0 So While I Figure Out DropBox...

...have a video of amazing rat tricks. Because, yes, rodents are trainable.



Tomorrow's post will be pic-heavy. Very, very pic-heavy.

Detail: So While I Figure Out DropBox...

0 Newsflash: If We Could Talk to the Animals...

...or, well, control them with telepathy. That is exactly what happens towards the end of the clip above: a human's brainwaves move the tail of a living, but anaesthetized, rodent. Admit it: making furry little slaves is what people who want to talk to animals really want to do.

Here's the whole deal on that clip: Researcher Seung-Schik Yoo at Harvard Medical School has successfully linked a human's mind with a rat's body. Several volunteers were hooked up to a numbed rat via EEG's, which are basically your standard electrodes. A certain EEG pattern would stimulate the rat's motor center, making it move. It is piggybacking off of a previous experiment that surgically linked the brains of two rats together, allowing them to cooperate at an unparalleled rate. Now, look, no surgery necessary!

What's really creepy is that the article is geared towards controlling other people like living puppets. There are a million creepy uses for human-controlled rat puppets, but a million and a half creepier reasons for wanting to control other people. Call us paranoid, but this article just came right out and said, "yeah, we wanna do this with humans." Creepy.

Some say that the test is completely invalid. The rat was under painkillers, so there's no way to tell if it was really being mind controlled or not. The link is still astonishing, and it's neat that the human mind can manipulate an animal body. Imagine how many people would sign up to be dogs for a day if given the chance.

Source: NewScientist.com.

Detail: Newsflash: If We Could Talk to the Animals...

0 Fun Spotlight: Big Run Wolf Ranch!

Instead of my usual Creature Feature, today's entry will be a totally different kind of Creature Feature. Much like many bloggers who actually go out and go things, I will provide coverage of any nature-related events I happen to encounter. I'd like to do this seriously one day- it's an awesome idea -  but funds and such will not allow. So, for now, I am limited mostly to events that happen in Illinois.

That said, if you see an event hosted at or by Big Run Wolf Ranch, don't turn it down. They happened to be at my local forest preserve last night (the 24th). That place has a lot more than just wolves, so along with Shanoa, we to see some really wild stuff:

For those of you who have no idea what a groundhog is...there ya go. This is the groundhog we in IL use for our Groundhog Day predictions. 

Skunks make amazingly great pets, even though many people would consider them wild. They also come in colors other than black and white. Kirby II here was a real doll, letting everyone pet and cuddle them. Kids even got to "babysit" him.

 There was a coyote, too. He was skittish, as a real wild coyote would be. Coyotes will not eat humans, but will eat small pets like Chihuahuas. I like them already. Pecos, our coyote, was also used as an example of a desert animal, featuring large ears and small paws. Another good example: Fennecs.

The wolf above, Shanoa, also appeared at Loyola the night we had a wolf showing. The big male, Zeus, was unwilling to come; when unwillingness is backed with a 1400-pound bite, even a wolf handler will listen. Tangent: The porcupine also could not make it.

Now, something that bugs me that did not get answered: it's hard to tell where this guy draws the line between "domesticated" and "tame." As I went into detail in my first essay on breeds, domestication is an iffy issue with no real scientific gauge to back it. I'm curious as to where this guy draws the line; his wolves and many other animals were bred in captivity and tamed.

Detail: Fun Spotlight: Big Run Wolf Ranch!

0 "They Actually Eat That:" Porcupine.

Is there any vertebrate that sounds less appetizing than porcupine? It's big, and there's a lot of meat there, but it has spines, teeth, and claws to deal with. Granted, boars and bulls can be pretty nasty, but their skin won't turn your face into a bloody mess (plus, bacon). Who looks at a porcupine and goes "yeah, that looks delicious?" Well...a fair amount of people, actually.

Wherever there are porcupines, people will eat them. They usually do not want to, though. Native Americans can and will use porcupines as meat during the winter. Kenya had a porcupine crisis in 2005 - the most logical solution, after the porcupines had dug up graves and destroyed crops, was to eat the buggers. This may have been dirty porcupine meat, but there is no greater revenge than eating the ones who ate your food.

Porcupine meat is not just for the non-industrialized, either. Porcupines are assholes, for lack of a better word, on a regular basis. They carry diseases, nibble on everything, stick you or others with their hair-turned-needles, and generally are just unpleasant to have around. Last year, people in Pennsylvania started eating porcupines, too- or at least made hunting them legal in the wake of a porcupine outbreak. Again, revenge.

The practice of eating porcupine is still largely reserved for Native Americans and people with porcupine issues in the West, but China and Vietnam at porcupine regularly. It is so popular over there that porcupines are actually threatened. We knew that Vietnam and China ate almost anything. It seemed unlikely that they would hunt a rodent enough to cause a population decrease of 20 percent. Revenge? Noooo, this is just how Southeast Asia rolls. They even farm porcupines.

So how does it taste? Supposedly...weirdly good. It has been described as being "like duck meat, but with more flavour and very crunchy." That particular person actually liked it better than duck; given what I've seen from people's reactions to duck, that is quite the compliment. Maybe the Vietnamese are onto something.

Detail: "They Actually Eat That:" Porcupine.

0 Creature Feature: Bigfoot Porcupines.

In the vein of speculation about the new Grass-type starter, "porcupine" has come up repeatedly. The idea of getting a massive porcupine as a starter brought to mind a certain "Bigfoot" video that was debunked in a flash. We already had a yeti Pokemon; a porcupine becoming Bigfoot would not be out of the question. I doubt Game Freak will be that creative, but just in case, the stuff connecting porcupines and Bigfoot is pretty crazy anyways.


Late last year, this video was blogged by an ardent cryptozoologist. Unfortunately, not only was it a year or two too late, but the video had been debunked. Not "no way, you're avoiding the truth!" debunked, but legitimately, "OK, yeah, our bad" debunked. It continues to fool people today regardless. So, what was it, really?

A few PhotoShops and de-fuzzes later, "Bigfoot" was revealed to be a rather large North American Porcupine. For those of you who are secretly mole people, porcupines are spiny rodents native to virtually every landmass except Australia and Antarctica. They are herbivores, but are armed with spiny hairs ("quills") which they do not shoot, merely bristle whenever a predator approaches. They are also fairly large, third only to the beaver and capybara in size.

It turns out porcupines can look an awful lot like large primates when they want to. The first instinct of a porcupine is not to turn buttwards towards a mouth of teeth; they would rather run than fight, and resemble rather large, furry, short-tailed monkeys when they climb away from predators. Giant, short-tailed thing? Clearly Bigfoot.

One of the craziest conspiracy theories has a basis in fact: that porcupines may be hiding Bigfoot bones. Macabre as it sounds, porcupines do indeed hoard bones. Bones are the rodent version of vitamin tablets. If a porcupine finds a bone, it may well chew on it in order to gain phosphorous.  Whether Bigfoot wound up in there and absolutely nowhere else or not is another matter entirely. I would suspect the men in black before a porcupine conspiracy.

...

You didn't see anything.

Detail: Creature Feature: Bigfoot Porcupines.

0 Creature Feature: Horned Gophers.

Looking at the design of one of the latest Pokemon, Chespin, made me notice something: it is really, really hard to make rodents anywhere near badass. Even giant rodents like capybaras are seen as buck-toothed meat. Adding horns and fire to a fuzzy mouse wouldn't make it any more -

Oh, wait a second. That actually looks pretty cool. Still not intimidating, but cool. 

Horned gophers (Ceratogaulus) were once very real, very alive creatures.  There are four species known in the genus, all of which had nasal horns like small, fuzzy rhinos. They lived in burrows, much like modern gophers. Presumably, they were also herbivorous. They lived in what is now the modern U.S. Great Plains, particularly Nebraska, in the Miocene and Pleistocene eras. Everything cool there is dead.

Horned gophers had many things in common with modern rodents and moles, which are not rodents (so please hold your Gurren Lagann jokes). They had flat paws with sharp claws that were perfect for digging, and thus likely spent much of their time in burrows. These gophers were just shy of a foot long, so even if they had facial horns, they were far from terrifying. This makes horned gophers the smallest horned mammals to date. A shame they're all extinct.

To this day, nobody really knows what those horns were for. They're the wrong shape for digging. Moderns rodents similar to these gophers have terrible vision, so a mating display is virtually out of the question. The best guess, judging by the horns' positioning, is that the horns were used as a defense against predators. They even evolved further towards that end as the species progressed.  This rodent had teeth and horns for any preds to deal with. Not bad for a rodent!

The horned gopher's unique look has not gone unnoticed by the media. Although you will never see these guys in Jurassic Park, games like Tiny Zoo offer them as extinct oddities. They are fairly popular as far as small, extinct mammals go. I kinda wish the new Primeval would have one as a mascot character.

Oh, hey, speaking of...

Detail: Creature Feature: Horned Gophers.