Spotted skunks have been keeping a secret

Black fur, white stripes, fanny full of foul-smelling liquid — everybody can identify the striped skunk. But did you know these malodorous mammals have a number of smaller cousins marked by a pattern of black-and-white Rorschach blots? They’re known as the spotted skunks, and they do something the stripeys can’t.

Spotted skunks perform a spread-eagled handstand before they spray you.

“I jokingly call them the acrobats of the skunk world,” said Adam Ferguson, a small-carnivore biologist at the Field Museum in Chicago.

There are more than one species, and parsing the difference between them is tricky. For starters, the stink-butts all look rather similar. Most scientists these days agree that there are four spotted skunk species, though earlier research pointed to as few as two species or as many as 14.

However, researchers have a new answer to this question based on more than 200 DNA samples collected from spotted skunks, some of which were roadkill, in places from British Columbia to Costa Rica.

“There are definitely seven spe

cies,” says Molly Mcdonough, a phylogenomicist at Chicago State University and a research associate at both the Field Museum and the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History.

Mcdonough and Ferguson, the co-lead authors of a new study, are also married. She calls him the skunk wrassler, and he calls her the lab wizard. When he proposed, he even slipped the ring into a box of DNA prep products.

“If you approach the skunk very quietly and gently, they tend not to spray,” Ferguson said. “But I say skunks are like people. Some of them are just jerks.”

COURTESY OF JERRY W. DRAGOO A spotted skunk’s handstand is a warning before spraying. The handstands earned them the nickname “acrobats of the skunk world.”