Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Armadillos are common where I live, and despite their strange desire to launch themselves into oncoming vehicles at night, they are one of my favorite creatures. Armored, fast, and sporting substantial claws, armadillos sound like something that might appear in one of the Jurassic Park movies. Of course, the fact that they feed mostly on earthworms would lower their threat level considerably, but they still look like something left over from a time when the world was a different place entirely.

Only the nine banded armadillo lives in the United States, and it is the only one of the nine known species to be expanding its range. Aside from the dreaded highways, two things threaten populations of armadillos: cold, and hunting.

While rarely on the menu in the U.S., armadillo meat is popular in South America, where it is said to taste like pork. I consider myself fairly adventurous in the food department, but since leprosy is transmissible through the meat, I’ll be taking their word for that.

Hunting pressure is something we expect to threaten species, but we don’t typically think of weather as a problem for naturally living creatures. Armadillos, however, have very slow metabolisms, often sleeping 14 hours per day. In addition, they do not store fat like other mammals do, and feed primarily on insects and invertebrates, so in a long cold snap, entire populations can literally starve to death.

Another weird thing about the local nine-banded armadillos is that they always give birth to four young. Not just four babies, but four genetically identical babies. Only one egg is fertilized, and it always splits in this fashion, the only reliable example of polyembryony (the ten dollar word for this process) among mammals. True, identical twins sometimes occur in many species, but not as a regular mode of reproduction. In fact, you have to look to parasitical wasps and flatworms to find this reproductive strategy as the norm.

This, and the fact that they are one of the few species to harbor leprosy, has made them of interest to scientists. Personally, simply the fact that they are closely related to extinct glyptodonts would be interesting enough.

Cheers,

Michelle