Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff Lauren bog obamb here. The taxonic family of weasels is a motley crewe. They can be slinky and shy like a pine Marten, or grouchy and taciturn like a badger. Ferrets and otters are playfuling curious, and then there are honey badgers, which are basically just berserker weasels. But perhaps the most fascinating weasel is the wolverine. The scientific name for a wolverine is gullo gullo, which is literally Latin
for glutton, glutton. I'm not sure whether the team at Marvel knew that when they were designing X Men's brudy antihero, but these animals seem legitimately super heroic, not only in what and how much they managed to eat, but how they generally ace life in the northern forests and alpine tundra they call home. About the size of a midsized dog, but resembling a small bear, a wolverine is a weasel of paradox, weighing in between twenty two and forty pounds.
It's about ten to eighteen kilows, the males being larger than the females. They defend territories greater than those presided over by grizzly bears, from forty miles up to three hundred and seventy miles that's between sixty five and six hundred kilometers, and they do it aggressively. They've been known to fight a wolf or even a bear off of
a kill. That's said. Wolverines are omnivores, eating pretty much whatever their sensitive noses lead them to ground squirrels, moose, mountain goats, carcasses buried meters under the ice, and snow birds, eggs, berries, et cetera. They'll even dig deep under the snow to kill and eat a hibernating animal, unlike a lot of other Arctic animals that deal with the long, bitter winters
by either hibernating or migrating someplace. Ballmere a wolverine's dense, frost resisted coat, which at one time made them a major target for fur trappers. It's snowshoe like paws and the ability to chump through frozen meat and even bones make it possible for them to stay outside in the far North year round. They're all so pretty hyperactive, no
matter what time of year it is. One wolverine wearing a tracking device in Grand Tenton National Park was found to have walked over five hundred miles that's over eight hundred kilometers in two months. We spoke with Rebecca Waters, executive director of the Wolverine Foundation based in Bozeman, Montana. She said they can go and go and go, no matter what the terrain is like. They have crazy metabolisms,
and they don't hibernate, so they're always out exploring. They've also been known to climb hills and slide down on the snow repeatedly just for fun. While curious and fearless, wolverines are almost pathologically kg. They're nocturnal, so they're used to slinking around in the shadows, and they've been known
to stock researchers for miles without being spotted. And just as fur trappers of old had a difficult time catching wolverines and preventing them from robbing their traps, modern researchers have had a hard time finding, following, and catching them. Waters said they're wildly clever and playful. It's very hard to trap a wolverine. If you're trying to catch it to kill it, but they know when a research live trap is out, and they'll return again and again for
free meal. Sometimes they'll take apart the camera strops that are set up nearby, or play with loose ropes or wires, But as difficult as they are to find in the flesh, it's not tough to find where they've been. One of the common names for wolverines is skunk bear or stink bear, because they spray various landmarks and sometimes their enemies, with a special concoction of methyl budonic acids from their anal glands, the smell of which has variously been described as sweaty, cheesy,
and like a barnyard. They do this to communicate with each other, since one male might have three or more females living in his territory raising his kits or babies with him. Males do help raise the babies. Wolverines also communicate vocally with each other and especially their kits and mother. Wolverines dig burrows sometimes fifteen feet that's four and a half meters under the snow to protect their kids from
predators and the coal. Although wolverines are currently considered a species of least concern of extinction, having bounced back after nearly going extinct during the nineteenth century due to habitat loss and aggressive hunting, poisoning, and extermination campaigns. They're currently facing new threats. Waters said. Habitat loss and fragmentation are issues for the population in the lower forty eight States
due to development. Wolverines require cold and snow, which is mostly found at high elevations in the lower forty eight. Wolverines have very large territories, so a single mountain range can only hold a few adult animals, and young animals have to find uninhabited territories, often in a different range, if they want to reproduce. All of this is, of course compounded by climate change, which is reducing the amount of cold and snowy habitat in the mountains. As the
snowy winter season becomes shorter, wolverine habitat shrinks. Today's episode was written by Joceline Shield and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is Productive, Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other topics, bub visit our home planet how stuff Works dot com, and for more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows