Squirrel king

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A squirrel king is a collection of squirrels whose tails have tangled together, making them unable to separate themselves.^[1] It is similar to a phenomenon recorded in rats, the rat king.^[2] A squirrel king starts as a litter of young in the same nest, whose tails become knotted together by nesting materials and/or by tree sap gluing the tails together, particularly if the young squirrels have been gnawing bark of the tree that their nest is in, letting sap flow. If the squirrels are not separated, they may fall to the ground still joined to each other when they try to come out of their nest, and will invariably die unless separated through human intervention.^[3][4] Unlike the rat king, the squirrel king is not found in medieval European literature.^[5]

The term rat king comes from the German, Rattenkönig, used to describe persons who lived off others. An alternative theory states that the name in French was rouet de rats (or a spinning wheel of rats, the knotted tails being wheel spokes), with the term transforming over time into roi des rats,^[6] because formerly French oi was pronounced [we] or similar; nowadays it is pronounced [wa].