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Muskrat — printable fact sheet
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Muskrat
Ondatra zibethicus
Ondatra zibethicus is a large vole, not a rat and not a beaver, though it lives a distinctly beaver-like life. It is North America's most important freshwater furbearer by sheer volume — tens of millions of pelts were traded in the twentieth century — and it is now established a…
Did you know?
- Muskrats can swim underwater for up to 15 minutes by slowing their heart rate, allowing them to evade predators and find food.
- Muskrat has an old legal and culinary status as a fish: in parts of the Detroit River region, Catholic dispensations dating to the frontier era still allow muskrat to be eaten on Fridays during Lent, and church muskrat dinners are a local tradition. Muskrats can eat frogs, crayfish, mussels and fish when plant food is short, which is unusual for a rodent. In several Indigenous North American creation stories it is the muskrat, not the more powerful animals, that succeeds in diving to the bottom of the primordial water and bringing up the mud from which the earth is made.
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