Trivia question for Nov-16-2011

Carter has seen plenty of these and always likes to stop and watch them as they play and communicate as a family.  These guys have a wide range of habitats – from northern woodlands to tropical forests.

These guys eat large varieties of food, commonly eating legumes and foraging on other plants, including shoots, leaves, cacti, and grasses. They also eat acorns, fruit, and corn. Their special stomach allows them to eat some things that humans cannot, such as mushrooms and Red Sumac that are poisonous to humans. Their diet varies by season according to availability of food sources. They will also eat hay, grass, white clover, and other food that they can find in a farm yard. These deer have been known to opportunistically feed on nesting songbirds, field mice, and birds trapped in Mist nets.

This deer is a ruminant, which means it has a four-chambered stomach. Each chamber has a different and specific function that allows the deer to quickly eat a variety of different food, digesting it at a later time in a safe area of cover. Their stomach hosts a complex set of bacteria that change as the deer’s diet changes through the seasons. If the bacteria necessary for digestion of a particular food (e.g., hay) are absent it will not be digested.

So here are Carter’s questions:  Tell us what kind of deer this is and tell us what this animal has to do with a lifejacket?  Also, tell us what happens to these guys when they eat fallen fruit which is partially fermented?

Good Luck 😉

Answer:

Congratulations goes out to Joe from Smyrna GA for being the first with the correct answer.  The deer we featured is the White-Tailed Deer. The white-tailed deer, also known as the Virginia deer or simply as the whitetail, is a medium-sized deer native to the United States (all but five of the states), Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America as far south as Peru. It has also been introduced to New Zealand and some countries in Europe, such as Finland, Czech Republic, and Serbia.

The correlation between the deer and the lifejacket is that if sewn together correctly and inflated, their skins have actually been used as lifejackets.  Like humans, if these guys eat too many fallen fruit which have already started to ferment, they will actually become intoxicated.  Here is more on these deer: White-Tailed Deer

Thanks for playing along 😉