It's called the Creature Feature!

Creature Feature is basically going to be a series where I bring home some of my animals from work

and I basically tell you all about them, so I hope you enjoy it!

This is the first in the Creature Feature series, and today I want to introduce you to

la La La La La

This is Olaf! If you haven't subscribed yet, please do hit that subscribe button and become part the Creature Crew

and you'll be able to see much more Creature Features every single week

I'm going to be introducing you to some other colleagues of mine, such as birds of prey, some bats, and armadillos

So if you want to stick around, it's a cool place to be. And his name is Olaf because he loves warm hugs.

I know. Just - just let it go.

In case you don't know what this gorgeous creature over here is; this is a chinchilla.

Where you going Olaf? You're just going to chill there in my arm. Today I am going to mostly be a rock ledge for

Olaf over here, Olaf is from my work. So he's not mine

He doesn't belong to me, and he was actually bred by one of my colleagues

who had a couple of babies a few years ago and Olaf was one of them. Olaf's cousins would come from the Andes. Olaf is

about three years old now, but if properly looked after, chinchillas can live anywhere between 11 to 20 years.

I know, that's like a really broad spectrum

And honestly there is a lot of debate as to how long a Chinchilla can live.

I've known them to be as old as seventeen years, but I've also known them to die as young as nine years

Just like out of the blue, almost.

Great, he's camera-shy. Um these guys are actually "crepuscular." You might not have heard that word before.

Crepuscular is basically waking up at twilight. No, not that kind of Twilight.

They wake up just before dawn and just before dusk. Basically when it's nice and cool

And they will come out in a big group. They actually live in herds. Yeah, just like an elephant, they live in herds.

They're very, very social and for that reason you should never keep them on their own. Olaf is never alone

he has about five other chinchillas that he can interact with.

What are you doing back there Olaf? Do you want to come down?

Yeah, thought so. So yeah, not nocturnal - waking up at night. Not diurnal - waking up during the day

Crepuscular. Waking up dawn and dusk. They're a true rodent just like their cousin the guinea pig

They're constantly having to chew. In the wild, these guys will graze on grasses

various twigs and leaves, all this dry matter, and that helps to gnaw down their teeth

which are always, always growing because they are a true rodent.

*sneezes*

I am actually allergic to all animals with fur. Why couldn't someone who didn't like animals be allergic to them. Like, why me?

Really why? Why? Their hearing is really mega. Oh, your ears are beautiful, aren't they?

Yes. And they can swing those ears forward to really hear things in front of them

Or they can flatten them down as well

Which can be a sign of stress those ears are also really great for cooling down and you'll notice that

There's not much fur over their ears. That helps to keep them cool

If they do get hot because as you can imagine these guys can suffer from Heatstroke very, very easily.

Here's a fun fact for the girls

In the chinchilla world, girls reign supreme!

The girls kind of bully the boys quite a bit

And they're very, very dominant with the males, so you'll often see

chinchillas fighting with each other and just one of the ways they like to fight with each other

apart from mounting and trying to show dominance that way

Is they actually can shoot very, very strong direct jets of pee at each other.

In fact, some chinchillas will do this to people if they're startled, if they're not very well handled yet.

That is something that you should be aware of, if you're looking at Chinchillas

You know that they they can bite and they can shoot a jet of pee as well. Also just like guinea pigs

chinchillas will digest their food twice. They'll eat that hay, poop it out, and then eat it again.

It's perfectly normal, don't freak out if you see a chinchilla eating its poo. It's not sick

They get sick if they don't eat their poo so just let them eat the poo.

I'm so jealous of Olaf's dense fur

I mean, I thought my hair was soft, but this is just on another level. They have the softest fur of any mammal

Hands-down, that's why it's so prized in

Fashion unfortunately people like to turn these guys into

Coats, and I really am not okay with that, but that's not going to happen to Olaf

Unfortunately it can take up to 150 chinchillas

150 Olafs to make one full-length coat. I want to try and give you guys a really great idea of that

fur texture it is just like there is nothing there look at how dense that is. Look how plush and dense.

Isn't that - look at that - wow. Now although they're really furry on their bodies their tail is actually quite coarse

Their tail is kind of more like a squirrel's tail

If you've ever touched a squirrel's tail that fur is so dense that actually they can't have fleas or ticks

So they're actually a very, very clean animal and ticks and fleas can't actually

Penetrate the fur because it's so thick. In fact you know if I pull out like one of my hairs, or if you pulled out

one of your hairs

You would have literally one strand of hair right? That's not the same for Olaf. With Olaf

If you pulled out like - if you, well not pulled out, but if you sort of ran your fingers through his fur

Let me see if I can do it now

Just really gently

They do sometimes

Routinely shed as well you'll notice that if I gently, gently groom - and this is very gently don't

Don't freak out. They do shed a lot of fur and from

From each hair follicle they can have up to I think it's about sixty hairs, so that's like you

pulling out one hair and sixty kind of coming from the same one little dot on your head, the same hair follicle

so that is super super dense fur and

Because it's so dense, and because of where they live, they can't actually bathe in water

They actually bath in dust or like a volcanic dust

So if you buy dust in a pet store for a chinchilla

And you put it in their enclosure in like a nice heavy dish

They'll roll around in it

And they will flip around and really just have a great time washing.

And that helps them to kind of keep their coat really clean. For a rodent

Chinchillas have a really long gestation period. And a gestation period is basically a

period of pregnancy. The average gestation period For a chinchilla is a hundred and eleven days.

111 days of Pregnancy for such a small animal is just

Wow, and when the babies are born like I remember when Olaf was born - literally not even the size of a ping-pong ball and probably

Weighs less than a Ping-pong ball, they're so tiny.

They're just basically fluff. In fact, Olaf looks like he's really big and fat

But actually Olaf is super skinny

They actually, they're just all fluff and most people when they feel them, they basically disappear

It feels like you're touching nothing and just touching clouds.

Magical chinchilla-like clouds. Because chinchillas live in these rocky crevices during the day where it's nice and cool to escape the sun

And the predators, they actually have this remarkable ability to be able to sleep in almost any position

They can - because of the nature of jaggedy rocks, they can actually sleep upside down

or on their side or

Leaning forward or even standing up vertically. They are really, really interesting animals.

They're so well adapted to their environment. Although chinchillas don't have, you know, any claws in order to fight back

they do have a few defense mechanisms. So, apart from being able to bite and apart from being able to

Projectile shoot pee as we discussed earlier, they can run super fast

Don't let Olaf fool you. He is not a slow

chilled-out animal if he's in trouble. He could bolt and you would not be able to catch him for dust. He'd just be like

Like a race car. There's also one other thing they can do in order to protect themselves

They can turn their backs on you and make you feel like you're really boring

Thanks, Olaf. Chinchillas have the remarkable ability to perform

What is called the Fur Slip. And

Basically imagine my hand is the talon of a bird of prey coming down to grab him from the sky

so if I don't have a good enough grip and I

close, they can actually blow a bit of their coat. Big chunks of their fur just come flying off like almost

Instantaneously. Literally these huge clumps

It's almost like you've just like got a pair of scissors

pulled up a whole lot of fur and snipped it, that's exactly what it looks like and

That means that they can sometimes wriggle away to safety even after they've been grabbed. So yeah, really cool. The Fur Slip.

Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you for another Creature Feature very, very soon. Bye! Say bye Olaf! Bye!

Pssst, don't forget to subscribe!