Mouse Rides Frog in India Monsoon
National Geographic has a picture worth seeing of a mouse riding a frog to escape the floodwaters of an Indian monsoon.
It could be the most spirited interspecies escape since The Rescuers. But unlike the 1977 Disney movie, this situation is anything but fun.
Photographed Friday in the northern Indian city of Lucknow, a mouse perches on a frog in waist-deep (for a frog, anyway) floodwaters—a small sign of the early arrival of annual summer monsoon rains.
To my eye, and I’m no mammalogist (though I did play one in undergrad), this looks like a young rat (perhaps genus Rattus?) rather than a mouse. Mouse vs Rat is a rather bad distinction that humans make based on size (we call big rodents rats and small ones mice). I’m even less familiar with old world rodents so I could well be wrong, but that’s what it looks like to me.
Jay, that does look like a rat - I consider myself an expert since I found one in our pantry last semester. As gross as many people consider those two animals, it is a sweet picture.
I am definitely an expert having raised hundreds of thousands of both species (seriously); its a mouse.