Hippo's Wild World of Animals - Random Animal Facts

This weeks animal is the snakecat itself, the ferret!

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Dook!

Ferret legging? Man, the olden days of future past yesteryear must have sucked so much.

It's a very strange universe.  We're apes that wear pants and sometimes we put ferrets in those pants to see how long we can keep them there, and sometimes we dress up animals as other animals and laugh about it.

ZOMG. I wrote a whole thing on European polecats, steppe polecats and black-footed ferrets - but I just realized that it never got posted.

I hope it still exists on one of the myriad tabs I have open on the machines at work. Otherwise I'll have to rebuild it. Stupid brain that probably got distracted by actual work.

This weeks animal is the relatively obscure rock hyrax!

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They do have a decent amount of predators like caracals, lions, eagles, snakes and owls.

Well somebody tell these guys to stop making fun of my clothes! [runs off, sobbing]

Yes, another vote for dugongs and caracals, please.

Those are wonderful!

Dugong!

I hope so, I like your detailed pre-history assessments for my animals of the week.

Obviously I never got to posting yesterday. Wound up too busy with watching the Maltese Falcon, as one will.

Today, I finally have a breather here at work, after spending all day tracking down lost credit card receipts and (oddly) arguing that yes we should work in the pouring rain and dump a few thousand litres of bleach in a lake tonight.

So, anyhow, here's a bit of what I can recall about ferrets and polecats:

The domestic ferret is directly descended from the European polecat (sometimes known as the forest polecat). There is another type of polecat, the steppe polecat (Mustela eversmanii) which lives in Central/Eastern Europe, across Russia, and Central Asia all the way to China. It is heavier than the European polecat, and rather than feeding mostly on mice and smaller rodents, they prefer slightly larger prey like ground skwirls, pikas (and hamsters). They're also cute as the Dickens.



In North America, there is the black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes). Normally, when there's a North American critter that shares a common name with an Old World species the North American critter turns out to not be very closely related to the European/Asian version, and is actually more closely related to some other North American critter. Not in this case! The black-footed ferret is very, very close to the steppe polecat. They were once even considered the same species. The black-footed ferret's diet is about 90% prairie dogs (which we saw in an earlier installment). The hatred that ranchers feel for prairie dogs had some unfortunate spillover on the black-footed ferret, as did a plague known as Sylvatic plague that wiped out large numbers of prairie dogs. They were one of the first critters listed in the 1967 Endangered Species Preservation Act, and by 2000 the Canadian Species at Risk Act considered them extirpated from the wild. Since then, captive breeding programs and reintroduction programs have been very successful (despite continued resistance from ranchers), and it's estimated there were about 1200 black-footed ferrets in the wild in 2013.



Together, these three species form a circumpolar triumvirate of ferrets. Perhaps not surprisingly, all three species can be linked back to a common ancestor that lived across all three continents in the Pleistocene. Mustela stromeri was a little smaller than either the steppe polecat or black-footed ferret, which is a bit of a change from the usual Pleistocene-to-modern body size pattern.

The polecats are still pretty closely related to many of the other Mustelids. Close enough that they can produce viable hybrids with European mink (Mustela lutreola). Their closest living relative that isn't a polecat/ferret is the Siberian weasel (Mustela sibirica), which is pretty darned cute its own self.



Ferret keepers in Great Britain have long considered the ferret to be a traditional hunting companion, and have made claims that England is the original home of the domesticated ferret - having been tamed from the wild polecat stock of Britain.

However... polecat fossils are extremely rare in England. They do exist in a few scattered sites in the Pleistocene, but seem to disappear again before people ever get to the island (as dated by Cannabis pollen in a previous entry). There just aren't any after that in either palaeontological or archaeological sites until the Norman conquest (1066 CE). In the Welsh language, the word for ferret (ffured) is directly from a Latin root (furittus, meaning "little thief"), unlike the Welsh name for pretty much every other critter in England. The Scots Gaelic word is fearaid, again suggesting that they didn't know this critter at all until the French brought them.

Today, there are two subspecies of European polecat known as the Welsh polecat (Mustela putorius anglia) and the Scottish polecat (Mustela putorius caledoniae) - but it seems likely these are actually feral populations of formerly domesticated ferrets. Unfortunately, over the years there's been so much hybridization between these "wild" populations and domestic ferrets that even if they were originally genetically distinct subspecies, we wouldn't be able to tell any more. There have been several campaigns to reintroduce polecats to the wilderness in several areas of Cumberland, Westmorland, Argyll and on Speyside, which is kind of amusing if in fact they're really an invasive species that was introduced in the 11th century.

Hopefully tomorrow I can do something about the hyraxes!

The staring pictures reminded me of this quote from Douglas Adams (in Last Chance to See):


The shoebill might not be flightless, but I'm getting the barking mad part from those pics.

This bird is gangsta.