40 Fun Facts About Weasels

In 2016, a small mammal first reported as a weasel gnawed a power cable and shut down which giant science machine?

The Large Hadron Collider went offline after the animal chewed through a power cable. A later CERN briefing suggested the culprit was really a marten, a bigger cousin.

In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, how do four of Judge Doom's five weasel henchmen meet their end?

They die laughing at a comic routine performed by detective Eddie Valiant, who then kicks their leader into the dip. The gang is known as the Toon Patrol.

Tina, a cartoon stoat named after the host town Cortina d'Ampezzo, was the 2026 mascot of which sporting event?

The Winter Olympics picked Tina, while fellow stoat Milo fronted the Paralympics. Milo is portrayed as born without a leg and using his tail in its place.

Which country imported stoats in the late 19th century as pest control, only to see them devastate its native birds?

New Zealand brought stoats in to fight a plague of rabbits, over the objections of scientists such as ornithologist Walter Buller. The predators now hunt the rare kiwi.

According to Pliny the Elder, the smell of a weasel was fatal to which legendary serpent?

The Basilisk was said to die when a weasel was thrown into its hole, though the weasel perished too. The legend may echo real fights between cobras and mongooses.

Vietnam's costly 'weasel coffee' is really made from beans eaten and passed by which wild animals?

Civets swallow the coffee cherries, which ferment in the gut before the beans are collected from the droppings. The result has sold for hundreds of dollars a kilogram.

The melody of Pop Goes the Weasel, an 1850s English dance tune, is often built into which children's toy?

Jack-in-the-box toys often play the melody, which was a fashionable ballroom dance before it became a nursery rhyme. Ice cream trucks are fond of it too.

Which Renaissance artist painted Lady with an Ermine, a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani cradling a white stoat?

Leonardo da Vinci painted it while working for the Sforza court in Milan, where the sitter was the duke's mistress. The portrait now hangs in Kraków, Poland.

Which wisecracking Marvel antihero has a best friend and arms dealer nicknamed Weasel, played on screen by T.J. Miller?

Deadpool leans on Weasel for weapons and information, yet often mistreats him. T.J. Miller played the character in the 2016 film and its 2018 sequel.

In which classic children's novel do weasels, stoats and ferrets from the Wild Wood take over Toad Hall?

The Wind in the Willows ends with a battle to retake the hall, in which Badger clears out the Wild Wooders with a large stick. Kenneth Grahame published the book in 1908.

The least weasel, slim enough to chase mice down their own burrows, holds which record among the world's mammals?

Smallest carnivore is its title: the tiniest forms measure under 20 cm long. A least weasel still eats about a third of its own body weight every day.

The least weasel's scientific name, Mustela nivalis, comes from the Latin for which white substance?

Snow is 'nix' in Latin, and Carl Linnaeus chose the name in 1766 because northern weasels turn pure white for the cold months. Southern ones stay brown all year.

What are baby weasels called, born pink, blind and deaf in litters of about six?

Kits grow a layer of white downy fur by four days old and are raised by their mother alone. They can breed themselves at just three to four months.

Stoats first reached North America about 500,000 years ago, when falling sea levels exposed which crossing from Asia?

The Bering land bridge let stoats walk into North America, yet the long-tailed weasel already living there never made the trip the other way.

Members of the weasel family spread naturally to every continent except Antarctica and which other one?

Australia has no native weasels, otters or badgers, because the family arose in Eurasia and reached only the continents that were joined to it by land.

In Cockney rhyming slang, a 'weasel' is which garment, the basis of one theory about Pop Goes the Weasel?

Coat is the meaning, short for 'weasel and stoat', and on this reading the song is about pawning one, since a 'pop shop' was a pawnbroker's. Other theories point to a yarn-measuring tool.

Which US president popularised the phrase 'weasel words', crediting it to a friend's brother who used it in 1879?

Theodore Roosevelt put the term into public use with a 1916 speech in St. Louis. It had first appeared in print in a magazine short story in 1900.

Alan Tudyk voices Zootopia's weasel crook Duke Weaselton and the similarly named Duke of Weselton in which Disney film?

Frozen cast Tudyk as the Duke of Weselton, a name that Zootopia's Duke Weaselton flips around. Judy Hopps arrests the weasel for robbing a florist.

Buck, a one-eyed weasel who hunts a giant dinosaur named Rudy, appears in which animated film series?

Ice Age introduced Buck in its third film, Dawn of the Dinosaurs, where he rescues the herd in a hidden jungle. Rudy is the albino Baryonyx that took his eye.

Naturalists suspect wild weasels perform their 'war dance' of erratic leaps and arched backs for which purpose?

To confuse prey is the leading guess, and stoats are reputed to mesmerise rabbits with the routine. Pet ferrets do the same dance when they are simply excited.

The phrase 'weasel words', first printed in 1900, likens empty talk to weasels sucking the insides out of what?

Eggs were the image: the short story, printed in The Century Magazine, said such words drain the life from their neighbours the way a weasel empties a shell.

Japan's kamaitachi are weasel spirits that ride whirlwinds and slash people with claws shaped like which farm tool?

Sickles give the creature its name: 'kama' is the Japanese word for the tool and 'itachi' means weasel. The cuts it leaves are said to be sharp but painless.

In Ojibwe tradition, which dreaded cannibal monster could be killed by a least weasel rushing up its backside?

The Wendigo was no match for the tiny hunter in Ojibwe lore. Inuit heroes facing a task that called for courage were said to turn themselves into a least weasel.

Greek folklore says the weasel, which supposedly delights in ruining wedding dresses, was once which kind of person?

An unhappy bride was turned into the animal, the story goes, which is why a weasel near the house was a bad sign for a family with a daughter about to marry.

In Greek myth, Galanthis became a weasel, or in some tellings a polecat, for helping at the birth of which hero?

Heracles was born only because Galanthis fooled the birth goddesses whom Hera had sent to hold up the delivery. Her punishment was a new life on four legs.

The stoat's white winter fur, known as ermine, is an ancient symbol of which French duchy and still appears on its flag?

Brittany took the fur as its emblem, and heraldry still draws ermine as a white field scattered with black shapes. British peers wear it on their ceremonial robes.

Which part of a stoat stays black when the animal turns white for winter, giving royal robes their dark flecks?

Tail tip alone stays dark, so coronation cloaks lined with many white pelts sewn together carried a pattern of hanging black points across the fur.

A single stoat that swam to Chalky Island in 2022 set off a costly hunt to protect which critically endangered parrot?

Kākāpō breed on the island refuge, so conservation staff sent in trapping experts, dogs, trail cameras, helicopters and boats to catch one male stoat.

A female stoat mates in summer but does not give birth until the following spring, thanks to which reproductive trick?

Delayed implantation keeps the embryo dormant for nine to ten months before it settles in the womb, so a stoat pregnancy lasts around 300 days in all.

Which rock musician and his band the Mothers of Invention released the 1970 album Weasels Ripped My Flesh?

Frank Zappa built the record from unreleased studio and live recordings after the band split in 1969. Its title track is about ninety seconds of noise and feedback.

US Air Force 'Wild Weasel' crews, first sent into action during the Vietnam War, bait and destroy which targets?

Radar and missile sites are the prey: a crew tempts the enemy into switching on its radar, then follows the emissions back to the source. The idea began as Project Ferret.

Richard Dawkins's 'weasel program', a demonstration of cumulative selection, evolves a line from which Shakespeare play?

Hamlet supplies the target, a short line that mentions a weasel. The program breeds random strings of letters toward it, keeping the closest match in each generation.

Tail hair from the kolinsky, a Siberian weasel, is prized for making which fine tools, misleadingly sold as 'sable'?

Paintbrushes of kolinsky hair can be shaped to an exceptionally fine point, so dental technicians also use them to hand-tint ceramic teeth. No real sable is involved.

Which large European island has no least weasels, even though they live across Great Britain and the mainland?

Ireland has stoats but no least weasels, although the smaller species lives on every major Mediterranean island and has even been introduced to Malta, Crete and the Azores.

I Am Weasel, a cartoon about a heroic weasel and his envious rival I.R. Baboon, began as a segment of which show?

Cow and Chicken carried the shorts from 1997 to 1999 before the weasel won a series of his own. The devilish Red Guy crossed over to torment both casts.

Which animals were classed in the weasel family until DNA research moved them into a family of their own, Mephitidae?

Skunks were long treated as a subfamily of the mustelids. Even without them, the weasel family remains the largest group of dog-like carnivores, with up to 70 species.

Almost all of the weasel family mark territory with smelly anal glands, except which species that can top 45 kg?

Sea otter is the exception, and it also wears the densest fur of any animal. It is one of the few non-primate mammals to use tools, cracking shellfish open with rocks.

How does a least weasel usually kill a vole, a method stoats also use on far bigger prey?

Bite behind the head is the method, and it dislocates the vole's neck bones. Stoats strike rabbits in the same spot, though such large victims usually die of shock instead.

Which relative of the weasels, found along New England's rocky coasts, was hunted to extinction for its fur?

Sea mink were the largest of the minks, which made their pelts the most desirable to traders. Science did not describe the species until 1903, after it had vanished.

One kind of weasel lives only alongside people, in the cities and villages of which North African country?

Egypt's own weasel ranges from Alexandria to Port Said and through the Nile Delta. It is so tied to towns that biologists describe it as an obligate synanthrope.