This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
You will no doubt be familiar with that well-known scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which the company is assaulted by an evil man-eating monster in the form of a cuddly white bunny rabbit.
Earlier this evening an uncannily similar episode of Pythonaemia unfolded at the Maison Des Girrafes…
A fight broke out between two male guinea-pigs in one of our EcoMo™ Rodent Powered Lawnmowers. As I attempted to remove the victim, the testosterone-fuelled assailant literally launched itself through the air and took a bite out of my right hand. It hung on with a demoniac grip and only removed itself when I lifted my hand, literally, out of the enclosure.
This is the horrid little bastard perpetrator.
You talkin’ to me? I said, you talkin’ to ME?
And here is the wound as it presented at the Cromer Hospital Minor Injuries Unit, a little while later.
At the Cromer Hospital Minor Injuries Unit, later
The photo is a little shaky because my right hand was injured at the time and I was holding the iPhone (v3.0, naturally) in my left.
The g-pig’s self sharpening nanostructured ceramic composite blades teeth sliced through the dermis and right through to the muscle, though my team of litigious chiropractors physicians says that with several months careful rehabilitation I should be able to walk again.
It must be morphic resonance, though, because in the hours leading up to this incident I had been thinking about guinea pigs.
For reasons I needn’t go into, I had been recalling one of my finest afternoons as an editor, when some time in 1991 I stirred from my viniferous slumbers long enough to accept this paper from Dan Graur, Winston A. Hide and Wen-Hsiung Li, whose title posed that age-old question who put the benzedrine in Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine Is The Guinea-Pig a Rodent?
The researchers started by observing that guinea pigs are peculiar in many ways. Among mammals they share only with humans an incapacity to synthesize vitamin C, and the bibliographic undergrowth is clogged with references to how unlike the guinea pig is to other rodents in its sequence homologies, rates of divergence, voting intentions &c, &c. These peculiarities might well extend to the relatives of the guinea pig, the Caviomorph rodents, a clade found only in South America. Graur et al said that these anomalies are anomalous only if we think of g-pigs as rodents. If we look at the evidence at face-value, it looks as though caviomorph rodents aren’t rodents at all – but represent a clade that branched off extremely early in mammalian evolution.
Although the referees thought the result most peculiar, and probably wrong (I think I can say that now … can’t I?) they urged Nature to publish it as it would surely stimulate discussion. We did, and it has. Although some presented evidence in support of the contention, it’s fair to say that most subsequent research has placed g-pigs firmly among the rodents, but that’s not the point. The paper by Graur and colleagues was instrumental in catalysing a new phase of research into mammalian phylogeny, using the then-new tools of molecular sequencing. It inspired a major review article. Since then, the Eppendorfs of DOOM have taken the mammalian tree and shaken it vigorously. We now suspect that whales are even-toed ungulates, replanted – and that many diverse mammals of African descent share a common ancestry from far-off days when Africa was an island continent.
And so it was that a weird little paper came out of left field, asked a seemingly silly question about guinea pigs, and got answers – whole reams and scads of answers – that transformed our understanding of mammalian evolution in a fundamental way.
Now, I see that blood is seeping out from beneath my dressing.
Nurse! NURSE!
Last updated: Friday, 19 Jun 2009 - 18:38 UTC
© 2009 Nature Publishing Group
“Among mammals they share only with humans an incapacity to synthesize vitamin C”
Fruit bats? Other apes? I thought there were more. (I’ve been working on a vitamin C post for the past year or so, but I get too overexcited about connections and things to properly write it down.)
Chez Cromercrox seems to be a dangerous place, as this video evidence also suggests:
(HT: the intrepid, and foolish McDawg)
I’d pay to see the assailant guinea pig vs. one of the Queen’s corgis.
I think the shock has given Henry (more) hallucinations (than normal).
That film is so funny!
Fascinating about the guinea pig ancestry – they’re also very good substitute for chicken or rabbit according to my Peruvian cookbook.
“the intrepid, and foolish McDawg”
One will accept that as some form of
condimentcompliment, O’Hara.Personally, I have Mrs Gee to thank for guiding me to the carrot approach – I survived, without a scratch. We now know what happens when one uses the other option though.
One can also report with proven factiods that the Cromer Minor Injuries Unit “is run by emergency nurse practitioners, who are experienced nurses who can independently see and treat all forms of minor injury”. and for those of you who haven’t been to Cromer yet, it’s literally (2 mins walk) just round the corner from just in case you too are bitten – unlikely (Ed).
From what I can understand thus far, Dr Gee’s life was saved by a Heron ??
Just come back to watch it again…still funny. Glad to hear you survived intact Graham.
(That does look like a pretty nasty cut, though, Henry!)
So this cavy was a cryptic carnivore craving vitamin G? Critter looks a bit peaked to me, maybe could use some formula pellets and some timothy hay?
We’re in the middle of an experiment: one unfortunate gpig fell from a height and its incisors fell out, 2wk of spooning VitC-enriched mush later, they are starting to emerge again. It didn’t lose any weight or condition, rather than eat a lot of mush, it just turned its attention to the timothy flowers which are quite bushy and nutritious.
Hope you’re up-to-date with your tetanus injection, Henry; it’s a must for any researcher who works with rodents. Also for pretty much anyone who works in the garden, assembles Eglus and composters, walks barefoot on the beach, sketches wildflowers and cacti in the horse paddock, opens baling wire to take out flakes of hay, etc., etc.
I just learned that the German company Wollmeise has a color of sock yarn called Versuchskaninchen, or Guinea Pig, in colors of red, blue, and purple. IOW, colors of the contents of veins and arteries opened by caviomorph incisors.
@Kristi: Hope you’re up-to-date with your tetanus injection, Henry
I sure am. When we moved to Cromer the doctor insisted on a booster, as North Norfolk is apparently something of a hotspot.
or Guinea Pig, in colors of red, blue, and purple. IOW, colors of the contents of veins and arteries opened by caviomorph incisors.
I might have known that they’d pick up these stormtroopin’ habits in Germany.