28: Great Potoo & African Giant Pouched Rat

Ellen: Hey there, this is Ellen Weatherford.

Christian: And Christian Weatherford.

Ellen: And this is Just the Zoo of Us, your favorite animal review podcast where we take your favorite species of animals, we review them and we rate them out of 10 in the categories of effectiveness, ingenuity and aesthetics.

Christian: We are many things, but zoological experts aren't among them.

Ellen: What kind of things are we?

Christian: Human.

Ellen: And only that.

Christian: Definitely not multiple beings.

Ellen: We are one being and not several.

Christian: We do a lot of research and try our best to make sure we're presenting you with information that is both trustworthy and good.

Ellen: Only the best. We don't settle for less. Is that our new slogan?

Christian: Let's workshop it.

Ellen: Okay.

Christian: Any announcements today before we get into it?

Ellen: Yes. I'm just going to repeat our announcement from last week that we have a live show coming up, and that if you are in Jacksonville, Florida, please come check us out. We're going to be at Cultivate, which is in the Riverside area on Saturday, November 30th so come check us out. We've got tickets available online, so come join us. It's going to be really great.

Christian: Looking forward to it.

Ellen: Yeah. I believe, Christian, it is your turn to go first this week.

Christian: Excellent. Because this week I have a good birb.

Ellen: A birb friend!

Christian: Yes. Specifically the great potoo.

Ellen: Potoo!

Christian: Scientific name: Nyctibius grandis.

Ellen: Nailed it.

Christian: So this is a specific species of potoo. You'll hear a lot about potoos on the internet right now. It actually refers to an entire family of birds.

Ellen: So there's many potoos.

Christian: There are. But this one specifically, the great potoo. The potoo was submitted to us by Kyle Rauch.

Ellen: Thanks Kyle!

Christian: And I'll be pulling my information from two different places: the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Neotropical birds, found at neotropical.birds.cornell.edu, and also Animal Diversity Web, found at animaldiversity.org.

Ellen: Excellent.

Christian: Two sources I believe I've used many times before.

Ellen: We have some go-tos.

Christian: Yes. So getting right into it, this bird weighs around 360 to 650 grams, which in imperial is 13 to 23 ounces.

Ellen: Oh, he's so light.

Christian: So here's the thing. Their length is 480 to 600 millimeters, or 19 to 24 inches.

Ellen: Oh.

Christian: So they're light, yes, but all birds are kind of like that. But in terms of the birds, this is the biggest potoo, actually, hence the name great potoo.

Ellen: It's an absolute unit.

Christian: And its wingspan is even bigger, as is usual with flighted birds, at 700 to 804 millimeters or 28 to 32 inches.

Ellen: Okay, so that's a good few feet of wingspan.

Christian: Yeah. And just a quick note here, whenever I'm doing these conversions, I'm rounding up, or just rounding to the nearest whole number for simplicity.

Ellen: Yeah, please don't do like, sig figs for your conversions. That's not good audio.

Christian: Yeah. Now, let's talk about where these guys can be found. They're found in Central and South America, from southeastern Mexico, south to northern Columbia, and east of the Andes south to eastern Bolivia and central Brazil. There's also kind of a separated pocket of them found in southeastern Brazil. And they live primarily in rainforests and forests.

Ellen: As birds tend to do.

Christian: Yes. So these birds spend a lot of their time in trees. As I mentioned earlier, their family refers to all potoos and it's called Nyctibiidae, and they're related to nightjars and frogmouths.

Ellen: Oh okay! I know about frogmouths.

Christian: Yes. And you can kind of see that with the way their mouths look.

Ellen: I actually often get them kind of confused for each other.

Christian: Yeah. I don't know if I'd be able to tell the difference either.

Ellen: We actually saw a tawny frogmouth at Zoo Atlanta.

Christian: Yeah. So, like the frogmouth, the great potoo has a short to beak but it's also wide.

Ellen: It's hilarious. Y'all, it looks so funny. It's so ridiculous. It's so short and pointy. It's very, very pointy but it's very short, and it's very, very wide.

Christian: It's got these big mouths.

Ellen: It's really funny looking.

Christian: And the great potoo is nocturnal, so it's doing most of its hunting at night and during the day it stands pretty still. And I'll talk about that here shortly, cause that's kind of its signature thing.

Ellen: It reminds me of an owl. Is it related to an owl?

Christian: Potoos are in a different order than owls, but I do see a lot of resemblances there. Again, in their feet and in the round shape of their heads. That's about where it stops.

Ellen: Some convergent evolution perhaps?

Christian: Perhaps... Another little fun fact here: There is no dimorphism between the sexes, so it's actually very, very difficult to identify which is a male and female in the field.

Ellen: Oh! Interesting.

Christian: Yes, and they usually spend their times apart too.

Ellen: Oh really? Are they like solitary?

Christian: Mostly. Yeah.

Ellen: Oh. Just po-one.

Christian: I'll talk about this a little later when we talk about reproduction, but first: effectiveness, our first category. How good do they do the things they do? Physical attributes, that sort. I'm giving the great potoo an 8 out of 10, and it's pretty much all based on their camouflage. So the great potoo has feathers that are colored and patterned in a way such that they blend in perfectly with tree bark in their regions. If they stay completely still against the tree during the daytime, you're likely not to ever see them.

Ellen: It's like lots of browns and grays and tans.

Christian: And they're like, spotted in the same way that the bark is.

Ellen: Yeah, yeah yeah. I think it's pretty.

Christian: Yeah. I'm also going to talk about this in the ingenuity, but I just want to note the physical attribute of their camouflage, which is the coloration, because the rest of it comes from behavioral type things.

Ellen: Ooh, some more motion camouflage like we talked about in the last episode.

Christian: All right, I'm moving on to ingenuity. This is where they do smart things, or things that take some planning, some forethought, tool use, that sort of thing. Ingenuity, 7 out of 10. So I mentioned their camouflage, so of course during the daytime they'll stay relatively still, but they'll position themselves at the end of like a broken branch or even the main trunk of a tree that's been broken at the end. They'll position themselves there and completely minimize movement. Again, they're nocturnal, so during the day they're not doing a whole lot, but while they are up and about in the day, they'll stay in that spot at the end of the tree, very minimal head movement, and when it senses something nearby, something that's moving, making sounds, something that could be a predator, they stretch out their neck pointed upwards to kind of mimic the end of the branch.

Ellen: So they're pointing their beak up at the sky.

Christian: Yes. And then, staying completely still, they close their eyes and that combined with their camouflage makes them look like just an extension of the tree.

Ellen: They are become branch.

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: Don't worry about me. It's just me, a branch on this tree. Definitely not a bird. You can keep moving on.

Christian: So yeah, they do this when they sense something nearby and as long as they stay still, you're probably not likely to see them. They'll peep their eyes open just a little bit to kind of, to see when the threat has gone away. I thought that was interesting.

Ellen: This reminds me of being a little kid and playing hide and seek, and having the idea in my head that if I could not see who was looking for me, they could not see me either. And like just barely squinting my eyes open.

Christian: That's cute. My second point for their ingenuity is their hunting method. So even when they are awake at nighttime, what they're doing is they will kind of go to the lower levels of tree branches and stay still until something gets nearby. So when you see a picture of these fellows, you notice they have these big eyes. So they're really, really good for seeing in the dark.

Ellen: Oh yeah. Good nocturnal adaptation.

Christian: Yeah. So again, another kind of thing to liken them to owls, but they're different in that the eyes aren't framed in the same way. Because with these guys, their eyes are almost bug-eyed. If you see them from directly head-on, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Ellen: Oh, you know what? I have seen pictures of where I know what you're talking about. And it makes a really funny aesthetic because they have the wide, flat mouth and also these enormous bug eyes and it makes them look kind of like they're kind of panicking at all times, just in a state of anxiety.

Christian: Yeah. What they'll do is they'll sit and wait for prey to get nearby, and then once it does get nearby, they will just take off flying after it and just go grab it in their enormous mouth and eat it.

Ellen: So they're eating things like bugs or are they eating like, rodents or what? What kind of things are they hunting?

Christian: So they eat large flying insects. Here's something I wasn't expecting: occasionally, small bats.

Ellen: Oh no!

Christian: Yeah!

Ellen: Oh my goodness!

Christian: Right?

Ellen: Okay. So I guess yes, now that I'm thinking of it, there are probably bats in that area where they live in that are small enough for this bird, which is big, but it's not like a huge bird. Right? For instance, have you seen like the little Honduran bats that like the size of like your thumb? Tiny, tiny little bats that like, sleep in flowers and stuff. It's really cute.

Christian: They don't even need to be that small. I think the ones that that are at the Jacksonville Zoo, like in the jaguar area, like those would fit easily in the palm of your hand.

Ellen: Yeah.

Christian: Those would be fair game for this bird.

Ellen: You said they live in Mexico too, right?

Christian: The very southeastern part of Mexico.

Ellen: Okay. Cause vampire bats live in Mexico, so I wonder if they eat vampire bats. But that's interesting, I hadn't thought of them as eating bats. I would have thought of them as sharing the same prey. Like I would have thought of them as both eating bugs.

Christian: No, so I think bats would be going for smaller bugs actually. Well, the size of bats that this one's going for, it would be going for smaller bugs, cause the bugs that this one is going for are like big beetles, like sized flying insects.

Ellen: That's funny because it seems like they're kind of preying on the bat, so they're getting their food but they're also taking out their competition.

Christian: Two-pronged method there.

Ellen: That's how you can out hunt the bats, is by just eating them.

Christian: If you can't join them, eat them.

Ellen: If you can't beat them eat them.

Christian: That's much better. On to aesthetics, the third category, how pretty they are, how cute they are, how aesthetically pleasing. So for this one I'm giving an 8 out of 10 cause they are a tree.

Ellen: Just am tree.

Christian: I'm very impressed with their pretty feathers and how they look like trees, and of course their wide mouths are somehow endearing.

Ellen: It is kinda cute. A little bit. I think it almost looks like a smile, almost in a way.

Christian: Here in a moment I'm gonna talk about the sounds they make and I think it goes well with that aesthetic. And then lastly, their big eyes.

Ellen: Yeah. That does give them a cute look. I like big eyes.

Christian: Yes. So that's my main scores. I'm going to get into some miscellaneous info. So in terms of conservation status, the great potoo is of Least Concern on the IUCN Red List.

Ellen: Oh very good.

Christian: Their population is decreasing, but not at an alarming enough rate to pose concern. In some rural parts of Brazil, potoo feathers are thought to have the power to ensure chastity.

Ellen: Oh, dear.

Christian: Yes.

Ellen: Oh no.

Christian: So they're hunted for their body parts to be used in ceremonies to ward off seduction.

Ellen: Ward off seduction...

Christian: I can relate to this because I once had a RuneScape subscription.

Ellen: [loses it] Oh my God.

Christian: And of course, you know they're susceptible to things like slash and burn agriculture in the rainforests, that sort of thing. Now, their sound.

Ellen: This is the real bread and butter of the potoo.

Christian: I'm gonna imitate it.

Ellen: Okay. Let me hear it. Can you back away from the microphone a little bit?

Christian: It kind of sounds like, [BWAAA].

Ellen: One more time.

Christian: [BWAAA].

Ellen: There's this video that's been circling around that shows a potoo sound, and the caption on it says it sounds like a frustrated teenager whose mom has just told them that they can't like, go to their friend's house because the sound that they make sounds like, "MMMOOOMMMM."

Christian: So keep in mind the different potoos sound differently, so I'm not sure which one that one was. But yeah, this one, its call is described as haunting, which of course you would mostly be hearing this at nighttime.

Ellen: Oh gosh. That really just makes it worse, doesn't it?

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: Man, we should have done this one for our Halloween episodes.

Christian: Maybe. Things that predate it include: monkeys...

Ellen: Oh no. How- okay. How does a monkey catch a potoo?!

Christian: So let me describe everything else too. So monkeys, these things called tayras, which are a kind of weasel in that part of the world.

Ellen: But they have short stubby legs!

Christian: I know.

Ellen: They cannot get that high up off the ground!

Christian: Also collared forest falcons.

Ellen: That one makes sense. This one's on brand. This one I approve of, this is fine.

Christian: It leads me to believe, do they go all in on their camouflage?

Ellen: And just like just like...

Christian: "Nope, Nope. Still doesn't see me, still doesn't see me- Ow, shucks! It's got me!" Makes me wonder.

Ellen: Yeah, I have seen the video- we were just watching videos of the potoo the other day and I have seen a video where they do that squinty thing, but then they just very slowly move their head to keep track of whatever they're hiding from. So I wonder if they're just really rolling the dice. Maybe they like, fail their stealth check and just kind of run with it.

Christian: I don't know, because they can definitely fly.

Ellen: Right! Just do that! Just do that.

Christian: I don't know. Maybe the things that hunt them are stealthier. Who knows.

Ellen: A monkey?

Christian: I don't know. And then lastly, they lay a single egg at the end of that broken tree branch that they hang out on. So they don't build a nest, but they do lay one, like if you imagine a vertical tree and the very tip of it is broken off...

Ellen: Trees tend to be vertical. Yeah.

Christian: Yes. Unless misfortune has befallen it. But with this one, imagine at the very end of the trunk, it's broken off and has a bit of a divot. So that's where it would lay its one egg.

Ellen: Just the one?

Christian: Yep.

Ellen: Awww...

Christian: And it doesn't build a nest or anything. And what it does is it covers it with its body, because even when the egg hatches, it's not quite at the coloration it needs for camouflage. But the parent will just kind of cover it with its body and do its "stay still" camouflage to cover it.

Ellen: Oh, gotta protect the beeb.

Christian: Yeah. But here's what's strange: so there's only ever one of the parents doing this at a time. And the problem with this is you can't tell the sexes in the adults. So it's kind of unknown if it's just one of the parents sticking around, or if they're just trading off.

Ellen: Oh, so we don't know like both parents are raising the chick.

Christian: Right.

Ellen: Huh. Well darn cause I was gonna ask you about that.

Christian: I guess this must be a common problem in birds where there is no dimorphism and they do this where they're not doing it at the same time.

Ellen: Sure. Huh. Well shoot.

Christian: Interesting little tidbit, I thought.

Ellen: I guess maybe good moms, maybe good dads, maybe both. Not sure. Oh, and talking about the babies, I did also see a picture of a baby potoo. Like it still had the little fluff on it and it was pointing its nose up in the air. Like it was already doing the defense posture. So it seems like that's something that they learn very early in life and I love that.

Christian: Oh, and I'll add another last bit here: the plural form is potoos.

Ellen: It's not pothrees?

Christian: Excellent.

Ellen: Pofours? I appreciate you teeing up my joke.

Christian: All right. That's all I got.

Ellen: Excellent job. I love this bird.

Christian: Thank you.

Ellen: Thank you for telling us about the potoo. Before we move on to my animal, I would like to take a quick moment to thank our patrons on Patreon, this week I'm thinking Briana Feinberg, Krystina Sanders, the Jungle Gym Queen, and Jacob Jones. Thank you all!

Christian: What animal do you bring us to this week, my love?

Ellen: This week I'm talking about the African giant pouched rat, also known as the Gambian pouched rat.

Christian: That's quite the title.

Ellen: Their scientific name is Cricetomys gambianus.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: This species was requested by the Jungle Gym Queen in our Facebook group. It's actually been sitting on my list of animals that I've wanted to talk about since like, before we actually even recorded our first episode when I started our species list, and it's just been sitting there and I haven't had an excuse to talk about it yet, so finally somebody requested it and I was able to set it free from the species list.

Christian: Excellent.

Ellen: So I'm getting my information on the African giant pouched rat from the San Diego Zoo, the University of Michigan's Animal Diversity Web (woo woo! Love them) and APOPO.org.

Christian: One more time.

Ellen: APOPO.org. I'll explain that when I get to it.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: So I'm going to first introduce you to the African giant pouched rat. As the name would imply, this is a large rat. Just the body length, from like the nose to the butt, is about one to one and a half feet.

Christian: Wow.

Ellen: And then the tail is equally as long, adding up to a total length of around 3 feet, which is just under a meter from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail, that's about 3 feet long.

Christian: That absolute metric unit.

Ellen: So their weight is typically around 3 pounds, but they can be up to 9 pounds, which is roughly the size of like a smaller house cat. I said that I heard my cat in the background go "meow!"

Christian: "Wish you would!" Our cat is not of the smaller variety.

Ellen: He's a big boy. Yeah, our cat is definitely bigger than this rat, but this is still a very large rat. This rat has brown fur and a pale underside. They're native to subsaharan Africa and they have a really wide range of habitable biomes, right? So they don't like just live in forests or just live in grasslands. They can live in a lot of different places, pretty much anywhere where they can find shelter. And shelter could be trees, it could be rocks, it could be shrubs, it could be termite mounds, it could be burrows of other animals, pretty much anywhere where they can find somewhere to burrow, they will live there.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: Their taxonomic family is called Nesomyidae and this is a family of African rats and mice. This is different from the family that we think of as like common rats. So European rats, they belong to a different family, so they're only sort of distantly related to them, but they are still, you know, rodents. The giant pouched rat is obviously much larger than those rats, but it also has much longer limbs proportionally, larger and taller ears, and this was a surprising part: smaller eyes. Like proportional to the body at least, much smaller eyes. They have actually really tiny eyes.

Christian: Weird.

Ellen: It is weird. That's a good segue for me to get into the first category for this pouched rat: effectiveness. Just like your effectiveness, this is physical adaptations that let the animal do a good job of doing its things. I'm giving the African pouched rat a 7 out of 10. It's decent. This is more of a generalist, instead of a specialist. They're not like, highly specialized for anything in particular, but they're a little more adaptable. They are opportunistic omnivores. They will eat pretty much anything. Fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts, insects, meat, whatever's available. They will take it and they will chow down.

Christian: All right.

Ellen: So the word "pouched" might make you think that it has like a tummy pocket, like a marsupial.

Christian: Yeah, I figured it was probably not the first guess type thing.

Ellen: So the first time I heard of these rats, that was my assumption was that the pouch was referring to like, a tummy pocket of some sort.

Christian: Sure.

Ellen: Or you know how like, otters have little pockets like under their arms and stuff where they have little like, hidden pouches? This is not really that. The pouched part of their name actually refers to pouches that it has in its cheeks.

Christian: Aw, like chipmunks.

Ellen: It's just like chipmunks and it allows it to store massive amounts of stuff in their cheeks, just like a hamster. Although they're not really related to hamsters, so this is another example of convergent evolution.

Christian: Neat.

Ellen: Where they evolved their own little secret mouth pockets. It uses those pouches to carry food, but it also carries nesting materials in its pouches. So when it's like building nests and lining its nest with stuff, it stuffs all that stuff in its cheeks and carries it back.

Christian: That sounds very unpleasant.

Ellen: It doesn't sound fun, but they seem to enjoy it.

Christian: I was just thinking, how much food could I fit in my cheeks?

Ellen: In your human cheeks? How- okay, let's think about it. How many grapes do you think you could fit in your cheeks?

Christian: Four on each side.

Ellen: On each side? That's it? I think you could get up to six on each side.

Christian: I was thinking in terms of Jolly Ranchers for some reason.

Ellen: Okay. How many Jolly Ranchers do you think you could fit in your mouth? Fine, let's go there.

Christian: Five.

Ellen: Five Jolly Ranchers in your mouth and that's it?

Christian: Each side.

Ellen: Okay, so a total of 10 Jolly Ranchers.

Christian: Yes.

Ellen: You know, we've got a whole bucket of Halloween candy in our kitchen. We can test this out right now. We can see how many Jolly Ranchers you can fit in your mouth.

Christian: I'm good. All the listener would hear is [gross slurping sounds].

Ellen: Stop it! Gross!

Christian: Great radio.

Ellen: Now I have to throw the whole episode away. So yeah, they put food in their cheeks, just like a, just like a hamster. It's really cute. They're also pretty good at climbing and swimming. They have that, that really, really long tail that they have, gives them pretty good balance and it lets them do a pretty good job of climbing and running around in the trees. This allows them to access different, hard to reach food so they could climb a tree and get like, fruit for example, and they also can get up to spaces where they can take shelter inside of hollowed out trees so they can like climb a tree and then use a hole in the tree to get inside of it and then use the tree as shelter. Yeah, it's pretty neat. One of my first like, deductions is that they do have pretty small eyes, like I mentioned earlier, and this is actually counterintuitive because they are nocturnal.

Christian: Huh.

Ellen: Yeah. So like you mentioned for the potoo, usually nocturnal animals have pretty big eyes that allow them to take in more light and see better in low light, but they don't, they have are actually really small eyes. So their eyes aren't helping them out much, so they're relying more heavily on their sense of smell for navigation. Yeah, sometimes even if you do see them out and active during the daytime, it seems like they kind of don't actually use their sight at all. They act as though they're blind.

Christian: Weird.

Ellen: It's really weird. It's very strange. But so yeah, they don't have very good vision, but I feel like they kind of make up for it with a really good sense of smell. They're also pretty sensitive to temperature. They're very lean, they don't have a lot of fat on their body.

Christian: Oh, okay.

Ellen: They don't carry very much fat on them, which means that they're really vulnerable to cold and they can have some negative effects from experiencing lower temperatures, but they're also nocturnal and they burrow during the day to avoid the heat of the daytime, which kind of tells us that they're also sensitive to heat.

Christian: Huh.

Ellen: Yeah. So they're a little bit picky about their temperatures. They don't really do particularly well in either very high or very low temperatures. They kind of need a more temperate environment.

Christian: And these are found in Africa?

Ellen: Africa. Central and southern Africa.

Christian: Huh. Okay.

Ellen: Yeah, it's just interesting. They're more temperature sensitive than you might have assumed them to be. So my last kind of point that I gave them for effectiveness is that, like many other rodents, they are prolific breeders. So an adult female rat can have up to 9 litters per year of up to 5 offspring per litter.

Christian: Oh geez.

Ellen: An adult female pouched rat is capable of producing up to 45 pups per year.

Christian: Yikes.

Ellen: It's so many. This is a rodent thing, right? Like when you're kind of little, you might die- well, you're probably going to die. So you just have all of the babies to kind of make up for your mortality rates.

Christian: Oh man.

Ellen: So yeah, they have lots of babies.

Christian: So what keeps them in check?

Ellen: I mean things eat them, you know. Like birds of prey will eat them.

Christian: Oh, okay. I was gonna ask if there's anything in particular or just whatever.

Ellen: They're not the favored prey of anything in particular. There's nothing that really like, seeks them out. But I mean, birds of prey will grab them. You know, stuff like that. So that sums up the effectiveness for them. Moving on to ingenuity. This is where the pouched rat shines. They have ingenuity in the bag. I'm giving them a 10 out of 10.

Christian: Alright. Hehe...

Ellen: This is a very, very smart little dude- What?

Christian: It's got it in the bag. Pouched rat. Ha.

Ellen: Oh my God. Anyway, so like I mentioned earlier, they like to burrow, they take shelter in naturally occurring crevices. These could be hollowed out trees or termite mounds, anything like that. They can also dig their own burrows in the ground if there's none available. Once they've kind of got their burrow situated, they will also construct systems of tunnels. So it will give them multiple openings for entering and exiting as well as chambers for nesting and having babies and stuff like that. They also hoard. They're major big time hoarders. They hoard real bad.

Christian: Oh boy.

Ellen: So the pouched rats will stash food in their burrows even when food is plentiful and there is no shortage. So a lot of animals will kind of stash food for like the winter, or like a seasonal thing for when food is low. But pouched rats will hoard all the time no matter what.

Christian: I don't know who that sounds like.

Ellen: Puppy, who hoards treats in our couch.

Christian: I've got a different opinion on that now.

Ellen: What?

Christian: I think she's just trying to hide the treats she doesn't like. She's trying to spare us our feelings.

Ellen: Oh is she being nice to us? That's probably true because I haven't seen her do it with the new treats that we got her.

Christian: "This is bad. Get it out of my face."

Ellen: Well, so the pouched rats will stash anything all the time.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: Yeah. They just are big time hoarders, which I actually thought was pretty smart of them because like, I dunno, I felt like it was a a good example of preparation and thinking ahead. Thinking longterm. Right? Like, better I'm safe than sorry.

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: Another smart thing that they do is that, since I mentioned that they are kind of susceptible to cold temperatures, when it starts to get chilly, the rats will huddle together in their burrows to stay warm. They're usually pretty solitary, but when it gets chilly, they can all kind of form a huddle and stay warm.

Christian: Those winter cuddle feels.

Ellen: It is. Yeah. It's, you know, it starts to get cold, boyfriend weather starts creeping in...

Christian: That new season of that show you watch is now available on Netflix.

Ellen: It's time to bust out the sweaters and the blankets and have yourself a good old cuddle. Another thing that they do is that when they're threatened, they puff up their cheeks with air to make them look bigger. They inflate their cheeks.

Christian: I really want to see you this.

Ellen: It's really funny because if you can imagine like, you're squaring up with like some human person that is like, intimidating you and then as you're about to fight, all of a sudden they just blow their cheeks up with air.

Christian: So you're in the basement of this tavern, right? The owner has hired yet another adventurer to deal with the giant rats in the basement. The party of four to six people come down the stairs...

Ellen: And all of the rats puff up their cheeks really big. Are you still gonna fight them? No, you're not. So yeah, I thought that was a smart thing that they do. But the last thing I want to talk about for their ingenuity was kind of the main reason I wanted to talk about the African giant pouched rat. These are called HeroRATs.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: HeroRATs are used by the organization APOPO, that I mentioned at the top. So I'm getting all of my information for this little segment directly from their website, APOPO.org.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: Now APOPO is an acronym based on their Dutch name, because the organization was founded by a Dutch person, so the organization is of Dutch origins, so that acronym is based on their Dutch name, which translates to, in English: Anti-personnel Landmines Detection Product Development.

Christian: Uh oh!

Ellen: This is the bomb squad.

Christian: Does this end poorly for the rats?

Ellen: No! No it doesn't. So African giant pouched rats, with their keen sense of smell, incredible intelligence, and high motivation for reward are prime candidates for a specialized task force tackling a pretty daunting task, which is landmine detection and extraction. So the rats are put through a 9-month training course, which I'm going to affectionately refer to as rat college, and using clicker training and treats to associate the scent of explosive materials with receiving a food reward. Their favorite is bananas, they love bananas and they will fill their cheeks with bananas and it's really cute. In order to graduate from rat college, they have to pass a final exam, which consists of detecting real, actual deactivated landmines. So they will set up this field and the trainer will deploy- well, not deploy, the trainer will hide all of these landmines in this field and the rat has to cover the entire field and point out to its handler where the mines are. And if the rat misses any of them, if it misses one land mine, the rat does not pass rat college and doesn't get its rat diploma.

Christian: Strict but fair.

Ellen: So, it's a pretty rigorous course and the rats have to be extremely accurate to pass and to be used in the actual real life field. What this results in is a rat that can, after completing their training, the rat is able to search- this is a direct quote from their website, "an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes." And this is a task which would take a human with a metal detector up to four days to finish. So they're working much faster than humans. Now you're probably wondering why- how the rat is doing this without exploding.

Christian: Yeah. Cause for a second, you know, you mentioned this was- what, the landmine detection and... something else, it was like detection and...

Ellen: Extraction?

Christian: Detection and extraction, as opposed to detection and detonation.

Ellen: No, so actually the reason why they use rats instead of dogs, for example, is that rats are small enough that they're too light to trigger the detonation device of the landmine.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: Yeah, they're too little. So they're like as smart as dogs, if not even smarter, but they're little enough to be able to navigate the field without setting off any mines.

Christian: See, then you just gotta train chihuahuas.

Ellen: I would rather not, personally. So using HeroRATS, APOPO has detected and destroyed over 107,000 land mines and unexploded bombs.

Christian: Wow.

Ellen: Yeah. This has resulted in restoring over 23 million square meters of land to safe use by humans in Cambodia, Angola, Tanzania, Mozambique, Vietnam and Laos.

Christian: Oh, okay. So they were deployed into Asia as well.

Ellen: Yeah. And they've also worked on using the rats in South America. Central and South America.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: You know, they're native to Africa, they're already suited to these sort of warmer temperature, like close to the equator sort of areas. So it's pretty easy to pick them up and transport them to areas with a similar climate and they can do pretty well there too.

Christian: Cool.

Ellen: There's one other thing that APOPO uses them for other than detecting landmines, and that is sniffing out tuberculosis. They will give these rats human samples, that will be things like saliva, mucus, stuff like that. And it takes a HeroRAT only 20 minutes to sniff through a hundred samples. The same task would take a human lab technician using traditional methods, again, up to four days.

Christian: Wow.

Ellen: So they're moving through way faster than a human would be able to work through these samples. So the HeroRATs have screened, according to their website, over 570,000 samples, detected over 14,000 cases of tuberculosis, and increased clinic detection rates by 42%.

Christian: wow.

Ellen: Yeah. So these rats are really doing the work out there.

Christian: It's kind of a spin on the lab rat idea.

Ellen: Right, yeah. So, you know, kind of a big selling point of this organization is that they treat the rats very well. They pride themselves on, you know, offering the rats really good rewards and taking really good care of them. And there are a lot of videos of kind of behind the scenes of the organization, and you can see where they keep the rats and it just seems like the rats are having a good time.

Christian: I'm picturing a rat in a lab coat sniffing Petri dishes.

Ellen: Like the rat has like a little uh, safety goggles on. The rat's got PPE and close-toed shoes and its hair tied back in a ponytail.

Christian: "No! No, Dr. Whiskers! Don't put the sample in your mouth!" "I bring back? I bring back."

Ellen: "Oh, I take to burrow? I hoard." So no, they don't wear lab coats, but what they do wear that's really cute is they wear harnesses and leashes because the handler, you know, has to be able to bring them back. Right? So they wear a little harnesses and it's pretty cute.

Ellen: How nice.

Ellen: It is very cute. So yeah, that's the organization APOPO. Like I really recommend checking them out because they're doing some really, really good work and I just love these rats. These are great. Good boys. And that brings us to our final category for the African giant pouched rat: aesthetics. I give them a 6 out of 10. They are pretty cute. I think rats are cute in general. I like rats. I used to have pet rats. They're great. They were obviously not the giant pouched rat, they were just regular old rats you get at the store. I think they're adorable. They're just really cute. Now, the African giant pouched rat I think is a little less cute than the standard-fare rats.

Christian: Why's that?

Ellen: It has smaller eyes and it just has like pointier ears and that kinda messes with the vibe for me personally. They're also a pretty plain in their appearance. They're just kind of a solid, like sandy brown color, you know? They don't really have any interesting markings or anything. Just a 6 out of 10. They're pretty cute. Most people say that they don't like the tail because it is all scaly and bald.

Christian: Yeah, it's weird.

Ellen: I am personally not bothered by it at all. I don't have any qualms about it. But during the time that I worked at PetSmart and I worked at one that did sell like, fancy rats that you would keep as a pet and every single person I think that had any sort of negative feelings about rats was kind of grossed out by their tail.

Christian: I guess it's so uncommon in mammals to have an appendage like that.

Ellen: Oh, we just talked about, I think it was the quokka that we talked about that had a long naked tail.

Christian: Really?

Ellen: I think so. Yeah. The quokka has like a long naked tail, like a rat.

Christian: Well, I'll stop talking about my hangups. What else you got?

Ellen: Miscellaneous information, their conservation status is of least concern. Pouched rats can feasibly be kept as pets due to their high trainability and their adaptability. So it lets them kinda thrive in captivity. They do okay. Now of course, this is a massive rat that you're keeping in your house, right? This is a rat the size of a cat. So you're going to need like a big cage and being a rodent, their teeth are constantly growing and they never stop, so you have to be providing them with things to chew on to grind their teeth down. So yeah, they're like super high maintenance for a rodent. Right? I would say go get a fancy rat cause they're much better pets. But actually importing pouched rats into the USA was banned in 2003 after an outbreak of monkey pox, which pouched rats can carry and spread to humans.

Christian: Huh.

Ellen: Yeah, they can be a carrier of this disease. However, in South Florida, some escaped pets have established invasive wild populations.

Christian: This has gotta be like the fourth or fifth time.

Ellen: Florida is such a hotbed for invasive species. There are so many animals that come in here. You know, I feel like people just bring in all of these, it's not just like exotic pets that people bring in, but it's like little, like bugs and frogs and stuff that come in on plants. Right?

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: And then they fall off and then Florida just has that like perfect tropical, humid environment where just a lot of things are able to really take off here.

Christian: Yeah, they might as well just handing them a brochure, like welcome to Florida.

Ellen: Please establish breeding populations in our swamps and forests. Please do it.

Christian: Nothing here to eat you? Lucky you.

Ellen: That is the African giant pouched rat.

Christian: Well thank you hun, that was very interesting.

Ellen: I love these friends. I thought they were great. Well yeah, so thank you very much for checking us out. I really appreciate you spending this time with us. You guys are so nice. I've made so many awesome friends through doing the show and you guys interacting with us and engaging with us. You guys are really delightful on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Just search the title of the show. You'll find us. If you have an animal species that you want to hear us review, you can submit those to us. My email address is ellen@justthezooofus.com. A transcript of this episode and all of the other ones will be made available at justthezooofus.com, and our final note, thank you to Louie Zong for letting us use your song "Adventuring" off of your album Bee Sides, we really love it. Go check out Louie Zong. His music is so good. It's all great.

Christian: It's been the the best soundtrack to our little adventure here.

Ellen: It has been, and a lot of times we play his music just kind of like out and about in our house, eating dinner, cleaning the house. It's just, it's really nice. So go check out Louie Zong. That's all I have.

Christian: Well, thanks everyone.

Ellen: Thank you! Byeee!

Christian: Bye.