Golden-rumped elephant shrew (click image to enlarge)

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Here is the golden-rumped elephant shrew, which is also known as a golden-rumped sengi, or a yellow-rumped either one of those. It’s not actually related to the shrews, although it is related to the elephants, distantly. Some things I’ve learned about this fellow:

1. Translating its scientific name at the website of a zoology course at the University of Alberta, I see that this sengi’s official name means snout-dog golden-rump. (Pygos means rump, and is found in the word callipygian, “having well-shaped buttocks,” which is one of those words that middle-schoolers delight in discovering in the dictionary.)

2. The rump is golden for a reason. That pretty blond fur covers a padded area of super-tough skin. The idea seems to be that predators will be attracted to the golden glow and bite there, rather than somewhere that might hurt more.

3. The golden-rumped sengi lives only in a tiny area of coastal Kenya.

4. It’s number 46 on the EDGE list of the top 100 evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered mammals—in other words, this endangered species is particularly irreplaceable.

5. This elephant shrew is monogamous, which is quite rare for a small mammal, or indeed, any mammal.

6. It can be very difficult to distinguish between the members of the Rhynchocyon genus, also known as the giant forest sengis, in the field, but the California Academy of Sciences has a page dedicated to helping you tell them apart.

7. According to the American Society of Mammalogists’ species account of this elephant shrew,

“If mildly disturbed, Rhynchocyon freezes until the danger passes, or, if further disturbed, it walks away while loudly slapping the leaf litter with its tail every 1 to 3 seconds. If pursued, Rhynchocyon takes flight using a swift half-bound gait…hammering the leaf litter loudly with its rear legs, and producing a characteristic “crunch, crunch, crunch” sound as it disappears.”

8. The golden-rumped elephant shrew is diurnal, or active during the day, and spends its nights in a nest it builds on the forest floor. For some reason, it requires a new nest every other day or so. It builds the new nest in the morning, and the construction takes about two hours.

Below is Coco’s golden-rumped elephant shrew. See you tomorrow!

Golden-rumped elephant shrew by Coco, age 12

Japanese mole (click image to enlarge)

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Researching this mole, I found a short story in the Paris Review by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese, called “Mogera Wogura.” It is a fantastic story, in both senses of the word, and it seems to be digging its mole claws into my mind. It’s strange and I suspect it will haunt me a while. Somebody else please read it so we can discuss it!

Japanese mole by Coco, age 12 (click image to enlarge)

Coco’s drawing has sold!

The moles are very common and have no major threats, which is great for the little fellows. I wonder about the origin of the Japanese mole’s scientific name, but I can’t find anything on it. It seems that the common Japanese word for a mole is mogura, which is pretty much a combination of this mole’s generic and specific names. Hmm. There is only so much I can learn, and this shall have to be a mole nomenclature mystery in my life, I imagine.

Like everyone, my daughter Coco and I have been saddened by the earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan this month. We’ve decided to have a Daily Mammal fundraiser to raise some money to help people and animals affected by the disasters.

Next week, beginning Sunday and running through Saturday, the two of us will post drawings of Japanese mammals. We’ll post a new mammal each morning of the week at 10 am mountain time. Our drawings will be for sale with all proceeds going to help victims of the Japanese earthquakes. Half of the money will go to the American Red Cross, to help human mammals, and half to Animal Refuge Kansai, a Japanese organization that’s rescuing animals who lost their homes.

My drawings will be selling for $50, or $60 with a mat. Coco’s will be $25 unmatted and $35 matted. (The drawings are 6″ x 9″ and the mats are 9″ x 12″.)

Please come back Sunday and all next week to meet some beautiful mammals from Japan and consider purchasing a drawing to help victims of the tsunami and earthquake, and please invite your friends to stop by, too.

Now on to the jackrabbit!

Tehuantepec jackrabbit (click image to enlarge)

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This jackrabbit lives in Oaxaca, Mexico, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. It used to live in Chiapas, too, but that population seems to be gone. The rabbit is quite endangered; fewer than 1,000 individuals remain. It lives in savannas and grassy dunes along the shores of salt lagoons, and it is threatened by hunting, habitat destruction due to agriculture and human settlements, and fires caused by humans. I would venture that this jackrabbit’s enormous ears are not to enhance its hearing but rather to act as cooling devices, like the huge ears of the fennec fox. If you’d like to read a scholarly article about this hare’s home range and social behavior, here is a link to a PDF of one from a 2006 issue of Journal of Mammalogy by Verónica Farías et al.

Isn’t it sometimes so difficult to remember or even to believe that humans are just another kind of mammal? We would make the top ten list of anybody’s list of the world’s strangest mammals—if we weren’t the only ones who make such lists. In the two-volume Walker’s Mammals of the World, which I believe is one of the definitive reference works on mammal species, we humans are represented solely by images of astronauts. Isn’t that remarkable? Can you think of a better way to show what makes us distinct in the world? Well, you could show us as the only species that willfully destroys its own habitat (surely we are), but that’s a bit of a downer. We’re great apes…who figured out how to visit the moon! It’s amazing.

Anyway, a mammal named Coco drew the Tehuantepec jackrabbit, too, and her drawing is gorgeous. You will likely want to begin collecting her work next week, when you can still get an original drawing for $25, instead of waiting until she’s grown up and famous and they’re selling for $25,000.

Tehuantepec jackrabbit by Coco, age 12 (click image to enlarge)

Silky anteater (click image to enlarge)

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I’m posting two mammals tonight, both to get a day ahead of the actual World Cup and because I really hate my second drawing and want to bury it beneath the one above, which I actually like. So first, here’s the silky anteater, also called the pygmy anteater (Cyclopes didactylus), representing Brazil. Brazil was one of the two favorites to win the whole World Cup, but it has been bounced. Tomorrow is the second semifinal game, which will be played between Germany and Spain. Holland beat Uruguay today in the first semifinal match, so there are only European teams left.

The silky anteater is a strange little beast. It lives in the trees of the rainforest, and it’s nocturnal. It eats, as its name would suggest, ants, and they’re its favorite, but it will also eat termites. It’s a small little bitty anteater, just about 8 inches long and weighing less than a pound. Apparently, it lives in a tree that has fibrous, silky seedpods, which camouflage the little anteater as he safely sleeps the day away. According to EDGE of Existence, “Its long tongue is equipped with small spikes and mucus and is perfect for gathering up ants and termites.”

Here’s an odd little cameo appearance of the silky anteater from the 1972 movie Aguirre, the Wrath of God, directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski:

Korean hare (click image to enlarge)

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North Korea is a mystery in general, and a mystery at the World Cup as well. This was the first time they’d qualified since 1966, when, according to an essay published in Time a couple of weeks ago, they “thrilled the World Cup” and ushered in a new era of competition, fitness, and endurance, even though they lost their quarterfinal match against Portugal. There’s a documentary about the 1966 team that looks interesting.

During this 2010 World Cup, a few interesting stories came to light. North Korea’s star, Jong Tae-Se, while North Korean by ancestry, was born in Japan and lives there. He said that he amazed his teammates by showing them his cell phone. They are easily amused, Jong Tae-Se says: their favorite between-games activity is rock, paper, scissors. And it’s no wonder they’ve never seen a cell phone before: they’re used to invisible ones, like the one Kim Jong-Il supposedly used to communicate with the team’s coach during their World Cup matches.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m trying to be more cosmopolitan, and the first and biggest step in that direction is to seek to understand people from other places and cultures. But it is so hard to understand people from North Korea. Of course, it would be hard to understand any country about which so little is known, but when North Koreans are allowed to talk, they sound like cult members. There’s such a huge wall there, but whether it’s a wall of terror or paranoia or brainwashing or sheer deprivation, poverty, and exhaustion, I just don’t know. Newsweek worries about the North Korean team and their families. Since they brought dishonor to their motherland, losing all three of their games, including a 7-0 drubbing by Portugal, will they mysteriously disappear or face some other terrible fate? Newsweek argues that FIFA, the organization that governs international soccer, should boycott the country, as so many sports organizations boycotted South Africa. I have to say that I don’t see why we’re not boycotting the country, based on what we know of its secretive, abusive, dictatorial regime.

None of this is any business of the Korean hare’s (Lepus coreanus), a regular old hare who lives in both Koreas and in China.

Tree pangolin (click image to enlarge)

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Representing the Ivory Coast in the mammalian World Cup is this scaly, piny fellow, the tree pangolin. Like the anteaters of South America, the pangolin has evolved to have a long tongue and no teeth, adaptations that let it concentrate on eating ants. And like the armadillo, it has evolved a protective armor, in this case sharp scales that stick out of its thick skin. When threatened, the pangolin curls up in a tight ball that looks like a particularly round pinecone. Tree pangolins, like this one, have long, prehensile tails with a bare patch of skin at the end so they can use them to get a good grip on tree branches and swing upside down.

Sadly, the tree pangolin’s numbers are declining because of hunting for bushmeat and traditional medicine (its scales, of course, are considered an aphrodisiac, because someone considers every unusual part of any animal an aphrodisiac, it seems to me). The IUCN currently lists the species as near threatened; endangered is the next rung down the ladder to extinction.

The tree pangolin’s genus name, Manis, comes from the word manes, which is the ancient Roman word for spirits of the dead. The species name, tricuspis, does not denote teeth, as I had reckoned, but means “three points” and refers to the shape of the scales. Our bicuspid teeth, I guess, must have two points.

The Ivory Coast gives us a good chance to talk about an aspect of soccer we haven’t discussed: faking, diving, acting, flopping. In soccer, as in none of the major American sports as far as I know, players will pretend to be far more injured than they are in order to persuade the referees to call a foul against another player. One such foul, unless it’s especially egregious, will draw a yellow card, which is a sort of warning. Two yellow cards equal a red card, and a player who gets a red card is sent off the pitch, leaving his team down a man for the rest of the game, and is not allowed to play in his team’s next game.

In the Ivory Coast game against Brazil in this World Cup, there was a spectacular instance of diving, which is what this injury-faking is called. Brazil’s star, Kaká, gently jostled an Ivorian player named Kader Keita somewhere in the abdomen, and Keita fell to the ground clutching his eye, writhing in agony. Kaká had previously drawn a yellow card, and Keita’s lousy acting somehow convinced the ref to give Kaká the red card now, meaning Kaká was sent off and Brazil had to play with 10 players. It didn’t make the difference for Ivory Coast, though: they still lost 3-1 and did not advance past the group stage of the tournament. If you watch this video of highlights from the game, you can zip up to about 1:30 (after a 10-second ad) and see the star of the Ivory Coast team, Didier Drogba, make a really neat goal with his head, immediately followed by the Kader Keita-Kaká fracas.

Coco also drew a tree pangolin for us.

Tree pangolin by Coco, age 11

Group F Results

The tree pangolin is the first mammal from Group G, but I forgot to do the Group F results in the last post, so let’s do it now. Group F was the Alpine ibex from Italy, the black-and-gold howler monkey from Paraguay, the New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat, and Slovakia’s Tatra chamois.

When another group had a bat, I speculated that the bat would just fly away from the pitch, earning it either a draw or a forfeit. But the fact that this bat is evolving into being a ground mammal means it has the kind of adaptability that wins games. I think it could beat these other mammals. Of the others, the Alpine ibex’s horns are bigger and more threatening than the chamois’, and I think either of their sharp hooves could defeat the monkey. So the two teams from Group F that will continue on to the Round of 16 are:

New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat (New Zealand)
and
Alpine ibex (Italy)

American shrew mole (click image to enlarge)

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This smallest of the American moles looks about like how I imagine Mole in The Wind in the Willows: gray, chubby, soft, and blind. The American shrew mole lives in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada, from British Columbia to central California. The moles zip around in “runways” or trenches that they dig on the earth’s surface, just below the fallen leaves covering the ground. They also make the more classic kind of burrow, too.

American shrew moles only sleep one to eight minutes at a time—but they’re only awake between two and 18 minutes straight. (I picture them running along beneath the leaves and suddenly dropping in their tracks for a little snooze, then starting up just where they left off again. I don’t know if that’s accurate, though.) They use their noses to help them hunt in a rather methodical way. They’ll tap-tap-tap their nose on the ground in front of them, then turn their head to the right and tap-tap-tap again, then to the left with a tap-tap-tap, then take a step forward and repeat the process. They keep doing this until their nose touches a delicious earthworm, which they proceed to devour.

Snowshoe hare (click image to enlarge)

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Snowshoe hares live in Canada and the northern United States. Their name comes from their amazingly adapted hind feet, which are large and broad with a stiff coat of hair that lets them walk on top of snow. Their other impressive adaptation is their coloring. In the summer, they’re reddish brown, but when fall comes, they begin molting, replacing their brown fur with a new, fluffy white coat. In between the two coats, their fur is patchy, like patchy snow that falls and melts in the autumn or spring. Young snowshoe hares especially rely on this protective coloration to escape predators. They’ll freeze when they sense danger, trying to blend into the background. Older hares will often choose to run instead, and they can go as fast as 27 miles an hour.