Word: voles
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...list of injustices Spanish farmers face - falling subsidies, erratic weather, irksome E.U. regulations - add the humble mountain vole. Few worried when the furry rodents first appeared on the plains of Castilla-León last fall. But by summer, a curious nuisance had become a devastating plague. These days, an estimated 750 million voles are marauding their way through central Spain's alfalfa, beets, potatoes and even vineyards. According to figures released by the regional government at the start of August, they have ravaged some 260,000 hectares (more than 1,000 sq. mi.) and caused at least 30 million...
...there's increasing evidence that oxytocin is also involved in deeper bonding. It certainly plays that role in a much studied little rodent called the prairie vole, which is famous for its fidelity to its mate. The critter's brain releases a rush of oxytocin as it bonds with its beloved. Block the chemical, and voles fail to make a connection. Inject more of the hormone, and they fall for each other even faster...
...space. Despite the possible public-health hazards these pets represent, business appears as healthy as ever. Michael Jones, a veterinarian at the Jones Animal Hospital in Tacoma, Wash., says he sees growing numbers of pet marsupials from New Zealand known as sugar gliders, as well as chinchillas and naked vole rats. If animal inspectors and public-health officials are concerned, exotic-animal traders are not worrying. "I don't see it being a big deal," says Ellis Brown, owner of Natural Selections Exotics in Miami. "The pet industry is constantly threatened with bans. [The authorities] might...
LOVE Some species of rodents, such as the prairie vole, form long pair bonds with their mates, as human beings do. Others, such as the montane vole, have only transitory liaisons, as do chimpanzees. The difference, according to Tom Insel and Larry Young at Emory University in Atlanta, lies in the promoter upstream of the oxytocin-and vasopressin-receptor genes. The insertion of an extra chunk of DNA text, usually about 460 letters long, into the promoter makes the animal more likely to bond with its mate. The extra text does not create love, but perhaps it creates the possibility...
From the gloom of this year's I.U.C.N. Red List of Threatened Species emerges one point of light: the Bavarian pine vole. Previously declared to be extinct, this humble rodent is in fact alive and well and living - not in Bavaria as you'd expect, but in Northern Tyrol. (The Lord Howe Island stick insect, last seen on its Australian island home in 1920, is the only other species to have been rediscovered after being classified as extinct.) The pine vole hadn't been spotted since 1962 but two years ago, a group of the rodents popped up across...