Episode 454: Bats!

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This week we’re going to learn about a bunch of bats! Thanks to John, Murilo, and Alexandra for their suggestions!

Further reading:

Why Bats Can’t Walk: The Evolutionary Lock That Keeps Them Flying

On a Wing and a Song—Bats Belt out High-Pitched Tunes to Woo Mates

Why some bats hunt during the day

Puzzling Proto-Bats

A pekapeka just walking around catching bugs on the ground [photo by Rod Morris, from link above]:

BLOOOOOOD! but a really cute smile too:

The western red bat looks ready for Halloween!

Show transcript:

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

This week as monster month continues, we’re going to learn about bats! We’ve talked about bats in lots of previous episodes, but we have a lot of really neat information in this one that we’ve never covered before. Thanks to John, Alexandra, and Murilo for their suggestions!

John suggested we learn about diurnal bats and also asked if there are any flightless bats, maybe ones that live on islands. There are lots of island-living bats, and many birds that live on islands evolve to be flightless. It makes sense that bats might do the same thing–but I couldn’t find any information about any known bat that has lost the ability to fly.

The reason seems to be how highly derived bats are. That means they’re specialized, the only mammal known that has ever evolved true flight. Unlike birds, which don’t need to use their legs when flying, bats’ legs are actually part of the wings. The wing membranes, called patagia, stretch not just between the elongated finger bones of the bat’s hands, they also stretch between the arms and legs, and connect the legs too.

A January 2025 study comparing bat skeletons to the skeletons of birds determined that unlike in birds, where the size of the legs doesn’t have anything to do with the size of the wings, in bats the leg size and the wing size are closely related. If a bat evolves smaller wings, its legs also evolve to become smaller. That’s why there are no bats that resemble ostriches, with tiny wings but really long legs.

Another possible reason is that bat legs have evolved to point backwards compared to other animals. It’s not just the feet, the knees are also rotated backwards. That’s why bats hang upside-down when they’re not flying. Many species of bat never land on the ground, because they literally can’t walk at all.

But there are a few species of bats that can walk quite well. One is the increasingly threatened New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat. It lives in a few places in both the North and South Islands, as well as some small islands off the coast, although it used to be much more widespread. It’s also called by its Maori name, the pekapeka.

The pekapeka mainly lives in forested areas and is quite small. It’s brown with a lighter belly, and it has big ears, as do most bats. Its eyes are small and its vision isn’t very good, but it has a good sense of smell. Its wings are small so its legs are correspondingly small too, but its legs are also strong despite their size. It has a clawed thumb toe on its feet and on its wings that helps it climb around in trees when it needs to, and it also spends about half of its time on the ground. It walks just fine, crawling with its wings folded so that the ends point up and back, out of the way. And yes, its legs are rotated backwards as you’d expect in a bat, and it roosts by hanging from its feet in trees.

The pekapeka flies normally and catches insects using echolocation, just like other microbats throughout the world. It especially likes moths. Unlike almost all other bats, it finds a lot of its food on the ground too, using its sense of smell to track down spiders, insects and larvae, and other small invertebrates. It will actually dig into the dirt and leaf litter to find food. It also eats nectar and flowers, and is an important pollinator of some plants.

One great thing about the pekapeka is that the males sing to attract a mate. The sound is so high-pitched that it’s not practical to share it here, because you probably wouldn’t be able to hear it, but I’ll link to an article that has a sample bat song so you can listen.

Another bat that can walk just fine is one suggested by Murilo, the vampire bat. In movies, vampire bats are usually depicted as being humongous, as big as a person! In reality, those big bats are actually megabats, and megabats mostly eat fruit. Megabats are the ones that are sometimes called sky puppies, because they don’t rely very much on echolocation so they don’t have the complicated ears and noses that microbats do. Until recently scientists thought megabats couldn’t echolocate at all, but now we know they can, they’re just not all that good at it. The vampire bat is tiny in comparison.

There are three species of vampire bat alive today. They share the same subfamily, Desmodontinae, but have been classified in different genera because they differ considerably from each other. Their other relations are ordinary bats that eat insects, fruit, and other things that you’d expect from bats. Vampire bats really do eat blood exclusively.

The hairy-legged vampire bat is the most basal of the three species, meaning it retains traits that haven’t changed as much from its ancestors. It feeds exclusively on bird blood. The white-winged vampire bat also mostly feeds on bird blood, but it will sometimes eat the blood of mammals. It’s the common vampire bat that eats the blood of mammals.

Vampire bats probably evolved from ancestors that ate insects. Scientists hypothesize that they might have originally specialized in eating ectoparasites of other animals, or possibly insects that were attracted to animal wounds. If that’s the case, the bat would have already been eating a lot of blood along with the insects, and at some point it started taking a shortcut to getting that yummy blood. We know this has happened at least one other time, in a bird.

I thought we had talked about the red-billed oxpecker in an old episode, but if we did, I couldn’t find it. It lives throughout the savannas of sub-Saharan Africa and is brown with a bright orange bill and eyes, with a yellow eye ring. It eats ticks that it picks off rhinoceroses, cattle, and other large mammals, but it actually mainly eats blood. It’s happy to eat the ticks, because they’re full of blood, and the animals it perches on are happy that it eats ticks, but the bird will also peck at wounds so it can drink blood directly from the animal.

So it’s likely that the vampire bat started out eating ticks or other ectoparasites, then began eating the blood that oozed from the wound after it removed a tick. From there it was a short step to biting the animal to cause blood to flow, and within four million years, it was fully adapted to drinking blood.

The vampire bat has extremely sharp front teeth that stick out so that it can use them to make little cuts in an animal’s skin, after first using its teeth to shave the fur down so it can reach the skin more easily. Its fangs lack enamel, so they stay razor sharp. The vampire bat’s saliva contains anticoagulants, so the blood won’t clot right away and the bat can lick it up until it’s full, which takes about 20 minutes. It digests blood extremely quickly, so that it absorbs the nutrients from the blood and starts urinating the extra liquid within a few minutes of starting to feed. That way it can eat more and it can also stay light enough to take flight if it’s disturbed. If you were wondering, its poop is the same as other bat poop. It does echolocate, although not as expertly as bats that eat insects, but the common vampire bat also has specialized thermoreceptors on its nose that sense heat. It’s the only mammal known that can detect infrared radiation, and the only other vertebrates known that can do the same thing are some snakes.

Because vampire bats have to be able to walk around on animals to find a good spot to bite them, the bats have evolved to be able to walk, run, and even jump just fine. Like the pekapeka, it folds the ends of its wings back out of the way and basically walks on the wrists of its wings and its backwards-pointing feet.

Even though the pekapeka and the vampire bat are comfortable running around on the ground, neither has lost the ability to fly. Being able to fly seems to be baked into being a bat. So while it’s not impossible that a bat might eventually become truly flightless, it’s unlikely.

As for bats that are diurnal, or daytime bats, there are a few. A study published in 2018 determined that of the four known species of bat that routinely go out hunting during the daytime, all four live on islands where there are no predatory birds. That doesn’t mean that all bats that live in places where there aren’t any hawks or eagles or crows are active during the day, because most species are still nocturnal, but that seems to be the one requirement for a daytime bat.

John was also interested in learning about the biggest fossil bat ever found. Bats are delicate creatures and don’t fossilize very well, so the bat fossil record is really fragmentary. For example, until 2015 the oldest pekapeka fossil discovered was only 17,500 years old. In 2015, a new fossilized pekapeka ancestor was discovered on the South Island that’s been dated to 16 to 19 million years ago. The fossil shows that the bat was adapted to walk just as the modern pekapeka is, and its teeth are similar so it probably had a similar diet—but it’s estimated to be three times the size of the pekapeka! That sounds like it must have been a huge bat, but the pekapeka only weighs 15 grams at most. That’s barely more than half an ounce, or about the same weight as a CD or DVD, not counting the case. Its ancestor is estimated to have weighed as much as 40 grams, which is almost as heavy as a golf ball. It’s also what a typical vampire bat weighs, if you were wondering.

An even bigger fossil bat has been discovered in a fossil site in France, a country in Europe, and another in Tunisia, a country in North Africa. It’s called Necromantis and is estimated to have weighed as much as 47 grams, which is the same weight as two mice. Two nervous mice, because Mecromantis had strong jaws and big teeth, which suggests it ate small vertebrates–like mice. It lived between 44 and 36 million years ago in areas that were most likely tropical.

An ancestor of the vampire bat was even bigger, possibly as much as 60 grams. That’s just over 2 ounces! That’s a bit heavier than a tennis ball. It lived in South America during the Pleistocene, so recently that in addition to fossils, we also have subfossil remains. That means they’re mineralized but not yet fully fossilized. It’s called Desmodus draculae, and it was most likely still around when humans migrated to South America around 25,000 years ago. Big as it was, it still wasn’t as big as a typical megabat.

Because bat fossils are so rare, it’s led to a scientific mystery. We don’t have any fossils of bat ancestors that weren’t yet bats, but were evolving into bats. In other words, we don’t know what bats looked like before they evolved to be flying animals. The best guess is that the earliest bat ancestors were shrew-like animals that lived in trees and ate insects.

So far we haven’t mentioned any bats that live in Arizona, suggested by Alexandra, so let’s learn about the western red bat. Most bats are black, gray, or brown in color, but the western red bat is a cheerful orange with white shoulder patches and black wing membranes. It’s ready for Halloween all the time! Males are usually more brightly colored than females.

The western red bat lives throughout western North America in summer. It migrates to the southern parts of its range in winter, as far south as Central America. It’s also called the desert red bat but it actually spends most of its life in forests, where its red coat blends in with dead leaves. It eats insects and while it doesn’t spend much time on the ground, every so often it will drop to the ground to catch an insect before hopping back into the air. Not only that, but when the western red bat migrates, it will sometimes fly along with flocks of migrating birds in the daytime.

Unlike many bats, the western red bat is solitary most of the year. Also unlike most bats, instead of having just one baby at a time, it can have up to four babies in a litter. The mother has four nipples instead of just two as in most bats, and for the first three or four weeks of the babies’ lives, the mother has to carry them around while she hunts, until they learn to fly.

As a last note about bats, Murilo specifically mentioned that vampire bats carry diseases that humans can catch. (If diseases bother you, you can stop listening now because we’re almost done.) The common vampire bat does occasionally bite humans, usually the bare big toe of someone sleeping outside, or sometimes the earlobe or even the nose. Vampire bats do show a lot of resistance to blood-borne diseases, but they still spread diseases. The best way to avoid catching a disease from a vampire bat is to not sleep outside without shelter if you can avoid it, if you’re in an area of South America where vampire bats live. That means that if you’re out camping, bring a tent even if it’s hot. Also, avoid eating the meat of wild boar from South America. Not only can boars catch diseases from vampire bats that they pass on to humans, but wild boars also eat fruit partially eaten by fruit bats that also carry diseases. The fruit bats drop partially eaten fruit, the wild boar eats the fruit along with the saliva left on it by the bat, and then the boar can get sick from the saliva.

Most mammals can catch rabies. If you see a bat out in the daytime crawling on the ground, don’t assume that you’re seeing a very rare daytime bat that can also walk around like a pekapeka. Leave the bat alone and contact animal control, because most likely the poor bat has contracted rabies. If you touch the bat, even if it doesn’t bite you, you will have to get a series of rabies vaccines to make sure you don’t come down with rabies, which is an incurable disease and always fatal. That is way scarier than anything else we’ve ever talked about on monster month episodes!

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 453: The Skeleton Coast

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It’s October, AKA Monster Month! Let’s learn about some animals of the Skeleton Coast–which sounds spooky, but actually isn’t.

Lots of brown fur seals [photo by Robur.q – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

The desert plated lizard [photo by redrovertracy, some rights reserved (CC BY) – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/45483586, CC BY 4.0]:

Rüppell’s korhaan [photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

The pearl spotted owlet is cute rather than spooky, but it has a haunting call [photo by Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

Show transcript:

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

It’s October at last, and that means monster month! To start us off this year, we’re going to learn about animals of the Skeleton Coast, which sounds a lot more spooky than it actually is.

The Skeleton Coast is a stretch of coastline 310 miles long, or 500 km, on the Atlantic coast of Africa. It’s part of Namibia, a huge country in southern Africa that’s mostly quite dry, with two deserts within its borders. Because the country gets so little rainfall, it has to conserve water for its people, animals, and crops, so the government is serious about conservation and natural resources. It’s home to one of the most cutting-edge water treatment plants in the world, and since the government’s establishment in 1993, it’s been working to help farmers and citizens in general to practice sustainable natural resource management. It’s also a beautiful part of the world, with amazing geography, and animals and plants found nowhere else in the world, so eco-tourism has been increasing, which helps the economy.

Namibia is also home to the San people, who call the Skeleton Coast “the land god made in anger.” The northern part of the coast is blocked off from land by huge sand dunes, while the southern part is rocky. To get there, you have to cross a desert, and then cross a treacherous marsh that’s hundreds of miles across. Then to get home, you have to go back the way you came across the marsh and the desert, because launching a boat from the Skeleton Coast is impossible if you don’t have a powerful engine.

The sea along the Skeleton Coast is treacherous, with lots of rocks offshore, extremely heavy surf, and frequent thick fogs. There are around a thousand shipwrecks visible along the coast, with the oldest dating to the 1530s, and thousands more documented that aren’t visible or haven’t been found yet. Ships still wreck there sometimes.

Animals do live along the Skeleton Coast, especially seals. The brown fur seal, also called the Cape fur seal, has a huge colony in the northern part of the coast, which is a national park. The brown fur seal lives in various parts of southern Africa, with a subspecies that also lives on some islands off southeastern Australia and Tasmania. A big male can grow 7 ½ feet long, or 2.3 meters, and as you can probably guess from its name, it’s mostly brown in color. Males have a short mane on the neck that’s usually darker than the rest of its fur. It has magnificent long whiskers, especially males.

The brown fur seal mainly eats fish, but it also likes squid and will eat other animals like crustaceans and even birds. It can dive deeply and stay underwater for over seven minutes. It spends most of its life in the water, mainly only coming out on land to breed, give birth, and take care of the babies.

The seals used to be killed for their fur, but this was outlawed in Namibia in 1990 except by special permit, which has allowed the seals’ numbers to increase. The Skeleton Coast is named that mainly because of the massive amounts of seal bones that fur hunters left behind after killing and skinning seals.

Unfortunately, something the rocks around the Skeleton Coast collect are plastic debris, especially fishing debris like nets. So many brown fur seals get caught in the debris and drown that a group of volunteers called Ocean Conservation Namibia go out almost every day to help untangle seals.

The Skeleton Coast doesn’t get any rain to speak of, or only trace amounts in any given year, but it does get thick sea fogs. Most of the plants along the coast are succulents and lichens that don’t need a lot of moisture. A lot of larger animals that hunt seals along the coast actually live farther inland, like hyenas and lions. The animals that live year-round on the coast are much smaller.

That includes the desert plated lizard, which is only found in parts of Namibia and Angola. It’s a slender but strong lizard that can grow over 6 inches long, or 16 cm, not counting its long tail. It’s mainly the color of sand, tan or orange and gray, or gray-white, or some other similar variation, with a white belly, and this is because it lives on sand dunes.

The sand dunes are covered with scrubby vegetation, so in the daytime the lizards come out and eat anything they can find among the plants or in the sand, from seeds and other plant materials to insects and other arthropods. If a potential predator approaches, the lizard will dive into the sand to hide. Its scales are smooth and its legs are short, which allows it to “swim” through sand efficiently and fast. The desert plated lizard lives in small colonies, and although it only lives in this one small part of Africa, it’s extremely common throughout its territory.

A lot of birds visit the skeleton coast—306 of them, in fact, including Rüppell’s korhaan, a species of bustard that only lives in Namibia. It’s a gray and brown bird with black and white markings, with a long neck and fairly long legs. Its body is chunky but its neck is very thin, which makes it look slightly weird but very cute. It mainly eats insects, especially termites, but it will also eat small animals like lizards when it can find them, and it also eats seeds and other plant material. It’s small for a bustard, because bustards are pretty big birds, with the largest species, the great bustard that lives in parts of Europe and Asia, standing over three feet tall, or about a meter. Rüppell’s korhaan is about a third of that size.

Let’s finish with another bird that’s a little more spooky, considering that it’s October. It’s the pearl-spotted owlet, a little owl that’s found throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, including along the Skeleton Coast. It’s a very small owl, barely more than 8 inches long, or 21 cm. It’s brown with lots of white speckles and streaks, yellow eyes, and two black spots on the back of its head that look like MORE EYES. It shares this trait with some other species of owl, including the northern pygmy owl of western North America, and in fact the two owls belong to the same genus, so they’re closely related.

The pearl spotted owlet is active during the day, but it mostly hunts at night. Since it’s such a small owl, barely larger than a typical songbird, it eats lots of insects, but it will also eat other small birds, bats, lizards, and any other small animal it can catch.

It’s not a very spooky-looking owl, despite having eye spots on the back of its head, but it has a spooky call. Listen to this and be glad you’re not a little bat hearing this sound and wondering if you’re in danger:

[owl call]

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 452: Rare Wallabies and Two Hoofed Beasts

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Thanks to Brody, Oz, and Sam for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Chasing gold

Two spectacled hare-wallabies hanging out under a spinifex bush [picture from this site]:

A regular swamp wallaby [photo by jjron – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4022233]:

The glorious golden swamp wallaby [photo by Jack Evershed, taken from the first article linked above]:

The takin can also be golden:

The gaur is so incredibly big! It’s so big, honestly, it’s just ridiculous:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have suggestions from Oz, Sam, and Brody, with some interesting mammals!

Let’s start with Brody’s suggestion, the wallaby! It’s been a while since we talked about the wallaby, which is an adorable marsupial closely related to the kangaroo. It’s native to Australia and New Guinea, part of the family Macropodidae.

One thing everyone knows about kangaroos, which is also true for wallabies, is that they hop instead of running. Their hind legs are extremely strong with big feet, and in fact the word Macropodidae means big feet. The animal hops by leaning forward and jumping, with its big hind feet leaving the ground at about the same time, and landing at the same time too before it bounces again. Its big tail helps it balance.

We talked about the wallaby last in episode 390, so let’s learn about some species of wallaby that we didn’t talk about then. For example, the spectacled hare-wallaby. It’s a small species that’s common in northern Australia and parts of Papua New Guinea. It’s active at night and is mostly solitary, so unless you’re wandering around at night you might not have seen one. It’s called the spectacled hare-wallaby because it has orange-colored fur around its eyes so that it looks sort of like it’s wearing glasses. The rest of its fur is brown, gray, and golden. Its ears are small and its tail and hind legs are very long, with short little front legs. It’s very cute.

The spectacled hare-wallaby prefers sandy or stony areas, like dunes and shrubland, where it can find lots of plants to eat but can easily hop away if it spots a predator. It’s smaller than a domestic cat, but it can travel incredibly fast when it wants to.

If you live along the eastern part of Australia, you might have seen the swamp wallaby, also called the black wallaby because it’s mostly dark gray or gray-brown in color, often with a white tip to the tail. It’s stocky and much larger than the spectacled hare-wallaby, almost three feet tall, or 85 cm, when it’s sitting up. It doesn’t just live in swamps but also likes forests and other areas with lots of places to hide. Unlike the spectacled hare-wallaby, it’s not that fast and can’t always outrun potential predators, but it’s good at hiding because its fur is so dark.

Most wallabies are grazers, meaning they mainly eat grass, but the swamp wallaby is a browser. Instead of having grinding teeth to break down grass, its teeth are sharper for cutting through plant material like bushes, shrubs, and ferns. The swamp wallaby will even use its front legs to pull branches into reach so it can eat the leaves.

Wallabies are marsupials, meaning the babies are born extremely early by our standards, crawl into the mother’s pouch and clamp onto a teat, and continue to develop in the pouch. Wallabies usually only have one baby at a time, but the mother swamp wallaby has two babies in its pouch almost all its adult life. The swamp wallaby has two uteruses, and a few days before the first baby is ready to be born, the female comes into estrus again, meaning she’s ready to mate. By the time her first baby is born, she’s already pregnant with her second baby. When the second baby is born, the first baby is old enough that’s it doesn’t spend all the time in the pouch—but by then, she’s already pregnant with her third baby. By the time the third baby is born, the first baby is grown up and on its own, the second baby is old enough that it isn’t in the pouch all the time, and—you guessed it—the mother is already pregnant with baby four. It sounds exhausting, but it works well for the swamp wallaby.

As I mentioned, the swamp wallaby is also called the black wallaby, but there’s a rare color variation that’s called a golden swamp wallaby. It’s still a swamp wallaby but its fur is golden yellow and it has a white face. The coloration is due to a mutation in coat color, but golden swamp wallabies seem to be perfectly safe in the few areas where they’re found, so it doesn’t seem to be a detriment. Some scientists suspect the color morph is helpful in open forests with sandier soil, which is exactly where the golden swamp wallabies are found.

Speaking of golden animals, let’s talk next about the takin, suggested by Sam. We talked about the golden takin back in episode 218, which is a subspecies of takin. The takin is closely related to sheep and mountain goats, but it looks more like a small musk ox.

The takin lives in the eastern Himalaya Mountains, and is a strong, stocky animal with a lot of adaptations to intense cold. It has a thick coat that grows even thicker in winter, with a soft, dense undercoat to trap heat next to the body. It also has large sinus cavities that warm the air it breathes before it reaches the lungs, which means it has a big snoot. Its skin is oily, which acts as a water repellent during rain and snowstorms. In spring it migrates to high elevations, but when winter starts it migrates back down to lower elevations where it’s not quite as cold.

It will eat just about any plant material it can reach, including tree bark, tough evergreen leaves, and bamboo. It sometimes shares the same bamboo forests where pandas live. It will even sometimes push over small trees so it can eat the leaves. It visits salt licks regularly, and some researchers think it needs the minerals available at salt licks to help neutralize the toxins found in many plants it eats.

Both male and female takins have horns, which grow sideways and back from the forehead in a crescent and can be almost three feet long, or 90 cm. It can stand over four feet tall at its humped shoulder, or around 1.4 m. Its fur is mainly golden-brown with gray and white patches.

A full-grown takin is big enough and strong enough that it doesn’t have many predators. If a bear or wolf threatens it, it can run fast if it needs to or hide in dense underbrush. But it’s just a little tiny baby compared to our last animal this week, suggested by Oz: the gaur. [pronounced gow-ur]

We’ve only mentioned the gaur once on the podcast, way back in episode 58, when I mispronounced it “gar.” It’s the largest living bovid, also called the Indian bison, although it doesn’t just live in India. It’s native to southeast Asia, but it’s increasingly rare due to habitat loss and poaching, even though it’s a protected animal.

The gaur looks kind of like a domestic cow, but much larger. It’s dark brown and its lower legs are white, as is its nose. It has a fairly short tail and long curving horns that are mostly pale but black at the tips, and its ears are large. Females are lighter in color than males and calves are a pale sandy-brown.

How big is the gaur? A big bull can grow over seven feet high at the shoulder, or 2.2 meters, and it’s even a bit taller if you measure it at the muscular hump just behind the shoulder. It’s an incredibly heavy animal too, with only elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes being heavier than a big bull. A bull can weigh over 3,300 lbs, or 1,500 kg. It’s so massive and muscular that bulls in particular look like they just got back from the gym and they’re flexing to show off.

The gaur is a bovid, but it doesn’t eat very much grass. Like the swamp wallaby, it’s a browser. It’s mainly found in forests, where it eats leaves, flowers, fruit, and even the bark of some trees, and it lives in herds of about a dozen animals each led by a wise old cow.

Almost the only predator that can kill a full-grown gaur is a tiger, and naturally the gaur does not like tigers at all as a result. If a herd spots a tiger, they form a ring around the calves to protect them, and if the tiger tries to approach, the adult gaurs attack and try to drive the tiger away. Sometimes the gaurs can even kill the tiger. At night the adult gaurs make a ring around the calves this same way, so that if a tiger or other predator approaches in the night, the adults are ready to defend their babies as soon as they wake up. Personally, if I were a tiger I think I wouldn’t bother trying to kill a gaur.

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 451: the Stellar Jay and the Gulper Eel

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Thanks to Joelle, Jacob, and Anna for their suggestions this week!

Further reading/watching:

Gulper Eel Balloons Its Massive Jaws

Watch rare footage of a shapeshifting eel with ‘remarkably full tummy’ swimming in the deep sea

The beautiful stellar jay:

The maybe not quite as beautiful but really awesome gulper eel (with its mouth full of water, image taken from first video linked above):

The same eel as above but with its mouth open so you can see just how big it is!

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about a bird suggested by Joelle, Jacob, and Anna, and a weird fish also suggested by Jacob.

Let’s start with the bird, the stellar jay, also called Steller’s jay! In the last few years there has been a push among bird enthusiasts to change the common names of birds named after people to names that are more general. While Steller’s jay hasn’t officially been renamed to the stellar jay, a lot of people are calling it that already so that’s what we’ll call it here. The word stellar means outstanding, and that’s definitely a good description of this bird.

The stellar jay is a beautiful bird that lives in western North America down into parts of Central America. It’s closely related to the blue jay found in eastern North America, and if you saw it from the middle down you might think it was a blue jay, except that it doesn’t have white markings on its tail and wings. It has a blue tail and wing feathers with dark bars, but from about the shoulders up it looks very different from the blue jay. It’s silvery-gray, brownish, or black on its head, neck, and back. Some populations have a white eyebrow marking that makes the bird look like it’s frowning. It has a crest like the blue jay, but its crest is bigger, spikier like it hasn’t brushed its hair yet, and the bird itself is bigger overall than its eastern cousin.

The stellar jay lives in forests, especially coniferous forests, where it eats pretty much anything it can find. It’s an omnivore that likes insects and other invertebrates, eggs and baby birds of other species, and even small animals like lizards and mice, but it also eats lots of nuts, berries, seeds, and other plant material. It will visit bird feeders, and especially likes sunflower seeds and raw peanuts.

The stellar jay is a corvid, distantly related to crows and magpies, and it shares the corvid trait of being intelligent, sometimes aggressive, and loud. It will imitate hawks in order to scare other birds away from food, and it will often chase smaller birds away from feeders. During nesting season, the birds get a lot quieter, and the male will sneak his way to and from the nest to feed his mate while she’s sitting on the eggs. The stellar jay prefers to build its nest in a conifer, either in a hollow in the trunk or on branches close to the trunk.

This is what the stellar jay sounds like:

[bird calls]

Jacob also suggested we learn about the gulper eel, which is sort of the opposite of the stellar jay. It’s a deep-sea fish with a lot of names, including pelican eel and my favorite, the umbrella-mouth. It’s black or sometimes dark brown and can grow up to about three feet long, or 90 cm. Much of its length consists of a long, whip-like tail.

The gulper eel’s mouth is ENORMOUS, ridiculously enormous, especially considering how slender the rest of the fish is. Its lower jaw is hinged and is extremely long, with a stretchy pouch of skin that forms its mouth and I guess you can call them cheeks. It is a very weird fish. Most of the time it keeps its jaw folded down against its sides, so that the jaws are barely visible and it looks more or less like a regular eelh. But when it wants to, the gulper eel can unfold its jaw and gulp in water to inflate its pouch, which makes it look like a black balloon with a tail. It sometimes does this if it feels threatened so that it looks bigger, but the huge jaws are actually for swallowing animals whole.

Not only can its mouth stretch to engulf animals bigger than the gulper eel is, its stomach can stretch just as much. It has tiny teeth, though, so it’s not likely that it would try to eat animals stronger than it is, because if it swallowed a big fish, that fish might thrash around inside the gulper eel and kill it. More often, the gulper eel’s stretchy mouth and stomach allow it to eat large groups of very small animals, mostly shrimp and other small crustaceans. It also helps it swallow squid and other soft-bodied animals that are larger than it is but not dangerous.

The gulper eel has a well-developed lateral line system, more properly called the octavolateralis system. All fish and some amphibians have this system, and in many species you can see it. It’s a line or a series of dots along the fish’s sides, and it’s actually a series of modified cells that are super sensitive to water motion. The lateral line system is what allows schools of fish to stay in formation while moving around as a group, and it also helps a fish know when a predator is approaching or when potential prey is nearby. It can even help the fish sense obstacles in the water that aren’t moving, like rocks. In the gulper eel, instead of the sensory cells being in a tiny canal under the skin, they’re on the surface to increase the amount of information the fish can gather from tiny water movements.

At the end of the tail, the gulper eel has a tiny organ called a caudal appendage, which is translucent. It has tiny tentacles and glows with a pinkish light, although it occasionally flashes red. Some researchers report that the lateral line also sometimes produces bioluminescence. The bioluminescence may lure small animals to the gulper eel the same way the anglerfish’s lure does. It’s possible that the gulper eel sometimes hangs in the deep water with its long tail curved up over its head, waiting for prey to approach, but for the most part it’s an active hunter of small crustaceans and other animals.

You may remember from other episodes that most deep-sea animals can’t see the color red. Some predatory fish, including a species of dragon fish, use that to their advantage by emitting red light that they can see but their prey can’t. It’s possible that the gulper eel’s tail emits red light to help it find groups of the tiny crustaceans it mostly eats. It has very small eyes and we don’t even know if it can see the color red or not. We also don’t know if its bioluminescent tail also gives off other light wavelengths that would act as a lure to small animals, or if it uses its caudal appendage to communicate with other gulper eels.

The gulper eel lives in many of the world’s oceans, especially in tropical areas, in depths up to 9,800 feet, or 3,000 meters. Sometimes it lives in shallower water too. Because it lives so deep most of the time, we don’t know a whole lot about it. Luckily, in the last few years scientists have learned a lot more about it from deep-sea rover observations.

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 450: Geckos and the Snow Leopard

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Thanks for Preston and Pranav for suggesting this week’s topics!

Further reading:

DNA has revealed the origin of this giant ‘mystery’ gecko

Snow Leopards Dispersed Out of Tibetan Plateau Multiple Times, Researchers Say

Conquest of Asia and Europe by snow leopards during the last Ice Ages uncovered

The crested gecko AKA the eyelash gecko:

The fluffy snow leopard:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a couple of suggestions from Preston and one from Pranav! This is the first episode I’ve recorded in my new apartment, so let’s make it a good one.

First, Preston wanted to learn more about the crested gecko, mainly because he has a pet crested gecko named George Washington. That is one of the best gecko names ever!

The crested gecko is also called the eyelash gecko. We’ve talked about it a few times, but not recently at all. It’s native to a collection of remote Pacific islands called New Caledonia, where it spends most of its time in trees, eating insects and other small animals, but also fruit, nectar, and lots of other food. It’s an omnivore and nocturnal, and can grow more than 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It gets its names from the tiny spines above its eyes that look like eyelashes, and more spines in two rows down its back, like a tiny dragon. It can be brown, reddish, orange, yellow, or gray, with various colored spots, which has made it a popular pet. These days all pet crested geckos were bred in captivity, since it’s now protected in the wild.

The crested gecko has tiny claws on its toes, which is unusual since most geckos don’t have claws. It can drop its tail like other geckos if a predator is after it, but the tail doesn’t grow back. Since its tail is prehensile and helps it climb around in trees, you’d think the gecko would have trouble climbing after it loses its tail, but it doesn’t. Maybe that’s because in addition to claws, like other geckos it has basically microscopic hairlike structures on its toes that allow it to climb smooth surfaces like windows and walls and the trunks of smooth trees. It can also jump long distances to get to a new branch.

The crested gecko was discovered by science in 1866, but wasn’t seen after that in so long that people thought it was extinct. Then in 1994, a German herpetologist out looking for specimens after a tropical storm found a single crested gecko. It turns out that the geckos had been fine all along, but because they’re nocturnal and mostly live in trees, scientists just hadn’t spotted any.

While we’re talking about geckos, Pranav requested that we revisit Delcourt’s giant gecko with some updated information. We did mention the new findings back in episode 389, but it’s really interesting so let’s go over it again.

Way back in episode 20 we talked about Delcourt’s giant gecko, which is only known from a single museum specimen donated in the 19th century. In 1979 a herpetologist named Alain Delcourt, working in the Marseilles Natural History Museum in France, noticed a big taxidermied lizard in storage and wondered what it was. It wasn’t labeled and he didn’t recognize it, surprising since it was the biggest gecko he’d ever seen—two feet long, or about 60 cm. He sent photos to several reptile experts and they didn’t know what it was either. Finally the specimen was examined and in 1986 it was described as a new species.

No one knew anything about the stuffed specimen, including where it was caught. At first researchers thought it might be from New Caledonia since a lot of the museum’s other specimens were collected from the Pacific Islands. None of the specimens donated between 1833 and 1869 had any documentation, so it seemed probable the giant gecko was donated during that time and probably collected not long before. More recently there was speculation that it was actually from New Zealand, since it matched Maori lore about a big lizard called the kawekaweau.

In June of 2023, Delcourt’s gecko was finally genetically tested and determined to belong to a group of geckos from New Caledonia, the same archipelago of islands where the crested gecko is from. Many of its close relations are large, although not as large as it is. It’s now been placed into its own genus.

Of course, this means that Delcourt’s gecko isn’t the identity of the kawekaweau, since it isn’t very closely related to the geckos of New Zealand, but it might mean the gecko still survives in remote parts of New Caledonia. It was probably nocturnal and lived in trees, hunting birds, lizards, and other small animals.

Now we’re done with geckos for today, but we’re not done with this episode! Preston also wanted to learn about the snow leopard, and it’s amazing that we’ve never talked about it before! The snow leopard is a big cat that’s most closely related to the tiger, although they don’t look very much alike. The term big cat refers to tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, and jaguars, but it can also include cheetahs and cougars depending on who you ask. Big cats have round pupils instead of slit pupils like domestic cats and other smaller cats.

The snow leopard mostly lives in cold, mountainous areas in parts of Asia, from Siberia to India. It prefers to live in rocky areas where its coat pattern hides it from its prey. Its fur is thick and it can be anywhere from pure white to tan or gray, with black spots and rosettes. Its head is small, its legs relatively short, and its tail is very fluffy and incredibly long. A big male can grow up to 1.5 meters long, or 5 feet, plus a tail that’s almost as long as his body, but he’s only about two feet tall at the shoulder, or not quite 60 cm.

The snow leopard is well adapted to cold and snow. Fur grows on the underside of its paws to keep its feet warm, its paws are really large to act as snowshoes, and its ears are small and rounded to keep the tips from being frostbitten. Its long tail helps it balance when climbing over rocks. Its tail also stores fat, and is so long and fluffy that the snow leopard can use its tail as a blanket when it’s sleeping. Built-in blanket!

Unfortunately for the snow leopard, its thick, beautiful fur has been used as a blanket by humans for a long time, and it’s still sometimes killed for its fur even though it’s a protected species almost everywhere it lives. It’s also sometimes killed by farmers and herders who think the snow leopard will kill their livestock. It actually doesn’t attack livestock very often, and almost never attacks people. It eats small animals of various kinds depending on where it lives, like mice and rats, hares and rabbits, wild goats and sheep, marmots, deer, civets, and even rhesus macaques. It mainly only kills livestock where its wild prey has been reduced because of human activity. It’s also vulnerable to habitat loss and climate change.

Snow leopards are mostly solitary, although a mated pair will hunt together and of course the mother snow leopard teaches her babies to hunt as they get older. Individuals leave scent marks and spray urine to let other snow leopards know they’re around. Males roam widely but females usually stay to a territory that they’re familiar with, although the territory may be quite large.

Most snow leopard cubs are born in the early summer, and a female usually only has two or three babies in a litter. The mother takes care of her babies by herself. She makes a den among rocks and lines it with her belly fur, but cubs are born with a lot of fur already to keep them warm. The mother takes care of them for about two years until they finally leave to find their own territories.

Lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars can all roar. Snow leopards, cheetahs, and cougars can’t. But snow leopards, cheetahs, and cougars can purr, while lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars can’t. The ability to roar is due to special adaptations in the larynx, but these adaptations also mean the animal can’t purr. So basically a cat can either roar or purr but not both and the snow leopard can purr.

We actually don’t know a whole lot about the snow leopard because it lives in such remote places, and one big mystery is how the snow leopard ended up adapted to cold. Most cats, large and small, prefer hot climates. Until recently, we didn’t even have any snow leopard fossils to give us a clue.

Then a collection of leopard fossils revealed some snow leopard fossils mixed in. They’re about a million years old, collected in parts of China, France, and Portugal. A study of the fossils, and a beautifully preserved partial skeleton found in Portugal, has shed light on the migration and evolution of the snow leopard.

The snow leopard was already well adapted for mountainous areas, but when the climate became colder during the Pleistocene, AKA the Ice Age, it evolved to thrive in a cold climate. It spread into many parts of Asia and Europe, especially mountainous areas, out-competing other predators like leopards that weren’t well adapted to cold. With the warming climate after the ice ages ended, the snow leopard was at a disadvantage and gradually died out except around the Tibetan plateau where it still lives today, and we’re very lucky to still have 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 449: The Gloucester Sea Serpent

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This is a chapter of the Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie book, which you can buy or request at the library!

Further reading:

Debunking a Great New England Sea Serpent

A narwhal. I use this picture all the time:

The diseased black snake that was taken for a baby sea serpent:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to have a sea monster episode! This is actually a chapter of the book that I published a few years ago now, Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie, and it’s called the Gloucester Sea Serpent. We had a Patreon episode recently that was about a different sea serpent, and while I was researching that, it was driving me completely nuts, because I kept trying to find the episode where I talked about the Gloucester sea serpent, and I finally remembered that that wasn’t an episode at all. It was just a chapter in the book. Maybe it’s time to record it.

While the Gloucester sea serpent was first mentioned in a traveler’s journal in 1638, it really came to prominence almost two centuries later. On August 6, 1817, two women said they’d seen a sea monster in the Cape Ann harbor. A fisherman said he’d seen it too, but neither the fisherman nor the women were believed. A 60-foot, or 18-meter, sea serpent in the harbor? Ridiculous!

Only a few days later, though, the monster started showing up in Gloucester Bay and attracted major attention—not because it was elusive, but because it was so commonly seen. Sailors, fishers, and even people on shore saw what was described as a huge serpent in the waters of Gloucester Bay, Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. On one occasion more than two hundred people watched it for nearly four hours.

The creature’s length was described as anywhere up to 150 feet long, or 46 meters, and many people said it had a horse-sized head. Some people described its head as being about the same shape as a horse’s too, although with a shorter snout. The body was snake-like and about the thickness of a barrel.

Many people thought the sea monster had humps along the back, usually referred to as bunches or occasionally joints. Others said it undulated through the water in an up-and-down motion, which looked like humps. Others said it had no bunches or humps at all. Most people agreed that its back was dark brown.

One of the earlier witnesses, a man named Amos Story, watched the sea serpent from shore for an hour and a half. He was adamant that it had no bunches, that he only saw at most about 12 feet of its length at one time, or 3.6 meters, and that its head resembled that of a sea turtle. It was also fast, with Story claiming it covered a mile in only three minutes or so. That’s about 20 miles per hour, or 32 kilometers per hour—an incredible speed for an animal in the water.

As it happens, the leatherback sea turtle has been recorded as swimming that fast, and it can grow over 7 feet long, or 2.2 meters, and possibly much longer. It lives throughout the world’s oceans and is just as happy in cold waters as it is in tropical waters. In other words, it’s possible Story actually saw a huge leatherback turtle, which would explain why it had a turtle-like head that it held above the surface of the water at least part of the time. This is something leatherback turtles do. Then again, the leatherback has distinctive ridges and serrations on its back that Story didn’t mention.

So many people reported seeing the sea serpent that the Linnaean Society of New England decided it needed to investigate. The society had only formed a few years before, in 1814, to promote natural history. By 1822 it had disbanded, but in those eight years it accomplished quite a bit, including opening a small museum in Boston. Its most controversial endeavor was the sea serpent investigation.

Members of the Linnaean Society interviewed witnesses, making careful notes that were signed by the interviewees to indicate the details were accurate. These statements tell us a lot about what people saw, although it hasn’t helped us determine what the sea serpent actually was.

For instance, Captain Solomon Allen saw the creature more than once and gave a clear description of it. It was at least 90 feet long, or 27.5 meters, with as many as fifty joints, or bunches. Its head was snake-like—specifically rattlesnake-like, presumably meaning it was wider at the back and had a narrower snout—but the size of a horse’s head. It was dark brown, plain in color, and swam with an undulating side-to-side motion. It dived by sinking straight down, moved quickly, and sometimes seemed to play in the water by swimming in circles.

All this is great information, but it doesn’t resemble any known animal. It also doesn’t necessarily resemble the other witness statements. Let’s go over some of the more detailed sightings and see if we can come to some conclusions.

A man named William Foster reported bunches along the monster’s length, although he also described them as rings. When the animal’s head rose from the water, the first thing Foster saw was what he described as a prong or spear. It was about a foot long, or 30 centimeters, and tapered to a point. His interviewer asked if the spear might have been a tongue, but Foster didn’t think so.

Three men on a schooner named the Laura, becalmed in the mouth of the harbor, witnessed the monster in late August. Sewall Toppan, master of the ship, reported that the monster’s head was the size of a 10-gallon keg, which would have been about 18 inches tall, or 46 centimeters, and 16 inches in diameter, or 40 centimeters. He said its head was held about 6 inches out of the water, or 15 centimeters, and that he could see 10 or 15 feet of its length disappearing into the water, or 3 to 4.5 meters. He didn’t see any kind of prong, but two of his sailors did.

One of the two sailors was Robert Bragg, who reported that the monster was swimming rapidly toward the ship with its head and about 15 feet of its body out of the water, or 4.5 meters. As it drew closer he saw its tongue, which he described as looking like a harpoon about 2 feet long, or 61 centimeters. He even reported that the animal raised its tongue almost straight up several times. He also said it was dark brown and smooth.

The third Laura witness, helmsman William Somerby, corroborated Bragg’s details, including the animal’s tongue, which he mentioned was light brown. As the monster passed within 40 feet of the ship, or 12 meters, Somerby even saw one of its eyes clearly. He said it was the size of an ox’s eye and was completely dark brown or possibly black. He and Bragg both noted that the animal had a bunch above its eyes, presumably meaning a bump or knob of some kind.

All three men said that they were familiar with whales and the animal was not a whale.

August 14 was a warm day and the water was calm. A man named Matthew Gaffney, a ship’s carpenter by trade but in his heart a monster hunter, borrowed a boat and took his brother and a friend with him to row. He also took a musket.

As the small boat approached cautiously, the monster was spiraling around in the water, as various people reported it doing on and off throughout the day. Gaffney waited until the boat was as close as it could safely approach without risking being capsized, then fired a shot at the monster’s head.

He was a good marksman and was certain he hit the animal, which sank immediately below the surface and vanished. Worried that the wounded monster would be enraged once its initial shock wore off, Gaffney and all the other boats on the harbor took off for shore. But when the sea monster resurfaced some distance off, it was obviously unbothered by being shot at. It continued its apparently playful circling around in the harbor.

Several witnesses who saw the monster on August 14, before and after Gaffney’s attempt to shoot it, gave statements. William H. Foster said it at first moved slowly, but then sped up and twisted and turned through the water. Sometimes its head would bend around toward its tail, and Foster specifically said that when that happened, parts of its body between the bunches would raise up as much as 8 inches out of the water, or 20 centimeters, showing that the animal was at least 40 feet long, or 12 meters.

Lonson Nash saw the sea serpent and reported that it moved quickly and left a long wake, and that while it swam underwater sometimes, it didn’t seem to be very far under. He could track its progress underwater by the disturbance it made on the surface. He also saw it double around so that its head was sometimes near its tail, but he mentioned that when it was swimming forward, it appeared perfectly straight.

Later that day, a shipmaster named Epes Ellery saw the monster’s head through a spyglass. He reported that it was flattened on top like a snake’s and that its mouth resembled a snake’s mouth—presumably meaning it had a thin lower jaw. He reported that its joints were the size of two-gallon kegs and rose about 6 inches above the surface, or 15 centimeters. He said the animal swam with a vertical motion, not a side-to-side motion.

An unnamed woman reported that the sea monster’s bunches looked like gallon kegs tied in a line. Another man said he saw the creature’s bunches at the surface as it lay still for a while, and that around 50 feet, or 15 meters, of its length was visible although he couldn’t see its head or tail. Other witnesses that same day reported much the same thing.

Captain Elkanah Finney saw the sea monster from shore later in August, after his son reported seeing something strange in the harbor. Finney first thought it was a bunch of seaweed, but when he looked at it through his spyglass he realized it was an animal moving quickly through the water. He said it might have been 100 feet long, or 30 meters, with 30 or 40 bunches down its length. In fact, he said it looked like a string of buoys and that each bunch was about the size of a barrel.

There are lots of other reports, all of them similar to these. The sea monster, whatever it was, spent a lot of time in and around Gloucester Bay that summer and even returned the following two summers. People were obviously seeing something. The question is what.

Let’s look at the sightings where the monster had a prong or that it stuck out a long, straight tongue. This sounds a lot like a narwhal. A narwhal can grow up to about 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and males, and some females, have a brown or brownish spiral tusk that can grow just over 10 feet long, or 3 meters. Many people think the narwhal’s tusk is a horn that sticks up from its forehead, but it’s actually an elongated tooth that grows through the upper lip. That would explain why some of the witnesses thought it was a tongue.

A young narwhal is black or dark brown, although it grows lighter throughout its life so that old narwhals are almost white. A young animal would also have a short tusk. A narwhal often swims with its head out of the water and a male will sometimes lift his tusk up and down in the air. He can do this easily because, unlike most whales, the narwhal’s neck vertebrae aren’t fused and can bend the head around.

Most importantly, the narwhal is an Arctic animal and isn’t typically found as far south as Massachusetts, although it’s certainly been seen in that part of the ocean on rare occasions. Its rareness, together with its odd appearance compared to other whales, might lead witnesses to think it wasn’t a whale at all but some kind of monster.

That doesn’t explain the bunches, though. The witnesses on the schooner Laura didn’t report seeing any bunches on their sea monster (whose “tongue” reportedly looked like a harpoon), but William Foster’s pronged sea monster did have bunches.

Some researchers have dismissed the bunches, or humps, as a string of narwhals or other small whales traveling in a line. That’s definitely a possibility, but too many witnesses described the bunches as being always partially out of the water, not moving up and down. Not only that, the bunches were seen when the sea monster was lying quietly on the placid surface, not moving, often for long stretches.

Remember, though, that many witnesses described the bunches as resembling a line of buoys or kegs tied on a line. The animal often seemed to swim in circles until its head nearly touched its tail. William Foster reported that when it did this, its body between the bunches would rise several inches out of the water. Lonson Nash said when it was swimming forward, its body appeared perfectly straight.

Maybe witnesses weren’t seeing a long serpentine animal with bumps along its back. Maybe they were seeing a string of kegs used as buoys to keep fishing nets afloat, that had become tangled around a small whale’s tail.

Small kegs or large pieces of cork were sometimes used for this purpose at the time, including in Newfoundland and Norway. If a net tangled around a narwhal’s tail, the animal might have become used to dragging its burden around until the net eventually rotted away and freed the whale. This is something that still happens to whales today with nets and other fishing gear, although these days the nets are all plastic and won’t rot.

Narwhals mostly eat fish and squid, and often dive deeply to find food along the ocean floor. Our entangled narwhal chasing fish underwater might appear to be traveling in playful circles as the net dragged along behind and above it. Pulling all the buoys underwater would probably be difficult for the whale, which would explain why it mostly stayed near the surface.

It’s not a perfect match, of course, but the tangled-narwhal hypothesis fits a lot of the details reported for the Gloucester sea serpent. Narwhals also often travel in small groups, so if the entangled narwhal was with a few friends, that would explain why not every witness saw the bunches.

As for the Linnaean Society of New England, their investigation of the sea monster was excellent for the time. They took the sightings seriously and tried to remain impartial, although the members did seem to start from an assumption that the animal was an actual serpent of some kind.

Unfortunately, they made one fatal blunder. In late September 1817, someone found and killed a snake 3.5 feet long, or a little over a meter, that had bunches all down its spine. It was found only a few miles from Gloucester Harbor. The Linnaean Society decided it had to be a baby sea serpent.

They said so loudly and even proposed a scientific name for the sea serpent. But it wasn’t long before the “baby sea serpent” was identified as a common black snake. The body was dissected and the bunches turned out to be tumors from a diseased spine. The society’s investigation became a joke. But at least we still have the eyewitness accounts they gathered.

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 448: Tennessee water mysteries

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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!

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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

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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

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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!