Four voles of Switzerland (click image to enlarge)

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Our last competitors in the mammalian World Cup are these four fellows from Switzerland. Clockwise from the top right, we have the European water vole (Arvicola aquatica), the European snow vole (Chionomys nivalis), the European pine vole (Microtus subterraneus), and the bank vole (Myodes glareolus). Some good news about these guys: they are all widespread throughout their ranges with no major threats, and IUCN classifies them as Least Concern. Yay for the voles!

Switzerland’s soccer team has made it to the World Cup several times, reaching the quarterfinals twice in the 1930s and again in 1954. In 2006, the Swiss team set two World Cup records: they were the first team to be bumped out of the competition without anyone ever scoring a goal against them, and they were the first team to not make a single penalty kick in a shootout. (Ukraine made three against them in the Round of 16, which is how Switzerland was eliminated.) This year, they didn’t make it out of the group stage, although they did shock everyone by beating favorites Spain in their first game of the tournament.

Tomorrow is the final match of the World Cup, and I may miss it because I’ll be traveling, but I won’t miss giving you the results of the Mammals of the World Cup competition! First, we need to wrap up the group results.

Group H Results

Group H was the tayra from Honduras, the pudú from Chile, the Spanish ibex, and today’s four voles (that seems unfair, now that I think about it). The voles might run around underfoot, but they’ll hardly pose a threat. The pudú is tiny. The tayra is the closest thing we have to a carnivore in this group, and the ibex has some mighty horns. So the two mammals continuing on to the Round of 16 from this group are:

Tayra (Honduras)
and
Spanish Ibex (Spain)

European otter (click image to enlarge)

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Hi, mammals! I think I’ll be on track to finish the Mammals of the World Cup on schedule with the actual World Cup if I post all of Group E today and then get back to once-a-day tomorrow. (Whether I will succeed is still unknown, as life has been pretty stressful around here. But I’m trying!) Also, I’m really not doing my best work lately, so dumping four mammals on you at once might distract you from that fact.

Our first mammal is the European otter (Lutra lutra), who is representing the Netherlands, where its numbers had decreased to almost nothing but it has been reintroduced. The Netherlands beat Slovakia (where the Yak part of my name comes from) in the Round of 16 and will be playing Brazil in the quarterfinals on Friday.

Orca (click image to enlarge)

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The orca or killer whale (Orcinus orca) is playing for Denmark tonight. Did you know that orcas in groups have been known to take down blue whales? It’s unlikely, I think, that anyone is going to beat the orca in this World Cup. Denmark, on the other hand, didn’t make it out of the group stage.

Japanese dwarf flying squirrel (click image to enlarge)

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From Japan, the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel (Pteromys momonga), which is also known as the momonga! It’s just too cute to be believed, really, and is also represented on one of my favorite Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, seen below. (I’m very into Yu-Gi-Oh! now. It comes with the 14-year-old son. I have a beast deck. Besides the Nimble Momonga, I also have a Tree Otter, a Sea Koala, a Kangaroo Champ, a Green Baboon Defender of the Forest, and a Rescue Cat.)

A very handy Yu-Gi-Oh! card (click image to enlarge)

Japan made it to the Round of 16 but lost to Paraguay today. After the group stage, they don’t allow ties anymore. First, they have 30 minutes of overtime, and if there’s still a draw, they take turns taking penalty kicks, which are kicks from a spot 12 yards from the goal. Five players from each team try that, and if there’s still a draw after the penalty kicks, they play sudden death. After the 30 minutes of extra time, the Japan-Paraguay game was tied 0-0, and Paraguay won in penalty kicks.

Allen's swamp monkey (click image to enlarge)

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This is Allen’s swamp monkey (Allenopithecus nigroviridis), and it’s from Cameroon (as well as Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Its scientific name means “Allen’s ape, black and green,” and it is indeed kind of black-and-green colored. Cameroon didn’t get out of the group stage at the World Cup.

Group E Results

Well, the killer whale is the killer whale, and none of these guys stand a chance against that apex predator. It moves on to the next round, and I think our mustelid friend in this group, the European otter, could do some damage to the swamp monkey, and obviously the momonga is adorable and tiny and hopeless against any of the other three. So the two mammals continuing on to the Round of 16 from Group E are:

Orca (Denmark)
and
European Otter (Netherlands)

European beaver (click image to enlarge)

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So I somehow picked a mammal for England that’s been extinct in England for, oh, about 400 years or so. Yep. The European beaver was hunted nearly to extinction by the 20th century, and no longer existed in most countries of Europe. Now it’s being reintroduced, and it has successfully regained a place in a couple dozen European countries, such as Denmark and France. They’ve been reintroduced in an ongoing five-year trial in Scotland, but don’t worry, I read enough British mysteries to know that Scotland is not England. In England, it seems there have been one or two semi-unsuccessful reintroduction attempts, and one that’s going pretty well at my new home, Lower Mill Estate, a “residential nature reserve” of “luxury second homes” where “the kids can pound the bike and walking trails round our seven private lakes; dad can contemplate life over a pint in one of the local country pubs; mum can relax and have treatments in the award-winning Spa.” Yes, I use the quotes because I am envious. Lower Mill Estate has European beavers living in a 15-acre enclosure. Perhaps success there will mean more beavers in England in the near future.

As for England’s soccer team, I haven’t much to say except that I’m surprised that they’ve only won one World Cup, which was in 1966, when England hosted the tournament. Now they’re tied for second in Group C, which is surprisingly led by Slovenia, with the USA, and they still have a decent shot at continuing to the Round of 16, even though they’ve been fairly lackluster and were even booed by their own fans after their match against Algeria ended in a draw.

Patagonian mara (click image to enlarge)

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To celebrate the World Cup, I’m drawing and writing about one mammal from each of the 32 countries that are participating. Those 32 countries are divided into eight groups, and today we continue meeting Group B with a visit to Argentina. The Patagonian mara is a long-legged rodent that lives only in Argentina, and it’s one of only a handful of monogamous mammals. (Do biologists count humans as monogamous mammals?)

Argentina’s soccer players may or may not be monogamous, but they are allowed to have sex during the World Cup (not during the actual games—that should go without saying), which is for some (I think misogynistic) reason controversial. (My favorite piece of information from the article linked above is that Argentina’s coach in the 1986 World Cup was a former gynecologist.) Most likely, everybody will be letting their players have sex and eat steak from grass-fed pampas cattle during tournaments now that Argentina is one of only two teams in the World Cup that won both of its first two matches, the other being the Netherlands, and before you ask, I do not know Holland’s sex policy is, but I do know that the Dutch players are no longer allowed to use Twitter. Unless something truly nutty happens, Argentina will be continuing on to the Group of 16 after playing Greece on Tuesday.

Alpine marmot (click image to enlarge)

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Hello mammals! To celebrate the World Cup, we’re meeting one mammal from each of the 32 countries that are playing. Today we visit France, the last member of the wide-open Group A, who played to a 0–0 draw against Uruguay last and will face Mexico tomorrow.

France is one of the top-ranked teams in the tournament, having won the World Cup in 1998 (the country also hosted) and come in second in 2006. The 2006 World Cup final became infamous when one of France’s stars, Zinedine Zidane, was ejected (“sent off,” they call it in soccer) from the game for head-butting Italy’s Marco Materazzi. It was agreed that Materazzi had insulted Zidane in some way, and many lip-readers took a stab at figuring out what exactly he had said. In Materazzi’s autobiography, he finally confessed: he had called Zidane’s sister a whore.

Most of the lip-readers’ ideas were even more inflammatory; Materazzi won a lawsuit against one English paper who claimed he had called Zidane, whose parents are Algerian, the “son of a terrorist whore.” In the end, I think the wild guesses say more about the guessers than about Materazzi, and that’s often the way with our subconscious biases. The racial diversity of France’s national team has been noted with both approbation and disgust, and those reactions, too, seem to reflect France’s issues with race and ethnicity in general. Italy, France’s opponent in the 2006 final, has a more ethnically homogenous population, and politicians in both France and Italy made racist comments about the team. My favorite response to one of these men, who said that the French could not see themselves in the team and thus were unlikely to fully support it, came from a black member of the French side, who said, “Hurrah for France—not the one he wants, the real one!”

The alpine marmot has none of the cultural baggage that we humans carry. It is widespread throughout its range and is showing itself capable to adapting and spreading to other environments, too. It lives in burrowing colonies up to 3,000 meters in altitude (around 10,000 feet).

Group A Results

Now we’ve met the players in the mammals’ Group A: South Africa’s vervet monkey, Mexico’s gray squirrel, Uruguay’s coypu, and France’s alpine marmot. Unlike South Africa’s soccer team, which has to go up against some stiff competition, South Africa’s mammal has it easy in this group of rodents. The marmot may have the edge if the mammals were competing at an extremely high altitude, but otherwise both the squirrel and the marmot seem pretty easy to beat. The coypu, on the other hand, is huge for a rodent and has enormous, strong orange teeth. So the two mammals advancing to the Round of 16 from Group A are (vuvuzelas, please):

Vervet Monkey (South Africa)
and
Coypu (Uruguay)

Coypu (click image to enlarge)

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Today we go a little further in our look at the mammals of the countries competing in the World Cup. Meet the coypu—you may also know it as the nutria—who is representing Uruguay. It’s a semi-aquatic rodent native to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, but it didn’t stay in those southern South American countries. Because of its warm and pretty fur, the coypu was imported into North America, Europe, and Asia for fur farming. When those fur farms didn’t really take off, the coypus escaped or were released, and they quickly became invasive semi-aquatic pests, destroying native wetlands, possibly contributing to the damaged levees that flooded New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. This is why they can’t serve as a metaphor for cosmopolitanism or even the global reach of soccer. A cosmopolitan seeks to understand other places, people, and cultures, not destroy them with her giant orange teeth. The coypu presents a warning, though, about the fragility of our ecosystems and a reminder that any small change can cause big destruction.

There is at least one interesting attempt to try to create some good from this situation in the southeastern United States. Righteous Fur, a New Orleans company, is selling clothing and jewelry made from the fur and teeth of coypus that are being exterminated anyway and whose pelts would otherwise be wasted. People who like wearing fur thus have a way to wear it without any deaths on their conscience, and in fact, if it’s handled right, it could be a way to actually help animals by wearing fur. (I would love a coypu-tooth necklace, but unfortunately, the Etsy shop is empty, just like mine is.)

Now as for Uruguay’s World Cup team, tomorrow they play South Africa on a day when surely no one will root against the home team. But I have taken an interest in Uruguay, for the plain reasons that they were in the first game I watched (a 0–0 draw against France) and I feel sorry for them because nearly everybody else has a much more stylish typeface on the back of their shirts. You can kind of see what I mean in the photo below. I think it’s a question of Puma vs. Adidas design. Uruguay wears Puma, most everyone else wears Adidas, and Adidas seems to have picked a much cooler style of type.

France in white, Uruguay in blue. AP photo.

Coypu by Coco, age 11

Mexican gray squirrel (click image to enlarge)

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To celebrate the World Cup, I’m drawing one mammal from each of the 32 competing countries. Today’s is the Mexican gray squirrel, also called the Mexican red-bellied squirrel, a busy little guy who is native to the treetops of both Mexico and Guatemala. (Guatemala’s national soccer team has never qualified for the World Cup.) The Mexican gray squirrel, like all other squirrels, I imagine, likes to eat nuts and seeds, but it also occasionally treats itself to a raid on a mango or cacao plantation. The species is widespread and not threatened (hooray! cue vuvuzelas!).

Mexico, whose national team is nicknamed El Tri for the country’s tricolor flag, is in the World Cup’s Group A, a tough bunch of contenders, as we discussed yesterday. In Friday’s opening game of the tournament, Mexico just managed to tie South Africa 1–1. Of course a win would have made either team happy, but the level of competition in their group is such that neither is out of the running yet. (If you missed the game, here’s the Guardian’s live blog of it.) Next, South Africa takes on Uruguay on Wednesday and Mexico faces France on Thursday.

Mexico is the USA’s major rival in soccer/fútbol, which makes life hard for some Mexican-Americans at World Cup time. Mexico has hosted the World Cup twice, and both times the team made it to the quarterfinals, but El Tri has never made it any further than that.