Chinchillas

Alex Re (00:00): Hello, welcome to On Wildlife. I'm your host Alex Re. On this podcast, we bring the wild to you. We take you on a journey into the life of a different animal every week, and I guarantee you, you're going to come out of fear knowing more about your favorite animal than you did before this week. I'm talking about an animal that you might just want to pick up and cuddle because of their incredibly soft fur. They've become pretty common pets over the years, but not many people know about their lives in the wild. So I hope you brought your hiking boots because we're heading up to the Andes Mountains to talk about chinchillas.

(00:56): There are two species of chinchilla chinchilla Lara and chinchilla breda. They're commonly called the long tailed and short tailed chinchillas respectively. And one of the best ways to tell them apart is by looking at the length of their tails. If you take apart their scientific name, you can see which one is which. Brev means short, and Ada is basically a sciencey word that means tail. Chinchillas can get to be around 14 inches long and weigh a little over a pound, and long tailed chinchillas can have tails around six inches long while they look kind of like rabbits. They're actually most closely related to Guinea pigs and porcupines. Chinchillas are native to South America, and in the past they were very common along the whole western coastline while they were originally widespread. They're now basically restricted to the countries of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile, and we'll talk about some of the problems that they're facing later on in the episode.

(02:02): Their preferred habitat is the rocky slopes of the Andes Mountains between 9,000 and 15,000 feet in elevation. It's kind of an extreme environment, but they're really well adapted to it. First of all, it can get pretty chilly at those heights, but that's not a problem for chinchillas because they have some really dense fur. They have 80 hairs per follicle, and for comparison, humans have only one to three hairs per follicle. They have the densest hair of all land mammals, only the sea Otter beats them out for densest fur on earth. Their fur can be around one and a half inches long, and it's usually a grayish color, but they can also be white and brown when animals have adaptations to keep a stable body temperature, it's called thermo regulation. They also have very strong hind legs that are useful for jumping and helping them navigate cliffs and rocky areas.

(03:01): They can jump up to five feet in the air. Although chinchillas live in a harsh environment, it's a relatively stable one with similar conditions all year round. Because of this, chinchillas are not good at handling large temperature fluctuations, especially when it becomes too hot. Their fur is so dense that they're extremely prone to heat stroke if they're exposed to temperatures exceeding 77 degrees Fahrenheit. They're the happiest at around 53 degrees Fahrenheit and chinchillas are nocturnal animals, meaning that they're mainly active at night during the day they stay in burrows or the spaces between rocks. Now what do chinchillas eat? We'll find that out right after the break. This week I want to give a shout out to Theo from Connecticut. His favorite animal is a mouse. Did you know that in one year a mouse can give birth to 35 babies? If you want me to give you a shout out on the podcast, send an email to on wildlife dot podcast@gmail.com telling me your name, where you're from, and your favorite animal.

(04:31): Now back to the episode. Chinchillas are strictly herbivorous animals, meaning that they only eat plants, they feed mainly on seeds and grass, but will also eat bark and succulent plants like Bram Meads and cacti, the most common food for them is a plant called Chilean needle grass. Their diets change seasonally as certain plants grow in different times of the year, and they have been observed eating 24 different species of plants. And even though they live in a very dry environment, they're also known to be pretty picky eaters. Although in the wild, their diets change seasonally. If their diets are changed abruptly in captivity, they can become extremely sick and it's pretty cute to watch them eat because they'll sit on their hind legs and eat with their front paws. And what's really crazy is that in the wild, they don't drink any water. They get all of their water from the plants that they eat, and they really should not get wet at all because of their extremely dense fur.

(05:35): If a chinchilla gets wet, the moisture could potentially stay in their fur for so long that bacteria and fungi could grow and cause a skin infection and potentially death. In addition to this being wet can alter a chinchilla's immune system and ability to regulate their body temperature. And if the chinchilla is cold for too long, they can develop a lung infection instead of water baths. Chinchillas keep clean by taking what are called dust baths in the wild. The dust they roll in is made of volcanic ash, volcanic glass, and rock. These dust baths help disperse natural oils across their coat and skin and remove debris from their coat. A chinchilla's front teeth also never stop growing, and because of this, they're almost constantly eating or looking for food because eating grinds down and helps to maintain their teeth at the right length. Chinchillas are unique in the rodent family because they're monogamous.

(06:36): Once two chinchillas mate, they stay together for life. Female chinchillas will give birth to up to two litters per year with one to six pups per litter and by rodent standards. This is a very small amount of offspring. Their gestation period is around four months and their babies are called kits compared to other rodents, this gestation period is pretty long too. When the kits are born, they're much more developed than most other small mammals. They have fur and their eyes are already open. The mothers will take care of their young and nurse them for around six to eight weeks, and they'll reach maturity at eight months old. The breeding season for chinchillas is between May and November, but they can really mate all year round. And when a female enters estrus or is ready to mate, she becomes excessively aggressive towards other individuals. But serious fighting between chinchillas is very rare.

(07:35): It's mostly dominance, aggression where individuals will be aggressive to one another based on their social status. Unlike most other rodents, male chinchillas will stick around throughout the raising of the babies and help watch over and protect them. Other females will also help to raise each other's babies and will even step in to nurse young that aren't theirs. Chinchillas are very social animals. They'll congregate in groups as small as 14, but as large as a hundred individuals. And there have been a few groups seen with around 500 individuals. That's a lot of chinchillas, and a group of chinchillas is called a herd, which is interesting because that term is usually reserved for large animals. The main reasons chinchillas group up is for social interaction and protection from predators. While the group is out feeding or sunbathing, there's always one individual acting as a lookout for the group.

(08:35): Herds of chinchillas will congregate in nearby rocky crevices and sometimes have extensive burrow systems. In the wild, there's very little interaction between separate herds of chinchillas. Because of the small amount of interaction with other groups, each population is pretty vulnerable to go extinct, and this is because of something called the bottleneck effect. Basically, when outside members don't meet with each other, there's not a good enough mix of genes. This can cause problems if their population decreases due to a natural disaster or other factors. It can especially cause genetic diseases. Luckily, chinchillas in the wild usually maintain stable population sizes. Chinchillas are also very vocal and make a wide range of sounds that mean different things. They'll chirp, squeak, and can even bark depending on the emotions they want to convey or the situation that they're in. Barks are mostly reserved for when they find themselves in trouble and they need to be intimidating.

(09:38): And as you can probably tell from their large ears, chinchillas have a pretty good sense of hearing, and although they're small, they can be fearsome when they're in dangerous situations while their first reaction is to try and run from an attacker. If they become trapped, they'll stand on their hind legs, puff up their tails and bark to try to intimidate a predator. If their show of intimidation doesn't work, they'll try and bite their attackers and can actually leave a pretty nasty bite. Their fur also helps them in defense as it's so thick that if they get bitten, a predator might not want the trouble of having a mouthful of fur. Okay, we're going to take our last break, but when we get back we'll talk about the relationship that humans have with chinchillas. Here's today's trivia question. What is the world's oldest living individual animal? If you thought of tortoises, you were close. It's actually a clam. The oldest animal that we know of was a clam named Ming who lived to be 507 years old.

(11:12): Now, chinchillas are pretty popular pets for people to have, but this pet trade is actually putting pressure on their wild populations. This is because people will trap them in the wild to sell them as pets usually illegally, but humans have had a history with them even before they were seen as pets. In ancient times, the Incan people were known to hunt chinchillas for their fur and meat. However, the modern obsession with chinchilla fur first began around the 17 hundreds and the peak of chinchilla hunting was around the 1830s. The first modern example of them being kept as pets is in the 1920s. In the twenties, an American mining engineer named Matthias f Chapman requested special permission of the Chilean government to import 11 chinchillas into the us and almost every chinchilla in the US is a direct descendant of these 11 original chinchillas. Due to the significant decrease in wild chinchillas, many captive breeding programs have been established and captive breeding has three main purposes to produce animals for their fur, for pets, and for biomedical research.

(12:26): The main use for biomedical research that they have is in auditory and behavioral studies because they're easily trained and they have a very highly evolved middle ear. Their auditory range is very similar to a humans, which is why they're used for auditory studies. These captive breeding programs are not an effort in conservation and are strictly for commercial purposes. They just help mitigate the number of individuals taken from the wild. People have tried to reintroduce captive bread chinchillas into the wild, but it's been extremely unsuccessful. All of the best conservation efforts for chinchillas lie in preserving their wild habitats and protecting the wild chinchillas that we have left. And breeding programs for chinchillas are not necessarily the most ethical programs either. Major fur producing programs will keep chinchillas in the minimum possible space. Since females are aggressive towards each other, breeders will keep them tethered to a single enclosure that's connected to multiple other enclosures with other females.

(13:33): In this network, there will be one free roaming male with access to all of the females, and even though they're not as popular as they were back in the day, fur coats are still a major problem. It takes 120 to 150 chinchillas to make a single chinchilla fur coat. So you can see how this amount can put intense pressure on wild populations in the wild, at least currently because their population size is so small, chinchillas don't have the biggest impact on their ecosystems, but they still play an important role. The two most crucial roles they play are as prey for other animals and as seed dispersers. They're prey items for just about every predatory animal that they share a habitat with, like hawks, eagles, snakes, skunks, owls, foxes, and even humans. Two of their main predators are the EO Fox and the Magellan horned owl.

(14:31): They're also important for spreading the seeds of the plants they eat and interact with through either the seeds getting caught in their fur or by leaving them through feces in the wild. Both chinchilla species are endangered and because of where they live, their conservation is extremely difficult. In the lower of the range, there is an over burning and over harvesting of plants. People also clear their habitats so that they can make more farms and places for livestock to live, and there are only around 10,000 chinchillas left in the Chilean mountains. While there are many laws in place to protect chinchillas like all other endangered animals, the laws are not really followed to the best that they can be, but there are some organizations that you can support that help wild chinchillas and their habitats. Some of these organizations are Save the Wild Chinchillas, the Nature Conservancy in Chile and The Mountain Institute. Thank you so much for coming on this adventure with me as we explored the world of Chinchillas. You can find the sources that we use for this podcast and links to organizations that we reference at onwildlife.org. You can also email us with any questions at On Wildlife dot podcast@gmail.com, and you can follow us on Instagram at On Wildlife or on TikTok at wildlife. Don't forget to tune in next Wednesday for another awesome episode, and that's on Wildlife

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