what’s the strangest animal you’ve worked with and what did you need to do with it?

Question: what's the strangest animal you've worked with and what did you need to do with it?
- Keywords:
  animal,
  strange
Asked by SAUDI IN AN AUDI to Adam on 21 Jun 2017.
- Adam Hargreaves answered on 21 Jun 2017:
  
  Definitely the sand rat, which is a species of gerbil. This is for a few reasons; it never ever drinks water in the world, it eats a plant called Atriplex which has leaves that are essentially salty cardboard, and they get diabetes and die if you feed them what you would normally feed to mice and other rodents. A lot of scientists thought they got diabetes because they were missing a gene called Pdx1, which is needed to make a pancreas and to express insulin. Animals without the Pdx1 usually die as soon as they’re born, so this was extremely weird!
  I moved to Oxford to work on sequencing the genome of the sand rat, and I managed after a lot of hard work to find the Pdx1 gene, which has become completely mutated. Not only that, but about 90 other genes around it have also completely mutated. This is like nothing we’ve ever seen in an animals genome before, so very strange and very exciting at the same time!

Question: what's the strangest animal you've worked with and what did you need to do with it?