Sociable nosachi. Where you live and what to eat distant relatives of raccoons
In the forests of South and Central America and the southern United States, you can often find small animals with a long tail and a long nose similar whether in primitive primates, raccoons. This — noshi family of raccoons. In our material we will tell about how they differ from other relatives and what they look like primates.
Noshi, or coati, your mask, striped tail and movable fingers like raccoons, and this similarity is not accidental: they belong to the raccoon family (Procyonidae), though their closest relatives — not the raccoon, olingo — like them South American animals.
However, noshi — no ordinary raccoons. In contrast to all other raccoon, noshi active day. Activity you can’t miss them: they are noisy, they feed in large groups, digging through the fallen leaves and earth with its moving nose, and noisily communicate with each other.
Their nose, moving and sensitive as the snout of a boar, and a keen sense of smell allow them to locate in the forest litter insects, worms, small lizards and snakes or carrion. They also, balancing long tail, good at climbing trees, where they find fruit and occasionally bird eggs.
This omnivorous raccoon to normal, but the habit to keep large groups found in this family is quite rare. Noshi is also very social: most of the year they live in groups consisting of females, calves and young males.
Excluded from this sociality only by adult males when they reach maturity, they ruthlessly expelled from the group, and again join they can only during the breeding season. Within each group is allowed only one male.
Before you seek permission to copulate, the male has patiently to gain the trust of the females in a few weeks, feed with them, and occupying a subordinate position in relation to all the females of the group. But, when trust was gained, the male mates with all the females of the group. Then kicked it again. Females also briefly leave the group, coming together again only after the cubs get a little older.
In the group noshi behave like primates: feed together, put a sentinel, watching the predators spend a lot of time mutually grooming and often “talking” to each other using a variety of voice signals. Russian anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky calls nosuh “an ideal candidate for intelligence,” because they have all the prerequisites for the formation of large, as in primates, brain: the wood life, sociality and almost prehensile limbs.
Nosuh is divided into two kinds, noshi (Nasua) and the mountain noshi (Nasuella), with a pair of types in each of them. Their numbers are high, and they are fairly easy to meet: the person they belong to is quite tolerant.
Sophia Zolotovskaya