Recently, the movie "Totoro" was finally released in China.
Totoro is a masterpiece of Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki and the logo of Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli, released in Japan on April 16, 1988.
There are mainly three totoro cats in the film, two small and one large, because of their cute attitude, there are still many people who like the rag dolls in the image of totoro.
Many fans may brush "Totoro" twice or three times, but after watching the movie many times, they can't help but ask, what kind of animal is such a cute totoro? Does it really exist in reality? Today we will answer everyone's doubts.
Close to Totoro's pet, the woolly mouse
Native to the South American Andes Mountains, the woolly rat is mainly distributed in Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina in South America, also known as the golden rat and the American chinchilla. Although its name also has a rat character, it actually belongs to the mammalian rodent porcupine suborder American chinchilla family. It is more distantly related to various rodents of the rat-shaped suborder.
Their food is also different — rats are omnivores and woolly chinchillas are vegetarian. Even their reproductive systems are different – rats have double ovulation tubes and woolly rats have single ovulatory tubes, so rats are very fertile and can give birth to a litter every 20 days; while woolly rats can only give birth to 1-2 litters per year, and the probability of giving birth to 1-2 litters per time is 80%. That's why the chinchilla is so rare.
Although its appearance is similar to that of mice, it is larger, the short-tailed woolly rat is larger, with a body length of 30 to 38 cm and a tail length of about 10 cm; the long-tailed woolly rat is small, with a body length of 24 to 28 cm and a tail length of 14 to 15 cm. The coat on the back and body side of the woolly rat is gray-blue, and the abdominal coat gradually becomes lighter to white, which is an important fur raw material for the early Spanish colonists, and later through artificial hybridization, it has been bred into jade, beige, charcoal, black, white and silver. Its coat color, like Mendel's pea form, is an important specimen for the study of genetics.
Woolly mouse
Since the 1920s, wild chinchillas have been included in the list of endangered species due to the large number of humans, and in 2008, the number of wild rats has been less than 10,000, so several major producing countries are strictly prohibited from exporting. Mining engineer Matthias smuggled several wild chinchillas to the United States, established the first farms, and began to breed in large quantities, which were later transported to places like Canada and Europe.
After this small animal was transported to Hong Kong, it was called totoro because of its close appearance to the totoro in the animation. There are also people in Japan who refer to the golden yellow individual as Pikachu.
Woolly rats are also very strict on environmental health, like to eat a variety of clean plants, eat when they look very close to rats, but also with the front paws to hold to the mouth, its life expectancy is also much longer than rats, generally 15 to 20 years, of which 8 to 10 years have fertility.
Get close to the animal of the big totoro, the sun bear
The sun bear is the smallest of the bear family, with a body length of only 110-150 cm and a weight of 27-75 kg, mainly distributed in South asia and Southeast Asia, because of the large number of malay peninsula, so also called Malay bear. In China, there are also a small number of distributions in Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi and other places.
sun bear
Totoro has a white belly, but our common bears, such as brown bears and white bears, are all the same coat color. The sun bear has a U-shaped light fur on the neck, corresponding to a moon bear, and there is a similar pattern on the neck, which is what we often call the Asian black bear, which is called the bear blind in the northeast region.
The big totoro has a pair of very large round glasses, but our common bears seem to have small eyes. Don't worry, there's another kind of spectacled bear that can provide material for it — as the only bear in South America, it's the closest living animal to a panda.
Spectacled bear
Similar to totoro, spectacled bears are very fond of fruit, with pineapples accounting for 50% of food and less than 4% of meat, very different from other meatless relatives.