Suddenly, a red critter appears...
After a 4-hour long steep climb, heavily packed, rained-down and leech bitten, we reached an oasis, a sheltered flat resting area at the top of Ranomafana National Park. Our arrival grabbed the immediate attention of this little devil, the Ring-tailed mongoose.
They're very fun and active, not shy of humans at all, for one reason only: humans have food, and this critter has an appetite for anything edibale.
The ring-tailed mongoose is a euplerid that lives on the island of Madagascar. There is actually much disagreement about the placement of Madagascar's carnivores including the ring-tailed mongoose, within the phylogenetic tree. Recent molecular work by Anne Yoder et al. reported in the journal "Nature" suggests that the Malagasy Carnivora evolved from a single herpestid ancestor.
