First, thanks for the cards and letters regarding the recent car bangup experienced by Ann and myself. Ann is doing fine, and I just have a lousy headache. I can't sleep because of it, so I am sending this real-time; like 4am. Good thing I have early classes, eh? Q: If unaltered female ferrets are not bred when they come in heat, they usually become sick and die. This seems to be a very foolish way to reproduce. Is this trait shared by any mustelid cousins? Did early ferret domesticators purposefully or accidentally breed for such behavior? Or was it a chance mutation that by the vagaries of genetics and distribution became prevalent? What sort of social behaviors could this biological behavior lead to? A: Gosh, this could be the study for an entire semester. Let me see if I can do it in less than 100 lines. Nope. Next question. OK, I'll try. Actually, this is a common enough trait for many mammals, especially those that are typically solitary. And it makes fine evolutionary sense if you think about it. Consider the major objective of a species is reproduction (even with humans as any teenager will testify). First it has to survive, meaning avoiding being eaten while eating others, until it reaches reproductive age. After the magic moment, the animal still has to survive until the kids start watching M-TV and forcing normally pacifist parents to consider the purchase of a shotgun and lots of rock salt. To do this, the beastie fills a rather specific niche within the environment. Sometimes they evolved playing solitaire. The typical/general mustelid pattern is a patchwork of solitary males overlapping a similar patchwork of solitary females. The larger the territory, the more oportunities to meet several members of the opposite sex. Kind of like having a BMW and a gold card. Prolonged estrous, or being in heat for a _realllly_ long time can insure the highest number of close encounters of the mustelid kind with multiple mates, increase the opportunities for a close encounter of any kind, or a combination of both. In truth, there has to be either a net gain in animals despite the lost of the occasion female, or at least a break-even point, or the species would become extinct. Since it isn't so, then it must be either a good thing, or at least something that isn't bad. In other words, there is an advantage to these females having a prolonged estrous, or it wouldn't be there. As for the social stuff, it greatly explains the dominance patterns of the typical mustelid. Many animals, such as dogs, form a basic linear dominance pattern where there is a head dog , and strung out like beads behind him are all the little pups. Not so in ferrets. But they still form dominance structures. In the polecat/ferret case, one beastie might be dominant over several others, while dominated by another group. To really complicate things, some of the ferts at the bottom of one list may be at the top of another. Kind of like a patchwork of dominance. Very similar to what would be found in the wild, if the ferts were allowed to form territories. Kind of like Wild Kingdom in your front room. Our pet ferrets still follow these ancestral traits (estrous and dominance) and would be solitary except we maintain them in a "family" setting. Of course, they are not really related in some cases, but they come to regard each other as siblings rather than competitors. Hence the play fighting, mock mouth biting, neck shaking, etc. New introductions are often treated as territorial interlopers, hence the terrible fighting sometimes displayed. I also think much of the fighting between males and females is due to neutering, which kind of evens out the playing field so to speak. The males would normally ignore the female, but because of hormonal changes as a result of neutering, they appear as "non-female," and have to be territorially excluded. BTW, mustelids use poop to define territory. The reason for the "drag racing" after elimination is not to clean the butt, but to place the anal glands in contact with the surface. An olfactory signpost. Want to see alot of poop everywhere? Add 5 ferrets to an established group of 14. Each and everyone will forget what the litter pan was for. Land mine city. Look out! Aww, blew his foot off, so to speak. Now this is _very_ simplistic; like I said, this could be a full semester class. But I hope it helps. At least I got to talk about sex. Bob and the 19 Born-to-be-Poopinators. [Posted in FML issue 1684]