The Olympic year is all about breaking world records and improving personal records of many athletes, and we were not going to be any less as our ferreret is also breaking records. Let’s find out how…
In one of our field trips we visited a reservoir built in the XIX century to supply the livestock with water, along with the coalmen and the forest workers. This village was conditioned by the Govern of the Balearic Islands in the mid 90’s to shelter an introduced population of ferreret, within the setting of the “Plan de Recuperación de Ferreret” (Plan of Retrieval of the Ferreret).
The study of adult specimens in this village was initiated in the year 2006 by the Dr. Samuel Pinya, the biologist of our Ferreret project. And since then, it is visited every year in order to monitor the adult population. Curiously this village fosters, with distinction, the population with the largest specimens of all the many populations that have been observed and studied to this day.
In all of these years, Dr. Pinya has identified more than 3000 different adult specimens. To this day, the largest specimen in length ever found was a female captured on July 17th 2014, measured at 44,08 mm. But this Olympic year, the record of the largest ferreret was broken. To be precise, on the 4th of August we have found a female specimen with a body length of 44,89 mm and a weight of 6,6 grams.
Clearly, it is excellent news to find specimens of such proportions, since the body length is a good indicator of the state of health of the specimens in the adult population. Thereby, large specimens with a considerable weight are an indicator of an area with good resources to feed on and little presence of predators.
