okay, so i have a very strong memory of reading something, but only a vague recollection of what it is i read. somewhere a long time ago, i came across an article or entry regarding these scary little bastard animals that live in the arctic ice (maybe antarctic- actually, yeah, antarctic).
said animals (i don’t know what the hell a vole is, but for some reason ‘vole’ keeps popping into my head) have extremely hot heads, due to amazing circulation, and burrow through the ice with them. they are pretty small. a bunch of them will burrow up underneath a penguin or something (yeah, come to think of it, definitely antarctic- they eat penguins) and make their way to the surface. the ice collapses underneath the hapless penguin, and the little vole buggers devour it.
is this real? i very well may have dreamt reading it (i have a tendency to remember dreams as reality and vice versa- NOT kidding), or it could have been a lie. can anybody veriffy this for me? searching +vole +penguin turned up nothing of value.
You should have spotted the error when you mentioned Antarctica. Apart from aquatic beasts such as seals and whales, there are no mammals that live in Antartica.
Other than birds, there are no - repeat no - animals that reside permanently upon the Antartic continent.
When I was at McMurdo last time, we did manage to capture a few Antarctic Voles. I still have one which I lease out to the Smithsonian Sub-millimeter array on Mauna Kea to keep the pipes warm. Works great, but it’s expensive to fly in the penguins. Voles only eat Emperor Penguins. They won’t touch any other variety.
Hate to kill a good gag, but voles are little rodents like shrews. Like all tiny rodents, they are voracious eaters and have incredibly high metabolisms. They run pretty damn quick too.
And during the winter, they exist quite well on the ground, tunneling UNDER the snowpack where temperatures can stay relatively constant throughout the winter.
Their tunneling also causes damage to lawns and golf courses. In the spring when the snow melts and the grass is still dead and brown, you’ll often find areas of grass pockmarked with golf-ball sized holes where they chewed out the turf and made little nests.
You aren’t killing a gag. If we didn’t know what voles are, none of this would be funny. But describing voles as ‘little rodents like shrews’ isn’t accurate enough because it doesn’t exclude my ex who is a little rodent like a shrew, but isn’t a vole.
The article called them “Hot Headed Ice Borers.” I believe I read in a follow up issue that a south american science journal (not a very prominiant, or after this, reputable, one) had picked up the story and reported it as fact.
April 1996 – Hot-headed moles in antarctic ice. The story describes researcher April Pazzo (italian for “fool”) working at a station on the Ross shelf and observing these tiny animals “burrowing” through the ice by melting it with their 107-degree heads and coming up, as a pack, beneath unsuspecting penguins.
I’ve used it as a group exercise to get beginning science students to look at articles in the popular press with a jaundiced eye.