Etruscan shrew
Suncus etruscus
— Where the name comes from
Suncus goes back, through colonial English, to the Sanskrit chucchundarī, the Indian name for these animals. Etruscus because the first specimen described came from Tuscany, and in Italian it was long called the Etruscan shrew. The Italian common name is a diminutive of mustela, the weasel: the smallest mammal in the world carries the name, shrunk down, of a predator.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Hedgehogs and moles
- Habitat
- Mediterranean scrub, dry-stone walls, olive groves, stony ground
- Range
- The Mediterranean basin, southern Asia as far as Malaysia
- Size
- 3.5–5 cm of body, 1.2–2.7 g
- Diet
- Insectivore — crickets, grasshoppers, grubs, spiders
- Lifespan
- About 15 months
— Characteristics
- 01
It is the lightest mammal in the world: it weighs under two grams.
- 02
Its heart reaches 1,500 beats a minute, the record among mammals.
- 03
It eats twice its own weight every day.
— What sets it apart
It has reached the physical limit beyond which a warm-blooded mammal cannot exist. Below two grams the ratio of surface to volume sheds heat faster than any metabolism can make it, and the Etruscan shrew lives exactly on that threshold: its heart beats twenty-five times a second, it breathes eight hundred times a minute and it must eat almost without pause. A few hours of fasting kill it. It is not small by accident — it is as small as it is physically possible to be.
