by Matthew Cobb
Jerry’s out all afternoon and has left me with the keys to the blog. So I’m going to use the opportunity to post something I saw on TWITTER. John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College tweeted this:
Here’s the gif:
@EdYong209 replied ‘It’s a shrew caravan’. Which indeed it is. If a white-toothed shrew family is disturbed in its nest, then mum will flee, with her babies in a trail behind her, holding onto each other’s rumps. The Mammal Society says:
Young shrews are occasionally observed following their mother in a ‘caravan’. Each shrew grasps the base of the tail of the preceding shrew so that the mother runs along with a line of young trailing behind. This behaviour is often associated with disturbance of the nest and may also be used to encourage the young to explore their environment.
Here are some photos thanks to Ms Google:
That’s not a caravan; it’s a conga line!
b&
Oooo – you said blog!
Dr. Coyne is gone. Dr. Cobb’s roolz! Let’s party!
So I can mix alcohol drinks in my centrifuge? Whoo hoo!
Huh, it’s a shrew-man centipede.
Pied Piper.
Hilarious and wonderful at the same time 🙂
Yes, exactly!
A milk caravan.
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Impressive, they must hang on pretty tight. I wonder if mum stops if the caravan breaks.
There must be a nursery rhyme in here somewhere.
Amazing what you can see on Twitter these days.
A neat sight indeed!
I tried to find a nice shrew joke but the
genre is dominated by misogynistic stuff
from Shakespeare’s play.
There are some cute lemming jokes like:
What movie do lemmings prefer. Ans: Cliffhangers.
And a Koala joke:
A koala goes into a bar, orders a sandwich,
eats it, then shoots the piano player and walks out. The bartender goes out and asks the Koala why it did that. The Koala says its
in my nature, look me up in the dictionary. The bartender gets a dictionary where it says a Koala is a marsupial that eats shoots and leaves.
That’s a version* of the old wombat joke (heard in the early 70s), which requires an Australian idiom mentioned in a recent thread. Koalas (Phascolarctidae) are arboreal folivorous vombatimorph marsupials, so unlike vombatids they don’t eat roots as well as the other things.
*(also told about a panda, which is silly because “bamboo” is not a third person singular verb)
Mea culpa. I should have remembered that Koalas harbor bacteria that help them digest eucalyptus leaves and that the joke would more appropriately apply to some other critters.
So lets see? A koala walks into a bar and
orders a glass of eucalyptus juice. The bartender… Oh never mind!
For a film about a playful wombat see http://9bytz.com/playful-wombat/.
I’m glad you mentioned the kitten cam again, JAC. I’ve been watching it off and on ever since you mentioned it six months or so ago, and it’s been fun.
The present litter was born July 23, so they’re four weeks old tomorrow. Just in the last week they’ve started to be cats: wrestling, grooming, exploring.
The guy who hosts the kitten cam, “Foster Dad John”, is an absolute pet. He clearly loves cats and knows a great deal about raising kittens, methodically introducing them to progressively more complex surroundings.
Konrad Lorenz wrote about this & more on shrews in King Solomon’s Ring – read it! Great book by a founder of modern ethology.
Could this be snake mimicry as a defense mechanism? I’m guessing that snake predation is a danger for them. I would think that if a snake disturbs the nest and this shrew train comes running out, the snake may be startled and think that its just another snake coming out of the nest, giving the shrews some time to escape.
Interesting idea.
If so, it’s a pretty damn good imitation considering that shrews are among the very few venomous mammals.
And the implied threat isn’t necessarily pure theatre, either; there are persistent traditional beliefs that shrews can cause lameness in animals or humans dating back to at least the 1500s in England.