Nature Moment: Golden Rumped Elephant Shrew and Crane

Mr. Crane rides a water-hyacinth sailboat.

My office window looks out over a lake. (Yeah, I know, huh?) And in that lake, there are very invasive but deathly beautiful water hyacinths. Left unchecked, they begin to dot the lake like teeny green islands. If  left alone long enough, they'll dot the lake like MASSIVE green islands. In the winter rainy season, this is incredibly gorgeous, because storms blow in and make the green mounds of water hyacinth skate across the lake like flower-festooned buffalo stampeding under a thundering sky. As they destroy their non-native habitat and promote fish-kill due to oxygen depletion. (But pretty fish-kill!)

Anyway, today there was a crane riding a water hyacinth clump barely wider than its own body as the wind blew them across the lake. It was almost The Best Thing I Ever Saw.


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Less locally, Ms. Kinyak at The Daily Mammal introduced me to my new favorite animal: the Golden-rumped Elephant Shrew.

She has a fine collection of links to information about this distant little elephant-kin. One of the things that impressed me was that the elephant shrew is monogamous. I've often wondered how much of that behavior is instinctual and how much is learned. With humans, I feel it's a learned behavior; certainly in our culture there are specific behaviors you must be committed to in order to make a monogamous relationship work. I wouldn't say they are difficult behaviors; in fact, I enjoy them tremendously. But if you neglect the discipline, the relationship can evaporate.

My point is: how complicated a behavior is monogamy? Can highly simple animals do it, or does it take a more socially advanced animal?

Golden-rumped Elephant Shrew: social genius.

And my second point is: Elephants are socially advanced animals. Elephant Shrews are distant relatives of the elephant. Are these shrews tiny social geniuses?

To support my theory that Elephant Shrews are genteel social geniuses, please consider, if you will, their rumps. In her blog entry, Ms. Kinyak says: "The rump is golden for a reason. That pretty blond fur covers a padded area of super-tough skin. The idea seems to be that predators will be attracted to the golden glow and bite there, rather than somewhere that might hurt more."

Given the week I've just had at work, I find myself deeply impressed. That's a survival behavior I seriously need to adopt.

Well played, tiny Golden-rumped Elephant Shrew. Well played.