With the NCAA basketball tournament just days away, this is my favorite time of year. But obsessed hoops fans shouldn't get to have all the fun. For those interested in a different kind of bracket, Arizona State University brings you March Mammal Madness!
A group of evolutionary biologists have put together a hypothetical round-by-round showdown of mammals in battle. Just like the standard tournament, the animals come from four separate groupings and arrive at a final four of fur-shredding awesomeness. There are favorites and upsets, and a good amount of research goes in to predicting winners.
“These are the things we get people to think about, but these are the things we think about as evolutionary biologists,” ASU professor Katie Hinde said. “We think not only ‘What is that animal like?’ but also ‘What is that animal like in relation to other animals in its environment?’”
That was the key behind a huge upset last year. A photo snapped in England of a least weasel riding a flying woodpecker went viral.
“We already had a bracket, and we had the least weasel in it,” Hinde said. “What was amazing was all these people picked the least weasel, without doing any research on it! ‘That thing is so (tough) it rides birds!’ They loved it. This is our winner. It lost in the first round. People were so enamored with it that they didn’t do research on the tenrec that it had to go up against.”
The tenrec is a tiny mammal that looks like a hedgehog on crack. It lives on Madagascar and has spines that can rotate 180 degrees. The least weasel’s kill strike goes for the nape of the neck. “For the tenrec, that’s where its biggest spikes are,” Hinde said. “If they were to encounter each other and the least weasel was audacious enough to take on the tenrec, its fight style would put it at a huge disadvantage. It ended up losing. That’s when people started putting on their brackets ‘Tenwrecked.’ ”
That may be the greatest passage of words I've ever borrowed from an article.
Go take a look at the blog updates, and check out the bracket. I'm pulling for the Siberian Chipmunk.
A group of evolutionary biologists have put together a hypothetical round-by-round showdown of mammals in battle. Just like the standard tournament, the animals come from four separate groupings and arrive at a final four of fur-shredding awesomeness. There are favorites and upsets, and a good amount of research goes in to predicting winners.
“These are the things we get people to think about, but these are the things we think about as evolutionary biologists,” ASU professor Katie Hinde said. “We think not only ‘What is that animal like?’ but also ‘What is that animal like in relation to other animals in its environment?’”
That was the key behind a huge upset last year. A photo snapped in England of a least weasel riding a flying woodpecker went viral.
“We already had a bracket, and we had the least weasel in it,” Hinde said. “What was amazing was all these people picked the least weasel, without doing any research on it! ‘That thing is so (tough) it rides birds!’ They loved it. This is our winner. It lost in the first round. People were so enamored with it that they didn’t do research on the tenrec that it had to go up against.”
The tenrec is a tiny mammal that looks like a hedgehog on crack. It lives on Madagascar and has spines that can rotate 180 degrees. The least weasel’s kill strike goes for the nape of the neck. “For the tenrec, that’s where its biggest spikes are,” Hinde said. “If they were to encounter each other and the least weasel was audacious enough to take on the tenrec, its fight style would put it at a huge disadvantage. It ended up losing. That’s when people started putting on their brackets ‘Tenwrecked.’ ”
That may be the greatest passage of words I've ever borrowed from an article.
Go take a look at the blog updates, and check out the bracket. I'm pulling for the Siberian Chipmunk.