This is not because I don't like them, but because on the whole, they get enough coverage without my involvement. There are a number of reasons for this, but the ones I most usually hold accountable are:
1. They are bigger and therefore easier to notice.
2. The bulk of familiar species are not considered pests, at least not in all situations, and even if they are, well, they are more readily forgiven because:
3. They are "traditionally" cute
Of course, this is very unfair on the groups I do cover more regularly because, well, many terrestrial invertebrates are actually quite large and difficult not to notice, provided that you are in the tropics - but when that happens many people tend to freak out and scream instead of oohing and aahing and taking pictures (I have noticed an increasing tendency to suppress the freak-out instinct, but it is still unfortunately common), and in terms of actually being destructive, a miniscule fraction relative to the absolute number of invertebrate species could ever be described as pests, and there are few if any serious pests from the amphibians and reptiles - and defining cute as "sharing facial proportions with a baby human" just because your instincts dictate it is quite lazy, really.
Fortunately, some mammals buck that trend. Today's guest has a head-start because:
1. It is a "small mammal" by most definitions, and being subterranean it is not easy to notice (although it does leave conspicuous signs here and there).
2. It will eat your vegetables. From below. And various garden plants. More on that later.
3. It has quite distorted features - as a result of living underground - and therefore escapes from the trap of having traditionally cute proportions. At any stage of life.
This is it:
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| Aww? I think this fuzzy little orc weighs in somewhere near the uglier end of "so ugly it's cute" - narrowly avoiding being too ugly to be cute by being fluffier than the more famous naked molerat. |
It is called Ansell's molerat - Fukomys anselli (Burda et al, 1999) - and it's really quite a fascinating little creature. Despite being somewhere between a hamster and a guinea-pig in size, it digs some of the longest tunnels of any mammal - it probably helps that it is colonial, and - unlike almost any other mammals - molerats show division of labour between manual labour and, well, reproductive labour. This seems to be inborn: a worker is born to die younger and not breed, while a reproductive lives longer and reproduces quite prolifically.
Being a molerat, and not a mole, they do a few things differently to the moles that many expatriates in Lusaka assume are responsible for the neat little mounds of earth that pop up all over their gardens. For a start, they dig primarily with their teeth, which keeps those monster gnashers in check, but perhaps the thing that should let immigrants know that they are dealing with a very different wee beastie is that molerats are (at least primarily) herbivorous, chowing down on roots, rhizomes and tubers. Moles - despite the apparent horror with which many keen european gardeners view them - tend towards the carnivorous side of omnivory, and so while they might take a bite out of a tuber here and there, their regulation of underground invertebrates would probably make up for the damage - even if they had no other benefits (which they do).
(To avoid redundancy, there is a broad review of the weirdness of molerats <<here>> )
Most molerats will eat the odd invertebrate - indeed very few animals of the right size to get a decent meal out of a termite or a beetle grub pass up the opportunity - and in addition to the wide range of native plants whose underparts disappearing will concern few, if any gardeners, they do like to sample a lot of garden plants. Most notably in my garden, they will readily eat:
Agapanthus
Cordyline
Yucca
Dracaena
Beaucarnea
Heliconia
Sanseveria
Polyscias
(And any tuberous vegetable that I am foolish enough to grow outside a raised bed).
This can get annoying, so - for any gardeners in the very limited (Lusaka/Central province and not widely within) area that this particular species haunts gardens, let's talk some benefits:
SOIL AERATION.
Yup. Like everything that moves underground, these little guys keep your soil, well, moving. Unlike almost anything else that moves underground, they do it on a scale that can very quickly make a big difference in the most compacted soils - and those complex networks of tunnels (sometimes kilometres long) also greatly improve the capacity of your soil to absorb heavy rainfall, rather than getting washed away by it. With global warming set to intensify our rains into a shorter, more tempestuous period, this is very good.
OPENING SEED BED
This is very much a conditional benefit, but in a garden that is aiming to please wildlife, that is dominated by perennials and involves a minimum of digging, annual wildflowers gradually become less and less abundant - and even short-lived perennials can struggle to self-seed without soil disturbance. Enter molerats, and their neat little mounds of freshly turned earth - creating an invasible surface for small seeds to grow in, and sometimes giving seeds that missed their moment years before a second chance to burst into life.
On the balance, given that most of the low-toxicity plants they like to eat are very easy to propogate, and that the species that we get in and around lusaka is IUCN listed as Near-Threatened - perhaps unsurprising given that its entire range is facing increasingly intensive agriculture and development, and that it is also relied upon by many local communities as a staple meat - I am more than happy to see the occasional Polyscia lean sharply over, or a young Cordyline get a foot shorter overnight. After all, every time I plant one of these that ends up getting destroyed, I'm actively contributing to the survival of a near-threatened endemic!
