| from the December 25, 2011 Newsletter issued from Hacienda Chichen Resort beside Chichén Itzá
Ruins, central Yucatán, MÉXICO TUZA Jogging the entry road at dawn, bright moonlight revealed something hamster-size and unmoving at the road's edge. A toe-nudge found it heavy and soft. It could have been an oversized, run-over rat, but it was exactly beside a plot where they'd cut the forest back to plant Henequen, and soil between the Henequen plants was honeycombed with tunnels and much occupied with crumbly mounds of red dirt, the work of mole-like critters known locally as Tuzas. Maybe this was a dead Tuza. I've wanted to see a Tuza, which are very seldom seen because they're subterranean. I jogged back to the hut carrying the unknown animal by its short tail. When the sun was up, I got to see what's shown below:
That's what my friends had been telling me a Tuza looks like. Still, I didn't yet know what the animal would be called in English and Latin. Lots of tunneling, hamster-size mammals are similar to almost identical. However, when I flipped the body over and saw the head's bottom, I knew what a Tuza was. You can see that below:
Tuzas are pocket-gophers. Those slits beneath the cheeks are openings to pouches into which the rodent who is foraging plant material outside its tunnel stuffs herbage. Later, protected inside its tunnel, it transfers the clipped stems and leaves from the pouch into its mouth. We've seen a pocket-gopher before, back in highland Chiapas in 2008, when friends brought me a live one from whose pouches green, compacted balls of clipped- off leaves had tumbled when captured. You can see how similar the Chiapas species was to our Yucatán one at http://www.backyardnature.net/chiapas/gopher.htm. Chiapas's species was a high-elevation specialist, probably Pappogeomys bulleri, but our current lowland one appears to be ORTHOGEOMYS HISPIDUS YUCATANENSIS. The yucatenensis is the subspecies name, and that subspecies is endemic to the Yucatán. The broader species is distributed through southern lowland Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, to northwestern Honduras. Its English name is usually given as Hispid Pocket Gopher. Tuzas are famous among Maya farmers for their ability to move into a field and kill plants by eating roots and tunneling. The Maya seldom suffer the Tuzas' presence for long, however, for they know how to drop poisoned grain down their holes. I suspect that that's exactly what had happened to our Tuza. The jogging road's newly cleared Henequen field was a perfect place for Tuzas, for roots of trees and bushes killed and removed for the Henequen now must be decaying, soft and mushy. For someone used to eating tough roots crammed wih bitter chemicals that dissuade root-eaters, those rotting roots with their breaking-down alkaloids must seem like delicacies. I left our Tuza in a spot where I could watch him decompose over the days, for upon death an animal becomes an ecosystem in itself, and beholding the succession of organisms who come to do their jobs is fascinating and inspiring. In fact, I became somewhat attached to the disappearing creature, before some animal carried him away on the third night. Before he was gone, however, I took a picture of his front paw, which was elegantly adapted for tunneling in earth, and poignantly evocative of a kinship I strongly feel between Tuza and me. That picture is below:
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