Monthly Archives: October 2025

Episode 456: The Loch Ness Monster

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Thanks to William who suggested we talk about the Loch Ness Monster for our big Halloween episode!

Further reading:

1888 (ca.): Alexander Macdonald’s Sightings

1933, July 22: Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer’s Loch Ness Encounter

The 1972 Loch Ness Monster Flipper Photos

White Mice, Bumblebees, and Alien Worms? Unexpected Mini-Monsterlings in Loch Ness

Further watching:

1933 King Kong clip: Brontosaurus attack!

The following stills are from the above King Kong clip:

The drawing by Rupert T. Gould for his 1934 book about the Loch Ness Monster. He drew it after interviewing Mr. Spicer about his 1933 sighting:

Show transcript:

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

This week is our big Halloween episode to finish off monster month! I hope your October has been amazing and you have fun plans for Halloween. William suggested we learn about the Loch Ness Monster, so let’s go!

We talked about the Loch Ness Monster, AKA Nessie, a really long time ago, back in episode 29. Those old episodes aren’t even available in the feed anymore—you have to go to the website to find them, and the audio isn’t very good. So here’s a revised and updated Nessie episode! There are some spooky stories associated with this one, but not too scary. Let’s call it one and a half out of five monsters on the spooky scale.

First, a little background about what Loch Ness is. It’s the biggest of a chain of long, narrow, steep-sided lakes and shallow rivers that cut the Scottish Highlands right in two along a fault line. Loch Ness is 22 miles long, or 35 km, with a maximum depth of 754 feet, or 230 meters, the biggest lake in all of the UK, not just Scotland.

During the Pleistocene, or ice age, Scotland was repeatedly covered with glaciers and ice sheets that were almost a kilometer thick. The ice only completely melted about 8,000 years ago. The massive weight of the glaciers over the fault line, where the rocks are already weaker, started the process of carving out the lake, and when the ice started melting in earnest around 10,000 years ago, the massive amounts of meltwater washed the weakened rocks out and left the deep valley that is now Loch Ness. The land slowly rose from where the ice had pressed it down, so that Loch Ness is now about 50 feet above sea level, or 15 meters. In other words, Loch Ness is only about 10,000 years old.

All the lochs and their rivers have made up a busy shipping channel since the Caledonian Canal made them more navigable with a series of locks and canals in 1822, but the area around Loch Ness was well populated and busy for centuries before that. It’s a beautiful area, so Loch Ness has also long been a popular tourist destination, well before the Nessie sightings started.

There have been stories of strange creatures in Loch Ness and all the lochs, but nothing that resembles the popular idea of Nessie. The stories were mostly of water monsters of Scottish folklore, like the kelpie we talked about in episode 351, or of out-of-place known animals like a bottle-nosed dolphin that was captured at sea and released in the loch as a prank in 1868.

The oldest monster report in the area actually comes from the 7th century, but it’s supposed to have happened in the River Ness, which drains from the lake. When local people told St. Columba about a monster that had grabbed a man swimming in the River Ness, and presumably ate him, the saint went there to take care of the monster. He told one of his followers to swim across the river, which sounds pretty rough, but the saint said, “Don’t worry, fam, I gotchu,” but in old-timey language. The man started swimming and sure enough, a water beast approached. The saint made the sign of the Christian cross and said, “Stop right there, don’t touch him. Get back, monster!” The monster swam away immediately and was never seen again.

The next sighting important enough for people to write down happened more than 1,400 years later, in 1933. The newspaper Inverness Courier printed a sighting by a woman named Aldie Mackay, who saw something that looked like a whale rolling around in the lake while she looked out the car window as her husband drove. Her husband saw it too.

Mackay’s sighting happened in mid-April of 1933 and the report appeared in May. But the big sighting that pretty much everyone has heard about happened two months later, in late July. It’s sometimes reported as an August sighting because the initial report appeared in the Inverness Courier on August 4, 1933.

A couple on holiday from London, Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer, reported seeing a large creature crossing the road around 50 meters in front of their car. In his initial report, Mr. Spicer described it as grayish with a thick body and a long neck, moving jerkily. The neck twisted and moved up and down. He didn’t see legs or a tail, but thought that a flopping movement around the downward slope of the body toward the neck might be the end of the tail, curved around the body. Mrs. Spicer disagreed and thought it was a small animal being carried at its shoulder.

Mr. Spicer initially described the monster as being about 6 to 8 feet long, or 1.8 to 2.4 meters, because, he said later, he was worried about accidentally exaggerating the size. Later, after he returned to look at the road again, he realized the monster had to have been around 25 feet long, or over 7.5 meters, since it was longer than the road was wide and its front and back ends were hidden in the trees on either side.

By the time the Spicer’s car reached the monster, it had already disappeared down the slope toward the lake, although neither witness actually saw it in the water. Mr. Spicer said that the monster actually looked like “a huge snail with a long neck.”

The Spicers didn’t stop where they saw the monster, but shortly later they stopped and talked to a man on a bicycle, telling him what they’d seen. The man must have read about the April sighting, or heard about it, because he told the Spicers that there were other recent monster reports around Loch Ness.

But something else featuring monsters happened in April of 1933. The movie King Kong was released in the first week of April, before the Spicer sighting and only a few days before the Aldie Mackay sighting. In addition to the giant gorilla King Kong, the movie featured dinosaurs, including a brontosaurus that attacks some people on a raft. Like the other monsters in King Kong, the brontosaurus was filmed using stop-motion animation, where a model is moved small increments, photographed, moved a little more, photographed again, and so on, so that when the photos are put together into a film, the model appears to move. This is how Wallace and Gromit is animated, and some old holiday specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It’s done well in King Kong, but the movements are a little jerky. To make the model look more realistic, the dinosaur was obscured by fog and trees in many scenes. It also emerges initially from the water and pursues the men onto land.

Spicer admitted in an interview a few months after his sighting that he had seen King Kong and that his monster strongly resembled the dinosaur in the movie. It’s possible that he and his wife really did see something crossing the road that they couldn’t identify, and that their memories of the King Kong dinosaurs filled in the gaps of what they couldn’t actually see. Remember that Mr. Spicer described the animal as moving jerkily with its neck moving up and down and twisting, something that also happens in the movie. He didn’t see any legs, and most of the time in the movie the brontosaurus’s legs are hidden or mostly hidden.

After the Spicer sighting, lots of previous monster sightings were reported. For instance, the Northern Chronicle newspaper printed a letter it received about an 1888 sighting, or sightings. A man named Alexander Macdonald traveled on the mail steamer pretty frequently, and he often saw what he said looked like a stubby-legged, really big salamander in the water. But by 1933 Macdonald was long dead, so no one could ask him if the letter-writer maybe just made it all up.

One good thing has come from Nessie’s popularity. Loch Ness has been studied far more than it would have been otherwise. The water is murky with low visibility, so underwater cameras aren’t much use. However, submersibles with cameras attached have been deployed many times in the loch. In 1972 a dramatic result was reported, with a clearly diamond-shaped flipper photographed from a submersible, but it turned out that the flipper was basically painted onto two photos that otherwise show nothing but the reflection of light on silt or bubbles.

Sonar scanning has been done on the entire lake repeatedly, in 1962, 1968, 1969, twice in 1970, 1981 through 1982, 1987, 2003, and 2023. They found no gigantic animals. The 1987 scan resulted in three hits of something larger than the biggest known salmon in the loch, but much smaller than a lake monster. It’s possible that the hits were only debris such as sunken boats or logs. From all the scans, though, we know there are no hidden outlets to the sea under the lake’s surface.

There are lots of known animals in and around the loch, from salmon to otters, and lots and lots of birds. Seals frequently visit, coming up the shallow River Ness through its locks. Any of these animals, especially the seals, may have contributed to Nessie sightings over the years, together with boats seen in the distance and floating debris such as logs. The lake doesn’t contain enough fish to sustain a population of large mystery animals even if they had somehow eluded all those sonar scans. No bones or dead bodies have been found, and no clear photographs have ever been taken of an unknown animal.

In the 1970s the idea that sightings of the Loch Ness Monster might actually be sightings of unusually large eels became popular. A 2018 environmental DNA study brought the idea back up, since the study discovered that there are a whole, whole lot of eels in Loch Ness. The estimate is a population of more than 8,000 eels in the loch, which is good since the European eel is actually critically endangered. But most of the eels found in Loch Ness are smaller than average, and the longest European eel ever measured was only about 4 feet long, or 1.2 meters. An eel can’t stick its head out of the water like Nessie is supposed to do, but it does sometimes swim on its side close to the water’s surface, which could result in sightings of a string of many humps undulating through the water.

There are also lots of suggested weather and water conditions in Loch Ness that could make people believe they’d seen a monster, from rare mirages to less rare standing waves. But whatever Nessie really is, there is a mystery animal in Loch Ness. It’s just not very exciting so very few people have heard of it.

A 1972 search for Nessie by the same team that announced that famous underwater photograph of a flipper, which later turned out to be mostly painted on, filmed something in the loch that wasn’t just paint. They were small, pale blobs on the grainy film. The team called them bumblebees from their shape.

Then in July of 1981, a different company searching not for Nessie but for a shipwreck from 1952, filmed some strange white creatures at the bottom of the loch. One of the searchers described them as giant white tadpoles, two or three inches long, or about 5 to 7 cm. Another searcher described them as resembling white mice but moving jerkily.

The search for the wreck lasted three weeks and the white mystery animals were spotted more than once, but not frequently. Afterwards, the company sent video of them to Dr. P Humphrey Greenwood, an ichthyologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Since this was the 1980s, of course, the film was videotape, not digital, but Dr. Greenwood got some of the frames computer enhanced. The enhancement showed that the animals seemed to have three pairs of limbs and Dr. Greenwood tentatively identified them as bottom-dwelling crustaceans, but not ones native to Loch Ness. A few years ago, zoologist Karl Shuker suggests they might be some kind of amphipod.

Amphipods are shrimp-like crustaceans that live throughout the world in both the ocean and fresh water, and most species are quite small. While they do have more than three pairs of legs—eight pairs, in fact, plus two pairs of antennae—the 1981 video wasn’t of high quality and details might easily have been lost. Some of the almost 10,000 known species of amphipod are white or pale in color and grow to the right size to be the ones filmed in Loch Ness. But no amphipods of that description have ever been caught in Loch Ness.

New amphipods are discovered all the time, of course. They’re simply everywhere, and the smallest species are only a millimeter long. But because they’re so common, it’s also easy to transport them from one body of water to another. It’s possible that the white mice crustaceans in Loch Ness traveled there on a monster hunter’s boat.

If you’re lucky enough to visit Loch Ness, definitely bring your binoculars just in case you see something big in the water. But keep your scientist hat on too, because it’s more likely that you’ll see a floating log or stump, a big fish, an anomalous wave causing an optical illusion, or some other reasonable explanation for the sighting. But you never know! Happy Halloween!

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 455: Spooky Animals

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Thanks to Richard of NC, Richard my brother, Siya, Ezra, and Owen and Aksel for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Creature Feature: Googly-Eyed Stubby Squid

Nocturnal Spiders Use Trapped Fireflies as Glowing Bait to Attract Additional Prey

A male vampire deer:

The adorable googly eyed squid [still taken from video linked above]:

The snowy owl [photo by Bill Bouton from San Luis Obispo, CA, USA – Snowy Owl, Bubo scandiacus, male, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19899431]:

Show transcript:

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

This week for monster month, let’s learn about some animals that are considered spooky, although in actuality they’re just regular animals who don’t even know the meaning of spooky. Thanks to Ezra, Owen and Aksel, Richard from NC, my brother Richard, and Siya for their suggestions!

We’ll start with the two Richards. Richard from NC suggested vampire deer, and my brother Richard suggested zombie salmon.

The vampire deer is more commonly called the water deer, but considering it has tusks growing down from its upper jaw that look like fangs, vampire deer is an excellent name. Females have short tusks, but in males they grow quite long, sometimes over 3 inches long, or 8 cm. Since the animal only stands about two feet tall at the shoulder, or 65 cm, that’s pretty impressive. Its hind legs are longer than its front, so that when it runs it sort of bounces like a rabbit. It has a very short tail, small rounded ears, and is golden brown in color with a lighter underside. It doesn’t have antlers. We talked about the musk deer in episode 366, which also has fangs instead of antlers, but the vampire deer isn’t closely related to the musk deer.

The vampire deer currently lives in Korea, China, and Russia although it used to be much more widespread. It mostly lives in reedy habitats near rivers, and it’s a solitary animal although females will sometimes congregate to eat. Males protect their territories by fighting with their tusks, although they don’t actually drink blood.

As for the zombie salmon, it’s not a type of fish but something that can happen to an ordinary salmon. The salmon is a fish that famously spends most of its adult life in the ocean, but travels up rivers to spawn. The eggs hatch in freshwater and the baby fish grow up in the river, and then they migrate to the ocean and live there for almost the rest of their lives. Eventually the fish is fully mature and ready to spawn, so it travels to the river where it was hatched, fights its way upstream, and the cycle starts all over with the new generation.

Almost all salmon die after spawning. This is partly because the energy requirements of swimming upstream is so high, but also because a salmon is genetically programmed to die after spawning. This is called senescence, and while it’s common in invertebrates like octopuses and some insects, it’s rare in vertebrates. Not only that, there’s not enough food for an adult salmon in the spawning area, and an adult salmon’s body is adapted for salt water, not fresh water, so it can’t live long in rivers as an adult anyway.

A small number of female Atlantic salmon are able to return to the ocean, recover and regain their strength, and spawn again a few years later, but for all other species, after spawning, that’s it. Within days all the salmon have died.

But sometimes, rarely, a salmon remains alive for weeks after spawning. It doesn’t have the energy to return to the ocean, and its body is in the process of shutting down for planned senescence, and the freshwater is causing damage to the fish’s skin. But still it survives, growing more and more raggedy, just like a zombie in a movie. But unlike movie zombies, it doesn’t want to eat brains. Eventually the zombie salmon dies, if something doesn’t catch and eat it first.

Next, Siya suggested the googly-eyed squid. Some people find squid and octopuses scary because they look so strange, but I admit I added this squid to the episode because I think its name is funny. It’s also called the stubby squid or the googly-eyed stubby squid. Its scientific name is Rossia pacifica, which gives you a hint that it lives in the northern Pacific Ocean. In the winter it likes shallow water without strong currents, but in summer it migrates to deeper water where it doesn’t get too warm.

The googly-eyed squid is small and closely related to the cuttlefish. It grows less than four and a half inches long, or 11 cm, including its eight short arms and two retractable tentacles. It’s usually reddish-brown or purplish in color, but like most squid it can change color when it needs to. It gets its name because it has large eyes that show white around the edges and have a black pupil, which makes it look like it has googly eyes.

During the day, the googly-eyed squid buries itself most of the way in sand or mud at the bottom of the sea floor, with just its googly eyes showing so it can watch for danger. At night it comes out to hunt small animals like crabs and other crustaceans, mollusks, and fish, but what it really likes is shrimp. Naturally, it has good eyesight.

Next, let’s talk about a bird that some people find spooky. Ezra, Owen, and Aksel all suggested the snowy owl.

The snowy owl is mostly snow-white although young birds have black and gray markings. Its eyes are yellow and it often hunts in the daytime, but not always. Its wingspan can be as much as six feet across, or 1.8 meters.

The snowy owl lives throughout the Arctic and nearby regions, especially in summer, but sometimes travels long distances to find food. It’s also migratory, traveling south for the winter. Snowy owls have been spotted in such far-flung places as Hawaii, Bermuda, Pakistan and India, Iran, and Japan and Korea.

The snowy owl mostly eats small animals like lemmings and mice, although it will kill and eat pretty much anything it can catch, including ducks and other water birds, fish, and even insects and frogs. It will sometimes eat carrion and even sometimes steals food from other birds. It swallows small animals whole, and a day or two later, regurgitates a compacted pellet made up of the indigestible parts, including bones and fur. A lot of predatory birds do this, not just snowy owls. Scientists who study the birds love finding these pellets, because they can dissect them and learn what the bird has been eating.

Not only does the snowy owl make its nest on the ground, sometimes it hunts on the ground too, just running along after an animal on its big feet.

This is what the snowy owl sounds like:

[owl call]

Let’s finish with an invertebrate that a lot of people are scared of, a spider! This particular spider is a species of sheet-web spider, which lives in Taiwan. It’s a nocturnal spider that was only described in 2012. Unlike a lot of spiders, which build upright webs to trap insects that are flying along between branches and twigs, the sheet-web spider builds its web horizontally just above the ground.

The webs are light-colored and reflect light. The spiders build their webs in shady areas, and scientists think that moths see the light reflecting off the webs, and think the webs are actually the ground in an area open to the sky. Moths like open areas like this, and moths also happen to be one of the spider’s favorite foods. When a group of scientists experimented by darkening some webs with charcoal dust, they determined that the darkened webs attracted considerably fewer moths.

But it turns out that the sheet-web spider does something even more extraordinary. If a firefly gets caught in the web, the spider doesn’t eat it—or at least, not right away. It lets it stay in the web, flashing its light. Scientists noticed this and were intrigued. Did the fireflies not taste good, or was something else going on?

They placed LEDs that blinked like fireflies in some webs, but not in others, and monitored the results. It turns out that three times the number of insects were attracted to the webs with fake fireflies, and most of those were other fireflies. Fireflies attract a mate by flashing. The spiders were taking advantage of having a built-in lure stuck in their webs. So even though spiders are very tiny and have tiny brains, sometimes they’re pretty darn smart.

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 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!