The Tiniest Werewolf
You’re walking through a scrubby desert in the American Southwest and you hear a high, quavering, little, howl coming from the underbrush. Is it a small coyote, perhaps a chupacabra?
In fact, it is a much more ferocious and marvelous creature–a werewolf mouse (Onychomys torridus).
You may also know it as the “grasshopper mouse”, a more common but much less fearsome name.
The grasshopper mouse is unique among mice and rodents in general in that it has an exclusive taste for the flesh of the living. This tiny werewolf feasts upon insects, scorpions, centipedes, and even snakes and other mice. They are frequently known to sate their ravenous hunger on highly venomous prey that is significantly larger than they are.
For example, this is an Arizona bark scorpion. Their venom is extremely painful and even potent enough to kill humans in rare cases (though this is usually only a threat to the very young, the very old, and the immunocompromised). Their venom is easily able to kill mouse-sized rodents.
Well, except for the grasshopper mouse.
(Animal Death Warning for the video linked below).
The grasshopper mouse is not only capable of killing and eating Arizona bark scorpions, but through some fun biochemistry shenanigans they feel no pain at all from their sting. Essentially, compounds in the scorpion venom bond to a different receptor in grasshopper mice than they do in other animals and as a result the venom compounds block pain rather than causing pain.
To use an extremely clumsy and oversimplified analogy, it would be like if someone stabbed you with a syringe full of poison and your body turned it into morphine. This talent is of particular interest to scientists, who would like to harness the mouse’s biochemical shenanigans to help control pain in humans.
The icing on the extremely-weird-animal cake is that grasshopper mice defend their territory by howling, like tiny little werewolves. 10/10 fantastically strange little beasts.
