810-Lmcasttr Farming, Saturday, August 2,1986
Tenrecs OF Madagascar
Come In Variety Of Sizes
WASHINGTON - At one point in
his research stint on Madagascar,
zoologist Martin Nicoll awakened
to the scampering of as many as
228 tiny feet across his bedroom
floor. They belonged to 57 tenrecs,
Madagascar’s oldest living
mammals.
The island off Africa’s east coast
has at least 25 species of tenrecs,
some tiny and mouselike, another
growing as big as a rabbit. Nicoll,
hoping to learn about tenrec eating
and reproductive habits, had
acquired an assortment of them
from the wild. They included
streaked tenrecs, mouse-eared
tenrecs, and mole tenrecs. The
population soon multiplied, which
is a special tenrec talent; one
species can produce 32 to a litter.
“To my surprise, I would come
home and find several tenrecs of
different species, normally very
aggressive, sleeping together and
mutually grooming one another’s
faces,” Nicoll recalls.
Behavior
Bizarre
Nicoll, research associate at the
National Zoo in Washington, has
studied tenrecs across their range
of west-central Africa, the
Seychelles Island chain, and
Madagascar. He is one of the few
scientists to observe and record
the many bizarre facets of tenrec
anatomy and behavior.
One-third of the species he ob
served on Madagascar had never
before been seen alive. He con
firmed that tenrecs are extremely
cool, with an average temperature
7 to 10 degrees Celsius lower than
that of other placental mammals.
His work is partly funded by Lie
National Geographic Society.
Nicoll reports:
• Although most tenrecs dwell on
land, three aquatic varieties live in
the rivers of west-central Africa.
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Two have webbed feet and a very
flat head.
• One aquatic tenrec has large,
radar-like ears and a tail shaped
like a beaver’s, but turned
sideways. The tail is knife-sharp. If
a person wanders in its streams
and tries to touch the animal, it
will bite.
• A similar but rare aquatic
tenrec travels fast-flowing rivers
of Madagascar, where two of its
five known habitat sites have
deteriorated. Its fur is like a
mink’s.
• The pygmy hedgehog tenrec,
which resembles a hedgehog, is
arboreal but clumsy, spending
much of its time trying to get back
into trees. “You walk through the
forest and occasionally hear soft
thuds, and the animals are falling
out,” Nicoll says. “They’re not
very competent climbers.”
• Two tenrec species are
streaked. The black-and-white
streaked ones live on
Madagascar’s central plateau and
are nocturnal. The black-and
yellow streaked variety stays in
the eastern ram forest and is
partly diurnal.
Communicate
With Quills
• Both streaked versions and the
juveniles of the tailless tenrec
“stndulate” - rubbing together a
group of specialized quills on their
backs to produce high-frequency
sounds for communication. When
alarmed, they stridulate in intense
bursts.
• Streaked tenrecs forage in
groups. Nicoll stalked them in his
attempts to capture individuals for
study. “When you go after one, the
group immediately goes into a
defensive mode, making buzzing
calls and rubbing the quills on their
backs together,” he says. “As you
put your hand down to pick one up,
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Just one of at least 25 kinds of tenrecs on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, this
streaked tenrec bears a crest of long quills on its head and shorter ones on its body. The
streaked tenrec communicates by rubbing its quills together to make high-frequency
sounds.
it detects you and all of the quills
previously lying flat are thrown up
into a great corona. Then the
animals jump back at you, while
giving out a ‘zip, zip!
The animal has turned into a
virtual pincushion. “If you would
persist in annoying it, it would
continue to attack and you could
end up with 30 barbed spines in
your hand,” Nicoll says. Mean
while, the rest of the group has
scattered and frozen, disappearing
in the leaf cover.
• Many tenrecs “echolocate”
while exploring strange places by
producing tongue clicks.
• The tailless, or common,
tenrec, known as tandraka by the
Malagasy people, is hunted for
food (the streaked kind is taboo).
But it takes persistence to over
come its quills, pungent odor, and
formidable jaws. “My whole hand
was put out of action once when it
was bitten by a common tenrec,”
Nicoll says.
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> Tailless tenrec males m the
Seychelles frequently fight over
females, the smaller males
sneaking up to try to mate and
scurrying away at the approach of
the “huge” males. The huge males
have thick pads of skin on their
backs, enormous teeth, and
massive head muscles.
“When a huge male’s mouth
opens, his jaw muscles bulge so
that it looks as if he’s got two
balloons stuffed inside,” Nicoll
says.
Rain-forest tenrecs appear to
keep relatively steady body
temperatures, but across the
island in the desert, the tenrecs
practice torpor, allowing their
temperatures to fluctuate with the
air temperature, sometimes as
much as 15 degrees a day. On a
wintry desert night, the pygmy
hedgehog tenrec doesn’t seem to
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notice the cold.
“The peculiarity is that when a
mammal has offspring, she
generally becomes a very efficient
thermoregulator. But these
animals don’t. On cold days, a
whole family will cool down,”
Nicoll says.
Tenrecs are insectivores,
feasting mostly on insects and
earthworms. Like many of
Madagascar’s animals, some
tenrecs appear to be fighting for
survival. The island has one of the
world’s highest levels of rain
forest destruction, and the mam
habitats of tenrecs have already
been lost.
“Besides being models of
primitive mammals, tenrecs are
important links in a variety of food
chains,” Nicoll says. “We hope
that by studying tenrecs, we’ll find
out more about how man is af
fecting Madagascar’s natural
ecosystems.”
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