well-known one in the world of vibroacoustics, where artificially created USVs can cluster particles in a localized area. If rodents employed a similar technique, it'd make the task of sifting through friendly pheromones and suspicious smells much easier.

Far from making them the only animals with a strange sense of smell, the confirmation of this ability would place rodents in a fairly extensive top-tier-smelling club. Snakes, for instance, use their forked tongues to "smell in stereo" as scent particles are picked up by their tongues and transported to the vomeronasal organ, giving them a heightened sense of smell. For animals that rely on all of their senses to avoid being on the receiving end of a hungry predator, rodents evolving their sensoral mechanisms to enhance their sense of smell makes a lot of sense.

Of course, there's another extremely important reason that's crucial to get to the bottom of these USVs -- medical research.

"Rodents are at the forefront of biological research," Jessica Zhou, a student researcher at Harvard University and co-author of the paper, said in a press statement. "Rodents, especially rats and mice, are the unsung heroes of the scientific world."

Mercado notes that rat vocalizations have been used in studying disorders related to communication, social behavior, and emotional processing. If these USVs are more complicated than we originally thought, Mercado argues, those results may need to be reexamined. However, this discovery could open new doors to understanding how to manipulate nanoparticles using sound -- similar to how nocturnal animals taught humanity the secrets of night vision.

"The fact that we were oblivious to anything like this being possible means we don't have the understanding yet for how nanoparticles might be sonically manipulated for complex uses," Mercado said in a press statement. "But we might have a pretty big head start if we confirm that nature has already solved the problem for us."