Hadron fried marten
New museum exhibition explores unusual animal deaths
The remains of a thoroughly cooked stone marten ( Martes foina) are now on display at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in an exhibition called “Dead Animal Tales”. On 20 November last, the stone marten hopped over a fence at the £5.6 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, touched a transformer and was electrocuted by 18,000 volts. The LHC, which accelerates particles to near the speed of light to study the fiery origins of the Universe, lost power and shut down. “It’s a fine example of what the exhibition is all about,” said Kees Moeliker, the museum director. “It shows that animal and human life collide more and more, with dramatic results for both… Every hair of this creature was burned. The whiskers were burned to the bare minimum and especially the feet, the legs, they were cooked. They were darker, like roasted.”
This wasn’t the first time a marten has sabotaged the collider. In April 2016, an animal originally thought to be a weasel and later guessed to be a marten, which is in the weasel family, appeared to have gnawed through a power cable, closing the collider for a week.
“The things we get are so surprising,” said Moeliker. “Just before the stone marten we had a fish that lodged itself in the throat of a man.” The man had deliberately swallowed the catfish as part of a game with friends — they had reportedly worked up from goldfish to larger, more exotic species. However, he didn’t know it was an armoured catfish. When it entered his throat, it raised spines to defend itself, which did not save its life but did put the 28-year-old man in hospital for a week.
The Rotterdam exhibition also displays the sparrow that was shot to death after knocking over 23,000 dominoes in the Netherlands in 2005, sabotaging a world record attempt; a seagull that died after it flew into an ambulance; a mallard duck known in the scientific community for its documented history of homosexual necrophilia [ FT178:12]; and a hedgehog that died after it put its head into a McDonald’s McFlurry cup and couldn’t escape. And then there’s the smallest critter in the collection. A few years ago, Moeliker started collecting pubic lice after two British doctors alerted him that the animal might be endangered by habitat destruction associated with modern personal grooming habits. Guardian, 28 Jan; npr.org, 1 Feb 2017.