r/Awwducational • u/IdyllicSafeguard • Sep 26 '24
Verified The Japanese weasel's agility and lithe body allow it to pursue its prey anywhere; down tunnels, up trees, or into water. During winter, it spends its time chasing rodents through snowy tunnels and, after catching and eating its target, it lays down to enjoy the warmth of its prey's burrow.
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u/Captain_Midnight Sep 27 '24
Damn, imagine a dude hunting you, killing you, eating you...then sleeping in your bed. Nature is metal.
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u/maybesaydie Sep 29 '24
Weasels are one of my favorite small predators. They're adorable, relentless and they keep vermin down.
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u/IdyllicSafeguard Sep 26 '24
Because of its skinny body, the Japanese weasel retains little heat or energy, and so must hunt often.
Even when this weasel is full, it will attack any prey within its line of sight. It's extra kills go into its hidden cache.
It can be active during both day and night.
The Japanese weasel is a mostly solitary creature. Any breach of territory, especially among dominant males, is taken as an invitation for a fight — involving lots of aggressive barking, screeching, and hissing.
The Japanese weasel can produce a pungent musk from its anal gland.
This musk can be used as a defence, making the weasel unpalatable to keen-nosed mammalian predators. Birds of prey, however, are less picky about how their meals smell, and will readily hunt this weasel.
It rubs its musk across its territory; communicating information like the weasel's gender, age, social status, health, and breeding condition.
A male will track down a female by her musky "signposts". The two then go on a "date" that can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days.
The female lets the male know when she's willing to mate. Once the act is done, the male promptly dips out — chivalry never existed among weasels.
The female raises her kits alone. She keeps them safe in a soft hollow, feeds them milk until their teeth grow in, and takes them on practice hunts.
The entire process, from birth to independence — a weasel's childhood — lasts only around 8 weeks.
The average lifespan for a wild weasel is only 2 years. Some make it to 5 but rarely more. In captivity, a Japanese weasel can live up to 8 years.
The Japanese weasel is native to most of Japan — on the three islands of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku — but because of its high hunting success rate it's been purposefully introduced to many other islands as a form of rodent pest control.
Its introduced range includes many of the subtropical Ryukyu Islands in the southwest, Hokkaido in Japan's cold north, and even beyond, to the southern tip of Sakhalin Island in Russia.
In the early 1980s, it was introduced to Miyake-jima, an island some 180 kilometres (110 miles) southeast of Tokyo, after which the breeding success of the island's bush warblers decreased markedly.
The Japanese weasel can easily be mistaken for the Siberian weasel — which was introduced to Japan between 1920 and 1930. The only noticeable physical difference is tail length; the Siberian weasel has a longer tail, relative to body length, than the Japanese.
There is Japanese countryside folklore that tells of how this weasel, if it makes it to the age of 100 years old, will spontaneously transform into ten martens.
This weasel is also associated with the yōkai called kamaitachi, or “sickle weasels". These yōkai travel in trios on mountain winds; knocking down victims, slicing them up with sickle-like front claws, and then disappearing.
You can learn more about the Japanese weasel, bird-hunting mustelids, and mythical sickle weasels, on my website here!