The latter allows us to be digital packrats who never delete or even organize anything; our messes are just kept invisible, their management outsourced.
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Similarly, the media often depicts people with insecure housing as somehow drawn to trash as a natural part of their physical or mental health "conditions" (hoarders, dirty, or packrats) and/or focuses on how they make their dwellings and their livelihoods from trash (in the form of cardboard shelters, as thieves and scavengers).
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They also list dates on desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) scutes and bone (11,280 to 12,520) and dates for middens of packrats in the shelter (11,850 to 31,250).
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The Neotominae are a subfamily of the family Cricetidae. They consist of four tribes, 16 genera, and many species of New World rats and mice, predominantly found in North America. Among them are the well-known deer mice, white-footed mice, packrats, and grasshopper mice. Neotomines are related to the other two subfamilies of mice in the New World, Sigmodontinae and Tylomyinae.
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D. E. Wilson and D. M. Reeder (eds.) pp. 894–1531. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. They are commonly called "packrats" or "trade rats" and build large, domed dens that can reach several feet in height. Coyotes and other predators will attempt to prey on these rodents by laying waste to the dens, but the sheer volume of material is usually dissuasive.
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Of 100 white-throated woodrat houses found on the Santa Rita Experimental Range, 75 different items were used for construction. The most commonly used building materials included mesquite, catclaw acacia, paloverde, desert ironwood (Olneya tesota), and creosotebush twigs; cholla joints and fruits; portions of prickly-pear where it was abundant; and juniper, pinyon pine, and oak twigs where they were abundant. Other items included horse, cow, and coyote dung, animal bones, stones, and human-discarded materials.Vaughan, Terry A. (1990) "Ecology of living packrats", pp.
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Phagophilia or phagophily is feeding on parasites."A glossary of some of the terms used in insect ecology", by Claude K. Warner, 1947, Cornell University"Die Formen der Vergesellschaftung im Tierreiche: Ein systematisch- soziologischer Versuch", Paul Deegener, 1918 German zoologist M. Beier reported that phagophilia is the feeding behavior of some pseudoscorpions. It was reported that many pseudoscorpions species co-exist with some packrat species, and two of them feed on packrat ectoparasites, to mutual benefit.SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PSEUDOSCORPIONS (ARACHNIDA) AND PACKRATS (RODENTIA), Journal of Arachnology 34(2):289-298.
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The book discusses some of the problems of trying to maintain an interstellar trading culture without access to superluminal travel or to superluminal communication. Time-measurement details provide an interesting concept in the book: the Qeng Ho measure time primarily in terms of seconds, since the notion of days, months, and years has no usefulness between various star-systems. The timekeeping system uses terms such as kiloseconds and megaseconds. The Qeng Ho's computer and timekeeping systems feature the advent of "programmer archaeologists": the Qeng Ho are packrats of computer programs and systems, retaining them over millennia, even as far back to the era of Unix programs (as implied by one passage mentioning that the fundamental time-keeping system is the Unix epoch): This massive accumulation of data implies that almost any useful program one could want already exists in the Qeng Ho fleet library, hence the need for computer archaeologists to dig up needed programs, work around their peculiarities and bugs, and assemble them into useful constructs.
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