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This furry little chap is Billy and he’s a 6 month old white rat with a brown hood and a stripe down his back. As you can see, he loves his Daddy and enjoys hugging my fingers quite a lot. Billy and his brother Harry (who’s a bit scared of the camera still but is a beautiful platinum rat with a white tummy) joined my household 3 weeks ago.
I’ve been thinking about getting some rats for a while now and was recommended a good shop that buys in from local breeders. I instead went to Awful Chain Store Petshop to look at cages though as I figured they would be cheaper there - and they were, by about 25 percent. In their adoption section filled with ferocious guinea pigs and rabbits with ADHD I met Phil and Thomas, a pair of 6-month-old male rats that were obviously from a breeder and weren’t the usual ugly albino chain store rats from a farm. Phil and Thomas had been there a month and no one seemed to want them. Their original owner moved house and her new landlord would not let her keep them and so she had put them up for adoption. I didn’t really want male rats as they’re a bit docile, I wanted females - mainly because it’s easier to add an extra rat to a colony of females than it is males. I wanted a group of three too, not a pair really but I could not leave these boys there, unwanted and unloved in an awful stinking cage with strong lighting and no toys or anything to do with their time and terrifyingly close to the smell of the piss of unfamiliar aminals and barking dogs wandering the store (yes, Pets At Home, Plymouth, I’m looking at you!). So, I filled in the adoption papers and hurried home with a cage to get their new home set up for them. They have a lovely big cage that could take three rats really but it’s nice for two of them. I then went back and picked them up and brought them home in a cab - much to the chagrin of the Czech driver who told me that he hated rats! Alas, rats do get bad press but I love them. Intelligent, clean, friendly, interactive and a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, I know so many “Phil”s of human format that most of them have nicknames to distinguish them, so Phil had to be re-named and “Billy” was chosen. I like diminutives anyway and I used to own a 35 year old Coenobita violascens called Billy who was part of a colony of eight Coenobita specimens I used to keep as pets. Alas, Billy died not long after I got him and the rest of the colony followed soon after - an infection I think. So, now we have Billy the rat instead and if Phil had to be renamed then so did Thomas who was Charlie for about 1h then it became clear he was a Harry and that stuck.
Their cage now has a wooden air-raid-shelter style house made of twigs, coloured chinchilla wooden chew-sticks attached to the bars as tiny platforms to climb on, a hammock, a rope bridge, a wooden puzzle of sticks to hide food inside, a metal wire ball to hide food inside, a rope ball and various puzzle-based sources of food and exercise. Their favourite toy is bogroll which they use to make their nest with and to play tug-o-war with.
They’re both very handsome boys (and know it) and once they’re used to posing for the camera I’m sure they’ll be Twitter celebrities as they’re so damn cute (and insane).
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High-Speed photographs of colour ink on water by Alberto Emiliano Seveso.
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A pyranha appeared in my colleague’s pint yesterday.
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This week we took some of our first year Animal Behaviour and Conservation Biology students to watch a Dartmoor Pony (Equus ferus Boddaert) dissection at Dartmoor Zoo, which is a relatively short drive from the University and is just on the south tip of Dartmoor, surrounded by beautiful countryside. Dartmoor ponies are an essential part of the moor’s ecosystem and are semi-feral at present. In order to conserve the moor’s ecosystem, it is vital that the ponies are preserved in a viable and healthy state. Because of the small gene pool getting even smaller, there is a scheme under way to cull individual female ponies that consistently deliver deformed or ill foals. This sounds quite an extreme means to deal with the problem but it’s really the only way.
To ensure this is a waste-free process, once the animals have been slaughtered, the zoo butchers the meat for use as feed for zoo animals such as tigers and lions. They also enjoy the occasional horse’s head but the public tends not to like to have to see that, so it’s kept to an occasional treat! The skin is used for leather or to make toys for the big cats to train with - as are the tails. The bones and offal are sent to be rendered into tallow and gelatine for non-human use, such as in laboratories.
In this photo, the underside of the horse has been opened and the digestive tract is spilling out. The bright yellow matter is adipose (fat) tissue under the skin of the pony. The large structure hanging to the floor is the cecum - in humans this is a small pouch at the junction of the small and large intestines, but in some animals like this pony that eat a lot of cellulose (in plant material), the cecum is much larger. This is because it is the location in which hind-gut fermentation takes place, where anaerobic Bacteria ferment cellulose to enable it to be digested.
Simply put, without its cecal Bacteria, this horse would not be able to survive on its diet of grass and plant matter since it would not be able to digest the cellulose present at all.
