For this blog post, I decided that I would go back to the basics. When I was in elementary school, one of the first English lessons I remember having was a talk on adjectives and feelings we associate with certain colors. For example, the color white is meant to be associated with ideas of goodness and purity, while green is connected with nature and envy. But, the color I remember getting the worst wrap was the color black, due to its ties with nothingness and anger.
This interpretation of color apparently coincides pretty well when it comes to fur color.
Squirrel fur color, that is.
Up until this point, I assumed that all squirrels had the same mannerisms. That they were all very spastic, quirky, and driven by food. But, after doing some extensive research (I typed squirrel fur colors into Google) some new information came to my attention. Black squirrels, which are native to the Midwestern United States, Ontario, Quebec, and parts of the Northeastern US and Great Britain, are actually significantly more aggressive than your average grey and red squirrels.
This difference in behavior is due to the squirrels’ higher levels of testosterone. This above-average level leads to the squirrels being “faster, fitter, fiercely territorial, and more aggressive.” More often than not, this means that black squirrels often beat out grey squirrels for both food and mates, which is ironic considering black squirrels are a sub-species of the grey squirrel (talk about betrayal, am I right or am I right).
So where did these black squirrels come from, and what environmental impact are they having in areas where they exist?
Now, it is still under dispute whether these mammals were dispersed throughout the England, the US and Canada after being brought from foreign lands, or whether the black subspecies was simply a genetic mutation, resulting in the development of this squirrel sub-species around the world. As far as their impact on their surrounding environments goes, they have been creating quite a bit of trouble. First of all, some scientists believe that this “mutation” makes the mammals more immune to diseases, which could lead to an increased overall squirrel population. And, just as I mentioned in one of my earlier articles, the grey squirrel in regions of England was harshly competing against the native red-squirrel, resulting in a large decrease in the red squirrel population. Now considering that the black squirrel is even more aggressive and territorial than the grey squirrel, they are obviously creating massive issues for both red and grey squirrels. In fact, black squirrels have become such an issue in parts of England, that in Cambridgeshire, England, as of 1958, all red squirrels have been extinct—the area now only consists of black squirrels.
Visual showdown– 3 ways this time. The black squirrel is cute but looks moderately aggressive.