The Rabbit

Oct 26, 2008 Features / Columnists, Interesting Creatures in Guyana

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Rabbits are small mammals of the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha that are found in several parts of the world. There are seven different genera in the family classified as rabbits.

They are mainly ground dwellers that live in environments ranging from desert to tropical forest and wetland.

Their natural geographic range encompasses the middle latitudes of the Western Hemisphere while in the Eastern Hemisphere rabbits are found in Europe, portions of Central and Southern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Sumatra and Japan.

However, the European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) are the ones that have been introduced to many locations around the world and all breeds of domestic rabbits are said to have originated there.

The long ears of rabbits are most likely an adaptation for detecting predators. In addition to their prominent ears which can measure more than 10 centimetres (four inches) long, rabbits have long powerful hind legs and a short tail.

Each foot has five digits (toes) and it is said that rabbits move about on the tips of the digits in a fashion known as ‘digitigrades locomotion’.

Full-bodied and egg-shaped, wild rabbits are rather uniform in body proportions and stance and the smallest is said to be the pygmy rabbit which can be as small as 20 centimetres (cm) in length and 0.4 kilograms (kg) (0.9 pound). The largest grow to about 50 cm and more than 2 kg.

The fur of rabbits is generally long and soft and their colour can range through shades of brown, grey and buff but there are some exceptions.

They are regarded as hindgut digesters meaning that most of their digestion takes place in their large intestine and cecum.

In rabbits the cecum is approximately 10 times bigger than the stomach and it, along with the large intestine, makes up roughly 40 per cent of their digestive tract.

Cecotropes, sometimes called ‘night faeces’ come from the cecum and are high in minerals, vitamins and proteins that are necessary to a rabbit’s health.

They are said to eat these in order to meet their nutritional requirements and it is a process which allows rabbits to extract the necessary nutrients from their food.

They are herbivores who feed by grazing on grass, forbs and leafy weeds but their diet also contains large amounts of cellulose which is hard to digest, but is resolved by the rabbits passing two distinct types of faeces – hard droppings and soft black viscous pellets, the latter of which are immediately eaten.

Rabbits reingest their own droppings rather than chewing the cud as do cows and many other herbivores in order to fully digest their food and extract sufficient nutrients.

Rabbits graze heavily and rapidly for roughly the first half hour of a grazing period usually in the late afternoon, followed by about half an hour of more selective feeding.

In this time, the rabbit will also excrete many hard faecal pellets, being waste pellets that will not be reingested. If the environment is relatively non-threatening, the rabbit will remain outdoors for many hours, grazing at intervals.

While out of the burrow, the rabbit will occasionally reingest its soft, partially digested pellets; this is rarely observed, since the pellets are reingested as they are produced.

Most rabbits produce many offspring each year, although scarcity of resources may cause this potential to be suppressed. A combination of factors allows the high rates of reproduction commonly associated with rabbits.

Rabbits generally are able to breed at a young age, and many regularly conceive litters of up to seven young, often doing so four or five times a year due to the fact that a rabbit’s gestation period is only 28 to 31 days.

In addition, females exhibit induced ovulation, their ovaries releasing eggs in response to copulation rather than according to a regular cycle. They can also undergo postpartum estrus, conceiving immediately after a litter has been born.

Newborn rabbits are naked, blind, and helpless at birth. Mothers are remarkably inattentive to their young and are almost absentee parents, commonly nursing their young only once per day and for just a few minutes.

To overcome this lack of attention, the milk of rabbits is highly nutritious and among the richest of that of all mammals. The young grow rapidly, and most are weaned in about a month.

Males do not assist in rearing the kittens and reports are that the mother rabbit is able to become pregnant again four days after the birth of her kittens.

According to research, rabbits have been a source of environmental problems when introduced into the wild by humans.

As a result of their appetites, and the rate at which they breed, wild rabbit depredation can be problematic for agriculture.
(Source: Wikipedia, the Free Online Encyclopedia)

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