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Black fur, white stripes, waist filled with foul-smelling fluid – everyone can distinguish the striped skunk. But did you know that these foul-smelling mammals have several smaller cousins marked by black and white Rorschach spots? They are known as spotted skunks and do something that striped skunks can’t.
Spotted skunks do a large eagle handstand before spraying you.
I jokingly call them the acrobats of the skunk world.” Adam Ferguson, a junior carnivore biologist at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Now that you’ve met the spotted skunk, there’s another important fact: There are multiple species and it’s hard to tell the difference between them. For starters, stink butts all look pretty similar. Most scientists these days agree that there are four species of spotted skunk, but previous research has pointed to at least two species, or as many as 14.
But researchers have a new answer to that question, which they published Thursday. Journal of Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. It’s based on more than 200 DNA samples collected from spotted skunks that are causing death on the roads in some places from British Columbia to Costa Rica.
“There are definitely seven species,” he says. Molly McDonough, a phylogenomics at Chicago State University and a research fellow at both the Field Museum and the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History.
Co-authors of the new study, Dr. McDonough and Dr. Ferguson is also married. She calls him the skunk wrestler and calls him the lab magician. When he proposed, he even stuffed the ring into a box of DNA preparation.
As they say, the couple sprayed together stays together.
Dr. “If you approach the skunk very quietly and gently, they don’t tend to spray,” Ferguson said. “But I say skunks are like humans. Some are just jerks.”
While spotted skunks do their best to keep researchers away, there are a few compelling reasons to study pint-sized carnivores.
For example, now that the researchers have mapped seven distinct lineages based on genomic similarities, they can see that the spotted skunk is much more diversified than its close relatives, the striped skunk and the hog-nosed skunk (which looks a bit like the skunk version). a black and white cookie). This is interesting, and scientists suspect it has something to do with the spotted skunk, the smallest of North America.
Dr. “We can assume they’re more rodent-like,” Ferguson said, referring to the two-pound skunks’ inability to go very far in any direction and their relatively fast breeding cycle.
These factors seem to have allowed spotted skunks to split into new species during the last ice age and changes in North America’s climate.
The researchers also found that most spotted skunk species can be divided into two groups or clades, three from the east and three from the west. (The seventh species of spotted skunk, Spilogale yucatanensis, is somewhat peculiar, native to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, but shares the closest evolutionary relationship with S. putorius, native to Florida and the Southeastern United States.)
The major difference between the two branches is that they seem to reproduce in completely different ways. In the eastern wing, females tend to be pregnant for about 50 to 65 days, mating in March or April and giving birth in May or June. In the west, spotted skunks usually breed in the fall around September or October and then give birth in April or May for a total gestation period of 180 to 200 days.
How is this possible? There is evidence that western skunks use a strategy known as delayed implantation, in which a fertilized egg enters a dormant period before it develops. Females of many mammalian species, from bats to bears, use this practice to conserve resources and survive seasonal food shortages.
And since representatives from both branches have overlapping areas in places like Texas, you may have two spotted skunks in the same location that look the same but apparently can’t breed with each other because their reproductive strategies are incompatible.
So, what’s it like studying skunks with your girlfriend? Well, once upon a time in Mexico, a pig-nosed skunk Dr. He sprayed Ferguson’s face and temporarily blinded him.
“As I was screaming and running for water, I was actually saying, ‘Shall I help you or catch the skunk?’ he asked.
Not wanting to lose the data point, Dr. McDonough caught the skunk.
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