{"id":70,"date":"2008-12-21T12:59:51","date_gmt":"2008-12-21T18:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=70"},"modified":"2008-12-21T13:35:36","modified_gmt":"2008-12-21T19:35:36","slug":"mortality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=70","title":{"rendered":"Mortality"},"content":{"rendered":"

In nature, things die. Plants die; animals die; rocks crumble. As a manager, it’s important for me to know what died and have some idea why. If it was a plant was it killed by disease, drought, insect damage, overuse by a native critter? Was it a juvenile, an adult, an aged adult? If it was an animal, did some other critter kill it (and if so, as it prey or a rival in a turf dispute?) or did it die of disease or old age or non-natural injury (vehicular injury, gunshot wound, poison, etc.?)<\/p>\n

Walking in the creek woods yesterday, I found another set of bones. Both skull and lower jaw, all teeth intact, a shoulder blade, a leg bone (broken, chewed), a rib. As I had other work to do, I brought only the skull back with me, to be sure of species (I’m still learning skull shape–my guess was right, but the dental formula proved it.)<\/p>\n

Here’s the skull as first seen, both pieces separate and upside down:<\/p>\n

\"raccoon-skull110\"<\/p>\n

The two parts articulated perfectly, wear marks on the teeth lining up to prove (if proximity hadn’t) that these belonged to the same individual.<\/p>\n

It’s a raccoon, as the 40 teeth and general shape prove–a mature individual (size considerably larger than some collected), also the wear marks on the canines). It does not show the blood-marks in the teeth we found in one, indicative of a possible bleeding disorder (or toxicity from a coumarin-type poison.) Raccoons around here are susceptible to distemper (as are gray foxes) but this individual might just have been old. Or it might have been taken by a larger predator.<\/p>\n

Here’s a picture of the skull–on a rock out in the open–next to a smaller, older one that was found without the lower jaw and with fewer teeth.<\/p>\n

\"Two

Two skulls for comparison<\/p><\/div>\n

Some of my friends refer to this as “CSI-80 Acres” …it would be, if I were more expert, but I’m not. Yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In nature, things die. Plants die; animals die; rocks crumble. As a manager, it’s important for me to know what died and have some idea why. If it was a plant was it killed by disease, drought, insect damage, overuse by a native critter? Was it a juvenile, an adult, an aged adult? If it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,20,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-land","category-mortality","category-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/74"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}