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    Galidictis

    Think of a “mongoose in a lemur coat with skunk-style stripes”

    A tiny, stripe-wearing branch of Madagascar’s unique carnivore family, and it feels almost like a two-species experiment in how to live very different lives on the same island. It has just two members: the broad-striped Malagasy mongoose (Galidictis fasciata), which prowls the damp, green lowland forests of eastern Madagascar, and Grandidier’s mongoose (Galidictis grandidieri), which survives in one of the harshest landscapes on the island, the dry, spiny forests and scrub of the far southwest. Both are slender, low-to-the-ground hunters with long bodies, pointed faces and full, bushy tails, and both are dressed in bold dark stripes across a paler background, as if someone crossbred a mongoose with a lemur and then added skunk-style racing stripes.

    By day, these animals are mostly ghosts. Galidictis species are primarily nocturnal or crepuscular, spending daylight hidden in burrows, rock crevices, hollow logs or dense tangles of vegetation, then emerging at dusk to patrol the forest floor. The broad-striped species of the east hunts in moist evergreen and lowland rainforest, padding softly over leaf litter in search of frogs, small rodents, lizards, nestling birds, insects and anything else it can overpower. Grandidier’s mongoose in the southwest faces a very different menu: in sub-arid, cactus-like spiny forest it relies heavily on invertebrates, including large beetles, giant hissing cockroaches and even scorpions, using strong jaws to crunch through tough shells and stingers. Both species are far smaller than the classic image of a mongoose—often under or around a kilo in weight—but they are agile, sharp-toothed predators perfectly tuned to their micro-worlds.

    Although they share a genus, the two species live at almost opposite ends of Madagascar and in contrasting habitats, so they never meet. The broad-striped Malagasy mongoose is an animal of wet eastern forests; Grandidier’s mongoose has one of the tiniest ranges of any Malagasy carnivore, restricted to a narrow band of spiny forest on the Mahafaly Plateau and nearby areas.