Spitting cobras, emus, and a Gila monster were but a few of my living companions in the seventies. Ironically, I am so not an animal lover, it is more that I tolerate animals. If you had told me that one day I would live amongst exotic animals within the confines of my own home, I would have run the other way. For four years, I endured co-habitation with a strange husband and his strange home business. I met my ex-husband in Tennessee. We dated for a short time and during a moment of insanity, I agreed to leave my family and friends and run off to Florida with him. All of our belongings were packed in my Datsun pickup truck and off we went. Our destination was unknown. For one week our home was in a tent in the Okefenokee Swamp. Our neighbors were raccoons that ravaged through our meager food supply on a nightly basis. Mosquitoes as big as hummingbirds buzzed us relentlessly. Of course, there were alligators galore lurking in the water’s edge. Once, we rented a sixteen foot flat bottom boat and trolled a few good miles through the murky waters of the Okefenokee Swamp. In some spots it was like going through a jungle with the occasional alligator eyes peering above the surface of the water at us. All seemed well and almost relaxing until we ran out of gas and were upstream from the base camp. The sun was setting and no other boats were in sight. All we could do was paddle. I with the oar in the rear paddling on one side, then the other. My ex was in the front sculling to steer. My job of paddling was the more strenuous of the two, but there was no way that I was putting my arm in the water as gator bait. Fortunately, after about one hour, a loan boater was puttering his way back to camp and seeing our dilemma threw us a line and towed us back to shore.
A small caviomorph rodent native to Chile is the Degu. The caviomorphs are characterized by their large heads, plump bodies, slender legs and short tails. They are also distinguished by the formation of their jaws and massafer muscles. The degu is sometimes also called the glitter-tailed rat though it is not related to the rat family.
The rodents are highly social creatures living in burrows. They dig together communally to make larger and more elaborate burrows than what they could do individually also. There are chains formed by degus digging together and coordinating their activities. The social behavior is also observed in case of the females who live in the same group who not only nest communally but also nurse the young of each other.