and suddenly I just really like shrews
I didn’t care for the tone of Haskell’s The Forest Unseen - it had a whiff of woo, which really turns me off - but it was full of great critter facts and teasers to explore. Thus today’s fascination with shrews, who turn out to be absolutely terrifying predators who would thoroughly destroy us if they weren’t luckily such itty bitty teensy weeny little buddies.
I mean. First of all, what the fuck, they’re venomous and do the living larder thing like parasitoid wasps! Dunno why, but I find that much creepier behavior coming from a mammal vs when bugs do it.
(Parasitoids are parasite babbies who eventually kill their hosts. Oh, huh. Does that make octopus babies parasitoids? Octopuses are semelparous - with very few exceptions, an octopus mama can only reproduce once in a lifetime and then she dies. This can take a while. Parasitoid molluscs are less creepy than parasitoid[-ish?] mammals, at least. I’ll take it.)
Okay, yeah, sorry, what do I mean by living larder. Right. I mean this:
Wasps are particularly known for that sort of thing - paralyzing other bugs, laying eggs near or in them, and leaving them to be devoured by their growing young. I mean, hell, they even do it to themselves:
What a beautiful sentence. I want you to just live with that for a moment. Parasitoid wasps are vulnerable to hyperparasitoid wasps. Fucking beautiful, man.
I tried to find a List Of Parasitoids, or at least a List Of Parasitoid Wasps, but all I came up with was various extremely specific subsets of the hypothetical ultimate parasitoid list I was hoping to find.
Back to shrews. Apparently one of our early ancestors was a tiny shrew-like mammal. Look in the mirror, folks. This could be you.
They’re fast little fuckers, too. Their heart rate is something 600-1500 beats/minute. Their twitchy little bodies have been recorded making 12 movements per second. Their metabolisms are so fast that they have to eat every few hours - and they have to eat 2x-3x their bodyweight every day! - in order to survive. (Now you see why they need a pantry stocked with living paralyzed food that stays fresh without refrigeration, when the choice is midnight snackies or death.)
They can even walk on water:
“You can find a shrew species in just about any habitat. Several species of water shrews even take to streams. The water shrew has stiff hairs on its feet that allow it to scamper across the surface of the water. Its stiff fur also traps air bubbles, allowing it to stay underwater for short bursts. It must stay in constant motion underwater, or it pops back up to the surface.”
- Matthew L. Miller, Cool Green Science
…are shrews secretly sharks?
Check out the alternative to winter hibernation they came up with:
“Common shrews shrink their heads — including their skulls — in winter, researchers have found. They believe that this dramatic example of downsizing may help the animals to survive when food is scarce.
“Individual wild common shrews (Sorex araneus) captured and tagged in Germany showed large reductions in skull size and body mass over the winter. Their spines also got shorter, and major organs, including the heart, lungs and spleen, shrank. Even their brain mass dropped by 20–30%, according to Javier Lázaro, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany. In spring, the animals started to regrow.”
- Emma Young, "Shrew skulls shrink for winter survival"
Yeah, my brain shrinks in winter too.
Who would win in a tiny wee little fight, an etruscan shrew or a bumblebee bat?
I’m bullish on the shrew.
(The other connection between shrews and bats is that shrews also use echolocation!)
Their babies travel together by biting onto each others’ tails and running around thus conjoined in some sort of furry centipede formation:
"Shrews have poor eyesight and these babies are nearly blind. To move they form a conga" - EvaRaw666, r/NatureIsFuckingLit
Let’s review this situation: Imagine you’re a cute little bug just wandering along on your many legs, and suddenly there’s this high-speed monster chirping around at top speed, racing directly at you in the dark, iron-red teeth dripping venom that you know could leave you trapped and paralyzed back in their lair waiting to be eaten, a long chain of legs and snouts and teeth bristling and weaving around like those long bendy buses with the accordian joints. Your heart is racing (not as fast as the shrew’s!) but you remind yourself that you’re safe, it’s okay, the monster is on the other side of the stream - but then you blink and suddenly it’s zooming right across the stream, literally walking on water to get at you anyway. It’s just so hungry, after all. All the time. SO HUNGRY. If only an owl was here to save you.
Frankly we’re just lucky they’re so small.
I remember reading about iron in teeth elsewhere - maybe it was komodo dragons? Or beavers.
Anyway I feel like I'm reading I snippet of T Kingfisher horror here so thank you!