These Adorable Rodents Are Democratic Snugglers

If you're a small animal in a cold environment, being standoffish is a bad survival strategy. That's why animals of many kinds huddle for warmth. They put their furred or feathered bodies right up against their neighbors' and conserve energy that they would otherwise spend heating themselves. One especially adorable huddler is the degu (Octodon degus), a rodent that lives in Chile and has a tail like a paintbrush. As temperatures drop, degus clump into cuddling groups to keep warm. A new study finds that degu huddles have no leaders: the animals are perfectly self-organized. In fact, they're so self-organized that they resemble water crystallizing into ice. Mauricio Canals, a doctor and ecologist at the University of Chile, takes snuggling rodents very seriously. He's authored several papers on the huddling behaviors of small mammals. Most recently, he and his coauthors captured 13 wild degus and brought them back to the ...