According to Grandpa, any wild mammal that invades your home or garden is a rodent, often lovingly referred to as a “varmint.” This turns out to be not quite so. We know that mice, rats, and hamsters are rodents, but other animals that resemble mice or rats may or may not belong to the order Rodentia.
MOLES
Image by Flickr user HocusFocusClick.
Moles are not rodents. Most moles belong to the order Soricomorpha. They eat insects and earthworms. However, there are several species called mole rats which are blind rodents of the genus Spalax. Mole rats were so named because they live underground like moles, but are not related to them.
PORCUPINES
Image by Flickr user ice.bluess.
A porcupine is a rodent. There are a couple of dozen species of porcupine belonging to two families. What they have in common are the quills they use to hide or defend themselves. Folklore says that they can shoot these quills at will, but that isn’t so. However, the quills do detach from the porcupine easily, so a dog that messes with a “quill pig” may come home with its face embedded. Porcupines are herbivores like other rodents.
HEDGEHOGS
Image by Flickr user michelleness.
A hedgehog is not a rodent. Their order is Erinaceomorpha, which means they are not related to porcupines at all! Hedgehogs share more of their lineage with shrews. They do, however, sport hair that is modified into quills for defense. Unlike porcupines, hedgehogs will eat anything, including insects, frogs, snails, eggs, roadkill, and plants.
SQUIRRELS
Image by Flickr use Sharon Mollerus.
Squirrels are rodents belonging to the family Sciuridae. This is a large family of species that include chipmunks, prairie dogs, groundhogs (also called woodchucks), marmots, and flying squirrels. Which takes care of many rodents you might wonder about. *Note: Many people confuse flying squirrels with sugar gliders. While flying squirrels are rodents, sugar gliders are marsupials.
RACCOONS
Image by Flickr user Michael Scheltgen.
The raccoon is not a rodent. It belongs to the Carnivora order, meaning it’s a meat-eater, although a raccoon will eat anything available, including whatever is growing in your garden or sitting in your garbage can. Raccoons are members of the Procyonid family, which also includes ringtail cats, coatis of South America, and kinkajous of Central and South America. Taxonomists once placed the animal in the same genus as bears (Ursus), but later gave raccoons their own genus (Procyon). Raccoons are native to North America, but due to human intervention (both deliberate and accidental), they can now be found roaming Europe and Japan.
CAPYBARAS
Image by Flickr user Tim Sträter.
The capybara is a rodent, despite being the size of a St. Bernard. The original R.O.U.S. is native to South America. The capybara is the only animal of the Hydrochaeridae family, of the suborder Hystricomorpha, which also includes nutrias, chinchillas, porcupines, and guinea pigs.
OPOSSUMS
Image by Flickr user Zeke Franco.
Opossums are not rodents. They are an order unto themselves, part of the “infraclass” known as marsupials. The label distinguishes marsupials from placental mammals, such as rodents. Like Australian marsupials (kangaroo, koala, possum, and wombat), the opossums of North and South America are born quite undeveloped, and must live in a pouch made of the mother’s skin and nurse until it is able to produce enough heat to survive. And get this: Australia is known for its marsupials because they flourished there, but those species are descended from South American marsupials.
BEAVERS
Image by Flickr user stevehdc.
A beaver is a rodent, belonging to the genus Castor. It is the largest rodent in North America, and can weigh up to 60 pounds! Beavers have specialized guts that can digest tree bark, and can build a nest better than even the most clever pack rat.
BATS
Image by Flickr user Kahunapule Michael Johnson.
Bats are not rodents. The flying mammals have their own order called Chiroptera. They were once classified in the superorder Archonta which also includes primates, but they are now in the superorder Laurasiatheria along with whales and hoofed animals, but not rodents.
RABBITS
Image by Flickr user Snork Maiden.
Rabbits are not rodents, despite what you may have been taught in school. They look like rodents; however their different teeth puts them in the Lagomorpha order. Rabbits were classified as rodents until 1912. It took decades for textbooks to catch up with the evolving taxonomy, and even longer for lagomorphs to be divorced from rodents in popular culture.
You can see that it is hard to tell the players without a program. Like other taxonomy classifications, rodent species are a diverse lot that don’t particularly look alike. And many species that resemble some rodents belong to other orders. Also, classifications do change as scientist uncover more information. If you aren’t sure how to classify an animal, it’s better to look it up than to guess.
PS: Now that you’ve read this, take the quiz based on this post at Buzzfeed.
Comments (17)
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nice beaver… what about sugar-gliders? where do they fit in?
posted by Nosferatu on 5-31-2011 at 9:46 am
Ah! I meant to include something about sugar gliders, which are often mistaken for flying squirrels. I will add that. Thanks!
posted by Miss Cellania on 5-31-2011 at 9:54 am
A rodent is always a varmint, but a varmint is not always a rodent. I’m pretty sure the word is derived from “vermin,” which I think is a term liberally applied (by many folk) to any “pesky critter” that disturbs anything in any way.
posted by cthulhu on 5-31-2011 at 10:20 am
I know to alot of people out there, rodents are right up there with spiders and snakes – just plain creepy. When my boys were young, we ventured into a pet store and found Aladin, a very big, playful, brown and gray rat that was used as a breeder at the store. I was watching the younger boy, as the older rounded a corner with Aladin on his shoulder. As a parent, it was shocking. Then I saw how the two of them were in a zone, and it became clear that they were meant for each other. We talked the owner into selling him and brought him home. He turned into more than a pet – he was family. My son would open his cage when he got home and the two of them “played” (no other word for it – chase, hide and seek, digging in the toy box). It lasted 3 years, and the whole family cried when he finally had to be put to sleep (tumors). Say what you want – we loved him. And you just never know what personality you can find.
posted by Nosferatu on 5-31-2011 at 10:57 am
Rabbits not being rodents really messed up my college pet plans – my roommate and I planned to have a rabbit in our dorm room, but after a student had an allergic reaction to a prairie dog kept by someone across the hall the school cracked down to allowing only rodents. We tried to plead our case, but to no avail…
posted by Daphne on 5-31-2011 at 11:43 am
Beavers can be dangerous. A warning to people with dofs who like to swim. A beaver bit my dog from underneath and tried to drag her under. She got away but lost a lot of blood before I got her to the vet. The vet said this experience was fairly common, so keep your dog out of ponds habituated by beavers.
posted by Sir Fatboy on 5-31-2011 at 12:14 pm
This may sound weird, but…I think porcupines are really cute. I’d love to have one as a pet, but those dang quills! My mom’s on her second hedgehog, but porcupines have such cute little faces.
posted by M on 5-31-2011 at 12:30 pm
That’s a whole lotta cute pictures, and a picture of a bat.
posted by Dinosaur1972 on 5-31-2011 at 1:27 pm
Did you know that porcupines can climb trees? I didn’t learn this until I moved to Alaska and happened to see one about ten feet up while looking out of a second story window. It was startling then, and is still surreal whenever I see one up in a tree, hanging out.
posted by JennieO on 5-31-2011 at 1:54 pm
that beaver looks devious.
posted by Matthew J on 5-31-2011 at 3:25 pm
M,
I met a pet porcupine. The guy had it de-quilled. It would hang out on his shoulder like a parrot. Pretty docile critter.
posted by n2y2 on 5-31-2011 at 6:39 pm
Daphne, that new policy doesn’t make much sense, considering that prairie dogs ARE rodents.
posted by Miss Cellania on 5-31-2011 at 7:30 pm
Wait a minute…since when is it spelled “opossum?” In school when I grew up it was always spelled “possum.”
posted by okinawa_dato on 5-31-2011 at 7:54 pm
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the policy was pretty strict – with a specific list of allowed pets, just loosely enforced until the prairie dog incident, which made our rabbit a no-go for sure.
posted by Daphne on 5-31-2011 at 8:42 pm
There are opossums, and there are also possums. The “O” designates the species in North America, while the non”o” possums are in Australia (and are cuter).
Still, nobody I know actually pronounces the “o”, ever.
posted by Miss Cellania on 5-31-2011 at 9:56 pm
i second the notion that rats make wonderful pets! they’re incredibly intelligent (most of the ones i’ve had over the years knew their names and learned a few tricks). they’re also surprisingly clean (they’ll spend a good portion of the day grooming themselves and each other). they don’t smell much at all, although once you get several in a cage together, you really need to keep up with cleaning it, otherwise it will get kinda stinky.
unfortunately they don’t live very long, and while i sort of got used to it, i finally quit keeping them as pets because it was still hard when they died. the longest-lived one i had was named Gilmour (and he was a pretty big guy, too), who lived about 3 years. my mom had one that lived for about 4 and a half years, which is a pretty long life. still, they tend to live longer than most other pet rodents, and are usually a lot more fun to have (they rarely bite, unlike gerbils and hamsters). they are susceptible to respiratory ailments though, and often have to be given antibiotics.
also, the “pet” rats are a different species than the rats people commonly associate with garbage and New York, and it’s not wise to capture and keep a wild rat as a pet.
another animal people often think is a rodent but is not, is the ferret. ferrets are mustelids, and are related to weasels, otters and badgers.
posted by Cat MacKinnon on 5-31-2011 at 11:04 pm
I would like to point out that while it says rabbits have different teeth, it doesn’t specify what’s different. Rodents have one set of front teeth – two big chompers in front on top and bottom. Lagomorphs (rabbits, hares, and pikas) have a second, smaller set behind the upper teeth. If you look into a rabbit’s open mouth sideways (that is, if you can get it open and still enough to see it) you can see the second set of teeth.
My mom always said I wasn’t allowed to have a rodent of any sort (darn it, I wanted a guinea pig!), but luckily, rabbits aren’t rodents – so I had about two hundred in the span of four years (hint: don’t get three rabbits when you only have two cages).
posted by Kate on 6-1-2011 at 2:32 am