Raccoon

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The raccoon, Procyon lotor, has been known to live more than 20 years in captivity. In the wild, its life expectancy is only 1.8 to 3.1 years. That gap is strange for a mammal native to North America that is famous for adapting to almost anything. It is the largest member of the procyonid family, with a grayish coat, a dark facial mask and a ringed tail. Why did naturalists spend decades unsure what kind of animal it even was? What do its unusually sensitive front paws tell us about how it thinks? And what happens when a species this flexible is carried to continents that never produced anything like it?

  1362625

• 2. Names and Slurs

  ›

  English borrowed the word raccoon from a Powhatan term used in the Colony of Virginia, meaning an animal that scratches with its hands. John Smith wrote the word down as aroughcun. William Strachey recorded it as arathkone. A Proto-Algonquian root, ahrah-koon-em, has also been identified and is glossed as the one who rubs, scrubs and scratches with its hands. Across various North American native languages, the animal's manual dexterity is the usual source of its names.

  Mapache, the Spanish word, comes from the Nahuatl mapachtli of the Aztecs. It means the one who takes everything in its hands. Hands, not the famous mask, were what first struck the people who named this animal.

  In 1780, Gottlieb Conrad Christian Storr gave the genus the name Procyon, built from the Greek pro and cyon. Paired with lotor, the Latin word for washer, the full name reads as before-dog washer. Other languages named the animal for the same washing habit. The French raton laveur means washing rat, and the German Waschbär means wash-bear.

  The short form coon has a darker history. It survives innocently in coonskin, for fur clothing, and in old coon, a phrase trappers used about themselves. In the 1830s, the United States Whig Party adopted the raccoon as an emblem. Opponents who thought the party too sympathetic to African-Americans mocked its members as coons. Soon after, the word became an ethnic slur, used especially between 1880 and 1920, and it is still considered offensive. Dogs bred to hunt raccoons are called coonhound and coon dog. The animal's newest nickname, trash panda, comes from its habit of eating human garbage in cities.

  378913

• 3. Misfiled as a Bear

  ›

  The first Europeans to leave a written record of the raccoon were members of the expedition of Christopher Columbus. In the decades that followed, taxonomists linked the animal to dogs, cats, badgers and, above all, bears. Carl Linnaeus, often called the father of modern taxonomy, placed it in the bear genus Ursus. In the second edition of his Systema Naturae in 1740 he called it Ursus cauda elongata, meaning long-tailed bear. In the tenth edition of 1758-59 it became Ursus Lotor, the washer bear.

  Storr's new genus meant either before the dog or doglike. He may also have had the raccoon's nocturnal habits in mind, since Procyon is the name of a star.

  Fossils from Russia and Bulgaria place the first known procyonids in Europe in the late Oligocene, about 25 million years ago. Tooth and skull structures suggest that procyonids and weasels share an ancestor. Molecular analysis, however, points to a closer relationship with bears. At least six million years later, in the early Miocene, procyonids crossed the Bering Strait, and the center of their distribution was probably Central America.

  The exact line to the modern raccoon is still disputed. Fossil comparisons suggest that coatis and raccoons descend from a species in the genus Paranasua, present between 5.2 and 6.0 million years ago. A genetic analysis in 2006 instead indicates that raccoons are more closely related to ringtails. About 2.5 million years ago, the ancestors of the common raccoon left the tropical and subtropical areas where other procyonids stayed, such as the crab-eating raccoon, Procyon cancrivorus. Fossils in the Great Plains from the middle of the Pliocene confirm that northward move. Their likely recent ancestor was Procyon rexroadensis, a large raccoon from the Rexroad Formation with narrow back teeth and a large lower jaw.

  As of 2005, Mammal Species of the World recognized 22 subspecies. Four island forms had often been treated as separate species after their discovery. They are the Bahamian raccoon, the Guadeloupe raccoon, the Tres Marias raccoon and the extinct Barbados raccoon. Studies of their form and genes in 1999-2003 and 2005 led to their listing as subspecies. The Cozumel raccoon, which weighs only 3 to 4 kg and has notably small teeth, is still regarded as a separate species.

  The four smallest subspecies weigh a typical 1.8 to 2.7 kg and live along the southern coast of Florida and its islands. The Ten Thousand Islands raccoon, Procyon lotor marinus, is one example. The two most widespread are the eastern raccoon and the Upper Mississippi Valley raccoon, which is the larger of the two. The raccoons now living wild in central Europe, the Caucasus and Japan have no known subspecies. Their founding populations came from zoos and fur farms as uncategorized specimens.

  1718192336

• 4. Mask, Paws, and Mind

  ›

  The black fur around the raccoon's eyes contrasts sharply with its white face, and the effect recalls a bandit's mask. That look has added to the animal's reputation for mischief. The mask and the alternating light and dark rings on the tail probably help raccoons read each other's expressions and posture quickly. The dark patches may also reduce glare and improve night vision.

  Body size varies widely with habitat. From head to hindquarters a raccoon measures 40 to 70 cm, and the tail adds 20 to 40 cm, though it is usually not much longer than 25 cm. Adults can weigh from 2 to 26 kg, usually between 5 and 12 kg. The smallest live in southern Florida, and the largest live near the northern edge of the range. Males are usually 15 to 20% heavier than females. By early winter a raccoon can weigh twice its spring weight because of stored fat. The largest wild raccoon on record weighed 28.4 kg and measured 140 cm in total length.

  The coat is mostly underfur, which makes up almost 90% of it and insulates against the cold with hairs 2 to 3 cm long. Long, stiff guard hairs shed moisture. Raccoons are poor sprinters, with a top short-distance speed of 16 to 24 km/h. They swim at about 5 km/h and can stay in the water for several hours. To climb down a tree headfirst, an unusual feat for a mammal of its size, a raccoon rotates its hind feet to point backwards.

  Touch is the raccoon's most important sense. Almost two-thirds of the part of its cerebral cortex that handles sensation is devoted to interpreting touch, more than in any other animal studied. The front paws are protected by a thin horny layer that becomes pliable when wet. They have no webbing between the five digits and no opposable thumb, so they lack the agility of primate hands. Vibrissae above the claws let raccoons identify objects before touching them. Standing for hours in water below 10 °C (50 °F) shows no negative effect on this sense.

  Vision matters less. Raccoons are thought to be color blind or nearly so, although their eyes are well adapted to green light. They see well in twilight thanks to the tapetum lucidum behind the retina, but their long-distance vision is poor. Their hearing reaches tones of 50-85 kHz, high enough to pick up quiet sounds such as earthworms moving underground.

  The zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam described raccoons as "clever beasts", and said that "in certain directions their cunning surpasses that of the fox". In 1908, the ethologist H. B. Davis gave raccoons 13 complex locks, and they opened 11 in fewer than 10 tries. They repeated the feat when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down. Davis concluded that they grasped the abstract principles of the mechanisms and learned about as fast as rhesus macaques.

  Memory studies in 1963, 1973-1975 and 1992 showed that raccoons can remember the solutions to tasks for at least three years. In a 1992 study by B. Pohl, raccoons instantly told identical symbols from different ones three years after a short learning phase. Stanislas Dehaene reports in his book The Number Sense that raccoons can tell boxes holding two or four grapes from boxes holding three. Suzana Herculano-Houzel and other neuroscientists found that raccoons rival primates in neuron density in the cerebral cortex, which they propose as an anatomical marker of intelligence. Almost all of these experiments leaned on the animal's sense of touch, and few studies of raccoon minds have been attempted at all.

  3031333410

• 5. Washing and Eating

  ›

  The scientific name points to the most famous raccoon habit, usually called dousing. In the wild, raccoons dabble for underwater food near the shoreline. They pick an item up in their front paws, examine it and rub it, sometimes to remove unwanted parts. To an onlooker it looks like washing. The rubbing works better underwater because water softens the hard layer on the paws and sharpens their sensitivity.

  The habit most people picture, carrying food to water before eating, has been observed only in captive raccoons. It has not been seen in the wild. The naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, believed that raccoons produce too little saliva and must moisten their food. That hypothesis is now considered incorrect. Captive raccoons douse more often when a stream-like watering hole lies no more than 3 m away. They also douse aquatic foods more often. The widely accepted theory is that captive dousing is a fixed action pattern left over from foraging at the shore. Cleaning dirty food does not seem to be the reason.

  A typical raccoon diet is about 40% invertebrates, 33% plant material and 27% vertebrates. The animal is usually nocturnal but sometimes ventures out in daylight to use a good food source. Samuel I. Zeveloff, author of Raccoons: A Natural History, argues the raccoon "may well be one of the world's most omnivorous animals". In spring and early summer it eats mostly insects, worms and other animals available early in the year. In late summer and autumn it prefers fruits and nuts such as acorns and walnuts, a rich source of calories for building winter fat.

  Popular belief overstates its hunting. Raccoons only occasionally take active or large prey such as birds and mammals. They favor easier targets, including crayfish, insects, fish, amphibians and bird eggs. They are avid predators of eggs and hatchlings in bird and reptile nests. For some globally threatened turtles, raccoons may have to be removed from the area or the nests relocated. In the northern parts of the range, raccoons go into a winter rest, sharply reducing their activity while permanent snow cover makes food hard to find.

  103674041

• 6. Family Life and Short Lives

  ›

  Studies in the 1990s by the ethologists Stanley D. Gehrt and Ulf Hohmann overturned the idea that raccoons are solitary. Related females often live in what is called a fission-fusion society. They share a common area and occasionally meet at feeding or resting grounds. Unrelated males form loose groups, usually of no more than four, to hold their position against foreign males during the mating season and against other intruders. Because some males attack unrelated kits, mothers isolate themselves until their kits are big enough to defend themselves.

  Hohmann called this arrangement a three-class society. Zeveloff is more cautious. He concludes that at least the females are solitary most of the time. Erik K. Fritzell's 1978 study in North Dakota found that males in areas of low population density are solitary as well. Gehrt notes that "typically you'll find 10 to 15 percent that will do the opposite" of what is expected.

  Home ranges vary with age, sex and habitat. In North Dakota prairies they span 7 to 50 km2 for males and 2 to 16 km2 for females, while the average in a marsh at Lake Erie was 0.5 km2. Outside the mating season, ranges are most likely not actively defended if food is sufficient. Shared latrines may carry information about feeding grounds. Raccoons have been seen meeting there later to eat, sleep and play together.

  Mating is triggered by lengthening daylight and usually falls between late January and mid-March. In Manitoba the season peaks later in March and extends until June. Males roam restlessly to find females, who are fertile for only three to four days. In a southern Texas study from 1990 to 1992, about one-third of females mated with more than one male. Gestation usually lasts 63 to 65 days, and a litter of two to five young is typical. Average litter size runs from 2.5 in Alabama to 4.8 in North Dakota. Males take no part in raising the young.

  Newborn kits are about 10 cm long and weigh 60 to 75 g. They are blind and deaf, yet their mask is already visible against light fur. Their ear canals open after around 18 to 23 days, and their eyes follow a few days later. Of the thirteen identified vocal calls, seven are used between mother and kits, including the birdlike twittering of newborns. Kits begin exploring outside the den at about 1 kg and eat solid food after six to nine weeks. They are usually weaned by 16 weeks. In the fall, after the mother has shown them dens and feeding grounds, the juveniles split up. Males can move more than 20 km away.

  Then the hard arithmetic begins. It is not unusual for only half of the young born in one year to survive a full year. After that, annual mortality drops to between 10% and 30%. The most frequent natural cause of death is distemper, which can reach epidemic proportions and kill most of a local population. Where traffic and hunting are heavy, they can account for up to 90% of adult deaths. Bobcats, coyotes and great horned owls are the main natural predators, and in the southeast alligators favor raccoons. Yet predation is not a significant cause of death overall. In the former Soviet Union, where raccoons were introduced, their main predators are wolves, lynxes and Eurasian eagle-owls.

  3443264547

• 7. Conquering Continents

  ›

  The raccoon's original habitat is deciduous and mixed forest, and it depends on vertical structures to climb when threatened. It avoids open terrain and stands of beech, because beech bark is too smooth to climb. Hollows in old oaks and rock crevices are favored dens. Lowland forests and marshes rich in water hold the densest populations, with more than 20 raccoons per square kilometer. On prairies, densities run from 0.5 to 3.2 per square kilometer.

  In North America, raccoons now live from Canada to Panama. Spanish colonists exterminated the population on Hispaniola for meat, and the historian Oviedo said in 1513 that it was gone. Cuba and Jamaica lost theirs as well, with the last Jamaican sighting reported in 1687. The Barbados raccoon was last seen in 1964. In 1996 the IUCN classified the Bahamas, Guadeloupe and Tres Marias raccoons as endangered, back when they were still considered separate species.

  The mainland story is the reverse. In the 1930s raccoons were comparatively rare. After a population explosion starting in the 1940s, there were 15 to 20 times as many by the late 1980s. Since the 1950s they have spread from Vancouver Island, once the northern limit of their range, far into four south-central Canadian provinces. Urbanization, farming, deliberate introductions and the removal of natural predators probably drove the increase.

  Germany hosts the largest raccoon population outside North America. In April 1934, a forester released two pairs of pet raccoons at the Edersee reservoir in northern Hesse, at the request of their owner, a poultry farmer. He did so two weeks before receiving permission from the Prussian hunting office to "enrich the fauna". A second population began in 1945, when 25 raccoons escaped from a fur farm at Wolfshagen, east of Berlin, after an air strike. The two are distinguishable by parasites. The roundworm Baylisascaris procyonis infects 70% of the Hessian raccoons, but none of the Brandenburg population is known to carry it.

  The Hessian region held an estimated 285 raccoons in 1956 and over 20,000 in 1970. By 2008 Germany had between 200,000 and 400,000, and by 2012 an estimated million or more. Since 1954 the raccoon has been declared a game animal in 14 of the 16 German states. Hunters and environmentalists say it spreads uncontrollably, threatens protected birds and displaces native competitors. The zoologist Frank-Uwe Michler finds no evidence that high raccoon density harms biodiversity. Hohmann argues that heavy hunting cannot be justified by the lack of natural predators, since predation is not a major cause of death. In the 1990s, only about 400 raccoons were hunted yearly. During the 2015-16 season, hunters took 128,100, with 60 percent in Hesse.

  Elsewhere in Europe, a stable population in northern France traces to pet raccoons that members of the U.S. Air Force released near the Laon-Couvron Air Base in 1966. Raccoons have lived around Madrid since the early 1970s, and in 2013 the city authorized "the capture and death of any specimen". Italy has one self-sustaining population, in Lombardy. Since 2016, the raccoon has been on the European Union's list of Invasive Alien Species of Union Concern. It cannot be imported, bred, transported, commercialized or intentionally released anywhere in the Union.

  Soviet planners wanted raccoons for their fur. Starting in 1936, more than a thousand animals were released across the former Soviet Union, with repeated introductions continuing until 1962. Releases of melanistic raccoons on Petrov Island near Vladivostok failed, as did all other attempts in the Russian Far East. In Kyrgyzstan's Jalal-Abad Province, raccoons were recorded as "practically absent" by January 1963. Two efforts succeeded. In Azerbaijan, an introduction in 1937 produced a stable population yielding 1,000-1,500 catches a year. In Belarus, three releases in 1954 and 1958 had grown to 700 animals by January 1963. By 1974, the Caucasus population was estimated at around 20,000.

  In Japan, the anime series Rascal the Raccoon (1977) set off a pet boom, with up to 1,500 raccoons imported each year. Descendants of discarded or escaped animals lived in 42 of 47 prefectures by 2004. In the wild, raccoons spread from 17 prefectures in 2000 to all 47 in 2008. On Hokkaido alone, they cause an estimated thirty million yen of agricultural damage, about $275,000.

  Cities became habitat too. The first urban sightings came in a suburb of Cincinnati in the 1920s. Since the 1950s raccoons have lived in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Toronto and New York City. Kassel has hosted Europe's first and densest urban population since the 1960s, with 50 to 150 animals per square kilometer. Urban home ranges are tiny, only 3 to 40 hectares for females. Hollow garden trees, garages, attics and abandoned houses offer dens. The share of urban raccoons sleeping in houses rose from 15% in Washington in 1991 to 43% in Kassel in 2003.

  664656670

• 8. Fur, Folklore, and Fear

  ›

  The Tuscarora told a tale called "How raccoons catch so many crayfish", centered on the animal's skill at foraging. In other stories the raccoon is a trickster that outwits coyotes and wolves. The Dakota believe it has natural spirit powers, since its mask resembles the black and white two-fingered facial paintings used in rituals to connect with spirit beings. The Aztecs linked supernatural abilities especially to females, whose devotion to their young was compared with the role of wise women. Petroglyphs with raccoon tracks survive at Lewis Canyon in Texas and at the Crow Hollow site in Grayson County, Kentucky. The meaning of the Raccoon Priests Gorget, a stylized raccoon carving found at the Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma, remains unknown.

  The famous Sioux leader Spotted Tail took his name from a raccoon skin hat with the tail attached, which he got from a fur trader. In the 19th century coonskins sometimes served as money. In the 1920s a raccoon coat was a status symbol among college students. At least 388,000 raccoons were killed in the 1934-35 hunting season, even though they had become rare. The annual harvest reached about one million in 1946-47 and two million in 1962-63. Three television episodes and a film about Davy Crockett, broadcast in 1954 and 1955, sparked demand for coonskin caps, though it is unlikely Crockett wore one. The hunt peaked at 5.2 million in 1976-77. By 1987 the raccoon was North America's most important wild furbearer by revenue. In the early 1990s the hunt fell from 1.9 to 0.9 million as pelt prices dropped.

  Raccoon was also food. The first edition of The Joy of Cooking, in 1931, included a recipe, and President Calvin Coolidge's pet raccoon Rebecca was originally sent to be served at the White House Thanksgiving dinner. Several thousand are still eaten each year in the United States, mostly in the South. The baculum, the raccoon's penis bone, found uses as a pipe cleaner, a toothpick under the name "coon rods", and a hoodoo amulet for love or luck. Stock car racer Richard Petty wore one on his trademark hat.

  Raccoons also carry disease. Rabies spread among them starting in Florida in the 1950s, and infected animals taken to Virginia in the late 1970s helped it travel further. Of 6,940 rabies cases documented in the United States in 2006, 2,615 were in raccoons. The first human death from raccoon rabies came in 2003. Rabid raccoons often retire to their dens instead of turning aggressive, and daylight activity alone is not a reliable sign of illness. Distemper does not affect humans. In an outbreak at Clifton, Ohio in 1968-94 of 145 raccoons died.

  The roundworm Baylisascaris procyonis is found in about 60% of adult raccoons. Humans can catch it by ingesting or inhaling eggs from feces, and it causes progressive neurological damage that is eventually fatal if untreated. The eggs are so robust that bleach alone cannot kill them. Burning or hot solutions of sodium hydroxide are needed.

  Their problem-solving lets raccoons break into all but the most secure food waste bins. Damage from dens in attics can cost several thousand dollars to repair. Loud noises, flashing lights and unpleasant odors can drive off a mother and her kits before they would normally leave, at about eight weeks. Over the long term only blocking access to food waste and den sites works. In farm country, a two-year Purdue University study published in 2004 found raccoons responsible for 87% of damage to corn plants, with sweet corn in its milk stage a favorite.

  Pet raccoons are discouraged because the species is not domesticated. They behave unpredictably, are very hard to train, and can unscrew jars, uncork bottles and open door latches. Neutering at around five or six months reduces the chance of aggression. Feeding them cat food over a long period can give them gout. Research on raccoon social behavior has led Austria and Germany to forbid keeping only one raccoon, to prevent loneliness. Both countries also require a pen rather than free run of the apartment.

  7879839196