The king of Shanghai's wild animals, almost as big as a dog

Sunday Weekly reporter Han Xiaoni

Yunnan Asian elephant, all the way to eat and drink;

Beijing weasel, frightening people shouting mother;

Nanjing and Hangzhou, wild boars everywhere...

In this list of wild animals entering the city, raccoons who "live" in at least 150 communities in Shanghai indicate strength and must have names.

1

The news of Shanghai's "raccoon fusion" should be heard by all Shanghai citizens. In the past two years, the number of wild raccoons in Shanghai has soared, and even caused trouble in some communities.

But do you really know raccoons? Just say its name, how many people can read it, right?

At this moment, I silently pronounce "貉" in my heart as a friend of luò, gè, hè, according to our small-scale investigation, congratulations are not alone. However, its correct pronunciation should be hé.

So, what does the hé look like?

When Wang Fang, a researcher and doctoral supervisor at the School of Life Sciences of Fudan University, first saw the raccoon, the thought flashed through his mind: it turned out to be a bit like a raccoon with makeup removed; was its big black nose stolen from the badger?

Looking more closely, he found that the raccoon was really a "four unlike". Its side face resembles a fox, its face resembles a dog's, and its figure burrowing through the grass seems to be a combination of a badger, a porcupine and a hedgehog.

His unforgettable first encounter with the raccoon took place on an evening in the summer of 2018. He was about to work in Shanghai at the time, looking around the Internet for wild raccoons in Shanghai, and thus met Jiang Yafeng, a biology teacher who was retiring from Yu Middle School.

Teacher Jiang's family lives in Huatang Garden in Meilong, Minhang. The ground floor of the building is raised, and there is a mezzanine floor less than 1 meter high to ventilate and prevent water accumulation.

One day, he looked down from the balcony of his 3rd floor and happened to see a group of strange small animals going in and out of the hole in the mezzanine.

Out of curiosity brought by his job, Teacher Jiang took photos, consulted the information, and found that what he saw was a raccoon. He also tried to tell other people stories, but there weren't so many people who were interested.

It was with the help of Teacher Jiang that Wang Zai saw wild raccoons for the first time in Huatang Garden.

After the first meeting, just ten seconds later, he had a strong feeling: what was written around the raccoon in the textbook was inaccurate.

"When I used to look up information, the most common adjectives about raccoons were timidity and cowardice." He said.

However, what he saw were two juvenile raccoons, about a year old, poking their heads out of the hole and looking out, without showing a hint of fear and nervousness, and their postures were very relaxed and natural.

"If the raccoon has any key words, it may be caution. In addition, it has a very strong curiosity. Wang Fang said,

After that, he went to Huatang Garden several times in succession. On the third trip, there were already raccoons who knew him.

"There was a small raccoon in front of me, looking for water to drink, catching insects, and I followed behind, keeping a certain distance. It had a judgment: the person was not a threat. ”

More than half an hour later, Xiao Raccoon's move surprised Wang Fang. "It came up to me, studied my shoelaces, and looked at my headlamp."

Previously, the species that Wang Fang had worked on included Sichuan golden snub-nosed monkeys, giant pandas, black bears, antelopes and so on. "Those wild animals have been climbing mountains for several years, and they may only have five seconds and ten seconds to take a quick look."

"I didn't expect to study wildlife in our country, and I could also look at each other in the city, at a close range of two or three meters, and even communicate." He said.

"I found that the raccoon was a very good learner and adapted much faster than I thought."

This reminded Wang Fang of the North American raccoon.

When he was a postdoctoral fellow in the United States, the wildlife could be found everywhere in the institute's yard.

Interestingly, the English name of the raccoon is raccoon. Because of its slight resemblance to raccoons, the English name is raccoon dog, which literally translates to "raccoon dog".

However, the difference between the two is still obvious.

As the name suggests, raccoons are raccoons in the family Raccoonidae. The raccoon is a very old canine and the only extant species in the genus Canineidae.

In Wang Fang's view, these two animals have the characteristics of origin that make people understand at a glance.

"The raccoon native to the Americas is more like a big plush toy that is cute and rogue, sincere and obscene; in the East Asian native raccoon, it retains more of a beastly appearance, sensitive, alert and shy."

2

Studio Ghibli's master animation master Takahata hoon created a classic anime film, The Changeable Tanuki (also known as "Heisei Tanuki Battle"), in which the protagonist is Raccoon.

In Japanese culture, raccoons are called "tanuki" (sometimes mistranslated as "tanuki cats"), and are legendary animals that transform into animals, and have also appeared in games such as Yin and Yang Division and Animal Forest.

Set against the backdrop of urban development in the Tama area outside Tokyo in the 1960s and 1970s, "The Changing Tanuki Cat" tells the story of a group of happy raccoons facing an existential crisis due to the continuous construction of residential areas by humans. In order to defend their homeland, they perform magical transfigurations to drive away humans.

It's just that there are many subspecies of raccoons. The raccoon depicted in the cartoon is a Japanese subspecies living in Japan. According to the DNA analysis of more than 40 community samples by Dr. Xu Zhengqiang, an expert at the Shanghai Zoo, the raccoons in Shanghai are all indigenous named subspecies.

Wang Fang and his team found in their observations that the legendary raccoon "transformation" really happened in Shanghai: there was a river next to a small district in Qingpu, and the raccoon would become a swimmer, drill into the water to catch fish and shrimp, and eat some koi that were dropped in ponds in the community.

There are many hilly shrubs next to the raccoon habitat of Jinshan, where they demonstrate the skills of digging, jumping and catching frogs; in a villa area in Songjiang, the raccoons become like gyroscopes, holding grass roots with their mouths, and their bodies work hard to circle and uproot the grass - because the grass roots here are rich in sap, sugar, and nutrient content; and in the urban environment of Pudong and Minhang, they quickly master the design of communities and roads, eat garbage, collect cat food, and thrive in the cracks of the human world.

Not only that, but the raccoon is also very "smart".

In October 2019, Wang Fang and his team tried to catch raccoons at night and put them in GPS collars.

There is a pedal in the cage used to catch the raccoon, and the raccoon will trigger the mechanism as soon as it is stepped on. In order to attract the raccoons, they successively put small crabs, crayfish, fish, lamb kebabs, chicken wings, bread worms, cat food, dog food and other bait in the cage.

From 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., through surveillance, they found that the raccoon would first carefully observe the cage, and then the body would probe into the cage as much as possible, eating all the food that could be safely eaten, but not stepping on the pedal.

The team went back and forth four or five times, and the capture operation, which lasted nearly two weeks, ended in failure.

You know, Wang Fang once used the same cage in North America to catch foxes, otters, raccoons, and even accidentally caught possums, "seven or eight in one night."

"I find our Chinese animals so clever." "Maybe it's because East China has been a place with a lot of people since ancient times, and they've become accustomed to wrestling with people," he said. ”

In the past two years, Wang Fang and others have found that the "education level" of raccoons in each community seems to be different.

"In the community where we couldn't catch the raccoon in the beginning, now we still can't catch it with a cage, and we have to use a catapult net." But there are also some raccoons in the neighborhood that stay a little longer and will break into the cage. Wang Fang said, "They seem to have different traditions and ability to survive." ”

"The raccoons in each region are very different, and we haven't fully figured it out yet. But overall, adult raccoons will be smarter and more 'well-informed'. ”

3

The ending of the animated film "The Changeable Tanuki" is beautiful and sad: although the raccoons struggle to use various solutions, they are unable to stop the humans. Raccoons have lost their homes and are becoming scarcer in number.

Takahata may not have imagined that in Shanghai, the story of people and raccoons would continue in such a way that raccoons have found their habitat in an urban environment, and their numbers have grown rapidly in the past two years.

Looking through the media reports on raccoons, you will find that in just two decades, this national second-level protected animal has undergone a process of encircling the city from suburban counties to "local flooding" in Shanghai.

From 1997 to 1999, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Agriculture and Forestry conducted a survey of Shanghai's terrestrial wildlife resources, and only traces of raccoons were found in nanhui and fengxian, which were then suburban counties.

In 2000, the Shanghai Museum of Natural History released a report entitled "Construction and Maintenance of Shanghai's Natural Ecological Environment". The reporter reported that medium-sized animals such as ocelots, badgers and raccoons were "quite rare in the city."

In the first decade of the new century, occasional news about raccoons appeared in the newspapers, mostly because the citizens witnessed the "little monsters" and did not know, and asked the media and relevant departments for help.

In 2001, volunteers saw raccoons paddling along the Huangpu River in Wujing Park, Wujing Town, Minhang.

In 2003 and 2004, raccoons were found at the second phase of the "Qiandai Famous Villa" construction site on Anning Road in Minhang and at a construction site on Fengshun Road in Minhang's Zhanqiao.

In 2010, residents of Minhang's New Meixin Garden saw a family of two small raccoons.

In 2012, 13 raccoons were found in a wasteland inside the Shanghai Zoo.

Two years later, the number of wild raccoons there doubled to about 30, the largest population in Shanghai at the time. Zoos and educational institutions also organize special parent-child activities for nighttime raccoon watching.

At the same time, more and more news is coming into the community.

In 2013, the Microblog sent by the police of Qingpu Xujing Police Station was watched by the whole network: "I am the one who receives the bear from the police in China!" ”

It turned out that one of the owners of Yintao Golf Villa kindly took in a small raccoon on a rainy night, and after careful observation, he regarded it as a bear and quickly called the police.

In the same year, raccoons were also found in the Spanish Famous Garden Community on Lane 1980 of Luoxiu Road in Minhang, causing residents to watch.

In 2015, there were 20 or 30 raccoons in the Yannanyuan Community of Lane 1111, Hongmei South Road, Minhang, and the performance was a bit high-profile.

According to property employees, in the autumn of the previous year, the monitoring had filmed that in the first half of the night every day, groups of raccoons lined up to enter the community, swam to the river to eat fish, and lined up to leave the community at dawn.

This year, the raccoon herd has become larger and larger. Every night, the raccoons in the community will "chat" with the raccoons outside. "Before, patrolling and walking dogs in the middle of the night, this year it has become walking raccoons, they follow behind people, people take one step, they take one step, people go further, it takes a step back." In 2017 and 2018, Minhang Chunshen Vanke City Community and Chunshen Mansion were witnessed successively.

Until the past two years, not only the number of raccoons has surged and the habitat has spread, but also clashes between raccoons and people have occurred in the Songjiang Milano Guidu and Rose Jiuli communities.

4

Why is there "raccoon fusion" in a metropolis like Shanghai?

On the one hand, this actually shows that Shanghai's urban ecological environment is getting better.

By the end of 2020, the green coverage rate of Shanghai's built-up areas will be as high as 40%, not only forest parks and wetlands, but also ecological spaces such as green belts, street gardens, and pocket parks, so that wild animals have a habitat.

Raccoons, on the other hand, have an amazing ability to adapt.

In the wild, raccoons live on hills and hills, so there is the idiom of "one hill of raccoon".

But in nature, it is a "weak chicken" like existence: when it encounters an ocelot or a fox, it can't beat it, and when it encounters a wolf, it can run away, and the jackal can eat it whole. Not to mention facing forest kings such as tigers and leopards.

And in the city, the raccoon suddenly had no such enemies.

They find easier sources of food by eating household waste discarded by humans.

The hiding environment has also changed from caves and tree roots to cracks under the balconies of residents' villas, gaps in walls, storage rooms, cracks in bridge piers, gas pipes, abandoned sewers, etc.

"The raccoon took the initiative to enter the city." Wang Fang said, "In order to adapt to the urban environment, this species has seen a lot of biological adaptation changes, such as smaller body size, less aggressiveness, and the addition of more starchy foods to eating habits." ”

This year, Wang Fang and his team observed three female raccoons taking turns nursing a baby raccoon. Previously, they also observed cooperative behavior among adult raccoons.

Raccoons, which are thought to be solitary animals, are likely to be emerging with certain characteristics of social animals.

In Shanghai, where wild mammal species are scarce, raccoons can "stand out" and have such explosive growth and spread that many researchers never expected.

Before that, another native species, the badger, had high hopes.

However, there are only about 30 wild badgers in Shanghai, the most famous of which is a litter of "nail households" - in 2019, when the Fengxian World Foreign Chinese School was under construction, it was accidentally found that there was a "badger family" living on the construction site, with at least 12 wild badgers.

For them, construction projects that cost more than 500 million yuan were shut down for two years.

At the beginning of this year, the news came that Fengxian District will spend 12 million yuan to build a new base in the south of the original badger life and start the natural migration project of the badger population.

"In Shanghai, the number of badgers has not increased; the civet cat has been wandering for nearly a decade, and this year our team only observed two in Jiangwan; the ocelot disappeared... These animals are more critical of their environment, and cities are not their best habitats. But the raccoon is really not picky. Wang Fang said.

In addition, the epidemic in the past two years has also created opportunities for the reproduction and spread of raccoons.

February to April is the courtship breeding season for raccoons. In the early spring of last year, there were suddenly no people and cars on the streets of Shanghai, and many places that had previously been impossible for raccoons to pass through could pass.

The baby raccoon was born in April, which is also a relatively quiet and safe period of time in the city. Therefore, the degree of fear of people and the degree of busyness of the city in this year's small raccoons are not the same as those of their parents.

5

The "raccoon spread" that is happening in Shanghai has surprised researchers such as Wang Fang.

"It's hard to study raccoons. Songjiang, Minhang, Qingpu and other places are infested with raccoons, and it takes us 1.5 hours to drive from Fudan University in Yangpu. We joked that if only we could study raccoons in Fudan one day. He said.

However, just last December, the citizens of Wujiaochang saw the raccoons.

"This site is more than 5 kilometers from the closest site we recorded before." Wang Fang said, "And last summer, when we were doing other surveys, we went to this community, and we interviewed them repeatedly at that time, and there were no raccoons." ”

"Before entering the winter dormant period, the raccoon quickly spread to the five corners."

And they haven't stopped. In May this year, another citizen witnessed raccoons in Jiangwan.

Wang Fang said: "From the Songjiang River in the southwest to the jiangwan in the north, it almost spans Shanghai. This diffusion rate is far faster than we can imagine. ”

"Now I believe that one day I can really see raccoons on the campus of Fudan University." This is happening. ”

In Shanghai, there are more than 300 infrared-triggered cameras that are recording the distribution and changes of wildlife day and night.

Coupled with more and more equipment and methods such as GPS tracking and positioning collars and infrared thermal imaging survey instruments, forestry departments, researchers, environmental protection agencies and a large number of citizens are working together to piece together the living conditions of the raccoon in Shanghai.

In just a few years, raccoons spread in four directions from a smaller area in the southwestern part of Shanghai, especially to the eastern and northern parts of the city, and increased rapidly in various areas such as Songjiang, Minhang, Pudong, Yangpu, Qingpu, and Fengxian.

At least 150 Shanghai communities currently have a distribution of raccoons, and the number of potential raccoons will exceed this number.

Roughly calculated, in Shanghai, the number of raccoons is likely to be 3000-5000.

Many citizens are concerned about: Are raccoons aggressive?

Wang Fang said that judging by Shanghai's experience, the raccoon has not shown any active aggression towards people at present.

But when raccoons can be actively fed from humans, their numbers will inevitably surge, and there will be negative changes in behavior such as active proximity to people, biting between the same kind, skin diseases, and noise pollution.

Last July, Wang saw the last thing he wanted to see in the Milano Guidu neighborhood in Songjiang.

At night, dozens of raccoons make one scream after another, biting each other, competing for cat food, and even clashing with pet dogs and residents, as if a "raccoon mutation" has occurred.

After observing the scene, Wang Fang found that there were residents in the community feeding these wild raccoons, and a large amount of cat food was piled up like a hill.

"This neighborhood is like a black hole, attracting surrounding raccoons to gather here and come to eat when it is time to eat."

To this end, Shanghai issued the first wildlife hunting license, which safely transferred the raccoons in the community to the wild environment.

After stopping artificial feeding, Wang Fang visited the community several times.

"By the seventh day, I had clearly felt that there were no raccoons in the community who took the initiative to approach people."

Therefore, not feeding wild animals is a very important basic rule.

Another question of concern is: As wild animals, do raccoons carry viruses?

The bad news is that, theoretically, as canines, raccoons are potential hosts of rabies and may also carry scabies mites, canine distemper, parvovirus, etc.

The good news is that raccoons are no more at risk in this regard than stray dogs and stray cats in the community.

6

So, will the number of raccoons in Shanghai grow endlessly?

This year, Wang Fang and his team surveyed more than 200 communities in Shanghai, of which 129 communities were found to have raccoons last year, and 100 communities were newly added.

As a result, they found an interesting phenomenon: more than 150 of these communities found raccoons; compared with last year, the number of raccoons increased by 52 communities, and the number of raccoons decreased by 52 communities, an increase of half.

Among them, songjiang, a key area infested with raccoons, has two-thirds of the raccoons in the community decreasing. On the contrary, the surrounding Qingpu and Minhang, raccoons are increasing rapidly.

Wang Fang analyzed: "This is related to the Fact that the Songjiang Forestry Station has done a lot of publicity since last year, artificial feeding has been controlled, and garbage classification has been more in place." ”

The message of the survey is that in Shanghai, the number of raccoons will increase for a long time, but it has a ceiling and can be controlled.

The researchers were more concerned about the density of raccoons than the overall number of raccoons in Shanghai.

"Because Shanghai is too big, there are many environments suitable for raccoons to live." Wang Fang said, "Local density is what really affects the citizens. ”

Last year in Milano Guidu, of the 8 hectares (1 hectare = 10,000 square meters) of the community, there were at least 50 raccoons, and there were 60-80 at the highest peak, so there was a scramble for space.

Wang Fang believes that for citizens and raccoons, less than 1 per hectare is likely to be a relatively safe number; more than 2 per hectare is a figure worth warning; more than 5 per hectare is likely to require urgent disposal.

"Of the more than 150 communities we found, there are actually nearly half of the communities, and most of the residents living in them are not even very aware of the raccoons living in their own communities and cannot feel their influence, and I think this state of non-interference with each other is the best." Another state of harmonious coexistence between humans and raccoons appeared in the Yuhai Community in Songjiang.

There are three large rockeries in this neighborhood, full of gaps, where several raccoon families live.

The rockery is surrounded by shrubs and groves, which allow people to see the raccoons, but are separated.

Several residents of the community are staff members of the Shanghai Botanical Garden, including the science popularization big V in terms of plants. They have created a culture of proper treatment of wildlife in the owner group, such as not feeding, not being afraid, but also not being driven away.

"When we go to see the raccoons, residents often take the initiative to come and introduce the raccoons to us, or come to us and tell us, don't arrest it." Wang Fang said.

"This community is the most ideal state in our minds - allowing wild animals to coexist with us on a large scale, and carving out a suitable living space for the raccoon on a small scale to maintain a natural living state."

Nowadays, not only Shanghai, from Suzhou and Wuxi, to Nanjing, Hangzhou, the entire Yangtze River Delta region can see the figure of raccoon. This year, it also appeared in the distant Wuhan.

In the words of Takeyoshi, a trainee at the Shanshui Nature Conservation Center, "In the imperial palace of the Japanese emperor, in the palace of Seoul in South Korea, in the downtown areas of Nanjing and Shanghai, the raccoon relied on its own characteristics of eating anything, sleeping anywhere, sleeping at night, and IQ online, and successfully swept through East Asia and stayed in the cracks of the city."

Looking at the world, wild boars in Berlin, Germany, red foxes in London and Bristol in the United Kingdom, raccoons in the United States... When the ecology is getting better and better, wild animals entering the city have brought trouble to major cities.

Wang Fang believes that with the continuous improvement of China's urban environment, there will inevitably be a day red-bellied squirrels and golden chipmunks, raccoons and red foxes, hedgehogs and wild boars may also bring complex urban management problems.

"The experience and lessons of the past have proved that poisoning and culling measures cannot control animals with strong adaptability, which will only cause chain ecological disasters and bring more difficult consequences to be cleaned up." He said.

"Finding ways for wildlife and humans to coexist in urban environments is almost the only option and a long-term challenge."

Source: Morning News