Tuesday, September 13, 2011

The Possessed African Mole Rat...

What are those heaps of soil we see every now and then on the course ?

A common question from members and guests as the walk of the course and its all to thank to our friend the mole rat and his other mole friends...

Common African Mole Rat

They not really possessed just very unhappy when you catch them to "relocate" of the golf course as seen in the video below.... they can do damage to the turf and give the maintenance staff a lot of work to repair areas.



One very unhappy mole rat...



They are quite a bit different to the other Moles we get in the course and these mole rats occurs in a wide range of substrates from friable sandy loams to sandy, stony soils. It is apparently, unable to utilize heavy red clay soils or the hard soils associated with mopane woodland. In South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province where DCC is located for those foreign readers, it occurs in a variety of habitats from short, mesic grassland to dense coastal forest, and from stony soils on hill slopes in the Drakensberg. In many parts of the range (e.g., Pretoria, Swaziland, and KwaZulu-Natal), they are found in a variety of man-made habitats including lawns, golf-courses and gardens. The species is subterranean, and social, with a colony size of around five animals (and up to 14) including a single reproductive pair. It has a litter size of two to six young and a generation time of about three years.



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