Roadking
07-16-2006, 04:16 AM
An extreme case in point is that of the tiniest and most numerous mammal of all, the shrew, who comes out at night and burrows largely unseen in every forest floor and through practically every garden in every continent but Australia and Antarctica, and is represented by more than 30 species in North America alone. Although some shrews are so tiny they weigh less than a dime and you seldom notice the traces of their diggings, their appetites are relatively enormous -inevitably so because such a minuscule creature, with so little mass per square inch of skin, metabolizes four times as fast as the smallest mouse (per gram of tissue) and therefore must eat up to three times his own weight in food every day, and not just vegetable matter (which is good enough for a mouse) but also worms, grubs, insects, fish, frogs, and even mammal meat. The fact that he feels hungry enough to hunt almost every waking minute, a compulsion ultimately enforced by the lurking threat of starvation should he ever fast as long as three or four hours, gives him a ferocious disposition befitting the most terrible mammalian predator (gram for gram) on Earth. A water shrew has been known to kill a fish sixty times heavier than himself by biting out its eyes and brain, which is equivalent to a man killing an elephant barehanded. And all while holding his breath underwater which, with shrew metabolism demanding hundreds of breaths per minute, is impressive if it lasts five seconds. Imprisoned with another shrew and no other food within reach, a shrew has little compunction as to cannibalism either. In fact, when three of the beasties were left alone under a glass tumbler, in a typical exampe, two of them promptly killed and ate the third down to its last bone and hair, emitting a shrill batlike twitter the while. Then, a couple of hours later, the hungrier of the survivors suddenly attacked and polished off his remaining companion, whereupon he took time out to clean his whiskers, apparently feeling more than delighted with himself - for the moment, that is - after having so neatly converted two worthy colleagues into breakfast, lunch, some scattered droppings and a few unavoidably wasted calories of heat. The last act in this raw drama followed in about three more hours when the sole survivor's appetite had renewed itself to such a pitch that he finally seized the most accessible flesh still in sight, his own tail, and, working up from there, literally devoured himself to death - a dramatic demonstration that at least some creatures, driven to the extreme, actually would rather be eaten alive than starve.