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The animal, identified as a capybara, is the world’s largest rodent and feeds on vegetation.
“If you think a giant guinea pig is cute, then you probably would like it,” said Todd Tognazzini, of the California Department of Fish and Game.
The animal was spotted at the waste-water treatment facility in Paso Robles, 280km north-west of Los Angles.
An employee at the plant took photos of the animal as it crawled out of a pond.
The capybara is a supersised relative of the rat and mouse that normally live in grassy wetlands and near rivers.
They can grow to a metre in length and have teeth that never stop growing, as they get worn down by eating grasses, their favourite food.
In fact, capybara means ‘master of the grasses’ in the tongue of the South American Guarani Indians. Capybara also love water – they have webbed toes to propel them through it and often mate in it.
They live in groups of 10 to 100 individuals, each one led by a dominant male.
The capybara’s South American habitat ranges from Panama to northeast Argentina, east of the Andes, according to a description on the website of the San Francisco Zoo.
A capybara can hold its breath under water for up to five minutes and the animal spends much of its roughly four-year lifespan near the water, he said.
The latest spotting of the capybara comes two years after another sighting of the animal at a ranch around one mile away.
Recently, some giants rats were discovered in South Africa amid reports that they were eating babies left unattended in some shanty towns. – Mailonline-Herald Reporter.
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