Oryzomys couesi, Coues's rice rat, is a semiaquatic rodent occurring from southernmost Texas south to northwestern Colombia. It is usually found in wet habitats, such as marshes, but also lives in drier forests and shrublands. It is a medium-sized to large nocturnal rat with coarse fur, usually brownish to reddish above and whitish below, although there is much geographic variation in size, proportions, color, and skull features. An excellent swimmer and diver, it builds nests of vegetation suspended among reeds. Its diet includes seeds and insects. It probably breeds year-round, and females give birth to about four young after a pregnancy of 21 to 28 days. This species may be infected by parasites and hantaviruses. It was first described in 1877, and related forms were eventually merged into a single species. This rat is common, and even locally considered a pest species, but some populations are threatened. (This article is part of a featured topic: Oryzomys.).
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_topics/Oryzomys> _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1660: A series of executions of the commissioners who signed the death warrant of Charles I of England concluded; six were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regicides_of_Charles_I> 1931: American gangster Al Capone was convicted on five counts of income-tax evasion. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone> 1952: Indonesian Army elements surrounded the Merdeka Palace, demanding that President Sukarno disband the Provisional People's Representative Council. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17_October_affair> 2001: Rehavam Ze'evi, the Israeli minister of tourism, was assassinated in revenge for the killing of PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Rehavam_Ze%27evi> _____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day: thwart: 1. (transitive) To cause to fail; to frustrate, to prevent. 2. (transitive, obsolete) To place (something) across (another thing); to position crosswise. 3. (transitive, also figuratively, obsolete) To hinder or obstruct by placing (something) in the way of; to block, to impede, to oppose. 4. (transitive, intransitive, obsolete) To move (something) across or counter to; to cross. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thwart> ___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day: I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. It's inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge. --Arthur Miller <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Miller> _______________________________________________ Wikipedia Daily Article mailing list. To unsubscribe, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/daily-article-l.lists.wikimedia.org Questions or comments? Contact [email protected]
