In the video of that attack, you can see a second marten make a brief appearance when its partner gets the monkey temporarily on the ground, though it doesn’t join the attack (at least during the clip).
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A few years ago, also in Corbett National Park, an impaired langur – much bigger than the macaque in question – had its hands full parrying the relentless strikes of a yellow-throated marten. The doomed rhesus in this case was apparently all by its lonesome, and fending off the darting, high-energy assault of two determined martens is a trying and tiring task for a single (and rather small) monkey. A healthy monkey is no easy meal: it can match or exceed the marten’s arboreal agility, and big teeth, grabby hands, and communal defence make many of the primate species sharing the yellow-throated’s range downright risky targets. In 2014, a three-year-old giant panda succumbed to injuries suffered during an attack by a group of yellow-throated martens in China's Sichuan Province, despite being taken into captivity for medical care.Īnd though they’re likely fairly unusual food, monkeys are known to occasionally fall on this tenacious critter's carnivorous radar. And typical yellow-throated-marten prey is on the small side: rodents, especially, and also insects, arachnids, and songbirds.īut the marten sometimes targets bigger quarry, including small and juvenile ungulates such as musk deer, goral, and muntjac. That said, the marten is no dyed-in-the-wool meat-eater: fruit composes an important part of its diet in many areas. If your students need additional practice understanding which animals are predators and which are prey, you have landed in the right place Teach Starter has created a worksheet where students must. Animals that are hunted and killed for food are referred to as prey. (We probably should be thankful today’s weasel clans top out around wolverine- or sea-otter-size it’s a bit chilling to think of a mustelid any bigger.) Like South America's giant otters, the yellow-throated marten combines mustelid feistiness, decent size (as weasel types go), and a lithe build with cooperative hunting habits: a formidable predatory toolkit. When an animal is considered a predator when it kills other organisms for food. Mustelids as a whole come well-armed and scrappy, and many tackle prey larger than themselves.
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"Unsurpassed for me in stirring emotions," he wrote in a Twitter post on the incident.įound from the Himalayas and Russian Far East south to Indonesia, yellow-throated martens are the heftiest of the marten genus, Martes (the fisher of North America, which can outweigh it, was long classified as a marten but now resides in its own genus), and also unusually sociable for their kind: they often scrounge in pairs (like these monkey-hunters) or larger groups. The attack played out for at least half an hour, according to Chris Mills of Norfolk Birding, which led the tour.