Monthly Archives: November 2017

Episode 043: The Chinese Ink Monkey

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:24 — 9.7MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week’s almost late but NOT LATE OKAY episode is about the Chinese ink monkey!

A pygmy tarsier, probably not an ink monkey:

Further reading:

The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl P.N. Shuker

Further listening:

Relic: The Lost Treasure Podcast – I’m a guest in episode 15 but all the episodes are great!

Bonus episode since this one is so short (click through and hit play)

Episode transcript:

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

This week’s episode was supposed to be about animals that were saved from extinction by human intervention, but between National Novel Writing Month, the Thanksgiving holidays, and the release of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp I didn’t get the research completed. So that episode will run in a week or two and we’ll learn about something else this week. Something short, because it’s Sunday and I need to get this episode edited and uploaded so you can listen to it first thing Monday morning.

But first, I want to tell you about an awesome podcast who had me as a guest last week. If you don’t already listen to Relic: The Lost Treasure podcast, I highly recommend it. It’s family friendly and a great take on an aspect of history that doesn’t always get the in-depth research it deserves. In between regular seasons, the host, Maxwell, releases roundtable discussion episodes with different people to cover topics that maybe aren’t exactly about lost treasure, but close. I appeared in episode 15, called “Back from Extinction,” where we discussed animals that were declared extinct but have been rediscovered, although not without controversy. I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can go check that one out. I’d planned my own saved from extinction episode as a sort of follow-up, but time got away from me.

So what are we talking about today? In honor of the end of National Novel Writing Month, which is kicking my butt this year, we’re investigating a mystery animal called the Chinese Ink Monkey.

The story goes that in antiquity, as far back as 2,000 BCE, a tiny primate known as an ink monkey was frequently the pet of scholars and scribes in China. It wasn’t just a cute little pet, it was useful. It was intelligent and could be trained to prepare ink, which back in those days came in blocks and had to be ground into powder and mixed with water to the right consistency. It would turn book pages so the scholar could read hands-free, it would hand pens and other items to the scholar, and it was small enough to sleep in the scholar’s brush pot or desk drawer. Such a useful little creature was highly sought after, but was supposed to have gone extinct at some point centuries ago.

According to a book of Chinese lore called The Dragon Book, published in English in 1938, the ink monkey was only around 5 inches long, or 13 cm. Its sleek fur was black and soft and it had red eyes. It was also supposed to drink any ink remaining at the end of the day as its preferred food.

Since ink in those days was frequently made with precious materials like sandalwood, crushed pearls, musk, rare herbs, and even gold, and those things are not just valuable, they’re not all that nutritious, ink monkeys probably didn’t actually drink ink. But was it even a real animal or just a legend?

In April of 1996, the ink monkey story got media attention when a press release from the official New China News Agency announced its rediscovery in the Wuyi Mountains of Fujian Province. The press release didn’t have many details at all. It basically just reported that the animal was mouse-sized and had been found.

The smallest monkey alive today is the pygmy marmoset from South America, which is about 10 inches long, or almost 26 cm. But there is another animal that looks like a monkey but which is no more than about six inches long, or 15 cm, not counting its tail.

The tarsier is a nocturnal primate with huge round eyes, mouse-like ears, and sucker-like discs at the ends of its toes which it uses to climb trees. Its tail is extremely long, as are its hind legs, which helps it jump through the trees where it spends almost its whole life. While the various species of tarsier are only found on various islands of Southeast Asia today, they were once more widespread. One extinct species did live in China, but not recently. Not even remotely recently. More like 35 to 40 million years ago.

The smallest species is the pygmy tarsier, which is only found in central Sulawesi in Indonesia. It was thought extinct for decades until 2000, when it was rediscovered by local scientists. It’s only about four inches long, or 10.5 cm.

There’s still some controversy as to whether the tarsier is actually a primate. DNA studies haven’t cleared it up yet. But one thing is clear: the tarsier is a heckin adorable little guy. Its eyes are each as big as its brain and most pictures of tarsiers taken in daylight show it squinting as though it’s considering an important philosophical question. The tarsier’s fur is soft, usually beige or orangey in color, and its eyes are golden.

We’ve met the tarsier before briefly in episode eight, the strange recordings episode, because the tarsier communicates in infrasound—sounds too high for humans to hear. It’s carnivorous too, mostly eating insects but it will also eat birds, bats, and reptiles when it can catch them.

But back to the press release that the ink monkey had been rediscovered in China. At least one imminent naturalist, Sir David Attenborough himself, suggested that a species of tarsier might easily have been living in China all along without being known to science. While it is doubtful that a tarsier could learn to prepare ink or turn book pages, it’s also possible that if a famous scholar kept one as a pet, the story of its helpfulness might have been added over the centuries.

The mystery of the ink monkey’s rediscovery was cleared up by zoologist Karl Shuker, who is basically the expert on the ink monkey. Most of my research for this episode comes from his book The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals. I’ll put a link in the show notes, of course. He discovered that a few weeks before the official press release, a short account of a discovery was published in the London Times on April 5, 1996. That report was about the discovery of a mouse-sized primate in China, sure, but not a living animal. This was a fossil discovery—specifically, a fossil jaw of an tiny proto-monkey that lived around 43 million years ago.

As Shuker concludes, the confusion probably stems from a poor English translation in the press release, leading to reporters thinking a live animal had been discovered.

But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t once a real primate that gave rise to the Chinese ink monkey legend—whether it’s a tarsier or an actual monkey or something else Maybe one day we’ll find out.

That’s it for this episode. I warned you it would be short. To make it up to you, I’ll unlock another Patreon episode for anyone to listen to, this one about mammoths and mastodons. That one probably should have been a regular episode anyway. I’ll put a link directly to the episode in the show notes and you don’t need a Patreon login to listen to it, just click the link and press play.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 042: Mystery Bears

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:40 — 17.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week we’re going to learn about bears, including a bunch of m y s t e r y  b e a r s!

Hi! I am a panda bear!

A polar bear:

A spectacled bear:

A baby spectacled bear OMG LOOK AT THAT BABY:

The giant short-faced bear was indeed giant:

Further reading:

Shuker Nature

Show transcript:

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

I’m in the mood for a bona fide mystery animal, and I bet you are too. So this week let’s learn about some mystery bears.

There are eight species of bears alive today that we know of: brown, polar, spectacled, sloth, sun, Asian and American black bears, and the giant panda. The other ones you may have heard of, like grizzlies, are subspecies of those eight. For a long time pandas were not considered bears at all, but more closely related to raccoons. These days they’re definitely in the bear box, but they’ve evolved in a completely different direction from other bears for some 19 million years, which is why they’re so different.

Before we get into the mysteries, let’s talk about just how different pandas are from other bears. As you probably know, the panda eats bamboo almost exclusively, unlike all other bears which are either omnivorous or, in the case of the polar bear, carnivorous. To survive on bamboo, the panda has evolved a lot of unusual adaptations. The front paws, for instance, have five toes just like all bears, and also a thumb. The thumb is actually a modified wrist bone that juts out from the base of the paw and helps the panda hold bamboo stalks as it eats the leaves.

Bamboo is not very nutritious. It’s certainly low in protein, especially considering that while the panda eats almost nothing but bamboo, it still has the digestive system of a carnivore. Special microbes in the panda’s intestines help break down the bamboo so the panda can digest it, but it takes a lot of bamboo to provide the energy a panda needs. A panda eats 20 to 30 pounds of bamboo leaves, stems, and shoots every day, or 9-14 kg, which means it also poops a whole lot. Seriously, it poops something like 40 times a day. And it still doesn’t have a lot of energy. It mostly just sits around eating and pooping. But while the panda just chews leaves all the time, it still has bear fangs and it will eat meat and eggs when it can. Researchers think that the panda only became exclusively a bamboo eater about two million years ago.

The panda lives in the mountains of China in only a few places. It used to also live in the lowlands but farming and other development drove it into more remote areas. There are about 50 pandas in captivity these days and somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 pandas in the wild, with the population finally increasing after laws protecting pandas from poaching started to be enforced.

The people of China knew about the panda for centuries, although they were considered rare and elusive even in the olden days, but it wasn’t until 1869 that anyone from outside of China had a clue that gigantic roly-poly black and white bamboo-eating six-toed bears were real. Seriously, would you believe that? In 1869 a French missionary and naturalist bought a dead panda from some hunters, dissected it to study, and sent the skin to a zoologist friend in Paris.

So it’s possible that there are other mystery bears out there, known to the locals who don’t realize their bears are special, just waiting to be spotted by someone who knows a thing or two about bears.

In 1920 a Swedish scientist named Sten Bergman was shown the pelt of a bear by locals during an expedition to the Kamchatka Peninsula. That’s in the very eastern part of Russia on the Pacific coast and is sparsely populated. It’s mountainous with a cluster of active volcanos and it’s well known for the brown bears that live in the area. The Kamchatka brown bears are among the largest brown bear subspecies in the world, almost the size of the closely related Kodiak brown bear. When it stands on its hind legs it can be almost ten feet tall, or 3 meters. It’s mostly harmless to humans. Mostly. It hardly ever kills people. Just, you know, occasionally. The Kamchatka brown bears have long brown fur, sometimes pale brown but usually a sort of medium brown. They’re certainly not black. But the pelt that Dr. Bergman was shown was jet black and had short fur. But it was definitely a bear pelt, and the pelt was definitely enormous—much larger than a brown bear pelt. Bergman also saw a huge skull supposedly from one of the black bears, and a paw print 15” long and 10” wide, or 38 cm by 25 ½ cm.

Unfortunately none of the giant black bears have turned up since, living or dead. It’s possible that the bear was an unusually large brown bear with anomalous fur. Brown bears do have considerable variability in both the color and length of their fur, so it’s not out of the question that occasionally a brown bear is born that is actually black. It’s also possible that this black bear is actually a different species of bear, but that it’s either gone extinct or is extremely rare and only lives in far remote areas of Siberia these days.

But the Kamchatka Peninsula has another mystery bear for us to ponder. In 1987 a hunter named Rodion Sivolobov bought a giant white bear skin from locals. It looked like a big polar bear pelt, but the locals assured him it was from a very specific, very rare type of local bear.

They called it the irkuiem and described it as large but with a relatively small head, relatively short hind legs, and an unusual method of running. It supposedly runs in a sort of rocking motion, bringing both hind legs up to the forelegs, then throwing the forelegs forward together to start a new stride–more like a rabbit’s bounding run than a bear’s typical gait.

Sivolobov sent samples of the pelt to various zoologists in Russia, but they said there wasn’t much they could determine without a skull. But with DNA testing so much more advanced these days, it would be REALLY NICE if Sivolobov would get right on that and get his white bear pelt tested. If it really exists and if he’s not scared he was sold a marked-up polar bear skin with a tall tale.

The polar bear lives in the Arctic and is so closely related to the brown bear that the two species occasionally crossbreed when their range overlaps. Technically polar bears are marine mammals since they hunt seals on sea ice and spend a lot of time in the water. Sometimes a polar bear will drift for long distances on a piece of sea ice, or may swim for days, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean.

Polar bear feet are huge, around 12 inches wide or 30 cm, which helps keep the bear from sinking in the snow since its weight is more widely distributed on broad paws. Think snowshoes. Broad feet also helps it swim faster. The paw pads are bumpy so it’s less likely to slip on ice, and the claws are short and strong for digging in snow and ice. The polar bear stays warm because its body is heavily insulated with fat, plus its fur is thick with a soft undercoat that insulates so well that polar bears really are virtually invisible to heat-sensing radar. Male polar bears grow long fur on their forelegs, apparently because lady polar bears find that attractive. Unlike most other bears, polar bears don’t hibernate.

Georg Wilhelm Steller was a German naturalist who took part in explorations of Kamchatka Peninsula and other areas. He’s the guy that Steller’s sea-cow is named after and one day it’s getting its own episode. Anyway, in 1751 Steller wrote a book called, in English, Beasts of the Sea, and in it he mentions a report of a white sea-bear. He didn’t see it himself, but here’s his account, which I’ve taken from Karl Shuker’s excellent blog ShukerNature. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

Here’s the quote:

“Report, as I gather from the account of the people, has declared that the sea-bear, as it is called by the Rutheni and other people is different. They say it is an amphibious sea beast very like a bear, but very fierce, both on land and in the water. They told likewise, that in the year 1736 it had overturned a boat and torn two men to pieces; that they were very much alarmed when they heard the sound of its voice, which was like the growl of a bear, and that they fled from their chase of the otter and seals on the sea and hastened back to land. They say that it is covered with white fur; that it lives near the Kuril Islands, and is more numerous toward Japan; that here it is seldom seen. I myself do not know how far to believe this report, for no one has ever seen one, either slain or cast up dead upon the shore.”

Shuker suggests that this report may actually be of a fur seal, which is found in the area and has sometimes been called a sea-bear. Then again, fur seals aren’t white. They’re gray or brown and would appear darker in the water.

The Kuril Islands are a string of 56 volcanic islands that stretch between the northeastern tip of Hokkaido, Japan to the southern tip of Kamchatka Peninsula, a distance of about 810 miles, or 1300 km. Some of the largest islands are inhabited by brown bears, but it’s far from the Arctic. Polar bears get overheated easily in warmer areas, so a population of polar bears—or even a stray one—is unlikely that far south.

There are also stories of pure white bears in the forests of Hubei province in China. It’s always possible this is a garbled account of the panda, but maybe not.

In 1864, Inuit hunters supposedly killed a huge bear with yellowish fur. Naturalist Roderick McFarlane acquired the skin and skull and sent them to the Smithsonian, which promptly lost them. That’s the story, anyway. In fact, the Smithsonian did misplace the skin and skull for a while, but zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam found and examined them. He decided it was a new species of bear due to the skull’s odd shape and the light tan color of the fur.

Older polar bears do tend to have yellowish fur so maybe that’s all this bear was. But it might have been something else. As I mentioned earlier, polar bears and various subspecies of brown bear do sometimes crossbreed and produce fertile young. It’s rare, but it happens occasionally both in the wild and in captivity. The resulting babies show traits of both polar bears and brown bears, and tend to be pale brown or tan in color with darker brown paws. Then again, there’s a MonsterQuest episode that I haven’t actually seen where a paleontologist examines the McFarlane skull and states it’s just that of a young female brown bear.

For having only eight species, bears are remarkably widespread and vary considerably in diet and appearance. The sloth bear mostly eats insects, for instance. It lives in India and has shaggy black fur with a pale muzzle and white claws, big floppy ears, and a white V-shaped mark on the chest. It lacks upper incisors, which helps it slurp up insects.

Sloth bears are actually pretty darn awesome. Males often help raise the cubs and mothers carry their babies around on their backs. The sloth bear doesn’t hibernate, probably because it doesn’t really get cold where it lives.

The spectacled bear lives in South America. It’s the last close relative of the giant short-faced bear that went extinct about 11,000 years ago. The spectacled bear is mostly black, although some individuals may appear brown or reddish, and most but not all have lighter markings on the face and chest. Its head is much less bearlike than other bears, with a rounded face and short snout. It mostly eats plants and lives in the Andes Mountains and surrounding areas. It spends a lot of time in trees, and will even build a little platform in a tree to sleep on or store food on.

And you know what? Paddington Bear is modeled on the spectacled bear.

The spectacled bear is not especially scary. Its relative, the giant short-faced bear, was another story. It lived in North America, especially in California, and its remains have been found in the La Brea tar pits. But it also lived as far south as Mississippi. And it was huge. It was simply enormous. It stood up to 6 feet at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters, and twice that when standing on its hind legs. One website I read pointed out that regulation height for a basketball rim is ten feet, which means a giant short-faced bear could dunk the ball every time without doing anything more strenuous than standing up. It was probably an omnivore like most modern bears, but we have mastodon bones that show tooth marks from the short-faced bear.

Naturally, as with just about any extinct animal, people keep hoping they’re not really extinct and occasionally someone reports seeing a giant short-faced bear. Some cryptozoologists speculate that the Kamchatka Peninsula mystery bears may actually be short-faced bears, but since short-faced bear fossils have only been found in North America, it’s probably not likely that there would be any living in Russia. Besides, the short-faced bear would have looked very different from the brown bear, probably shaped more like a colossal spectacled bear. Locals would definitely notice the difference. Moreover, it’s not likely to live in the same area that already has a population of brown bears, since both animals would then be competing for the same resources.

Personally, while the giant short-faced bear is awesome to imagine, I’m perfectly happy with it not wandering around in the forests. Because I like to hike. And I worry enough about the relatively small and harmless American black bear as it is.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 041: Comb Jellies and Sea Sponges THE CONTROVERSY

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:47 — 15.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

We’re learning about comb jellies this week, along with the sea sponge, and the MASSIVE CONTROVERSY ABOUT THE TWO THAT IS PITTING SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTIST I might be overstating it just a bit

The lovely Arctic comb jelly:

The lovely Venus’s girdle comb jelly:

A fossil comb jelly. Probably lovely when it was alive:

A sea sponge (most are not this Muppet-like):

Show transcript:

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

For this week’s episode, we’re revisiting jellyfish, more properly known as jellies. The first jelly episode is far and away our most popular and I can’t figure out why. I mean, I’m glad people like it. This time, we’re going to learn all about comb jellies, which are not really as exciting as true jellies. There is no ship-sinkingly enormous comb jelly lurking in the oceans of the world. But they are really interesting.

When you think of a jelly, you probably picture a roughly bell-shaped thing with long stinging tentacles. But most comb jellies are more like egg-shaped blobs, and either don’t have tentacles at all or only have relatively small tentacles that don’t sting. Although they look alike superficially, comb jellies and true jellies are so different that scientists don’t think they’re very closely related at all. Comb jellies are officially called ctenophores (TEN-oh-fours), spelled with a c-t at the beginning if you were wondering. I looked up the pronunciation. Yeah, I know, I pronounced Pliny wrong all through episode 12, but come on, it looks like it should be pronounced Pliny and not Plinny. It’s not like anyone ever came up to me and said, “Hey, what about that Plinny, what a guy.” I just read the name.

But I digress, inexplicably.

Instead of pulsing its bell to maneuver in the water, a comb jelly has rows of tiny compact filaments called cilia, fused together in combs that help it swim. The combs are also called swimming plates.

There are two main types of comb jellies, those with tentacles and those without tentacles. The ones without are called Nuda, or Beroids, and while they don’t have tentacles, they do have combs of extra-large cilia, called macrocilia, that sever prey into pieces small enough to swallow. Mostly they eat other comb jellies. Beroids also have big mouths, but a beroid can actually seal its mouth shut while it’s moving so it’s more streamlined.

Comb jellies with tentacles are divided into eight orders roughly based on body shape. The most common order, the cydippida, are egg-shaped with a pair of thin tentacles that they use sort of like fishing lines. The tentacles are long and sticky, trapping tiny organisms or particles of food. Some species have branched tentacles but none have more than two. The tentacles can retract—when you see a picture of a comb jelly with a weird spring-like thing sticking out from its bottom, that’s a retracted tentacle, not anything gross like a poop. The tentacles contain cells called colloblasts. When an organism touches a tentacle, the colloblast cells rupture and basically release glue that keeps the prey from escaping.

A cydippid comb jelly also has eight combs that run from the top of the body to the bottom, which makes it look sort of like a fancy decorated egg. Comb jelly cilia are iridescent, by the way, so they reflect light in rainbow patterns. Basically what I’m saying is, these little guys are actually really pretty.

All comb jellies are predators, but most eat plankton and other tiny food, because most comb jellies are really small—only a few inches long at most. Bigger species may eat krill and small crustaceans. The biggest comb jelly, Cestum veneris, more often called Venus’s girdle, can grow some five feet long, or 1.5 meters, but only some two inches, or 5 cm, wide. It looks like a nearly transparent or purplish ribbon and lives in tropical and subtropical seas. I wouldn’t want to touch it, but it’s not exactly dangerous. In fact, it’s so delicate that a diver attempting to touch one may accidentally destroy it instead. A lot of comb jellies are that delicate, making them hard to study, so we still don’t know a whole lot about them.

Comb jellies only have one body opening, called a mouth for convenience sake although the jelly uses it for anything that requires a body opening. Until recently, researchers thought that included pooping. Yeah, now you see why it’s not exactly a mouth. But it turns out that a comb jelly has pores on the opposite end of its body from its mouth opening that it uses to release at least some particles of indigestible food. This is interesting since it helps scientists understand how the anus evolved.

There aren’t that many species of comb jellies, maybe 100 or so. But new ones are discovered occasionally, especially deep-sea comb jellies. While comb jellies that live near the surface of the ocean are usually transparent, many deep-sea species are red, since it’s a color most deep-sea animals can’t see. Most are also bioluminescent, and when threatened some species will secrete a luminescent goo. The predator may get confused and attack the goo while the comb jelly swims away as fast as its frantically waving cilia can take it.

If you’ve listened to episode 15, about the hammerhead shark and megalodon, you’ll remember that we don’t have a lot of shark fossils because shark skeletons are made of cartilage, not bone. We just have a lot of shark teeth, mostly. Now think about how big and solid sharks are, then think about how smooshy jellies are. Then try to imagine what a jelly fossil might look like. Yeah.

We do have some comb jelly fossils, though. But we don’t have many. Like, five. We have five. The oldest are from the mid-Cambrian, some 500 million years ago, but they were very different from the comb jellies living today. They had lots more combs, for one thing—between 24 and 80 instead of 8. Researchers have found other fossils that may be of comb jellies. There’s a good possibility that they were widespread throughout the oceans back then—but from genetic testing and other molecular analysis, it appears that the comb jellies alive today are all descended from a common ancestor that survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction around 65 million years ago. So it’s possible that in addition to so many dinosaurs dying off, almost all comb jellies went extinct then too.

Just think, if that one species hadn’t survived and evolved into the comb jellies we have today, researchers might not have a clue what animal those comb jelly fossils represented. If you know about the Burgess shale fossils that have baffled and fascinated paleontologists for decades now, because so many of the fossils don’t resemble anything living today, then it’ll make sense to learn that a few of those five comb jelly fossils were actually found in the Burgess shale.

There are some other comb jelly fossils discovered in China and dated to 520 million years ago. But they don’t resemble the comb jellies living today at all because they had skeletons and spines. Pretty much every fossil found from the Cambrian had supportive or armored structures, even ones like comb jellies that don’t have those things today. I’ll probably do a whole episode eventually about the Cambrian period and the Burgess shale discoveries.

Anyway, there’s some controversy going on right now regarding whether comb jellies or sponges were the species that gave rise ultimately to all other animals, so let’s take a quick side trip and learn about sponges.

The sponge is a very simple animal, still around today. They don’t have any specialized structures like nerves or a digestive system or a circulatory system or organs. They’re just a sponge, basically. And if you were wondering, the sponge you use to clean your kitchen is named after the sea sponge, not vice versa, and you can still get actual dried sea sponges to use for cleaning. They’ve been used that way for millennia. It wasn’t until 1866 that scientists even realized sponges were animals and not plants.

Living sponges just hang out in the ocean or freshwater, stuck to a rock or something. Water flows through them and washes food and oxygen in and waste out. That’s it. That’s all a sponge does is let water flow through it. I feel like there’s a life lesson to be learned there, but I’m too busy doing ten things at once to figure it out.

Mostly sponges eat bacteria and other tiny food particles, although some eat small crustaceans and a few have developed a symbiotic relationship with plantlike microorganisms, which live safely in the sponge and produce enough food for both it and the sponge. Every so often a sponge will release eggs or sperm into the water. If the conditions around a sponge deteriorate, some species will create bundles of unspecialized cells called gemmules. When conditions improve, the gemmules will either grow into new sponges or, if the sponge that created them has died, it will recolonize the original sponge’s skeleton.

A sponge’s skeleton is a sponge, by the way. If you’ve got a natural sea sponge in your house, that’s what you’re cleaning your kitchen counters with, the skeleton of a sea sponge. Different sponges use different minerals to create their skeletons and most are pretty hard, but the ones sold as natural sponges are softer and throughout history have been used for everything from padding armor, applying paint, and filtering water. Loofah sponges aren’t actually made from sea sponges, though. They’re actually from the dried insides of the sponge gourd. I did not actually know that until just now.

Oh, and guess what else I just learned? There’s a small population of bottlenose dolphins in Western Australia that use sponges. The dolphins frequently hunt close to the bottom of the bay. To keep from scraping its rostrum, or bill, in the sand, a dolphin will sometimes stick a sponge under its chin. Researchers think that one especially smart dolphin figured this out and has been teaching her children how to do it ever since.

So that’s the sea sponge. Useful for many things, not much of a party animal. Compared to sea sponges, comb jellies are intellectual masterminds. Even though comb jellies don’t have brains.

Instead, comb jellies have a nerve net. The nerves are concentrated around its mouth and on its tentacles. It does also contain an organ that helps the jelly sense its orientation, basically so it knows which way is up. It usually swims with its mouth pointing upward, incidentally. But while the comb jelly’s nervous system is pretty sophisticated for such a simple animal, it’s also very different from other animals’ nervous systems. Like, super different. Its nerves are constructed from different molecules and use different neurotransmitters.

Its nerve cells are so different from other animals’ that some researchers think it actually evolved separately. Specifically, neuroscientist Leonid Moroz thinks so. He thinks that the first ancestor of comb jellies split off from the sea sponges some three quarters of a billion years ago and evolved separately from all other animals.

Since comb jellies use a different set of chemicals as other animals to accomplish the same tasks, a couple of articles I read make a big deal about how evolution must therefore follow a prescribed path—that animals must have certain traits to survive. But assuming comb jellies did split off from sponges that early and did evolve separately from other animals, they were still competing against those other animals. It’s not like they had an ocean to themselves, although that would be awesome if they did, because who knows what they might have evolved into?

The controversy about whether sea sponges or comb jellies were basically the trunk of the tree of animal life started in 2008, when a study in the journal Nature compared DNA sequences across a number of animal species and suggested that the comb jellies were evolutionarily first. A 2013 paper published in Science by another team of researchers made the same conclusion based on the genome of a species of comb jelly called the sea walnut. That is such a cute name. Don’t you just want to cuddle the little sea walnut and make little hats for it?

All this ignited what some articles call a firestorm of controversy. I like to imagine researchers reading the articles and FREAKING OUT. Moroz’s studies of the comb jelly’s nervous system, and the complete genome of a different comb jelly, the sea gooseberry, appeared in Nature in 2014. Moroz now thinks that nervous systems have developed independently at least nine times in various different groups.

The controversy at this point appears to have several factions. Moroz’s group thinks comb jellies split off from sponges, and that everything else split off from comb jellies but developed separately in the neurological sense. Another group thinks comb jellies split off from sponges and everything evolved from comb jellies, and that comb jellies aren’t all that weird neurologically. Another group thinks comb jellies and sponges split off from a common ancestor of both that had a simple nervous system, which comb jellies retained but sponges lost, and that everything else evolved from comb jellies. But then there’s the other side, the ones who think sure, comb jellies split off from sponges, but so did everything else ultimately, and comb jellies are no more the base of all animal life than the man in the moon.

One thing everyone agrees on, though, is that we still don’t know enough about comb jellies. And they are really pretty.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way. Rewards include stickers and twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 040: Bone-eating vultures

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:48 — 9.7MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week we look at a couple of unusual vultures, the bearded vulture and the Egyptian vulture. Thanks to Maureen J. who recommended this week’s topic!

The bearded vulture, badass bird:

This bearded vulture is probably thinking about eating bones right now:

The Egyptian vulture cares about its appearance:

Show transcript:

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

Halloween is over, we’re all pretty sick of candy, and it’s time to move on to something besides monsters. Something that is not associated with Halloween candy in any way, preferably. I ate, like, three bags of gummy spiders by myself this year.

Special thanks to Maureen J. who recently made several topic recommendations. One of her suggestions in particular is taking me down various research rabbit holes, which is a lot of fun but means it’ll be a while before that episode is ready. So in the meantime let’s learn about one of her other suggested topics, vultures.

Vultures are divided into two big groups, old world and new world vultures. The two groups are related, but not closely. Today we’re only looking two old world vultures, and in fact, let’s start with a bird that’s considered an old world vulture but is actually not any more closely related to them than the new world vultures are. That’s the bearded vulture.

The bearded vulture lives in the high mountains in parts of Asia, Africa, and southern and eastern Europe, and like other vultures it spends a lot of its time waiting for animals to die or just looking for already-dead animals that it can eat. Unlike most other vultures it often gets impatient and cuts out the waiting part by hunting small animals. It especially likes tortoises. Like golden eagles, the bearded vulture will scoop up a tortoise, carry it way way up high, and drop it. Then it coasts down and eats the smashed tortoise. There are stories that the bearded vulture will also sometimes attack larger prey with its wings, driving the animal over a cliff where it plunges to its death. This is a hardcore bird.

To add to the general air of all bearded vultures secretly being members of Norwegian death metal bands, they also wear corpse makeup. I don’t mean the bird’s ordinary coloring, although it is pretty impressive. Unlike other vultures, it doesn’t have a bald head. Adult birds have white heads with a black band from the eye to the base of the bill that continues in a sort of mustache hanging from either side of the bill. The rest of the bird is dark gray, brown, and cream-colored. No, I mean the bearded vulture actually rubs soil and dust containing ferrous oxide on its body to stain the feathers a rusty red, apparently because it just likes the way it looks. In fact, researchers think the color is a status symbol. A bird that has the time and energy to spend hours preening red dirt into its feathers is a bird that has its life nicely sorted. It also indicates to other bearded vultures that the bird has a big territory and knows it well, since the dust bathing is done in secret.

But let’s face it, the most metal thing about this bird is what it eats. The rotting flesh of dead animals? Pfft, that’s for other scavengers. Most of the time the bearded vulture doesn’t pay any attention to meat. It just wants the bones.

The bearded vulture’s stomach is specialized to digest even large bones in about 24 hours. Bone marrow has a high nutritional content, higher even than muscle tissue, but most animals find it difficult to get to the marrow easily enough to extract the nutrients without more effort than it’s worth. The bearded vulture just picks a bone and either swallows it whole, or, if the bone is too big to swallow, either drops it from a height the same way it does with tortoises or batters it against a rock with its bill until it shatters. But it can swallow bones up to 11 inches long, or 28 cm.

Most vultures regurgitate partially digested food for their babies. The bearded vulture naturally doesn’t do anything that soft. Instead, the parent vultures carry bones back to the nest and the babies swallow them. Young birds don’t leave the nest until they’re three or four months old, and they may continue to rely on their parents for food and help for up to two years.

The bearded vulture is a big bird with long, strong legs. Its wingspan can be over nine feet wide, or 2.8 meters, and the bird may weigh over 17 pounds, or 7.5 kilograms. It can carry bones and tortoises that weigh almost as much as it does.

The bearded vulture is also called the lammergeier, which is German for lamb-hawk. In many ways it’s more like a hawk than a vulture, and in fact falconers have sometimes kept them as tame birds. In the past, unfortunately people thought the bearded vulture killed children and lambs, which is why they’re mostly extinct in Europe—they were all killed.

The bearded vulture is most closely related to the Egyptian vulture, which also happens to be one of the smallest vultures in the world. It’s still a pretty big bird, though, with a wingspan up to about 5 ½ feet, or 170 cm.

The Egyptian vulture is white with black flight feathers, but like the bearded vulture, it will rub its feathers with rust-colored dirt to stain them red. While it has a floof of longer feathers on the back of its head and neck that’s called a hackle, its face is bare of feathers and is also a surprisingly bright shade of yellow or orange. The tip of the hooked beak is black. Both the Egyptian vulture and the bearded vulture have wedge-shaped tails, unlike all other vultures.

The Egyptian vulture doesn’t just live around Egypt. There are three subspecies that live in parts of Africa, Asia, and southwestern Europe. It prefers lower mountains and hills, and some populations migrate while others live in the same area year round. Overall, Egyptian vultures are endangered, and while they’re protected, they do tend to get electrocuted on power lines. This is also a problem for other big birds that live around people, like eagles.

Egyptian vultures eat carrion, not bones, but they also eat insects, fish, rotting fruit, and occasionally kill small mammals and reptiles. They also really like eating the eggs of other birds, but if an egg is too big for the vulture to swallow, it will pick up rocks and throw them at the egg until it breaks. That’s not the only tool use Egyptian vultures show. They like to gather wool to line their nests, and sometimes a vulture will pick up a stick in its bill and collect wool on the stick to more easily transport. That’s pretty sophisticated in the bird world.

Egyptian vultures also eat dung, especially from cows. Researchers think they do this for carotenoid pigments present in the dung, which helps keep the vulture’s face bright yellow or orange. Who knew vultures were so particular about their appearance?

Because the Egyptian vulture is smaller than other vultures, it often has to wait its turn at the carcasses it scavenges. Its slender bill is ideal for reaching smaller pieces of meat that other vultures have overlooked.

Bearded vultures are solitary except for mated pairs, but Egyptian vultures are more social. Sometimes Egyptian vultures will build their nests near other vulture nests on cliffs and in big trees. In those cases, babies will climb into each others’ nests to get more food.

One subspecies of Egyptian vulture lives in the Canary Islands and are bigger and heavier than the other subspecies. The Canary Islands were first colonized around 2,500 years ago. Genetic research shows that the Canary Islands vultures arrived at about the same time as the human settlers and their cattle. This is a rare but happy example of the arrival of humans actually helping a species thrive instead of driving them to extinction. Unfortunately these days the Canary Islands vultures are rare. Only about 25 breeding pairs remain.

One interesting thing about both Egyptian and bearded vultures. They mate for life, but sometimes a pair will accept a second male into their little family. Both males will mate with the female and help raise the babies. This increases the likelihood that the chicks will survive to adulthood.

Life is tough out there in the wild. Babies can use all the help they can get. Even if they are bone-eating death bird babies.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way. Rewards include stickers and twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!