Good morning all!
RRR- Looked at the bunnies site. My bunnies must have been rex rabbits, but they were the large size?
I saw an interesting documentary on KUAT last night. Even the 4-year-old watched it with undivided attention. It was called "Rat Attack" and documented the Mataum: the end of a 48-year growth cycle which ends in the mass blooming, fruiting, and die off of all the bamboo in Southeast India/Asia. The bamboo drops so much fruit, that by the end of the season, the rat population has boomed to 12,000 rats per acre. Yes, PER ACRE. The bamboo die-off coincides with the rice harvest--so the farmers will go out one morning, ready to harvest, and the rats will have completely cleaned out their feilds overnight. Facinating.
Anywhoo- as a side note, they mentioned a ground pheasant which also specializes/takes advatage of the mass fruiting.
NARRATOR: Many species of bamboo share this internal clock, but the Melocanna bamboo, common in Mizoram, boasts one final asset for survival: its fruit, with seed inside, is huge, 200-times larger than the average. This builtin food supply insures that the plant will survive. Mass seeding events like these have had some unexpected benefits for species other than bamboo. For example, they may have led to the domestication of the chicken.
DANIEL JANZEN (University of Pennsylvania): If you look at chickens as a whole, they're just a pheasant. And there are many, many species of pheasant in the Old World. One of them specialized on bamboo seeds, and that gave it a very different biology than all the other pheasant species have.
NARRATOR: Throughout Southeast Asia, wild chickens are called "bamboo fowl." And according to Janzen's theory, long before people began farming, these wild chickens learned to reproduce like crazy during mass seeding events. That set the stage for domestication.
DANIEL JANZEN: And, of course, what happened was people then, sometime in the distant past, basically started feeding chickens scraps from the house, whatever it happens to be, and then the chickens turned on, at the house, like, sort of, a miniature bamboo seed crop. And suddenly you have a domestic animal who's just really doing the same thing that it always did in nature.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/rats/program.html
