Weekend Egoblogging

Every once in a while I get tagged with a meme, and every once in a longer while I indulge my ego and respond...

The Animal Meme:

• An interesting animal I had: That's easy - my parrot. Clicker is a Senegal parrot, a pet store mascot my husband and I adopted from my dad when he closed his pet store several years ago. At first we balked at taking him, mostly because of my allergies, but my dad was pretty insistent and we have not regretted it one bit. He is a lot of fun to have around and is quite talented at learning new noises to mimic (he has a full repertoire of bodily functions he can imitate). Clicker is quite a popular little bird who even has his own MySpace page...and has at least 3 times more MySpace friends than I do.
  
  
• An interesting animal I ate: Hmm...I guess that would be alligator, when I was in New Orleans. It tasted like calamari.
  
  Being an (eccentric) invasive species biologist, I keep a life list of invasive species I have eaten. The animal part of the list is sorely lacking. I'm still looking for someone to venture into Chinatown with me and find a place that serves carp. A man from Asia that was at the last GISIN meeting insisted it is quite tasty!
  
  
• An interesting animal in the Museum: When my husband and I were first dating, we did a lot of crossword puzzles together. One that was particularly stumping us included a clue of "hoofed animal." We ended up solving it via the cross-clues - it was "aoudad." We were convinced it was some made-up creature, but later that month we visited the Academy of Natural Sciences, and in their taxidermy exhibit was a big fat aoudad!
  
  
• An interesting thing I did with or to an animal: Having worked in a pet store, it used to be part of my job to feed animals to other animals. I've fed mice to big snakes, goldfish to little snakes and turtles, and crickets to tarantulas. Watching animals catch and eat live prey is an interesting, if brutal event.
  
  
• An interesting animal in its natural habitat: Again, being an invasive species biologist, I am going to interpret this a bit loosely and consider animals in nature. There are too many examples of interesting invasive species, but I have managed to narrow it down by restricting the topic to things I have video for. So here's a cane toad wiggling its toe to attract (and eat!) its young, a red fox in Australia trying to grab a wallaby, and the gruesome story of introduced house mice gobbling up live albatross chicks on Gough Island.