It’s time to have a serious talk about the Easter Bunny.
I know, the long ears and twitchy nose are super cute. But it makes no sense for them to bring eggs for Easter.
As members of the family Leporidae—which includes all hares and rabbits—bunnies bear live young. In fact, having lots of squirming babies is one of their most quintessential traits. We don’t have the saying “breed like rabbits” for no reason.
They’re so prolific that over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle suggested they can do something few animals can: conceive while pregnant. It’s known as superfetation or superconception, and it’s a rare feat mostly performed mostly by some fish species. In 2010, researchers demonstrated that European brown hares are not only capable of it, it’s one way they increase the number of offspring they have each season.
But while that’s impressive and all, they don’t lay eggs, and being productive is hardly enough to warrant the Easter bunny’s reign as the paschal mascot, especially when it actually makes them kind of a problem.
European rabbits have found their way to the US and Australia and bred like bunnies do to become serious invasive pests. It’s thought that there are billions of these animals now living on other continents, eating their way through resources that native species need to survive. They can cause so much damage that their impacts linger decades after the last invasive rabbit has been removed.
And bunnies aren’t even an Easter thing in some places. In Switzerland, easter eggs are brought by a cuckoo—which, given their habit of leaving their eggs in other birds’ nests, seems pretty appropriate. So I say we ditch the bunny, and go with one of the egg-laying mammals which are more logically suited to the role of seasonal egg-bearer.
I’m talking, of course, about one of the species in the order Monotremata. Continue reading “Let’s Ditch the Boring Bunny! The Scientific Case for the Easter Echidna or Pasch Platypus”
