When it comes to hamsters, small partners will certainly not feel strange, hamsters are a collective name for a variety of animals in the hamster family Hamster subfamily. But when it comes to this hamster family, it contains more than just hamsters. Hamster family is the largest family of mammals, with more than 600 different species, in addition to the hamster subfamily, there are also voles subfamily, Western rat subfamily and so on quite a few branches, this time the claw claw is going to talk about one of the animals called "crown rat".
The crowned rat is a rodent of the subfamily crested rats of the hamster family , which is larger than the average hamster family. The crowned rat has 53 centimeters from head to tail, and only 36 centimeters in length, catching up with an ordinary adult domestic cat.
People who are not familiar with the crested rats, at first glance, will think that they are porcupines, because the gorgeous coat like mink fur is too eye-catching. The name of the crown rat comes from this exaggerated appearance.
Crowned rats are now mainly distributed on the African continent, and they live in the dry highland forests of countries such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya. Crowned rats are a very mysterious animal, they lie out of the day and night, live independently, scientists have difficulty catching their figures, so there has been no excessive understanding of their habits, even their approximate number is difficult to calculate.
In order to solve the various mysteries entangled in the crown rat, the scholars of the University of Utah in the United States trapped 25 crown rats in one go, and finally got some answers to some questions from them.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > where does their poison come from? </h1>
A long time ago, the people of East Africa have said that the fur of the crown rat is poisonous, but this animal is too mysterious, and humans rarely have the opportunity to deal with them, so whether the crown rat is poisonous, how toxic, the composition and source of the poison are all mysteries.
In 2011, a scientific report hypothesized the poison of the crown rat, which suggested that the crown rat chewed the bark of the acacia tree and then applied the toxin to its fur with its tongue, which is a bit like the poison dart frog, which does not produce toxins themselves, and makes itself poisonous by eating poisonous acacia leaves, but they are not afraid of this toxin themselves.
This time, scholars at the University of Utah directly kept the crown rats in captivity and fed them with acacia branches, and the crown rats immediately went up aggressively, began to chew on these poisonous plants, and made the act of smearing toxins on their fur, and it seems that the 2011 report guessed quite accurately.
The crested rat is one of the few mammals that is immune to the toxicity of acacia. Perhaps further research on them will reveal what exactly helped them dissolve the poison of acacia.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > they are mysterious but not alone</h1>
Crowned rats don't roam in groups, but that doesn't mean they'll be alone for life. Some animals do live completely independently, and even if they have the task of reproducing offspring, they only have a brief contact with the opposite sex during the breeding period. But the crown rat is surprisingly a monogamous animal, and their husband and wife are quite close.
Scholars set a trap in a small area, and over a period of 2 days, they caught two crown rats, exactly one female and one male, and when they were put together, the two crowned rats immediately walked toward each other, approached and began to comb each other, which clearly showed that they were very familiar.
The observations that follow confirmed the suspicion that the two crowned rats were a couple: they were almost inseparable, eating together, building nests together, grooming each other, then doing the most intimate things between husband and wife, and finally sleeping in their nests.
The crowned rat conforms to the common characteristics of "monogamous" mammals: herbivorous, larger, slow reproductive cycle, etc. In order to maximize the birth of offspring, crown rats, like other "monogamous" animals, need to spend a lot of time with their partners and understand, so that they can cooperate with tacit understanding when nesting and raising children, so that the survival rate of offspring is higher.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > is rodent but has 5 stomachs</h1>
We all know that most herbivores are ruminants, because plant fiber is not easily digested and absorbed, the more stomach, the longer the digestion process, the plant fiber is repeatedly processed, in order to be able to get more nutrients from it.
The crown rat is a large herbivorous rodent with a rare 5 stomach, its digestive process may resemble that of a ruminant, and it has some flora in the intestine that can ferment and metabolize plant fiber.
However, in the artificial captive environment, when the food tube is enough, the crowned rats are not so fond of grass roots and leaves and other plant fiber-rich foods, they also eat meat, insects do not refuse, fruits and plant tubers are also very like.
It can be seen that as long as there are conditions, herbivorous animals will try to eat other foods, and the sentence "Ancestors spent 5,000 years to let you evolve to the top of the food chain, not to make you a vegetarian" is very reasonable.
The study of crowned rats by scholars at the University of Utah has given us a lot of understanding of the living habits of these mysterious animals, but it has also led to another thinking: the existence of crowned rats is too mysterious, although it is registered in the list of endangered species, but the status quo note is "no care".
Because few people hunt for crested rats, many people feel no need to worry about the survival of this animal. However, in the process of trapping crown rats, a scholar who has studied crown rats in Africa for more than ten years said that from the time and results of trapping, the number of crown rats has a significant downward trend compared with the past, and this study can just fill some gaps in the data of crown rats and improve its protection level.
Don't let this mysterious little animal become extinct before it was widely recognized by humans.