Episode 448: Tennessee water mysteries

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:16 — 19.6MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

While I’m at Dragon Con, here’s an old Patreon episode about Tennessee water mysteries, including some spooky sightings of what were probably bears, and some mystery fish!

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

As this episode goes live, I should be at Dragon Con, so I decided to go ahead and schedule an old Patreon episode to run instead of trying to get a new episode ready in time. It’s about some water mysteries in my home state of Tennessee, although I actually just moved away from Tennessee to Georgia.

Tennessee is in the southeastern United States, a long thin state divided into three geographical sections. East Tennessee borders the southern Appalachian Mountains, Middle Tennessee is on the Cumberland Plateau, and West Tennessee borders the Mississippi River. The only natural lake in the state is Reelfoot in northwestern Tennessee, a shallow, swampy body of water formed in the early 19th century.

Before 1811, instead of a lake a small river flowed through the area, a tributary of the Mississippi. In earlier accounts, Reelfoot River is called Red Foot River. Most of the residents of the area at the time were Choctaw, although white settlers lived in the small town of New Madrid near the bank of the Mississippi.

From December 1811 through February 1812, a series of earthquakes in the New Madrid Seismic Zone changed the land radically. There were three main quakes and innumerable smaller ones, ranging from an estimated 6.7 for the smallest quake to a possible 8.8 for the largest.

In the initial quake and aftershocks on 16 December 1811, chimneys collapsed, trees fell, and fissures opened and closed, projecting water or sand high in the air. Boats on the Mississippi capsized as huge waves crashed from bank to bank.

A woman named Eliza Bryan, who lived in New Madrid, wrote an account of the quakes:

On the 16th of December, 1811, about 2 o’clock a.m., a violent shock of earthquake, accompanied by a very awful noise, resembling loud but distant thunder, but hoarse and vibrating, followed by complete saturation of the atmosphere with sulphurous vapor, causing total darkness. The screams of the inhabitants, the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species, the falling trees, and the roaring of the Mississippi, the current of which was retrograde for a few minutes, owing, as it is supposed, to an eruption in its bed, formed a scene truly horrible.

From this time on until the 4th of February the earth was in continual agitation, visibly waving as a gentle sea. On that day there was another shock…and on the 7th, at about 4 o’clock a.m., a concussion took place so much more violent than those preceding it that it is denominated the ‘hard shock.’

The Mississippi first seemed to recede from its banks, and its waters gathered up like a mountain… Then, rising 15 or 20 feet perpendicularly and expanding, as it were, at the same time, the banks overflowed with a retrograde current rapid as a torrent.

A riverboat captain reported in another account that his boat was caught in a ferocious current on the Mississippi, crashing across waves he estimated as six feet high, or 1.8 m. He also reported whirlpools that he estimated were 30 feet deep, or 9 m. He saw all the trees on either bank fall at once.

The December quake was so large it was felt across North America, from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Then, only five weeks later, it happened again, followed by the third major earthquake on 7 February. Only 15 miles, or 24 km, from the epicenter, the land dropped 20 feet, or 6 m, and created a basin that immediately filled with water. Reelfoot Lake was formed, Tennessee’s only natural lake.

Reelfoot is a state park these days, popular with boaters, fishers, hunters, and birdwatchers. The only cryptid sighting I could find took place in the Glass community near Obion, within ten miles, or 16 km, of the lake. A man who grew up in Glass reported in 2009 that a bipedal creature 8 or 9 feet tall, or 2.5-2.7 m, and covered in off-white hair was well-known to the residents of the community. They referred to it as “the white thing.” The man had seen it several times as a child and his father, who was initially a skeptic, changed his mind when he found huge tracks in the woods.

Technically, Tennessee has two natural lakes, but the “Lost Sea” is underground. It’s located in a large cave system called Craighead Caverns in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. It’s one of the largest underground lakes ever found, although it hasn’t been fully explored so its actual size isn’t known. The lake doesn’t support any known animals, although scientific explorations haven’t been conducted as far as I could find. In the 1960s the cave owners stocked the lake with rainbow trout in hopes that they would discover an exit to the surface. They didn’t, and the fish have to be fed and restocked since they have no natural food sources and won’t spawn in the lake. The cave, and the lake, are a local tourist attraction.

Besides Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee is home to many man-made lakes. Most are in East Tennessee. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt set up the New Deal plan, creating government-funded projects to employ out-of-work Americans. The Tennessee Valley Authority was founded in 1933 to improve the lives of people who lived along the Tennessee River and its tributaries. To curb seasonal flooding and stop the spread of malaria, and to bring electricity to residents, TVA built numerous hydroelectric dams.

I grew up in a town built in the 1930s to house workers on Norris Dam, which formed Norris Lake from the Clinch River. Norris Dam was TVA’s first large project, completed in 1936. This makes the lake only 85 years old, but that’s certainly long enough for local lore to grow up around it. As a kid I heard about monster catfish—as big as a VW Beetle—living at the bottom of the spillway. The largest fish ever caught in the lake, however, was a 49.5 pound, or 22.45 kg, striped bass in 1978. The largest catfish ever caught in Tennessee was a blue catfish that weighed 112 pounds, or 50.8 kg. That’s huge, but not the size of a car.

There are other strange reports from around Norris Lake. On the night of 3 March 2012, two men went to a clearing near the first man’s house, in a swampy area near the lake’s edge, to build a bonfire and talk. They noticed footsteps and the sound of a large animal moving around in the trees nearby but assumed it was a white-tailed deer, although both men did have the sensation of being watched throughout the evening. Around midnight, when the men decided to leave, they heard sticks breaking in the trees as though being stepped on. One of the men knocked on a tree with a piece of wood and heard knocking in response, and then both were frightened by a loud, deep, long growl.

Black bears do occasionally stray into the Norris area from the nearby Smoky Mountains, but black bears don’t growl—they make distinctive moaning or chuffing noises instead. They also usually stay away from humans and fire.

In the late 1980s, possibly September of 1988, a woman returning to her car after a day of fishing with her family saw a huge hairy Bigfoot-type figure cross the trail ahead of her at speed. She only caught a quick glimpse of it at dusk but estimated it was 8 or 9 feet tall, or 2.5-2.7 m, with long arms that swung oddly as it took huge strides.

Other Tennessee lakes have their share of mysteries too. The “catzilla” legend is repeated in just about every waterway, with the catfish’s size usually compared to that of a small car. There really are some enormous fish in Tennessee’s lakes, though. In January of 2021 a man caught and released an American paddlefish in Cherokee Lake that might have approached the world record weight of 151 pounds, or 68.5 kg. It was six feet long, or 1.8 m.

There’s also a 19th century mystery associated with the Tennessee River. The earliest report of it I could find is from April 1878 in the Chattanooga Daily Times, an account from an old resident about river monster sightings from earlier that century. The first sighting by a white settler is from 1822, when a man named Buck Sutton was fishing and sighted the monster. The next reported sighting was near the same area five years later, when a man named Billy Burns saw the monster while crossing the ferry. Jim Windom was fishing in 1829 when he saw it. All three men died the summer after their encounters, although subsequent sightings (including 1836 and 1839) didn’t lead to anyone’s death.

The sightings all apparently took place in a part of the Tennessee River near Chattanooga, now dammed to form Chickamauga Lake. At the time the river there was relatively sluggish and shallow, with many shoals.

The monster was described as serpent-like and about the length of a canoe, or around 20 to 25 feet long, or 6 to 7.6 m. At least one report says it had a doglike head. Billy Burns reported that its belly was yellow and its back was blue. The most interesting detail comes from at least two reports, that of a tall black fin on its back that stood at least 18 inches high, or 45 cm, or possibly two feet high, or 61 cm.

The Tennessee River has its share of unusual animals, from tiny freshwater jellyfish to the paddlefish, a filter feeder with an elongated rostrum, but nothing with such a large and prominent dorsal fin. The lake sturgeon, which can grow well over seven feet long, or 2.2 m, has bony plates on its back and an elongated snout, which doesn’t fit the description given by witnesses. The alligator gar can grow 10 feet long, or 3 m, but like the lake sturgeon, its dorsal fin is small and set far back on the body. The longnose gar can grow six feet long, or 1.8 m, but again, its dorsal fin is small and set far back on its body, and as its name implies, its jaws are elongated.

In shallow water the tail fins of any of these fish or others can show above the surface higher than the dorsal fin, but not two feet out of the water. Moreover, all these fish were much more common in the early 19th century than they are now, and locals would likely recognize all of them.

Alligators do occasionally show up in Tennessee, although not historically. Most alligator sightings are quite recent. The American alligator can grow up to 15 feet long, or 4.5 m, but even if one occasionally strayed into the Tennessee River in the 19th century, it has no structure on its back that could be mistaken for a tall fin.

On rare occasions, a bull shark could find its way into the Tennessee River. The Tennessee is a tributary of the Ohio River, which in turns flows into the Mississippi, which then empties into the Gulf of Mexico. While bull sharks do occasionally swim up the Mississippi, no genuine sighting of one in the Ohio or Tennessee rivers has ever been documented. It’s not impossible, though. An exceptionally large bull shark can grow up to 13 feet long, or 4 m, and it prefers shallow water. Tennesseans in the early 19th century would have no knowledge of sharks and might consider it a monster, not an ordinary fish.

It’s possible that the Tennessee River was once home to a large fish with a tall dorsal fin, one that was already rare in the early 19th century and which went extinct soon after. It’s also possible that the story was just a newspaper hoax, written to fill space on a slow news day. The article from 1878 was a “contribution…from an old citizen of Chattanooga” who was not named, talking about events that took place more than fifty years before. In 1885 another newspaper, the Chattanooga Daily Commercial, ran a nearly identical article—obviously taken from the 1878 one, often word-for-word—that claims the reporter heard the story “yesterday while listening attentively to the conversation of one of Chattanooga’s oldest citizens.”

We may never know what the strange Tennessee River animal was, just as we may not know whether bigfoot-type creatures live near Tennessee’s lakes. I have my doubts that there are catfish in Tennessee bigger than cars, though—but just to be on the safe side, I’m staying in the boat.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 447: So Many Legs!

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:26 — 11.6MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Thanks to Mila for suggesting one of our topics today!

Further reading:

The mystery of the ‘missing’ giant millipede

Never-before-seen head of prehistoric, car-size ‘millipede’ solves evolutionary mystery

A centipede compared to a millipede:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Let’s finish invertebrate August this year with two arthropods. One is a suggestion from Mila and the other is a scientific mystery that was solved by a recent discovery, at least partially.

Mila suggested we learn about centipedes, and the last time we talked about those animals was in episode 100. That’s because centipedes are supposed to have 100 legs.

But do centipedes actually have 100 legs? They don’t. Different species of centipede have different numbers of legs, from only 30 to something like 300. Like other arthropods, the centipede has to molt its exoskeleton to grow larger. When it does, some species grow more segments and legs. Others hatch with all the segments and legs they’ll ever have.

A centipede’s body is flattened and made up of segments, a different number of segments depending on the centipede’s species, but at least 15. Each segment has a pair of legs except for the last two, which have no legs. The first segment’s legs project forward and end in sharp claws with venom glands. These legs are called forcipules, and they actually look like pincers. No other animal has forcipules, only centipedes. The centipede uses its forcipules to capture and hold prey, and to defend itself from potential predators. A centipede pinch can be painful but not dangerous unless you’re also allergic to bees, in which case you might have an allergic reaction to a big centipede’s venom. Small centipedes can’t pinch hard enough to break a human’s skin.

A centipede’s last pair of legs points backwards and sometimes look like tail stingers, but they’re just modified legs that act as sensory antennae. Each pair of a centipede’s legs is a little longer than the pair in front of it, which helps keep the legs from bumping into each other when the centipede walks.

The centipede lives throughout the world, even in the Arctic and in deserts, but it needs a moist environment so it won’t dry out. It likes rotten wood, leaf litter, soil, especially soil under stones, and basements. Some centipedes have no eyes at all, many have eyes that can only sense light and dark, and some have relatively sophisticated compound eyes. Most centipedes are nocturnal.

The largest centipedes alive today belong to the genus Scolopendra. This genus includes the Amazonian giant centipede, which can grow over a foot long, or 30 cm. It’s reddish or black with yellow bands on the legs, and lives in parts of South America and the Caribbean. It eats insects, spiders–including tarantulas, frogs and other amphibians, small snakes and lizards, birds, and small mammals like mice. It’s even been known to catch bats in midair by hanging down from cave ceilings and grabbing the bat as it flies by.

Some people think that the Amazonian giant centipede is the longest in the world, but this isn’t actually the case. Its close relation, the Galapagos centipede, can grow 17 inches long, or 43 cm, and is black with red legs.

But if you think that’s big, wait until you hear about the other animal we’re discussing today. It’s called Arthropleura and it lived in what is now Europe and North America between about 344 and 292 million years ago.

Before we talk about it, though, we need to learn a little about the millipede. Millipedes are related to centipedes and share a lot of physical characteristics, like a segmented body and a lot of legs. The word millipede means one thousand feet, but millipedes can have anywhere from 36 to 1,306 legs. That is a lot of legs. It’s probably too many legs. The millipede with 1,306 legs is Eumillipes persephone, found in western Australia and only described in 2021. It lives deep underground in forested areas, where it probably eats fungus that grows on tree roots. It’s long and thin with short legs and no eyes. It’s only about 1 mm in diameter, but can grow nearly 4 inches long, or almost 10 cm.

Millipedes mostly eat decaying plant material and are generally chunkier-looking than centipedes. They have two pairs of legs per segment instead of just one, with the legs attached on the underside of the segment instead of on the sides. A millipede usually has short, strong antennae that it uses to poke around in soil and decaying leaves. It can’t pinch, sting, or bite, although some species can secrete a toxic liquid that also smells terrible. Mostly if it feels threatened, a millipede will curl up and hope the potential predator will leave it alone.

The biggest millipede alive today is probably the giant African millipede, which can grow over 13 inches long, or almost 34 cm, but because millipedes are common throughout the world and are often hard for scientists to find, there may very well be much larger millipedes out there that we just don’t know about.

As an example, in 1897 scientists discovered a new species of giant millipede in Madagascar and named it Spirostreptus sculptus. One specimen found was almost 11 inches long, or over 27 cm. But after that, no scientist saw the millipede again—until 2023, when a scientific expedition looking for lost species rediscovered it, along with 20 other species of animal. It turns out that the millipede isn’t even uncommon in the area, so the local people probably knew all about it.

But Arthropleura was way bigger than any millipede or centipede alive today. It could grow at least 8 ½ feet long, or 2.6 meters, and possibly longer. It probably weighed over 100 lbs, or 45 kg. We have plenty of fossilized specimens, but not one of them has an intact head. Then scientists discovered two beautifully preserved juvenile specimens in France, and CT scans in 2024 revealed that both specimens had nearly complete heads.

The big question about Arthropleura was whether it was more closely related to millipedes or centipedes, or if it was something very different. Without a head to study, no one could answer that question with any confidence, although a lot of scientists had definite opinions one way or another. Studies of the head scans determined that Arthropleura was indeed more closely related to modern millipedes—but naturally, since it lived so long ago, it also had a lot of traits more common in centipedes today. It also had something not found in either animal, eyes on little stalks.

There are still lots of mysteries surrounding Arthropleura. For instance, what did it eat? Because of its size, scientists initially thought it might be a predator. Now that we know it was more closely related to the millipede than the centipede, scientists think it might have eaten like a millipede too. That would mean it mostly ate decaying vegetation, but we don’t know for sure. We also don’t know if it could swim or not. We have a lot of Arthropleura tracks that seem to be made along the water’s edge, so some scientists hypothesize that it could swim or at least spent part of its time in the water. Other scientists point out that Arthropleura didn’t have gills or any other way to absorb oxygen while in the water, so it was more likely to be fully terrestrial. The first set of scientists sometimes comes back and argues that we don’t actually know how Arthropleura breathed or even why it was able to grow so large, and maybe it really did have gills. A third group of scientists then has to come in and say, hey, everyone calm down, maybe the next specimen we find will show evidence of both lungs and gills, and it spent part of its time on land and part in shallow water, so there’s no need to argue. And then they all go for pizza and remember that they really love arthropods, and isn’t Arthropleura the coolest arthropod of all?

At least, I think that’s how it works among scientists. And Arthropleura is really cool.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 446: Termites

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:13 — 10.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Thanks to Yonatan and Eilee for this week’s suggestion!

Further reading:

Replanted rainforests may benefit from termite transplants

A vast 4,000-year-old spatial pattern of termite mounds

A family of termites has been traversing the world’s oceans for millions of years

Worker termites [photo from this site]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have a topic I’ve been wanting to cover for a while, suggested by both Yonatan and Eilee. It’s the termite episode!

We talk a lot about animals that eat termites, and in many cases termite-eating animals also eat ants. I’ve always assumed that termites and ants are closely related, but they’re not. Termites are actually closely related to cockroaches, which are both in the order Blattodea, but it’s been 150 million years since they shared a common ancestor. They share another trait too, in that no one wants either insect infesting their house.

Like most cockroach species, though, most termite species don’t want anything to do with humans. They live in the wild, not in your house, and they’re incredibly common throughout most of the world. That’s why so many animals eat termites almost exclusively. There are just so many termites to eat!

There are around 3,000 species of termite and about a third of them live in Africa, with another 400 or so in South America, 400 or so in Asia, and 400 or so in Australia. The rest live in other parts of the world, but they need warm weather to survive so they’re not very common in cold areas like northern Europe.

A termite colony consists of a queen, soldiers, and workers, which sounds very similar to ants, but there are some major differences. Worker termites take care of the nest and babies, find and process food so the other termites can eat it, and store the processed food. They also take care of the queen. Unlike ants and bees, worker termites aren’t only female and aren’t always sterile. Soldiers are bigger and stronger than workers, with much bigger heads and jaws so they can fight off potential predators. In some species, the soldiers have such big jaws that they can’t actually eat without help. Worker termites feed them. Finally, the queen is the largest individual in the colony, usually considerably larger than workers, but unlike queen bees and ants, she has a mate who stays with her throughout her life, called a king. Some termite queens can live to be as much as 50 years old, and she and the king spend almost their entire lives underground in a nesting chamber.

The larger the colony, the more likely it is that the colony has more than one queen. The main queen is usually the one that started the colony along with her king, and when it was new they did all the work—taking care of the eggs and babies, foraging for food, and building the nest itself. As the first workers grew up, they took on more of those tasks, including expanding the nest.

Workers are small and their bodies have little to no pigment, so that they appear white. Some people call them white ants, but of course they’re not ants. Workers have to stay in a humid environment like the nest or their bodies dry out. Workers and soldiers don’t have eyes, although they can probably sense light and dark, and instead they navigate using their antennae, which can sense humidity and vibrations, and chemoreceptors that sense pheromones released by other termites.

Termites have another caste that’s not as common, usually referred to as reproductives. These are future kings and queens, and they’re larger and stronger than workers. They also have eyes and wings. When outside conditions are right, usually when the weather is warm and humid, the reproductive termites leave the nest and fly away. Males and females pair off and search for a new nesting site to start their own colony.

Termites mainly eat dead plant material, including plant material that most other animals can’t digest. A termite’s gut contains microbes that are found nowhere else in the world, which allow the termite to digest cellulose found in plants, especially wood. Baby termites aren’t born with these microbes, but they gain them from worker termites when the babies are fed or groomed.

In some areas termites will eat the wood used to build houses, which is why people don’t like them, but termites are actually important to the ecosystems where they live, recycling nutrients and helping break down fallen trees so other plants can grow. They also host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which are important to plant life.

A recent study in Australia determined that termites are really important for rainforest health. In some parts of Australia, conservation groups have started planting rainforest trees to restore deforested areas. Decomposers like termites are slower to populate these areas, with one site that was studied 12 years after planting showing limited termite activity. That means it takes longer for fallen branches, logs, and stumps to decay, which means it takes longer for the nutrients in those items and others to be available for other plants to use.

The problem seems to be that the new forests don’t have very many dead trees yet, so the termites don’t have a lot to eat. The team is considering bringing in fallen logs from more established forests so the termites have food and can establish colonies more easily.

Some species of termite in Africa, Australia, and South America build mounds, and those mounds can be huge. A mound is built above ground out of soil and termite dung, held together with termite saliva. It’s full of tunnels and shafts that allow the termites to move around inside and which bring air into the main part of the nest, which is mostly below ground. Different species build differently-shaped mounds, including some that are completely round.

Some termite mounds can be twice the height of a tall person, and extremely big around. The biggest measured had a diameter of almost 100 feet around, or 30 meters. But in at least one place on earth, in northeastern Brazil, there’s a network of interconnected termite mounds that is as big as Great Britain.

The complex consists of about 200 million mounds, each of them about 8 feet tall, or 2.5 meters, and about 30 feet across, or 9 meters. They’re just huge piles of soil excavated from underground, and tests have determined that the mounds range in age from 690 years old to at least 3,820 years old and are connected by tunnels–but the nests under the mounds are still in use!

Not all termite species build mounds or even live underground. A group called drywood termites live in wood and usually have much smaller colonies than other termites. They probably split off from other termites about 100 million years ago, and a 2022 genetic study determined that they probably originated in South America. But drywood termites have spread to many other parts of the world, and scientists think it’s because their homes float. They estimate that over the last 50 million years, drywood termites have actually floated across entire oceans at least 40 times. When their floating log homes washed ashore, the termites colonized the new land and adapted to local conditions.

A lot of people worry that termites will damage their homes, but in many parts of the world, people eat termites. The termites are fried or roasted until they’re nicely crunchy, and they’re supposed to have a nut-like flavor. They’re also high in protein and important fats. So the next time you worry about your house, you can shout at any potential termites that if they’re around, you might just eat them as a snack.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 445: Salinella

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:01 — 7.8MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

It’s a tiny mystery animal!

Further reading:

Salinella – what the crap was it?

Some of Frenzel’s drawings of Salinella:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Johannes Frenzel was a German zoologist in the 19th century. He worked in Argentina for several years, studying microscopic and near-microscopic animals, and seemed to be a perfectly good scientist who did good work but didn’t make a real splash. But these days he’s remembered for a mystery animal that is still causing controversy in the scientific community.

Frenzel described a strange worm-like animal he named Salinella salve in 1892, and Salinella hasn’t been seen since. According to Frenzel’s description of it, Salinella is very different from every other animal known. It’s so different, in fact, that some scientists think Frenzel just made the whole thing up.

In 1890 or 1891, a colleague gave Frenzel a soil sample reportedly from the salt pans in Argentina. We don’t know exactly where it came from, just that it’s somewhere in the Río Cuarto region. Frenzel put the sample in an aquarium and added water, although apparently some iodine got mixed in too, either on purpose or maybe by accident. Then he forgot all about the sample for a few weeks. It wasn’t covered and Frenzel reported that some dead flies had fallen into the aquarium.

When Frenzel finally got around to examining the sample, he discovered something he had never seen before. No one else had either, before or since. He said it was a worm-like animal about 2 millimeters long, and there wasn’t just one of them. There were quite a few in the sample, some in the soil and some attached to the glass.

When he studied the tiny worms, he discovered they had a very basic, very unusual body plan. It was basically just a tube open at both ends, with a single layer of cells around the interior sac. Each cell was covered with cilia on both the exterior side of the animal and the interior side. Cilia are hair-like structures, and salinella used them to move around, a method of propulsion called ciliary gliding. It didn’t have any organs or even tissues—basically nothing you’d expect even in a very simple animal. It reproduced by splitting down the middle, called transverse fission.

Assuming Frenzel was describing a real animal, and was describing it accurately, this body plan is unlike any other animal known. It’s most similar to what scientists think the body plan was of the precursors to sea sponges. It’s also similar in some ways to a group of parasitic animals called Mesozoa, which are wormlike, very simple, only a few millimeters long at most, and which have an outer layer of ciliated cells. Mesozoans aren’t well understood and most scientists these days think the group is made up of animals that aren’t closely related to each other. Salinella has sometimes been considered a mesozoan, but it’s still not that close of a match.

Frenzel took detailed notes and made careful drawings of Salinella, and compared it to known animals like protozoans. His description of the animal is solid, and he described many other animals in his career that are well-known to scientists today. The main reason some scientists now think Frenzel made Salinella up is because it’s so weird and no one has been able to find it since. Frenzel died in 1897 without ever having the chance to look for more specimens.

In 1963 an American biologist placed Salinella in its own phylum, which he named Monoblastozoa. In the early 2010s, a team of German scientists visited various saline lakes in Argentina and Chile in hopes of finding Salinella specimens, but without luck. The area where the original soil sample came from has mostly been converted to farmland, so if Salinella was restricted to that one spot, it might well be extinct now.

So what happened to the type specimens that Frenzel collected? We don’t know. They vanished sometime between 1891 when Frenzel moved back to Germany from Argentina, and now. It might even be that he couldn’t preserve the specimens, since he reported that every time he tried to preserve one, it disintegrated.

While I was researching this episode, I wondered if Salinella actually came from the flies that reportedly fell into the aquarium. Many parasites evolve to become very simple, like Myxozoa that we talked about in episode 422. But Frenzel observed Salinella apparently eating organic matter in the soil, which isn’t something a fly parasite would or could do.

At this point, unless we can find a living Salinella specimen, there’s no way to know if the animal was real or a figment of Frenzel’s imagination. Some scientists even suggest that Frenzel was mistaken in his description and the real animal might actually be very different from what he described. Considering how detailed and careful Frenzel’s notes and drawings are, and how many other species he described without causing any controversy at all, I think Salinella was a real animal, just a weird one. Let’s hope that one day it’s discovered again so we can learn more about it.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 444: Diskagma and Horodyskia

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:00 — 11.1MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

It’s Invertebrate August! These creatures are the most invertebrate-y of all!

Further reading:

Dubious Diskagma

Horodyskia is among the oldest multicellular macroorganisms, finds study

A painting of diskagma, taken from the top link above:

Little brown jug flowers (not related to diskagma in any way!):

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This episode started out as the March 2025 Patreon episode, but there was more I wanted to add to it that I didn’t have time to cover in that one. Here’s the expanded version to kick off Invertebrate August, which also happens to be episode 444 and releasing on August 4th! It’s about two mystery fossils.

The first is named Diskagma, which means disc-shaped fragment, and it was only described in 2013. That’s partly because it’s so small, barely two millimeters long at most, and partly because of where it’s found. That would be fossilized in extremely old rocks.

When I saw the illustration accompanying the blog post where I learned about Diskagma, I thought it was a cluster of cup-like flowers, sort of like the flowers of the plant called little brown jug. I was ready to send the link to Meredith Hemphill of the Herbarium of the Bizarre podcast, which by the way you should be listening to. But then I saw how old Diskagma is.

It’s been dated to 2.2 billion years old. That’s older than any plant, probably by as much as a billion years.

Even more astounding, it lived on land.

As a reminder, the Cambrian explosion took place about half a billion years ago, when tiny marine animals diversified rapidly to fill new ecological niches. That happened in the water, though, mainly in shallow, warm oceans. If you go back to around 850 million years ago, that may have been roughly the time that land plants evolved from green algae that lived in fresh water. Plant-like algae, or possibly algae-like plants, might be as old as 1 billion years old. But before then, scientists don’t find evidence of anything except microbes living on land, and they were probably restricted to lakes and other bodies of fresh water. That’s because there wasn’t much soil, just broken-up rock that contained very few nutrients and couldn’t retain much water.

Diskagma was shaped like a tiny elongated cup, or an urn or vase, with what looks like a stem on one end and what looks like an opening at the other end. The opening contained structures that look like little filaments, but the filaments didn’t fill the whole cup. Most of the cup was diskagma’s body, so to speak, although we don’t know what it contained. We also don’t know what the filaments were for. We do know that the stem actually did connect diskagma to other cups, so that they lived in little groups. We don’t know if it was a single animal with multiple cuplike structures or if it was a colony, or really anything.

That’s the problem. We don’t know anything about diskagma except that it existed, and that it lived on land 2.2 billion years ago. Tiny as it was, though, it wasn’t microscopic, and it definitely appears more complex than would be expected that long ago, especially from something living on dry land.

One suggestion is that the main part of its body contained a symbiotic bacteria that could convert chemicals to nutrients. As in many modern animals, especially extremophiles, the bacteria would have had a safe place to live and the diskagma would have had nutrients that allowed it to live without needing to eat.

Diskagma lived at an interesting time in the earth’s history, called the great oxygenation event, also called the great oxidation event. We talked about it in episode 341 in conjunction with cyanobacteria, because cyanobacteria basically started the great oxygenation event. Cyanobacteria are still around, by the way, and are doing just fine. They’re usually called blue-green algae even though they’re not actually algae.

Cyanobacteria photosynthesize, and they’ve been doing so for far longer than plants–possibly as much as 2.7 billion years, although scientists think cyanobacteria originally evolved around 3.5 billion years ago. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old, if you were wondering.

Like most plants also do, cyanobacteria produce oxygen as part of the photosynthetic process, and when they started doing so around 2.7 billion years ago, they changed the entire world. Before then, earth’s atmosphere hardly contained any oxygen. If you had a time machine and went back to more than two billion years ago, and you forgot to bring an oxygen tank, you’d instantly suffocate trying to breathe the air. But back then, even though animals and plants didn’t yet exist, the world contained a whole lot of microbial life, and none of it wanted anything to do with oxygen. Oxygen was toxic to the lifeforms that lived then, but cyanobacteria just kept producing it.

Cyanobacteria are tiny, but there were a lot of them. Over the course of about 700 million years, the oxygen added up until other lifeforms started to go extinct, poisoned by all that oxygen in the oceans and air. By two billion years ago, pretty much every lifeform that couldn’t evolve to use or at least tolerate oxygen had gone extinct.

Since Diskagma lived during the time of the great oxygenation event, some scientists suggest that it contained microbes that photosynthesized sunlight into nutrients diskagma could use. And, as in cyanobacteria, the side effect of photosynthesis is oxygen, so diskagma might have been contributing to the oxygen in the air that allows us to breathe these days. On the other hand, it might not have had anything to do with photosynthesis and the great oxygenation event might have driven diskagma to extinction. We have no way to know right now.

What we do know is that 700 million years after diskagma lived, something similar appears in the fossil record. It’s called Horodyskia and its fossils have been found in rocks dating between 1.5 billion years ago to 550 million years ago. Unlike diskagma, which has only been found in rocks from South Africa, horodyskia fossils have been found in Australia, China, and North America. That doesn’t mean diskagma wasn’t widespread, just that we haven’t found it anywhere else. There aren’t all that many rocks that are over two billion years old.

Horodyskia lived in the water, specifically at the bottom of the ocean, probably in shallow water. It’s been described as looking like a row of beads on a thread. The thread seemed to be buried in the sand, and growing up from it in intervals were little pear-shaped bulbs, each no larger than a millimeter long, that stuck up through the sand into the water. There may have been little root-like structures called holdfasts that grew from the bottom of the thread to help keep it in place.

We don’t know a lot about horodyskia either. It wasn’t a plant, since it also lived long before plants evolved. A 2023 study determined that it was a multicellular creature and that it was most likely a protist. Protists are related to animals, plants, and fungi, but aren’t any of those things, and they’re an incredibly diverse group. Most are single-celled and microscopic, but not always. They include algae, amoebas, slime molds, and lots more. Horodyskia’s bulbs might have been encased in a jelly-like substance, as is common in a lot of protists. Some horodyskia specimens found in younger rocks, the ones about 550 million years old, are much smaller than the earlier specimens, with each bulb barely a fraction of a millimeter in size.

We might not know much about these strange life forms, but knowing they existed tells us that even two billion years ago, life was a lot more varied than we used to think. And that’s the most exciting thing of all.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

The Books Have Been Claimed! and a bonus mouse

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07 — 1.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

I just wanted everyone to know that a listener has claimed the books and magazines I offered for giveaway in episode 443. You can also learn about 60 seconds’ worth of information about the African pygmy mouse.

The tiniest mouse [photo by Alouise Lynch – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59068329]:

Episode 443: Ant Lions and the Horrible Seal Problem

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:21 — 9.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Thanks to Jayson and warblrwatchr for suggesting this week’s invertebrates!

Further reading:

Parasite of the Day: Orthohalarachne attenuata

Trap-jaw ants jump with their jaws to escape the antlion’s den

Get out of my noooooose:

An ant lion pit:

An ant lion larva:

A lovely adult antlion, Nannoleon, which lives in parts of Africa [photo by Alandmanson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58068259]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

It’s almost August, and of course we’re doing invertebrate August again this year. Let’s get ready by talking about a few extra invertebrates this week, with suggestions from Jayson and warblrwatchr.

Before we get started, I have some quick housekeeping. First, a big shout-out to Nora who emailed me recently. I just wanted to say hi and I hope you’re having a good day. Next, I’m moving in just a few weeks to Atlanta, Georgia! I know I was talking forever about moving to Bloomington, Indiana, but I changed my mind. The next few episodes are already scheduled so I can concentrate on moving.

I’m about 75% packed at this point and have given away or sold a lot of stuff, including a lot of books. But I have a collection that a listener might be interested in. I offered it to the patrons last month but no one grabbed it, so I’ll offer it here.

I have every issue of the little magazine Flying Snake ever published, 30 in all. They’re a fun hodgepodge of articles, reprinted newspaper clippings, old photos, and other stuff more or less associated with cryptozoology and weirdness in general. I’ve decided they take up too much space on my shelves to take with me to Atlanta. If you’re interested in giving them a home, let me know and I’ll box them up and send them to you for free. The first person who says they’ll take them will get them, but the catch is that you have to take them all. I won’t just send you a few. I’ll also throw in all four volumes of the Journal of Cryptozoology. This offer stands until mid-August when I move, because if I have to move them to my new apartment, I’m just going to keep them.

Okay, now let’s learn about some invertebrates! First, Jayson wanted to learn about a tiny invertebrate called Orthohalarachne attenuata. It doesn’t have a common name because most people will never ever encounter it, or think about it, and I kind of wish I didn’t have to think about it because it’s gross. Thanks a lot, Jayson. It’s a mite that lives in the nasal passages of seals, sea lions, and walruses. It’s incredibly common and usually doesn’t bother the seal very much, although sometimes it can cause the seal to have difficulty breathing if the infestation is heavy.

The adult mite spends its whole life anchored in the seal’s nasal passages with sharp little claws, although it can move around if it wants to. Its larvae are more active. The mite is mainly spread by seals sneezing on each other, which spreads the larvae onto another seal, and the larvae crawl into the new seal’s nose and mouth.

Unless you’re a seal or other pinniped, this might sound gross but probably doesn’t bother you too much. But consider that in 1984, a man went to the doctor when one of his eyes started hurting. The doctor found a mite attached to his eyeball, and yes, it was Orthohalarachne attenuata. The man had visited Sea World two days before he started feeling pain in his eye, and happened to be close to some walruses that were sneezing.

Luckily for pinnipeds kept in captivity in zoos that give their animals proper care, mite infestations can be treated successfully by veterinarians.

Let’s move on quickly to an invertebrate that isn’t a parasite that can get in your eyes, the ant lion! It was suggested by warblrwatchr and I’ve been wanting to cover it for a while. When I was a kid, there was a strip of soft powdery dirt under the eaves of the school gym that always had ant lions in it, and I would squat down during recess and watch to see if any ants would fall in and get caught. Sometimes this did actually happen and the resulting battle between ant and ant lion was exciting and kind of horrible to witness.

The ant lion is actually the larva of antlion lacewing, which look like a small damselfly that is mainly active at dusk. Ant lions live throughout the world, with more than 2,000 species known. Some wait for prey while hidden in leaf litter, while some hide in rock crevices and become camouflaged by lichens growing on them. Many others dig little pits in sand or soft dirt. They’re also called the doodlebug in some places, because when they’re looking for a place to dig a little pit, they make a loopy pattern in the dirt as they’re walking around.

The ant lion’s body is robust and has little backwards-pointing bristles that help it dig itself into the dirt and stay there without moving until it needs to. It waits at the bottom of the pit, hidden underground with just its long, sharp jaws showing through the dirt, until an ant or other insect falls in. The ant can’t climb out because the sides of the pit are so sharply angled that they start to cave in, sending the ant down to the bottom of the pit. If that doesn’t work, the ant lion kicks dirt at the ant so that it falls. Then the ant lion grabs the ant in its fearsome jaws and injects venom and digestive enzymes into it, and that is the end of the ant. The jaws actually have little projections that are hollow and act like horrible little straws, so that the ant lion sucks the liquefied ant insides into its digestive system.

One species of ant, the trap-jaw ant, can sometimes escape the ant lion’s pit by using its own fearsome jaws as a spring to bounce itself to safety. There are many species of trap-jaw ant that live in tropical and subtropical areas throughout much of the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, and much of the Americas. Its long jaws can snap closed extremely quickly and with a lot of force, allowing it to kill prey, bite pieces off of food, and lots of other activities. They can also jump with their jaws, and this improves their ability to bounce right out of the ant lion pit.

The ant lion can remain in its larval stage for years, maturing slowly. It has no anus but it doesn’t expel the waste products that it can’t digest, it just stores them in its body. When it does finally pupate, it uses a lot of the waste to produce silk for its cocoon. Whatever is left over it leaves behind when it emerges from its cocoon.

The cocoons are naturally hidden underground, and when the adult antlion lacewing emerges, it digs its way to the surface and rests while its wings open. Compared to the tough little larva, the adult is delicate and not very robust. It doesn’t live very long, usually no more than a few weeks, and most species eat pollen or nectar, or maybe tiny insects. It mainly just seeks out a mate, and the female lays her eggs in soft soil. When they hatch, they build their first tiny pits and the cycle starts again. And nobody gets into anybody’s eyeballs.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 442: Trees and Megafauna

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:19 — 10.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Further reading:

The Trees That Miss the Mammoths

The disappearance of mastodons still threatens the native forests of South America

Study reveals ancient link between mammoth dung and pumpkin pie

A mammoth, probably about to eat something:

The Osage orange fruit looks like a little green brain:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Way back at the end of 2017, I found an article called “The Trees That Miss the Mammoths,” and made a Patreon episode about it. In episode 320, about elephants, which released in March of 2023, I cited a similar article connecting mammoths and other plants. Now there’s even more evidence that extinct megafauna and living plants are connected, so let’s have a full episode all about it.

Let’s start with the Kentucky coffeetree, which currently only survives in cultivation and in wetlands in parts of North America. It grows up to 70 feet high, or 21 meters, and produces leathery seed pods so tough that most animals literally can’t chew through them to get to the seeds. Its seed coating is so thick that water can’t penetrate it unless it’s been abraded considerably. Researchers are pretty sure the seed pods were eaten by mastodons and mammoths. Once the seeds traveled through a mammoth’s digestive system, they were nicely abraded and ready to sprout in a pile of dung.

There are five species of coffeetree, and the Kentucky coffeetree is the only one found in North America. The others are native to Asia, but a close relation grows in parts of Africa. It has similar tough seeds, which are eaten and spread by elephants.

The African forest elephant is incredibly important as a seed disperser. At least 14 species of tree need the elephant to eat their fruit in order for the seeds to sprout at all. If the forest elephant goes extinct, the trees will too.

When the North American mammoths went extinct, something similar happened. Mammoths and other megafauna co-evolved with many plants and trees to disperse their seeds, and in return the animals got to eat some yummy fruit. But when the mammoths went extinct, many plant seeds couldn’t germinate since there were no mammoths to eat the fruit and poop out the seeds. Some of these plants survive but have declined severely, like the Osage orange.

The Osage orange grows about 50 or 60 feet tall, or 15 to 18 meters, and produces big yellowish-green fruits that look like round greenish brains. Although it’s related to the mulberry, you wouldn’t be able to guess that from the fruit. The fruit drops from the tree and usually just sits there and rots. Some animals will eat it, especially cattle, but it’s not highly sought after by anything. Not anymore. In 1804, when the tree was first described by Europeans, it only grew in a few small areas in and near Texas. The tree mostly survives today because the plant can clone itself by sending up fresh sprouts from old roots.

But 10,000 years ago, the tree grew throughout North America, as far north as Ontario, Canada, and there were seven different species instead of just the one we have today. 10,000 years ago is about the time that much of the megafauna of North and South America went extinct, including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, elephant-like animals called gomphotheres, camels, and many, many others.

The osage orange tree’s thorns are too widely spaced to deter deer, but would have made a mammoth think twice before grabbing at the branches with its trunk. The thorns also grow much higher than deer can browse. Trees that bear thorns generally don’t grow them in the upper branches. There’s no point in wasting energy growing thorns where nothing is going to eat the leaves anyway. If there are thorns beyond reach of existing browsers, the tree must have evolved when something with a taller reach liked to eat its leaves.

The term “evolutionary anachronism” is used to describe aspects of a plant, like the Osage orange’s thorns and fruit, that evolved due to pressures of animals that are now extinct. Scientists have observed evolutionary anachronism plants throughout the world. For instance, the lady apple tree, which grows in northern Australia and parts of New Guinea. It can grow up to 66 feet tall, or 20 meters, and produces an edible red fruit with a single large seed. It’s a common tree these days, probably because the Aboriginal people ate the fruit, but before that, a bird called genyornis was probably the main seed disperser of the lady apple.

In episode 217 we talked about the genyornis, a flightless Australian bird that went extinct around 50,000 years ago but possibly more recently. It grew around 7 feet tall, or over 2 meters, and recent studies suggest it ate a lot of water plants. It would have probably eaten the lady apple fruit whenever it could, most likely swallowing the fruits whole and pooping the big seeds out later.

Way back in episode 19 we talked about a tree on the island of Mauritius that relied on the dodo’s digestive system to abrade its seeds so they could sprout. It turns out that study was flawed and the seeds don’t need to be abraded to sprout. They just need an animal to eat the flesh off the seed, either by just eating the fruit and leaving the seed behind, or by swallowing the entire fruit and pooping the seed out later, and that could have been done by any number of animals. The dodo probably did eat the fruits, but so did a lot of other animals that have also gone extinct on Mauritius.

In June of 2025, a study was published showing that the gomphothere Notiomastodon, which lived in South America until about 10,000 years ago, definitely ate fruit. Notiomastodon was an elephant relation that could probably grow almost ten feet tall, or 3 meters. It probably lived in family groups like modern elephants and probably looked a lot like a modern elephant, at least if you’re not an elephant expert or an elephant yourself. The 2025 study examined a lot of notiomastodon teeth, and it discovered evidence that the animals ate a lot of fruit. This means it would have been an important seed disperser, just like the African forest elephant that we talked about earlier.

Another plant that nearly went extinct after the mammoth did is a surprising one. Wild ancestors of modern North American squash plants relied on mammoths to disperse their seeds and create the type of habitat where the plants thrived. Mammoths probably behaved a lot like modern elephants, pulling down tree limbs to eat and sometimes pushing entire trees over. This disturbed land is what wild squash plants loved, and if you’ve ever prepared a pumpkin or squash you’ll know that it’s full of seeds. The wild ancestors of these modern cultivated plants didn’t have delicious fruits, though, at least not to human taste buds. The fruit contained toxins that made them bitter, which kept small animals from eating them. Small animals would chew up the seeds instead of swallowing them whole, which is not what the plants needed. But mammoths weren’t bothered by the toxins and in fact probably couldn’t even taste the bitterness. They thought these wild squash were delicious and they ate a lot of them.

After the mammoth went extinct, the wild squash lost its main seed disperser. As forests grew thicker after mammoths weren’t around to keep the trees open, the squash also lost a lot of its preferred habitat. The main reason why we have pumpkins and summer squash is because of our ancient ancestors. They bred for squash that weren’t bitter, and they planted them and cared for the plants. So even though the main cause of the mammoth’s extinction was probably overhunting by ancient humans, at least we got pumpkin pies out of the whole situation. However, I personally would prefer to have both pumpkin pie and mammoths.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 441: Mean Birds

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:25 — 12.8MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Thanks to Maryjane and Siya for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Look, don’t touch: birds with dart frog poison in their feathers found in New Guinea

The hooded pitohui:

The rufous-naped bellbird:

The regent whistler:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about some birds that by human standards seem pretty mean, although of course the birds are just being birds. Thanks to Maryjane and Siya for their suggestions this week!

We’ll start with Maryjane’s suggestion, the Northern shrike. It lives in North America, spending winter in parts of Canada and the northern United States. In summer it migrates to northern Canada. It’s a lovely gray and black bird with a dark eye streak, white markings on its tail and wings that flash when it flies, and a hooked bill. It’s a strong bird about the size of an American robin, and both the male and female sing. They will sometimes imitate other bird songs, and during breeding season a pair will sing duets. The Northern shrike looks very similar to the loggerhead shrike that lives farther south, in the southern parts of Canada and throughout most of the United States and Mexico.

Most important to us today, the Northern shrike is sometimes called the butcher bird, because in the olden days, butchers would hang meat up to cure–but we’ll get to that part.

It prefers to live in the edges of a forest near open spaces, and in the summer it lives along the border of the boreal forest and tundra. While it’s just a little songbird, in its heart it’s a falcon or hawk. It eats a lot of insects and other invertebrates, especially in summer, but it mainly kills and eats other songbirds and small mammals like mice and lemmings, even ones that are bigger and heavier than it is.

The shrike has ordinary feet for a perching bird, not talons, but its feet are strong and can hold onto struggling prey. Its beak is deadly to small animals. The bill has a sharp hook at the end and is notched so that it has two little projections that act like fangs. It will hover and drop onto its prey, or grab a bird in mid-flight and bear it to the ground to kill it. Sometimes it will hop along the ground until it startles a bird or insect into flying away. It will even flash the white patches on its wings to frighten hidden prey into moving.

If the shrike kills a wasp or bee, it will remove the stinger before eating it. It will pick off the wings of large insects and will sometime beat a dead insect against a rock or branch to soften it up and break off parts of the hard exoskeleton before eating it.

Shrikes are territorial and will chase away birds that are much bigger than them, like ducks and even geese. During nesting season, the female takes care of the eggs and the male provides food for her. To prove that he can provide lots of food for the female while she’s incubating the eggs, he will cache food throughout his territory in advance. This is something shrikes do anyway, but it’s especially important during nesting season.

If a shrike catches an animal it doesn’t want to eat right away, it will store it for later. It will cram it into a crack in a rock, impale it on a thorn or other sharp item like the points of a barbed wire fence, or wedge it into the fork of a tree branch. Then it can come back and eat it in a day or two when it’s hungry, or take the food to its mate.

When the eggs hatch, both parents help feed the babies. When the babies are old enough to leave the nest, the parents go their separate ways, but they will often each take some of the fledglings with them so they can continue to feed them and help them learn to hunt. Since a nest can have as many as nine babies, it’s not always possible for one parent to take all the babies. The siblings stick together even once they’re mostly grown and independent, often through their first winter.

This is what a Northern shrike sounds like:

[Northern shrike call]

We talked about some poisonous birds in episode 222, but Siya wanted to learn more about them. In that episode we mostly talked about the hooded pitohui, but since then, two more poisonous birds have been discovered in New Guinea.

Let’s refresh our memories about the hooded pitohui, mostly because its discovery by scientists is such a fun story.

The hooded pitohui lives in forests throughout much of New Guinea and eats seeds, insects and other invertebrates, and fruit. It’s related to orioles and looks very similar, with a dark orange body and black wings, head, and tail. It’s a social songbird that lives in family groups where everyone works to help raise the babies.

The people who live in New Guinea knew all about its toxicity, of course. They mentioned this to European naturalists as long ago as 1895, but weren’t believed, because the scientists had never heard of a toxic bird. It wasn’t until 1989 that a grad student studying birds of paradise made a surprising discovery.

Jack Dumbacher was trying to net some birds of paradise to study but kept catching pitohuis in his nets. He would untangle the birds and let them fly away, but naturally they were upset and one scratched him. He was in a hurry so he just licked the cuts clean. His tongue started to tingle, then burn, and then it went numb.

Fortunately the effects didn’t last long, but he mentioned it to another researcher who had had a similar experience. They realized something weird was going on, so Dumbacher asked some of the local people what the cause might be. They all said, “Yeah, don’t lick the pitohui bird.”

Dumbacher did, though, because sometimes scientists have to lick things. The next time his nets caught a pitohui, Dumbacher plucked one of its feathers and put it in his mouth. His mouth immediately started to burn.

Dumbacher was amazed to learn about a toxic bird, but it took a year for anyone else to take an interest, specifically Dr. John W. Daly, an expert in poison dart frogs in Central and South America. Back in the 1960s while he was studying the frogs, in order to determine which ones were actually toxic and which ones weren’t, he frequently poked a frog and licked his finger, so Daly completely understood Dumbacher putting a feather in his mouth.

Maybe don’t put random stuff in your mouth. Both Dumbacher and Daly were lucky they didn’t die, because it turns out that poison dart frogs and pitohuis both contain one of the deadliest neurotoxins in the world, called batrachotoxin.

A chemical analysis determined that both animals excrete the same toxin. In captivity, poison dart frogs lose their toxicity. Daly was the one who figured this out, but he couldn’t figure out why except that he was pretty sure they absorbed the toxins from something they were eating in the wild. He thought the same might be true for the pitohui.

Dumbacher agreed, and after he achieved his doctorate he started making expeditions to New Guinea to try to find out what. Both he and Daly thought it was probably an insect. But there are a lot of insects in Papua New Guinea and he couldn’t stay there and test insects for toxins all the time. He came and went as often as he could, and to make his trips easier he left his equipment in a village rather than hauling it back and forth with him.

What he didn’t know is that one villager, named Avit Wako, had gotten interested in the project. When Dumbacher was gone, he continued the experiments. In 1995 Dumbacher sent a student intern to the village, since he didn’t have time to go himself, and Avit Wako said, “Hey, good to see you! I solved your problem. The toxin comes from this particular kind of beetle.” He was right, too. The toxin comes from beetles in the genus Choresine.

But the pitohui isn’t the only toxic bird in New Guinea. In 2018 and 2019, two researchers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark got interested in poisonous birds and did some studies. One of the scientists is Kasun Bodawatta, whose colleagues thought he was having a rough time during the trip. The life of a scientist in the field can be hard, and Bodawatta kept having issues with a runny nose and weepy eyes. It wasn’t allergies or exhaustion, though, but the result of handling poisonous birds and their feathers. He described it as feeling “like cutting onions, but with a nerve agent.”

Bodawatta’s team discovered that two more birds in New Guinea contain the same toxins as the pitohui in their feathers and skin. The rufous-naped bellbird is gray-brown with white and yellow markings, and a patch of rufous on the back of its head. The regent whistler is black and yellow with a white patch on its throat. Both eat insects as a large part of their diets, and both show similar genetic mutations that allow them to sequester the Choresine toxins in their feathers and skin. Not only does this keep potential predators from eating the birds, it also probably helps kill mites and other parasites that might otherwise want to live in their feathers.

A 2023 study on the birds’ toxins discovered something new. In addition to the neurotoxin the birds absorb from beetles, the regent whistler’s skin also contains a different toxin that doesn’t have anything to do with beetles or other insects. The regent whistler’s skin glands contain a population of symbiotic bacteria that secrete a completely different toxin made of previously unknown molecules. The toxin helps protect the birds from harmful bacteria and fungi that are known to infect the skin and feathers of birds.

In 2024, a team of microbiologists and chemists began studying the antimicrobial secretions in hopes of creating a new type of antimicrobial drug for use in humans and other animals. So thank you, little birds, and thank you to the scientists and citizen scientists who study them.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 440: Trilobites!

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:27 — 11.7MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Thanks to Micah for suggesting this week’s topic, the trilobite!

Further reading:

The Largest Trilobites

Stunning 3D images show anatomy of 500 million-year-old Cambrian trilobites entombed in volcanic ash

Strange Symmetries #06: Trilobite Tridents

Trilobite Ventral Structures

A typical trilobite:

Isotelus rex, the largest trilobite ever found [photo from the first link above]:

Walliserops showing off its trident [picture by TheFossilTrade – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133758014]:

Another Walliserops individual with four prongs on its trident [photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about an ancient animal that was incredibly successful for millions of years, until it wasn’t. It’s a topic suggested by Micah: the trilobite.

Trilobites first appear in the fossil record in the Cambrian, about 520 million years ago. They evolved separately from other arthropods so early and left no living descendants, that they’re not actually very closely related to any animals alive today. They were arthropods, though, so they’re distantly related to all other arthropods, including insects, spiders, and crustaceans.

The word trilobite means “three lobes,” which describes its basic appearance. It had a head shield, often with elaborate spikes depending on the species, and a little tail shield. In between, its body was segmented like a pillbug’s or an armadillo’s, so that it could flex without cracking its exoskeleton. Its body was also divided into three lobes running from head to tail. Its head and tail were usually rounded so that the entire animal was roughly shaped like an oval, with the head part of the oval larger than the tail part. It had legs underneath that it used to crawl around on the sea floor, burrow into sand and mud, and swim. Some species could even roll up into a ball to protect its legs and softer underside, just like a pillbug.

Because trilobites existed for at least 270 million years, there were a lot of species. Scientists have identified about 22,000 different species so far, and there were undoubtedly thousands more that we don’t know about yet. Most are about the size of a big stag beetle although some were tinier. The largest trilobite found so far lived in what is now North America, and it grew over two feet long, or more than 70 centimeters, and was 15 inches wide, or 40 cm. It’s named Isotelus rex.

I. rex had 26 pairs of legs, possibly more, and prominent eyes on the head shield. Scientists think it lived in warm, shallow ocean water like most other trilobites did, where it burrowed in the bottom and ate small animals like worms. There were probably other species of trilobite that were even bigger, we just haven’t found specimens yet that are more than fragments.

Because trilobites molted their exoskeletons the way modern crustaceans and other animals still do, we have a whole lot of fossilized exoskeletons. Fossilized legs, antennae, and other body parts are much rarer, and preserved soft body parts are the rarest of all. We know that some trilobite species had gills on the legs, some had hairlike structures on the legs, and many had compound eyes. A specimen with preserved eggs inside was also found recently.

Some incredibly detailed trilobite fossils have been found in Morocco, including details like the mouth and digestive tract. The detail comes from volcanic ash that fell into shallow coastal water around half a billion years ago. The water cooled the ash enough that when it fell onto the trilobites living in the water, it didn’t burn them. It did suffocate them, though, since so much ash fell that the ocean was more ash than water.

The ash was soft and as fine as powder, and it covered the trilobites and protected their bodies from potential damage, while also preserving the body details as they fossilized over millions of years. The fossils were discovered in 2015, about 509 million years after the trilobites died, and are still being studied.

Two species of trilobite have been found at this Morocco site, and the team is using non-invasive technology to study the preserved insides in one exceptionally preserved specimen. Its entire digestive system is intact, probably because the poor trilobite ended up swallowing a lot of ash before it died. The ash kept the soft tissues from decomposing.

Some trilobites had spines growing from their head shields and even from the rest of the exoskeleton. Scientists think these may have helped protect the animals from being eaten, but they might also have helped them navigate more easily in the water without getting flipped over by currents. One genus of trilobite, Walliserops, even had a structure sticking out from the front of its head called a trident.

The trident grew forward and slightly upward from the head, then split into three prongs. Scientists aren’t sure what it was for, but suggest that it acted as a nose spike like some modern beetles have, which allowed trilobites to fight each other for resources or mates. The tridents weren’t completely symmetrical, and one individual has even been found with a four-pronged trident. (I guess you would call that a quadrent.) Some species had long tridents, some short, but there’s no evidence that only males or only females had them.

Electron microscopes and other modern imaging technology have allowed scientists to learn more about what the trilobite looked like when it was alive. This includes some hints about different species’ coloration and markings. Most trilobites had good vision and were probably as colorful as modern crustaceans. Some rare trilobite fossils show microscopic traces of spots and stripes. One species studied may have had a brown stripe that faded to white along the edges of the body.

All trilobites went extinct at the end of the Permian, about 250 million years ago, during the extinction event called the Great Dying. We talked about it in detail in episode 227 so I won’t go over its causes and effects again except to say that an estimated 95% of all marine animals went extinct during that event. The Great Dying ended the trilobite’s successful 270 million year run on this amazing planet.

When I was little, I found trilobites fascinating. They were so common for so long, and then they were gone. I’ve always wondered if some trilobites survived the Great Dying and were still alive in the deep sea. I’m not the only one who’s wondered that, so let’s talk a little more about why the trilobites went extinct and how some of them might have survived.

Almost all trilobites we know of lived in shallow coastal water. We have trilobite tracks of an ancient low tide shore, which tells us that at least some species could leave the water and venture onto land occasionally, possibly the first animals on earth to do so. Coastal water is well oxygenated and we know trilobites had trouble surviving anoxic events, when the water where they lived had much less oxygen than usual. Anoxic events are actually what led to the Great Dying, but it wasn’t the first time the world’s oceans became less oxygenated. It happened in earlier extinction events too during the Devonian, around 372 and 359 million years ago, and each time many species and genera of trilobites went extinct. The trilobite was already in decline when the Great Dying occurred, with only a handful of genera left, and the extinction event finished them off once and for all according to the fossil record.

But we do know of a few species of trilobite that were adapted to the deep sea. Deep-sea animals have to evolve to be tolerant of low-oxygen conditions. The deep sea is also very little known by humans. It’s possible, even if it’s unlikely, that deep-sea trilobites survived the Great Dying and that their descendants are still around, unknown to science.

One interesting note, and an ongoing mystery about trilobites, is that while we know they were arthropods, we don’t actually know which branch of the phylum Arthropoda they’re most related to. That’s because there are no ancestral versions of the trilobite that have ever been found. When they appear in the fossil record, they’re already recognizably trilobites. It’s possible that the ancestral forms didn’t have exoskeletons that were likely to fossilize, or that we just haven’t found the right fossil bed yet. Until we learn more, it’ll remain a mystery.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!