Coming soon: the second Daily Mammal 24-Hour Mammalthon! Prepare yourself!

As Striped Mammal Week draws to a close, we encounter the banded mongoose of Africa. Banded mongooses live in most every type of ecosystem except for deserts. They’re little nomads, staying in any given den (which they recycle from termite nests) for only a few days at a time, or maybe a few weeks if the den is really, really good. They eat mostly insects and similar invertebrates, but they will eat small vertebrates if the occasion presents itself. Something I’d like to see is the way they open eggs to get at their contents: the description in Walker’s Mammals of the World seems to indicate that they hike them between their back legs like footballs, aiming for a hard object that will break the egg’s shell.