August 7, 2026 Group Project Announcement - Blind Choice: Do you have a big encyclopedia or guidebook or textbook or manual next to your desk? Flip to a random page, find a topic you didn't know much about before, research it, and do a quick write-up on whatever you found. Share what you learned with the blaugust community - let's both learn something new. It can be any kind of manual or text - video game guides, Python manuals, a dictionary, an old textbook. Whatever you want to do! If you wanna share just facts, that's fine. If you wanna write about just your opinions or strong throughts on the topic, that's fine. If you wanna do both, do it! I love a bit of randomness so I'm interested in what you found regardless. Submit any time during Blaugust (or even a little after?). Leave me a comment below if you take part in this group project and don't mind sharing! I would love to see it and post links to them all together. My entry for Blind Choice: Armored rat: a literal video game enemy, by Milton Salazar I have one of those giant-ass encyclopedias of animals that's big enough to kill a man, and it's always fun to flip through casually. I've written about topics I already know a lot about, but I also want to explore some new things. I decided to flip through my Encyclopedia of Mammals to a random page and pick a random species from that page (that I don't know much about), and do a short write-up about it. I flipped to about the middle and found: spiny rats! Let's learn about spiny rats together. Spiny rats are, of course, rodents, and are in their own family Echimyidae. They are mostly tropical, which explains why I know nothing about them, and exist mostly in South and Central America, and into the Caribbean as well. Like a lot of rodents, they are very diverse and speciose, with about 78 different species existing! They are actually the most diverse rodent family in South America. Many look like your standard rats with pointed noses and long tails. Are they spiny? Yes (mostly)! Most species have bristly hairs on their back, but how spiny these hairs are varies. Some have straight-up spines and others have just really stiff bristly hairs, and some have no spines or bristles at all (false advertisement; I'm suing). Weirdly, their tails can break off easily like a lizard's and allows them to escape from predators. They can't grow it back afterwards (RIP tail). When researchers studied them in Panama, they found 15-20% of them had lost their tails. Spiny rats live in all kinds of habitats, with some being arboreal (live in the trees) and others being fully terrestrial (always on the ground), and many hide out in burrows, some of which can be complexly built. They eat all kinds of things, including bamboo, leaves, fruits, nuts, and insects. Most spiny rats live solitary lives, although at least one species lives in colonies. Apparently the rats can be pretty vocal and will call to each other. Armored rat, from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. The armored rat, other than having a badass name, is also very spiny and found in South America. They aren't born with the spines but start growing them in the first month of their lives, and the spines can grow up to 1.3 inches (33 millimeters) long. It lives in burrows, especially on the sides of rivers, and keeps a latrine within the burrow (a designated bathroom chamber). These prickly rodents are seed dispersers for a species of palms and are also considered ecosystem engineers because they alter their ecosystem so much (kinda like beavers). They engineer lots of burrows and tunnels, creating habitat for other animals. red-crested tree-rat, from Pro-Aves Columbia. Here is a really pretty spiny rat, the red-crested tree-rat, which is listed as critically endangered by the IUCN. It lives in Colombia where forest-clearing has decimated its habitat. Apparently only three specimens have ever been collected of it (!!!), with one being from 1898. They have only been seen by western science a handful of times and are really difficult to find. They are small, about 7-11 inches long with reddish fur and a black and white tail. They have no actual spines, just long bristle hairs. It was thought to be extinct for like a hundred years until it was seen again in 2011. painted tree rat, by Oberdan Nunes. The painted tree rat is also high on the list of aesthetically beautiful rats. It's one of the larger species, reaching about 12 inches long. It's distinct because the fur is black and white. This rat lives in the Atlantic forest where it often occurs in cocoa plantations. It is listed as endangered by the IUCN because of its fragmented habitat (probably due to the plantations). Like many of these rats, we know very little about it. A paper from 2026 indicates that it was last formally sighted in 2018 (!!), with only 11 formal occurrences recorded total since about 1944. So this is one rare rat. nutria. source. I just realized that the nutria, a beaver-like mammal, is also in the spiny rat family, weirdly! Other Americans might be familiar with the nutria because it was introduced to the states by fur farmers and is a big invasive species problem. I've seen them in Louisiana before! They are associated with water and look like smaller beavers, although they are pretty far separated from beavers genetically. Nutria are also called coypus sometimes, especially in South America. They're pretty big compared to the rest of the spiny rats, about 9-20 lbs (4-9 kg). Damn, I learn something new every day. This one also doesn't have spines. These spiny rates sure don't seem very spiny. Despite spiny rats being so diverse and relatively common, we don't seem to know much about many of them (at least not in terms of western science). That's true for a lot of animals in the global south, which remain globally understudied (to western science). It's a shame because this is such an interesting area ecologically, with lots of diverse habitats. Mostly this exercise just reiterated to me that there is so much basic knowledge that we just don't know. I'm used to this when working with insects, because insects are small and not many people care about them and there are just so many of them. But even mammals? The poster-children of conservation? It's still shocking to me. It's a harrowing reminder, I guess. Anyway, who wants to fund me to travel to South America and study spiny rats for the rest of my life? I'll bring chips! Sources: 2025 Sanchez et al. Wikipedia - Echimyidae Encyclopedia Brittanica Other entries for Blind Choice: perhaps you?