Q: "I've noticed a lot of people talking about ferrets and mongeese being
in the same family, but I thought they were different...can you tell me
the difference?"  "What do you know about ferrets in Hawaii?"
 
A: "I could, but then I would have to kill you using the "Death by a
Thousand Ferrets Sucking Your Ear Canal." Oooooooooo!
 
Superficially, mongeese (or mongooses--both are correct) are very similar to
ferrets, or rather to members of the weasel family.  This resemblance is so
profound that for quite some time they were mistakenly lumped together in a
single family.  You can still find old books using that old scheme of
classification.  The mistake was made long before scientists understood how
animals change as time progresses; indeed, the mistake was not rectified
until the concepts of homology and analogy were worked out by a British
scientist named Owen, back a century and a half ago.  Homology means two
things that look similar are related because they come from the same
ancestral structure, like a ferret paw and a human hand.  Analogy means two
things look similar because they perform the same function, but they do not
share close ancestors, such as the wings of a bat and pterodactyl.
 
Mongeese and ferrets look alike because of analogy; their shared appearance
is the result of convergence; that is, because both creatures eat similar
creatures, fill a similar niche, and are about the same size, they exhibit
a similar external appearence.  That similarity is made even more pronouced
because they both share a common ancestor in the distance past; a
protocarnivore from which they inherited basic similarities.  But that
relationship is quite distant, and ferrets are more closely related to seals
and dogs than to the viverids.
 
Try to imagine a giant tree, filled with many hundreds of thousands of
branches.  Now imagine each branch has a slightly different type of leaf.
The problem that paleontologists and zoologists are trying to figure out is
which leaf goes to which branch after they have all fallen off the tree.
Before Owen, scientists would put the skin and bones of one animal next to
the other, and if they were close in shape (morphology), then they were
assumed to be close in ancestry.  Thus, mustelids and viverids were lumped
together.  After Owen, animals were lumped together using the shape of their
teeth, and later, the shape of their skulls.  At that point, some scientists
began separating the two different groups, but it wasn't until the mid
1930's that the two groups were seen as truely separate.  Today, scientists
are abandoning the use of morphology to classify animals, and are moving
towards the use of protein and DNA analysis to prove close relationships;
these studies have shown ferrets to be closer to dogs and mongeese to be
closer to cats.
 
This isn't science fiction.  Today, the techniques exist to prove beyond a
doubt the relationship of one species to the other, and to be able to tie
that relationship to time so that we could be fairly certain of when the
various species diverged from one another.  All that is needed is time and
money.  Imagine being able to establish the breeding line of your ferret
with a simple cheek scrape or blood test.  Or to know your entire ancestral
lineage for thousands of years.  The point being, while in the past
taxonomic classification has had problems, with today's techniques those
problems are essentially being solved as we speak.  Which means, the idea
that ferrets, being mustelids, are in a different family than the mongeese,
being viverids, could only be better proven if God whispered the taxonomic
lineage to you Himself.
 
As for Hawaii, ferrets are illegal.  Mongeese, imported to eat exotic rats,
have established several feral populations on at least one island (possibly
more), and have been traced to several extinctions.  Hawaii, like New
Zealand, is unlike California in that it is a limited island ecosystem which
dramatically increases the chances of establishing exotic species.  Already
Hawaii has suffered from mongeese, goats, pigs, rabbits, rats, mice, dogs,
cats, some birds, fish, and insects, not to mention numerous plants.  It is
understandable that they would be concerned about risks of feral ferret
populations.  Personally, I think a mandatory sterilzation program would
eliminate risk, and ferrets would be far safer than cats to own in terms of
protecting the environment.  But, while I will argue ferrets have such a low
possiblity of becoming feral in CaCa Land that I consider it unimportant, I
cannot say the same thing about Hawaii.  The chances there are much better,
but even so, I doubt if they would harm the local species much, and instead
would probably consume the introduced prey animals, much like has been found
in New Zealand with stoats, ferrets, rabbits, rats and mice.
 
Bob C and 19 MO Weesel Waskels (Missing Simon)
[Posted in FML issue 2379]