Live Elephant Shrews at the Peabody Museum
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- YouTube
Live Elephant Shrews at the Peabody Museum
Elephant shrews are neither elephants nor shrews. The 16 living species of elephant shrew all have relatively large ears and eyes, a rat-like hairless tail, and long, thin legs that make them speedy runners. This pair of brothers was born at the Smithsonians National Zoo in Washington, D.C., on February 4, 2007. Active most of the day, they spend their time foraging and gathering leaf litter for nests. In the wild, each elephant shrew can build six or seven nests in its home range, where it sleeps, cares for offspring, and evades predators. Elephant shrews eat beetles, termites, spiders and ants, and supplement their diet with fruits and seeds. In captivity they are fed crickets, mealworms and dry cat food supplemented with peanut oil. Elephant shrews are found throughout the forests, savannas, scrublands, and deserts of southern Africa and parts of North Africa. The Black and Rufous Giant Elephant Shrew lives only in forests and dense woodlands of eastern Kenya and Tanzania, habitat that is rapidly disappearing because of human activity. As a result, this extraordinary animal is at high risk of extinction in the wild. Video shot by Dennis Voigt as for "Travels in the Great Tree of Life," produced for the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History with the support from the U.S. National Science Foundation through the CIPRes and Angiosperm Tree of Life Programs.
YouTube | February 18, 2009
