The wildest hamster in history not only carries a deadly poison, but also insists on monogamy

The African Mane Rat looks like a ferret, skunk and porcupine combined. With a body length of 25-30cm, they are actually members of the hamster family, a punk version of hamsters wandering in the wilderness.

Although it is cute, anyone who knows the truth would not want to touch the African Maned Rat, because its simple and honest appearance is highly poisonous, and the deadly poison even makes its fur white. According to a University of Utah article, the strength of the poison is far from simple, as just a few milligrams can make elephants kneel or even kill humans.

Cosplay skunks are meant to warn potential predators to stay away, just like poison dart frogs use bright colors to signal their venom. When these mice feel threatened, the hair on their backs stands up to form a distinct crown, hence the name crested mice. Then they will stick their buttocks up, pressing step by step, the skunk appearance and the highly poisonous blessing, so that the hunter will immediately calm down and turn his head to change to a "restaurant".

University of Utah biologist Sarah Weinstein and her team discovered a way for African maned mice to extract the poison. The research also yielded some unexpected findings. Maned rats are not solitary animals, they appear to be monogamous and even form small groups with their offspring.

People in Kenya have known something long ago: These maned rats are poisonous.

Bristle rats get their toxins from the poison arrow tree (Acokanthera schimpi), and humans often hunt by smearing their sap on their arrows. Poison arrow trees contain cardiolactones, which are toxic compounds similar to those found in monarch butterflies and cane toads. Monarch butterflies are poisonous, and they obtain verbenalactones by ingesting milkweed, while poisonous cane toads have special glands that produce this chemical. The maned rat is more like a monarch in that it must obtain its poison from the outside. To make themselves poisonous, bristle rats chew the bark from poison arrow trees and rub deadly chemicals onto their special hairs.

But this claim comes from an independent paper in 2011, and its accuracy remains to be seen. So Sarah Weinstein and her research team seduced the maned mice with peanut butter and fish and managed to capture 25 of them.

Wearing leather gloves and a thick coat, the researchers met the animals up close, determined their sex and weight, collected stool, tissue and hair samples, and tagged their ears.

At the research station, researchers transformed a cowshed into a stall with miniature ladders and nest boxes, doing their best to mimic the mice's natural habitat in tree cavities. Using video cameras, they then monitored the rats for 447 days and 525 nights, during which time they recorded many behaviors.

The researchers monitored the bristled rats as individuals, in pairs and groups. Coincidentally, when a female was paired with a male captured at the same location, they began barking at each other and grooming; with another male, the female was completely ignorant. This was a big surprise because everyone before this thought they were living alone. And this experiment has proved that they are not only not lonely, but also strong supporters of monogamy.

And some young, blood-related bred mice were caught where adult pairs lived, suggesting they lived with their parents for a long time. Further observations in the bullpen lab showed that these related crested mice socialized in groups.

The researchers also put the branches of the poison arrow tree into the cowshed laboratory. And then there are some bristle rats that do spend their time chewing on branches and then lick the goo onto their fur. It appears that the maned rat has developed a tolerance to this poison. They didn't immediately take the opportunity to pick up the toxin from the branches, which may indicate that the toxin has been lingering on the hair for an extended period of time and need not be applied before the toxin wears off.

Although IUCN currently ranks the maned rat as the least concerned species, the team believes that protection should not start in the case of a crisis in the number of species, but should be prevented in advance, so they are still studying the maned rat.

I also think that prevention should be the main thing. When it becomes an endangered species and then protects it, things are often very troublesome. But it is difficult to focus on so many species at the same time, and the best way is to coordinate human construction and animals' natural habitats to coincide.