Female Coatis Help Unrelated Offspring Steal Food
by Live Science staff
Unrelated adult coatis (a raccoon-like animal from south America) help juveniles steal from their relatives, a new study suggests. This kind of “turning on kin” behavior isn’t well documented in the animal kingdom, the researchers said.
“No previously published model of animal behavior would have predicted that young juvenile coatis should regularly attack and steal food from older relatives,” study researcher Ben Hirsch, of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, said in a statement.
Once they noticed this behavior, the researchers wanted to know how closely the coatis performing this act were related. The new genetic analysis found that the juveniles were sometimes attacking their own kin and often received help from unrelated adults.
“Additionally, the pattern that adult females come to the aid of these non-related juveniles really flies in the face of what we thought,” Hirsch said. “What we have described is a quasi-cooperative behavior that is evidently not kin based.”…
(read more: Live Science) (photo: Smithsonian’s National Zoo)
A Raccoon (Procyon lotor) naps in its lair at Edith L. Moore Nature Center in Houston, TX, USA.
(photo: Teri Zambon) (via: Houston Ausubon)
Illustration of a Kinkajou (Potos flavus) from the Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire Naturelle by Alcide d’Orbigny, published in 1849
(via: Wikipedia)
Babbling Celery: RIP Roscoe
So. One of the raccoons at the sanctuary bit a coworker. Texas law states that any native wildlife kept in captivity which harms a human being must be euthanized, regardless of its vaccination status.
Mother fucker.
This really upsets me. If it was any other state, he would have been fine since…
…what the hell is the point to that law.
I am just…speechless. That is unbelievable.
