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]