Discover 7 Amazing 5-Letter Animals

The number of animals with five-letter names is frankly too long to list. Everyone’s heard of the horse, the mouse, the shark, the snake, the skunk, and the goose. But there are also members of the animal kingdom with five-letter names that you may not have heard so much about. In this article, we discuss some of them!

1. Shrew

Shrews are mouse-sized creatures found all over the world, save parts of Oceania. The ones that concern this listicle belong to the Soricidae family. There are about 385 species of shrew in 26 genera.

Though they resemble mice, shrews are not rodents. Biologists know this because of their dentation. Unlike rodents, they only have one set of teeth and indeed they shed their milk teeth before they’re even born. The teeth of some shrews are red because their enamel contains iron. They also differ from mice because some shrew species are venomous. They don’t have fangs but deliver venom through grooves in their teeth. Shrew venom may be useful medicinally. These little animals also use echolocation, like bats and whales. However, the shrew doesn’t use echolocation to find food but to get information about where it is.

Shrews are considered insectivores and are related to moles and hedgehogs. Though the largest species, the Asian house shrew, is only about 6 inches long, the Etruscan shrew is even smaller. This animal is only 1 3/8 inches long and weighs only 0.063 ounces. This makes it the smallest land mammal on earth.

The Shrew’s Crazy Metabolism

Shrews are omnivores whose high metabolism forces them to eat as much as two times their own weight every day. They are quite capable of entering water to go after potential prey. Shrews don’t hibernate but go into torpor. In this state, they not only lose as much as half their weight, but the size of their bones and viscera shrinks. Female shrews are capable of giving birth pretty much constantly, especially if they live in the tropics. Her pregnancy lasts between 17 and 32 days, and she’ll get pregnant with a second litter days after giving birth to her first. It’s no wonder shrews only live between one and two and a half years.

2. Hyrax

This little animal looks somewhat like a groundhog or a pika, but it’s not even closely related to either. Even though the name hyrax comes from the Greek word for “shrewmouse,” its closest relative is the elephant. There are five species of hyrax, and they are found mostly in Africa, though the rock hyrax is also found in the Middle East and is even mentioned in the Bible.

Another weird thing about these creatures is that they are not quite warm-blooded. Because of this, they have to bask in the sun or bunch up to keep warm. They also basically have tusks, much like their elephant cousins. These tusks keep growing throughout their lives, like rodent teeth. The nails on their toes are more like hoofs, and their digestive system includes a stomach with several chambers. Because hyraxes lack a split hoof, Jews don’t consider them kosher. Like horses, hyraxes can’t vomit, and they chew their cud like cows. They don’t dig their own dens but make their home in crags and existing holes.

Hyraxes live in families of females and young. A single male guards them, and he may have more than one family in the area. Males without families are solitary. They may mate with young females in a family when the head male isn’t looking.

Most hyraxes are between 12 and 28 inches long, weigh between four and 11 pounds, and live from nine to 14 years. After a seven-to-eight-month long pregnancy, the female gives birth to as many as four babies. They’re ready to mate when they’re between 16 and 17 months old.

3. Lemur

Lemurs are endemic to Madagascar, which means they are found nowhere else. There used to be a gorilla-sized lemur called Archaeoindris fontoynontii. Now most of these five-letter animals are small and range between a little over an ounce in the case of the mouse lemur to the 20-pound Indri. There are about 100 species of lemur still in existence, and they are primates. This is the same order to which humans belong. Lemurs are strepsirrhine primates, which means they have wet noses like dogs, uteri with two horns, and can make their own vitamin C. Most lemurs are nocturnal.

Generally, lemurs have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot, and their fingers and toes have nails instead of claws. Their thumbs are not quite opposable, so they look awkward when handling objects such as food. An exception may be the aye-aye, a thoroughly weird-looking little lemur with an exceptionally long and thin middle finger. It uses this finger to dig for grubs in holes it gnaws into tree barks. Lemurs also have a toilet claw on their second toe, which they use to groom themselves, and again with the exception of the aye-aye, lower teeth arranged like the teeth in a comb for the same purpose.

Lemurs Are a Diverse Group

Lemur societies differ from one species to another. Many are female dominated, while others are male dominated. Some lemurs hunt alone at night but meet up with their group during the day. In some species, the females are larger than the males. In others, females and males look very different, while in others it’s difficult for humans to tell them apart. The ring-tailed lemur has a tail longer than its body, while the Indri hardly has a tail at all.

Lemur breeding seasons, for the most part, are very short. The tiny mouse lemur is pregnant for nine weeks, while other lemurs are pregnant for between 18 and 24 weeks. Smaller lemurs are more likely to have more than one baby. The mother carries the baby while she forages or hides it away. Large lemurs can live over 30 years and retain their fertility even into what should be old age.

These animals are endangered thanks to habitat destruction, an illegal pet trade, and their use as bush meat. They mostly live in the trees and are omnivores, though the diet of most lemurs is made of leaves and fruit. Some are specialists in one type of food. For example, the bamboo lemur eats bamboo and other types of grasses exclusively. Interestingly, the amount of cyanide found in a mostly bamboo diet should kill this lemur. Scientists don’t know why it doesn’t.

4. Agama

Another five-letter animal is the agama, which is a type of lizard. Indeed, its name literally means “lizard” in the Sranana Tongo language. This lizard lives in sub-Saharan Africa and includes 37 species in the genus Agama. It’s also called the rainbow lizard because of the many colors it can assume. Usually, the lizard has a white belly, brownish back legs, and a brown tail with stripes embellished with dark botches. A dominant male has a blue body, a yellow or red head, and a yellow tail, while everyone else has a green head. Male agamas grow to 9.8 inches, while females grow to about 7.87 inches.

The agama lives in forests and around rocky crags, but it also lives in and around human habitation. Agamas are active during the day.

Agama Reproduction

Females are ready to mate when they’re 14 to 18 months old, while males are ready when they’re two years old. After mating, the female digs a hole in damp, sandy soil that has both the cover of foliage and gets lots of sunlight. She’ll then lay about five to seven eggs in the hole. Since the temperature determines the sex of the hatchlings, males will hatch if the temperature of the nest reaches 84.2 degrees Fahrenheit, while females will hatch if the temperature is between 78.8- and 80.6-degrees F.

The eggs hatch after eight to 10 weeks and the hatchlings start to eat anything they can handle. This includes objects that aren’t edible, such as rocks and sand. They’ll live by themselves for about two months but join a group dominated by an alpha male when they’re about four months old. The dominant male challenges any lizard that tries to mate with his females. Then, the colors of his body change again. His gular pouch turns blue gray, and his head turns dark brown.

The agama mostly eats insects, but it’s also been known to eat vegetation and even small mammals and reptiles. The lizard waits till prey walks by, then chases it down. The tip of its tongue is sticky and helps the lizard hold on to small prey like ants.

5. Bilby

Found in Northwest Australia and looking somewhat like a long-eared kangaroo rat, the bilby is not a rodent. It is a marsupial. It lives a mostly solitary life in grasslands and deserts and hunts for its prey after dark. There used to be two species of this animal, the Greater and the Lesser. Part of the genus Macrotis, which means “big-eared,” the Lesser Bilby went extinct during the 1950s, but the Greater Bilby’s conservation status is vulnerable.

The bilby has a body length of between 12 and 22 inches with an 11-inch-long tail. Males can be twice as heavy as females, who usually weigh from 1.76 to 5.5 pounds. Besides the huge ears that help dispel desert heat, it has a long nose like a bandicoot, which gives it its other name of rabbit-eared bandicoot. Its fur is soft, silky, and silvery gray. The first part of the tail is the same color as the body, the middle part is black, and the end of the tail is white.

The bilby’s body stores water so efficiently that it doesn’t really need to drink but gets its water from its food. This includes grubs, insects and other small animals, fruit, bulbs, seeds, grasses, and mushrooms. Its very long, sticky tongue allows it to probe into nests in search of termites and other insects. Bilbies don’t see well, but their senses of hearing and smell are superb.

The bilby’s front legs allow it to be a powerful digger. It builds burrows connected by tunnels in its home range. There it stashes its babies and escapes predators and the heat of the Australian desert. Its back legs resemble those of a kangaroo, but it gallops instead of hops.

About Bilby Reproduction

Bilbies, at least those in captivity, are a bit picky about who they mate with. Dominant males mate with dominant females and other females, while subdominant males choose females of equal or lesser rank. They mate in a burrow, which the male scent marks before he leaves to let other males know he’s already had a go.

Females can have four litters a year if conditions are right and there’s an abundance of food. She is pregnant for only 12 to 14 days, which makes her pregnancy the shortest of any mammal. She usually has two babies. These babies are very undeveloped and creep into their mother’s pouch after birth and attach themselves to a nipple. They’ll stay in the pouch for 75 days. The bilby female’s pouch opens backward to keep sand from entering it.

When the baby bilbies emerge from the pouch, their mother takes care of them for another two weeks or so, then they’re on their own. Interestingly, the female bilby has different sets of nipples. There’s a set for the babies inside the pouch and a set outside the pouch, for once her babies leave the pouch, they don’t return to it. Females are ready to mate when they’re five months old and males are ready when they’re eight months old. Though biologists believe that 25 percent of baby bilbies die before maturity, a captive bilby can live about six or seven years.

6. Cobia

This five-letter animal is a fish. It can grow to 6 feet 7 inches in length and weigh 100 pounds or more. Found in warmer seas and oceans around the world, the cobia is known for its torpedo-shaped body, half-moon shaped tail, protruding lower jaw, and short, sharp, disconnected dorsal spines. The spines give the fish its family name, as rhachis is the Greek word for spine. The fish is usually dark brown with a white belly, with darker stripes on its side that stand out during the breeding season. The cobia sometimes looks like a shark when it swims. This is a bit ironic as its close relative is the remora, a fish known for hitching rides on sharks with the sucking discs on top of their heads.

The cobia eats other fish as well as crabs and squid and scavenges from other animals. It is solitary save during the breeding season. This lasts from spring to late summer, and you’ll find the cobias assembling in reefs, harbors, and shipwrecks. At that time the female releases up to one million tiny eggs into the water, where they become part of the plankton that floats on the ocean currents. The larvae are also part of the plankton until they’re about two weeks old and can swim on their own. Males are ready to breed when they’re two years old, and females are ready to breed when they’re three. Both sexes can live 15 years or longer.

Cobias are also migratory, and they spend the winter in the Gulf of Mexico and the summer as far north as New England. It’s a popular gamefish, and it is valued for its buttery, sweet flesh. Since the fish is solitary, it’s raised on aquaculture farms to meet the demand.

7. Quoll

This fascinating meat-eating marsupial is also found in Australia proper as well as Tasmania and New Guinea. There are six types of quoll, and each basically lives in a different region as their original habitat continues to be fragmented. Fortunately, they can thrive in all kinds of habitats, including forests, grassland, rocky areas, and scrubland where they can den in hollow trees, crags, and abandoned burrows since they don’t excavate their own. All quolls belong to the Dasyurus genus, and all are endangered or near threatened.

Like the bilby, the quoll is solitary and likes to hunt at night. They’re about the size of a cat and range in size from 9.8 to 29.5 inches long. Their furry tails are between 7.9 and 13.8 inches long. Their length and weight depend on the species. The largest quoll, the spotted tail, is the largest while the northern quoll is the smallest. They all have a wedge-shaped face, pretty spots on a light brown to black ground, and are ambush predators. The larger quolls have even been known to take wallabies and feed on human carcasses.

The Tragedy of the Male Quoll

Quolls mate in winter, which is May to June down under. It is one of the very few times in an adult quoll’s life they’ll have anything to do with another adult quoll. Females can mate with more than one male, and her resulting litter often has more than one father. One of the really fascinating things about this animal is something called semelparity. This means the animal only mates once, then dies. You see this fairly often in fish and insects, but it’s very unusual in mammals. In this case, it’s the male who dies soon after he mates. Quoll males do not live for much more than a year. Females live about three years. Their first litter is made up mostly of males, and their later litters are made up mostly of females.

Females can give birth to as many as 30 pups at a time, but only six survive because she only has six nipples. In most species of quoll, the mother develops folds of skin that serve as a pouch. The only quoll that has a real pouch is the spotted-tailed quoll. The quoll is pregnant for about 22 days. The young, as in so many marsupials, are born very underdeveloped. They are only about as big as a rice grain and need to make their way to the pouch and find a nipple. There they’ll stay for six to eight weeks. After that, they’ll ride on their mother’s back or remain in the den while she hunts. They’re mature at one year old.