Honey badgers

On a day when the BBC websites' top news is a sick Pope and an Anglican split, honey badgers don't come close for off-topic.

Your honey badger (as Dead Men Left will know) is a mustelid, but probably no more closely related to your British brock than a gorilla is to a marmoset.



Note an appearance of a skunk/anteater/possum cross, with shovelling forelimbs and a rough insect-repellant coat. Although not related to any but the former of these, the honey badger shares a niche and feeding habit with these suggestive of convergent adaptation.

To be recommended is the BBC's video of their series Weird Nature featuring some wonderful footage explaining the interdependence of honeybees, the honeyguide bird, honey badgers and Koi-San people during the tracking and plundering of Kalahari hoves..

Honey badgers display an extreme form of sexual dimorphism even among Mustelidae, with males double females' weight, and unlike its European namesake, males lead largely solitary adult lives. Females employ highly altricial rearing habits, raising small litters of just one or 2 kits who remain with their mother for at least 14 months.

An excellent resource on Mellivora capensis highlights the lack of phylogenetic relationships between several species called badgers. This has been a habit of first-world naturalists or colonists 'discovering' co-adapted but distinct species during their travels. Many US birds have little phylogenetic relationships to the Eurasian namesakes, and the same confusion is found for marine creatures.

*Exclusive- the existence of a Chinese ferret badger just has become known to me. Must learn more...

*Killer language fact- 'Weird' disobeys the 'i before e' rule. New mnemonic proposed is:
'I' be fore 'e' except after 'c'
But weird is weird as weird can be