Weasels
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40 free Weasels trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Weasels are tiny hunters with outsized nerve. Long, low and quick, they follow mice into their tunnels, tackle animals bigger than themselves and, in the north, change colour with the seasons. People have told stories about them for thousands of years, and not all of the stories are kind. This quiz turns the best weasel fun facts into questions. It covers how weasels and stoats hunt, breed and grow up, where in the world they live and where they cause trouble, and how their fur ended up on the shoulders of royalty. It also looks at weasels in myth and folklore, in everyday speech, and in films, cartoons, music and military hardware. It is written for animal lovers, curious kids and adults, and anyone building a nature round for quiz night. The first questions are friendly, the later ones dig deeper, and every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more about weasels than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In 2016, a small mammal first reported as a weasel gnawed a power cable and shut down which giant science machine?
Large Hadron Collider
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.
Q 02In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, how do four of Judge Doom's five weasel henchmen meet their end?
They die laughing
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.
Q 03Tina, a cartoon stoat named after the host town Cortina d'Ampezzo, was the 2026 mascot of which sporting event?
Winter Olympics
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.
Q 04Which country imported stoats in the late 19th century as pest control, only to see them devastate its native birds?
New Zealand
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.
Q 05According to Pliny the Elder, the smell of a weasel was fatal to which legendary serpent?
Basilisk
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.
Q 06Vietnam's costly 'weasel coffee' is really made from beans eaten and passed by which wild animals?
Civets
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.
Q 07The melody of Pop Goes the Weasel, an 1850s English dance tune, is often built into which children's toy?
Jack-in-the-box
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.
Q 08Which Renaissance artist painted Lady with an Ermine, a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani cradling a white stoat?
Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Q 09Which wisecracking Marvel antihero has a best friend and arms dealer nicknamed Weasel, played on screen by T.J. Miller?
Deadpool
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.
Q 10In which classic children's novel do weasels, stoats and ferrets from the Wild Wood take over Toad Hall?
The Wind in the Willows
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.
Q 11The least weasel, slim enough to chase mice down their own burrows, holds which record among the world's mammals?
Smallest carnivore
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.
Q 12The least weasel's scientific name, Mustela nivalis, comes from the Latin for which white substance?
Snow
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.
Q 13What are baby weasels called, born pink, blind and deaf in litters of about six?
Kits
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.
Q 21The phrase 'weasel words', first printed in 1900, likens empty talk to weasels sucking the insides out of what?
Eggs
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.
Q 22Japan's kamaitachi are weasel spirits that ride whirlwinds and slash people with claws shaped like which farm tool?
Sickles
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.
Q 23In Ojibwe tradition, which dreaded cannibal monster could be killed by a least weasel rushing up its backside?
Wendigo
Q 14Stoats first reached North America about 500,000 years ago, when falling sea levels exposed which crossing from Asia?
Bering land bridge
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.
Q 15Members of the weasel family spread naturally to every continent except Antarctica and which other one?
Australia
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.
Q 16In Cockney rhyming slang, a 'weasel' is which garment, the basis of one theory about Pop Goes the Weasel?
Coat
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.
Q 17Which US president popularised the phrase 'weasel words', crediting it to a friend's brother who used it in 1879?
Theodore Roosevelt
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.
Q 18Alan Tudyk voices Zootopia's weasel crook Duke Weaselton and the similarly named Duke of Weselton in which Disney film?
Frozen
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.
Q 19Buck, a one-eyed weasel who hunts a giant dinosaur named Rudy, appears in which animated film series?
Ice Age
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.
Q 20Naturalists suspect wild weasels perform their 'war dance' of erratic leaps and arched backs for which purpose?
To confuse prey
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 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.
Q 24Greek folklore says the weasel, which supposedly delights in ruining wedding dresses, was once which kind of person?
An unhappy bride
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.
Q 25In Greek myth, Galanthis became a weasel, or in some tellings a polecat, for helping at the birth of which hero?
Heracles
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.
Q 26The stoat's white winter fur, known as ermine, is an ancient symbol of which French duchy and still appears on its flag?
Brittany
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.
Q 27Which part of a stoat stays black when the animal turns white for winter, giving royal robes their dark flecks?
Tail tip
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.
Q 28A single stoat that swam to Chalky Island in 2022 set off a costly hunt to protect which critically endangered parrot?
Kākāpō
Kākāpō breed on the island refuge, so conservation staff sent in trapping experts, dogs, trail cameras, helicopters and boats to catch one male stoat.
Q 29A female stoat mates in summer but does not give birth until the following spring, thanks to which reproductive trick?
Delayed implantation
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.
Q 30Which rock musician and his band the Mothers of Invention released the 1970 album Weasels Ripped My Flesh?
Frank Zappa
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.