Animal · United Kingdom, France, Germany
European mole
Talpa europaea — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The mole spends almost its whole life underground, digging tunnels with hands turned outwards like shovels. Most people never see one — only the heaps of earth it pushes up.
Picture credit: Christoph Moning (CC BY 4.0) · Christoph Moning (CC BY 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the European mole live?
Home: Tunnels under meadows, fields and gardens.
In the wild it lives in these countries: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Russia.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 11–16 cm long. It weighs about 0.1 kilograms. On the menu: insects.
The story behind it
A mole's tunnels are not roads, they are traps. Worms crawling through the soil fall into them, and the mole patrols its network to collect whatever has dropped in. But it cannot eat a thousand worms at once, and a dead worm rots. So it does something startling: its saliva carries a toxin that paralyses an earthworm without killing it. The mole bites the worm, carries it to a chamber near the nest and leaves it there, alive but unable to crawl away. Researchers digging out such larders have found more than a thousand worms in a single store. A mole must eat close to its own weight in a day, and in winter, when the soil is frozen hard and nothing is moving, that larder is the difference between surviving and not.
Find it on the globe
European mole is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Is a mole blind?
No. Its eyes are tiny and often hidden in the fur, and underground there is nothing to see anyway, so it finds its way by touch and smell. But it can tell light from dark.
What are molehills?
The earth the mole has to get rid of. Digging a tunnel leaves soil with nowhere to go, so it pushes the load up a short shaft to the surface. A heap means a tunnel is being built right underneath.
Does a mole hibernate?
No, and it cannot afford to. It has to eat close to its own weight every day, so it keeps hunting all winter, digging deeper where the soil is not frozen — and living off the worms it stored.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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