Category Archives: animals

Episode 154: Some Australian animals and how to help

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This week let’s learn about some lesser-known Australian animals. A heat wave and dry conditions have led to many terrible bush fires in Australia, with many animals and people left hurt, killed, and homeless. Fortunately, there are ways you can help!

Check out the Animal Rescue Craft Guild for patterns and other information about crafting pouches, beds, and other items needed for injured and orphaned animals, and where to send the items you make.

Animals to the Max has a great episode about the fires and a long list of places where you can donate money where it’s needed most.

Some rescued joeys chilling in their donated pouches:

An Eastern banded bandicoot:

A bilby:

A long-nosed potoroo:

The woylie, or brush-tailed bettong:

The numbat:

Show transcript:

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

As you’ve probably heard, there are terrible fires sweeping through many parts of Australia right now amid a record-breaking heat wave. Both the fires and the heat have killed an estimated half a billion animals in the last few months. This week we’re going to learn about some lesser-known Australian animals and also talk about ways you can help the people in Australia who are helping animals, even if you don’t have any money to spare.

A Facebook group called the Animal Rescue Craft Guild is the resource for anyone who wants to make needed items for injured or orphaned animals. I’ll put a link in the show notes. The group shares what items are needed, patterns to make them, information about what fabrics and what fibers are appropriate for which items, and where to send them.

In the last week I’ve been knitting and crocheting nests for small animals, and this weekend my aunt Janice and I will be sewing pouches for larger animals. Well, Janice will be doing the sewing, I’ll cut out the cloth pieces for her to use. Many of the animals rescued from the fires are young marsupials, called joeys, whose mothers died, so the pouches are for joeys to live in until they’re old enough to be on their own. Being in a pouch makes the joey feel safe because it feels like being in its mother’s pouch. Rescue groups in Australia need all sizes and kinds of pouches, because there are so many different species of marsupial animals in Australia. So let’s learn about a few you may not have heard of.

One Australian marsupial that a lot of people don’t know much about is the bandicoot. There are a number of different species that live in parts of Australia and New Guinea. Some are exclusively herbivorous while some are omnivores. For instance, the Eastern barred bandicoot lives on the island of Tasmania and has recently been reintroduced into its historic range in Victoria in southeastern Australia. It’s still quite rare and threatened by introduced predators like foxes and by diseases. It’s an active animal and a fast runner, and makes a happy grunting noise when it finds food.

The Eastern barred bandicoot is about the size and shape of a rabbit but with shorter ears and a long nose that it uses to probe into the soil to find worms and other small animals that it then digs up. You can tell where one has been because it leaves a series of little holes in the ground called snout pokes. It’s light brown with darker and lighter stripes on its rounded rump, and has a short mouse-like tail. The Western barred bandicoot is a little smaller than the eastern but looks and acts very similar. Both are nocturnal and solitary, and spend the day sleeping in a nest lined with grass and leaves. When it rains, the bandicoot pushes dirt over its nest to help keep it dry. It eats plant material like seeds and roots as well as small animals like insects, worms, and snails. If something startles it, it will give a big jump, and as soon as it comes down it digs a burrow to hide in. Its pouch faces backwards so dirt won’t get into it when it digs.

Scientists are still working out what other animals the bandicoot is closely related to and how the different species are related to each other. It doesn’t help that many bandicoot species are already extinct. We do know that the bandicoot is most closely related to an animal called the bilby.

The bilby looks even more like a rabbit than the bandicoot does, and in fact sometimes it’s called the rabbit-bandicoot or the rabbit-eared bandicoot. Its fur is silky and slate gray on the back with white underneath, and it has a long nose, long ears, little pink paws, and a long tail. It grows to about 22 inches long, or 55 cm, not counting the tail, which is another 11 inches long, or 29 cm. Males are generally considerably larger than females. It even hops sort of like a hare.

There used to be two species of bilby, but the lesser bilby went extinct in the mid-20th century. The greater bilby is vulnerable due to habitat loss and introduced animals likes foxes and cats, but conservation efforts are underway with captive breeding programs and reintroduction of bilbies into areas where they used to live. There’s also a push to educate people about the bilby, and instead of chocolate Easter bunnies, a lot of people in Australia have started giving each other chocolate Easter bilbies.

The bilby is an omnivore and eats seeds, fruit, plant bulbs, insects, worms, and other small animals. Its large ears contain lots of blood vessels close to the surface. As blood travels through the ears, it radiates heat and returns to the heart much cooler than before, which helps cool the whole body.

The bilby sleeps in a burrow during the day, usually alone or with a few other bilbies, and it digs tunnels to connect different burrows throughout its territory. Like the bandicoot, its pouch faces backwards so dirt won’t get in it. Some bilbies may have a dozen burrows and will dig a new one every few weeks, which is helpful to other species of animal too since other animals may move into old bilby burrows.

The potoroo is another animal that people outside of Australia may not know about. It’s related to kangaroos and wallabies, but looks more like a rodent with a long, thin snout that curves downward. It’s brown with small ears and a thin tapering tail, and its hind legs are longer than its front legs so that it hops like a little kangaroo with its front feet tucked to its chest.

All species of potoroo are endangered even though when European settlers first arrived, it was a common animal all over Australia. Gilbert’s potoroo is so critically threatened that it’s estimated that only 70 are still alive today. In fact, it was suspected to be extinct until a small population was discovered in 1994. The long-footed potoroo was only discovered when one was caught in a trap in 1967. The long-nosed potoroo is less endangered than the other two species, but it’s still threatened by habitat loss, fires, and introduced predators like foxes, cats, and dogs.

The long-nosed potoroo grows to about 15 inches long at most, or 38 cm, with a tail about nine inches long, or 24 cm. Like the bandicoot and bilby, it’s nocturnal, solitary, omnivorous, and digs for a lot of its food. When it’s foraging, it sniffs the ground while moving its head side to side, and when it smells something it wants to eat, it digs to find it. It eats seeds, fruit, flowers, some leaves, and insects and other invertebrates, but it especially likes fungi like mushrooms.

Another little-known Australian marsupial is the bettong, also called the rat kangaroo. It’s related to potoroos and therefore to kangaroos, and looks similar. There are five species, all of them about the size of a rabbit. It hops on its hind legs and has a tail about the length of its body, specifically up to 15 inches, or 38 cm. Its fur is grey or brown, sometimes reddish. It’s nocturnal and solitary and sleeps in a nest during the day, much like the bandicoot. But since it has a prehensile tail, it actually carries its nesting material to the nest with its tail. Since it often lives in desert areas, it digs a warren of burrows and tunnels to stay out of the heat. Like the potoroo, it especially likes to eat mushrooms, but it will eat a lot of plant materials as well as invertebrates.

The woylie, or brush-tailed bettong, is one of the rarest species. It sometimes collects seeds of the Australian sandalwood tree to eat later, burying them in shallow holes. Like squirrels burying acorns, sometimes the woylie forgets where it hid the seeds and they germinate to grow into new trees.

Several species of bettong are threatened by habitat loss, fire, and introduced predators, but there are conservation plans in place to protect the bettong and its habitat.

The last animal we’ll learn about today is the numbat, which sounds like a Pokemon but which is a marsupial related to the extinct thylacine. It’s brown, gray, or reddish with white stripes over its back and rump, and a black streak through its eye, which also has a white ring around it. It grows to almost a foot long, or 29 cm long, with a long bushy tail that adds another eight inches to its length, or 21 cm.

The numbat eats termites and only termites. Termites are soft, so although the numbat has lots of little peg teeth—fifty of them, although sometimes less—it doesn’t need them. Its jaw is weak as a result but it has a long tongue with sticky saliva to lick up termites, and the roof of its mouth is ridged to scrape the termites off its tongue. Then it just swallows them.

The numbat needs to eat up to 20,000 termites every single day. Most marsupials are nocturnal, but the numbat is active during the day since it needs to be awake when the termites are active. It has good eyesight too, unlike many marsupials. It hunts termites by both sight and smell, and digs into the shallow tunnels termites dig outside of their nests. A termite’s nest is too tough for the numbat’s small claws to damage, but the tunnels leading away from the nest are easy for it to uncover.

At night the numbat sleeps in a burrow or sometimes in a hollow tree. Its burrow is usually a long tunnel that ends in a cozy round nesting chamber that it lines with grass, leaves, feathers, flowers, and other soft items. Its rump is protected by especially thick skin, and if a predator tries to get into its burrow, it will block the entrance with its rump. It can also climb trees with its sharp claws.

Male numbats have a scent gland on the chest that starts exuding a smelly oil during the summer, which it uses to mark its territory. The smell attracts females and warns other males away. Babies stay in their mother’s pouch for six months or so, until they’re so big the mother can’t walk properly. At that point she dumps them in the nest although she continues to nurse them. A few months after that the babies start to eat termites instead of just milk.

Like the other animals we’ve talked about today, the numbat is threatened by habitat loss and introduced predators, especially foxes and cats. But conservation programs have helped its numbers increase, and it’s been reintroduced into areas where it once lived.

Australia cares about all its animals, little and big, and I know that you care about animals too, or you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast. It’s easy to feel helpless when you hear the news about so many animals dying in fires. But there are ways you can help. Even if you don’t know how to sew, knit, crochet, or do woodworking, you probably know someone who does. Just ask them to teach you how. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to learn, and the patterns posted on the Facebook group I link to in the show notes are all quite simple. For the lining of most pouches, you can use old flannel sheets or even cotton t-shirts, as long as it’s clean, soft, and has no frayed or pilled areas. The outer layer of the pouches can usually be ordinary cloth, and some of the outer pouches can be knitted from regular old acrylic yarn.

If you aren’t able to craft, or you don’t have access to craft materials, you can raise money to donate to wildlife rescue groups in Australia. Check with any groups you may already belong to, like your place of worship, book clubs, gaming groups, your school or college, even your employer. Many groups may be interested in holding a bake sale or yard sale, or just gather donations from members to send to Australia. Last week’s episode of the great podcast Animals to the Max had an interview with an Australian wildlife expert, so I’ve linked to it in the show notes so you can listen if you haven’t already, and because that episode’s show notes have lots of great links where you can send donations.

Whatever you do to help, the people and animals of Australia appreciate it! Even if all you can do is learn about Australian animals so you can share that knowledge with other people, everything helps.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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 if you’d like to support us and get twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 153: The White River Monster

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Let’s start out the new year with a bona fide mystery animal, the White River Monster from Arkansas! Is it a real animal? If so, is it a known animal or something new to science? If it’s a known animal, what could it be? Lots of questions, maybe a few answers! Happy new year!

Further listening:

MonsterTalk

The not exactly useful picture supposedly of the White River Monster, taken in 1971:

A northern elephant seal, AKA Mr. Blobby:

A Florida manatee:

A bull shark:

Two bottlenose dolphins:

An alligator gar (below) and a human (above):

Alligator gar WEIRD FISH FACE:

Gulf sturgeon:

Show transcript:

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

If you’ve listened to the final episode of 2019 last week, you’ll remember it was about some mystery water animals of various kinds. Well, I’ve got another water mystery for you today to start off the new year, the White River monster. I heard about this one in a recent episode of MonsterTalk, which is a great podcast I recommend if you don’t already listen to it.

The White River is in North America, originating in the mountains in northwestern Arkansas and flowing from there through Missouri, then back into Arkansas where it joins the Mississippi River. In 1915 a man near the small town of Newport, in the central Ozarks region of Arkansas, saw an enormous animal with gray skin in the river.

A few other people saw it too, but it wasn’t until July of 1937 that things really heated up. The monster returned, and this time a lot of people saw it. News of it hit the local papers and spread throughout the country, and people started showing up to look for it. Some people came prepared to kill or catch it while others just wanted to see it.

Estimates of the monster’s size varied quite a bit. A man named Bramlett Bateman, who owned a lot of the farmland along that stretch of the river, was quoted in several newspaper articles. He described the monster as being the length of three cars in one article, but in another his estimate was smaller, only 12 feet long, or 3.7 m, and four or five feet wide, or 1.2 to 1.5 meters. But it doesn’t seem that he or anyone else got a really good look at it.

It was described by numerous people as being gray-skinned. Bateman said it had “the skin of an elephant…with the face of a catfish.” I dug into as many original newspaper articles as I could find without actually paying for access to them, and very few of them have a real description of the animal. The only description given in a New York Times article from July 23, 1937 is this:

“Half a dozen eye-witnesses…reported seeing a great creature rise to the surface at rare intervals, float silently for a few minutes and then submerge, making its presence known only by occasional snorts that bubbled up from the bottom.”

Another article quotes Bateman as saying he saw the monster “lolling on the surface of the water.”

Bateman decided he was going to blow the monster up with dynamite. What is it about people whose go-to solution to seeing an unidentified animal is to throw dynamite in the water? The local authorities said, uh no, you cannot just throw dynamite into the river, but other people brought machine guns and other weapons and patrolled the river looking for the monster. A plan to make a giant net and catch the monster petered out when people found out that making and deploying a net that big is expensive and difficult.

The monster was mostly reported in an eddy of the river that stretched for about a mile and was unusually deep, about 60 feet deep, or 18 meters. The river is about 75 feet wide at that point, or 23 meters. The Newport Chamber of Commerce hired a diver from Memphis named Charles B. Brown, who brought an eight-foot harpoon with him when he descended into the river. He didn’t find anything, but the tourists had fun.

Suggestions as to what the monster might be ranged from a sunken boat that sometimes bobbed briefly to the surface to a monstrous catfish. Many people were convinced it was a huge fish of some kind, especially an alligator gar.

Eventually sightings tapered off and the excitement died down until June of 1971, when it started being seen again. Again the size estimates were all over the place, with one witness saying it was the size of a boxcar, which would be about 50 feet long, or 15 meters, and 9 feet wide, or 2.8 meters. Another witness said it was only 20 feet long, or 6 meters. Some witnesses said it had smooth skin that looked like it was peeling all over, had a bone sticking out of its forehead, and it made sounds that one witness described as similar to both a horse’s neigh and a cow’s moo. On July 5, 1971, three-toed tracks 14 inches long, or 36 cm, were also found on an island together with crushed plants that showed a huge animal had come out of the water.

This time, at least, no one tried to dynamite or even net the monster. Instead, in 1973 Arkansas passed a law creating the White River Monster Refuge along that section of the river, to protect the monster. But no one has seen it since.

There is a photo of the monster taken in 1971, but it’s a blurry Polaroid that was reproduced in a newspaper and the original lost. The photo was taken by a man named Cloyce Warren, who was out fishing with two friends. Warren said it had “a spiny ridged backbone and [was] splashing all around.”

So what could the White River Monster be? Is it a misidentified known animal, a completely unknown animal, or just a hoax?

Obviously people are seeing something in that part of the White River. But it’s reportedly so big that if there was a population living anywhere in the river, it would be spotted all the time. So maybe it’s an animal that only sometimes strays into the White River and actually lives in the much larger Mississippi River—or even in the Gulf of Mexico, where it sometimes swims upriver.

Cryptozoologists and other interested people have made suggestions over the years. One suggestion is that it’s an elephant seal. The northern elephant seal is an enormous animal, although it’s nowhere near 50 feet long. The male is much larger than the female, up to 16 feet long, or 4.8 meters, and bulky with blubber that keeps it warm when diving deeply for food in the Pacific Ocean where it lives.

But wait, the Pacific Ocean? You mean it doesn’t live in the Gulf of Mexico?

Nope, the endangered elephant seal only lives in the Pacific. And the Pacific Ocean is separated from the Gulf of Mexico by a whole lot of the North American continent.

A man named Joe Nickell, who’s a paranormal investigator and who was interviewed on MonsterTalk episode 204, has suggested the White River Monster is a manatee—specifically the Florida manatee, which is a subspecies of West Indian manatee. In the winter it mostly lives around Florida but in summer many individuals travel widely. It’s sometimes found as far north as Massachusetts along the Atlantic coast, and as far west as Texas in the Gulf of Mexico.

The manatee is large, up to 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters, with females being somewhat larger than males. Its skin is gray but since it moves slowly, it can look mottled in color due to algae growing on its skin, and it sometimes also has barnacles stuck to it the way some whales do. It has a pair of front flippers with three or four toenails, no hind legs, and a paddle-like tail. It eats plants and only plants, and is completely harmless to humans, fish, and other animals. Also because it moves slowly and spends a lot of time at the surface, since it’s a mammal and has to breathe air, it’s vulnerable to being injured by boats.

In the 1970s there were only a few hundred manatees alive and it nearly went extinct. It was listed as an endangered species and after a lot of effort by a lot of different conservation groups, it’s now only considered threatened. So while people might recognize a manatee these days, back in the 1970s it was practically unknown everywhere except southern Florida since it was so rare. And in the decades before 1971, people didn’t travel as much and didn’t know much about increasingly rare animals that didn’t live in their particular part of the world.

In other words, it’s completely possible that people from Arkansas would see a manatee in 1915, 1937, and 1971 and not know what it was. But could a manatee really travel that far from the ocean and survive?

The Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana in the United States. Texas is to the west of Louisiana, then Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida to the east. In other words, it’s well within the known range of the Florida manatee. Manatees are known to sometimes travel up the Mississippi. This happened most recently in October of 2016 when a manatee traveled as far as Memphis, Tennessee before it was found dead in a small lake connected to the river. That’s a distance of 720 miles, or 1,158 km, and that was with wildlife officials trying to capture it to return it to the Gulf. That same year a manatee also traveled as far as Rhode Island along the Atlantic coast. Memphis is actually much farther up the Mississippi than the White River is, so if the manatee had branched off into the White River it might have led to new sightings of the White River Monster.

The manatee can live in fresh water perfectly well. One species, the Amazonian manatee, is a fully freshwater animal that never leaves the South American rivers where it lives. But despite its size, the manatee doesn’t have a lot of blubber or fat to keep it warm. The farther away it travels from warm water, the more likely it is to die of cold.

But while an errant manatee might explain some White River Monster sightings, it doesn’t fit with all of them. Other animals from the Gulf of Mexico sometimes find their way up the Mississippi too. It’s a huge river, and since an ocean animal doesn’t understand what a river is, it doesn’t know it’s never going to reach the ocean again unless it turns around. Most marine animals can’t survive for long in fresh water, but some animals, like the manatee, can tolerate fresh water much better. That’s also the case for the bull shark.

In 1937, the same year the White River Monster was spotted for the second time, a five-foot bull shark, or 1.5 meters, was caught in Illinois, which is even farther upstream from the Gulf of Mexico than Tennessee and Arkansas. Bull sharks live throughout much of the world’s oceans in warmer water near coasts and are often found in rivers and lakes, although they don’t live as long in fresh water as they do in salt water. The largest bull shark ever measured was 13 feet long, or 4 meters, so a large one is about the size of a manatee.

Occasionally a dolphin travels up the Mississippi River, but marine dolphins can’t survive for long in fresh water and will die soon if they can’t make their way back to the ocean. A dolphin in fresh water starts to develop skin lesions and then the skin begins to peel, leading to bacterial infection and death. Remember that some witnesses in 1971 described the White River Monster as a gray animal with peeling skin.

Nine different species of dolphin and many species of whale live in the Gulf of Mexico. Of those, only the bottlenose dolphin lives close to the coast and is usually the species that accidentally travels into fresh water and can’t find its way out. The bottlenose dolphin isn’t any larger than the manatee, up to about 13 feet long, or 4 meters.

1971 was an active hurricane year, including the category 5 Hurricane Edith that killed 37 people in mid-September. Marine animals that can travel quickly, like dolphins and sharks, will flee to calmer waters when a hurricane approaches, and while that usually means out to sea, it wouldn’t be out of the question for a frightened dolphin or other large marine animal to make its way into the Mississippi by accident ahead of a hurricane, especially a hurricane as big as Edith.

Another possible identity for the White River Monster is one that was suggested in 1937, the alligator gar. It’s a freshwater fish that lives throughout the Mississippi River and other rivers and lakes in the southern United States and parts of northern Mexico. The alligator gar gets its name because of its toothy jaws, which do resemble an alligator’s, and it can grow up to ten feet long, or 3 meters. It’s a really weird fish and eventually I’ll probably do a full episode on it and its relatives, just as I have a full episode planned about the manatee. It has gills like other fish, but it can also breathe air through its swim bladder, which is lined with lots of blood vessels that absorb oxygen. Every so often an alligator gar will come to the surface and gulp air to replenish the oxygen in its swim bladder, so it would be seen at the surface briefly but periodically as was described by many witnesses. This is also the case for the manatee and dolphin, who breathe air.

The alligator gar is an ambush predator, which means it waits in the water without moving much at all until an animal approaches. Then it shoots forward and grabs it. It mostly eats small fish, invertebrates of various kinds, and waterfowl like ducks.

The final possibility of the White River Monster’s identity is the gulf sturgeon. It’s a subspecies of the Atlantic sturgeon that lives in the Gulf of Mexico, although it’s also known from various rivers in the southeastern United States. The reason it’s found in rivers is that the gulf sturgeon is anadromous [a-NADro-mus], the term for a fish that migrates from the ocean into fresh water to spawn. The salmon is the most famous anadromous fish, which fights its way upriver to spawn and then die. In the case of the gulf sturgeon, it hatches in fresh water and lives there for the first two years or so of its life before making its way downstream to the ocean. Then it returns to freshwater to spawn every spring, usually the same river where it was hatched, and goes back to the ocean in autumn.

The gulf sturgeon fits a lot of the descriptions of the White River Monster sightings. It’s covered with five rows of scutes that project from the back and sides in a sort of low sawtooth pattern, which fits the “spiny ridged backbone” that Cloyce Warren reported seeing in 1971, and its elongated snout has sensory barbels like a catfish, which matches Bramlett Bateman’s 1937 description of the monster having the face of a catfish. It’s gray, gray-green, or brownish in color with a lighter belly, and it can grow up to 15 feet long, or 4.5 meters, although most are about half that length.

The gulf sturgeon usually migrates in groups, but occasionally one can get separated from its group and find its way into a stretch of water by itself. It also doesn’t eat much during the summer when it’s in freshwater. In the winter it lives just off the coast in shallow water, where it’s a bottom feeder. It sucks up invertebrates from the sea floor, feeling for them with their barbels. It gains lots of weight during the winter and then loses it all in the summer. Sturgeons do sometimes jump out of the water, especially in summer–as much as fix feet out of the water. No one’s sure why. Also during the summer, the sturgeon makes a sound like a creaky hinge.

I think it’s probable that the White River Monster sightings are of more than one type of animal, and while we can make an educated guess as to which animals might have been spotted and misidentified, we can’t know for sure. So while at least some of the sightings may have been of a manatee or a gulf sturgeon or another of the animals we talked about today, there’s also the possibility that something else occasionally swims up the Mississippi from the Gulf and into the White River. Hopefully, next time the White River Monster appears, someone gets a really good look at it and some good pictures so we know for sure.

This is what a sturgeon sounds like, by the way:

[sturgeon creaky sound]

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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 if you’d like to support us and get twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 152: The Freshwater Seahorse and Other Mystery Water Animals

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This week let’s look at some (mostly) smaller mystery animals associated with water! Thanks to Richard J., Janice, and Simon for the suggestions!

Further reading:

What Was the Montauk Monster?

The black-striped pipefish. Also, that guy has REALLY BIG FINGERTIPS:

The Pondicherry shark, not looking very happy:

A ratfish. What BIG EYES you have!

The hoodwinker sunfish, weird and serene:

The Montauk monster, looking very sad and dead:

Show transcript:

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

Let’s finish off the year with an episode about a few mystery animals, specifically a few mystery animals associated with water. Thanks to Richard, Janice, and Simon for the suggestions!

We’ll start off with a mystery suggested by Richard J, but not the Richard J. who is my brother. A different Richard J. Apparently half the people who listen to my podcast are named Richard, and that’s just fine with me.

Richard wanted to know if there are there such things as freshwater seahorses. We’ve talked about seahorses before in episode 130, but seahorses are definitely marine animals. That means they only live in the ocean. But Richard said he’d heard about a population of seahorses native to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, which is in South America. I put it on my suggestions list, but Richard was on the case. He sent me a link to an article looking into the mystery, which got me really intrigued, so I bumped it to the top of my list. Because I can do that. It’s my podcast.

Freshwater seahorses are supposedly known in the Mekong River and in Lake Titicaca, and sometimes you’ll see reference to the scientific name Hippocampus titicacanesis. But that’s actually not an official scientific name. There’s no type specimen and no published description. Hippocampus is the generic name for many seahorse species, but like I said, they’re all marine animals and there’s no evidence that any live in freshwater at all. Another scientific name supposedly used for the Mekong freshwater seahorse is Hippocampus aimei, but that’s a rejected name for a seahorse named Hippocampus spinosissimus, the hedgehog seahorse. It does live in parts of the Indo-Pacific Ocean, including around Australia, especially in coral reefs, and sometimes in the brackish water at the Mekong River’s mouth, but not in fresh water.

On the other hand, there’s no reason why a seahorse couldn’t adapt to freshwater living. A few of its close relatives have. There are a few species of freshwater pipefish, and in the world of aquarium enthusiasts they are actually sometimes called freshwater seahorses. The pipefish looks like a seahorse that’s been straightened out, and most of them are marine animals. But some have adapted to freshwater habitats.

This includes the black-striped pipefish, which is found off the coasts of much of Europe but which also lives in the mouths of rivers. At some point it got introduced into the Volga River and liked it so much it has started to expand into other freshwater lakes and rivers in Europe.

The pipefish is closely related to the seahorse, but while it does have bony plates like a seahorse, it’s a flexible fish. It swims more like a snake than a fish, and it can anchor itself to vegetation just like a seahorse by wrapping its tail around it. It mostly eats tiny crustaceans and newly hatched fish, since it swallows its food whole. It usually hides in vegetation until a tiny animal swims near, and then it uses its tube-shaped mouth like a straw to suck in water along with the animal. Just like the seahorse, the male pipefish has a brooding pouch and takes care of the eggs after the female deposits them in his pouch.

So where did the rumor that seahorses live in the Mekong come from? The Mekong is a river in southeast Asia that runs through at least six countries, including China, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Parts of it are hard to navigate due to waterfalls and rapids, but it’s used as a shipping route and there are lots of people who live along the river. Like all rivers, it’s home to many interesting animals, including a type of giant softshell turtle that can grow up to six feet long, or 1.8 meters, a type of otter, a bunch of enormous fish, including three species of catfish that can grow up to almost ten feet long, or 3 meters, and a giant freshwater stingray that can grow up to 16 feet long, or 5 meters, and of course lots more animals that aren’t as big or as impressive, but which are still important to the river’s biodiversity. But there’s no evidence of seahorses anywhere throughout the Mekong’s 2700 mile length, or 4,350 km.

But there is a hint about where the rumor of a Mekong seahorse could have come from. One researcher named Heiko Bleher chased down the type specimens of the supposed Mekong seahorse in a Paris museum, which were collected in the early 20th century by a man named Roule. Roule got them in Laos from a fisherman who had nailed the dried seahorses to his fishing hut. The fisherman told Roule the seahorses were from the Mekong, but when they were further studied in 1999 Roule’s specimens were discovered to actually be specimens of Hippocampus spinosissimus and Hippocampus barbouri. Both are marine fish but do sometimes live in brackish water at the mouth of the Mekong. So the fisherman wasn’t lying, but Roule misunderstood what he meant.

As for the freshwater seahorse supposedly found in Lake Titicaca, that one’s less easy to explain. Titicaca is a freshwater lake in South America, specifically in the Andes Mountains on the border of Bolivia and Peru. It’s the largest lake in South America and is far, far above the ocean’s surface—12,507 feet above sea level, in fact, or 3,812 meters. It’s also extremely deep, 932 feet deep in some areas, or 284 meters. It’s home to many species of animal that live nowhere else in the world. Why couldn’t it be home to a freshwater seahorse too?

Titicaca was formed when a massive earthquake some 25 million years ago essentially shoved two mountains apart, leaving a gap—although technically it’s two gaps connected with a narrow strait. Over the centuries rainwater, snowmelt, and streams gradually filled the gaps, and these days five rivers and many streams from higher in the mountains feed water into the lake. Water leaves the lake by the River Desaguadero and flows into two other lakes, but those lakes aren’t connected to the sea. Sometimes they dry up completely. So Titicaca isn’t connected to the ocean and never was, and even if it was, seahorses are weak swimmers and would never be able to venture up a river 12,000 feet above sea level. Some 90% of all fish in the lake are found nowhere else in the world. There’s just simply no way a population of seahorses could have gotten into the lake in the first place, even if they could survive there.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any freshwater seahorses out there ready to be discovered, of course. But I don’t think you’re going to find any in Lake Titicaca. And I have no idea how the rumor got started that any live there.

From a tiny seahorse let’s move on to a small shark, another topic suggested by Richard J. The Pondicherry shark grows to about 3.3 feet, or 1 meter, and once lived throughout the Indo-Pacific, especially in coastal waters. It’s considered critically endangered, but it’s so rare these days that we hardly know anything about it except that it’s harmless to humans, eats small fish and other small animals, and was once common. But until the mid-2010s, scientists were starting to worry it was already extinct. Then in 2016 two different Pondicherry sharks were photographed in two different places—and not where anyone had expected to find it. Some tourists took a photo of one in a river called the Menik and a freshwater fish survey camera caught a photo of one in the Kumbuk River. Both rivers are in Sri Lanka. Since then researchers have spotted a few more. The shark is protected, and hopefully the excitement around the shark’s rediscovery has helped people in the area learn about it so they know not to bother it. Some sharks tolerate fresh water and brackish water quite well, so it’s not surprising that the Pondicherry shark has moved into the rivers where it has less competition from commercial fishing boats.

Our next water mystery is actually not really a mystery, just a really strange-looking fish related to sharks. This one was suggested by my aunt Janice who doesn’t actually listen to the podcast but who likes to send me links to strange animal articles that she comes across on the internet. This one is called Chimaera Monstrosa, sometimes called the rat fish.

The rat fish mostly lives in the deep sea, although it’s sometimes seen in shallower water, and can grow up to 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters. It’s mostly brown but has white markings. Its body looks more or less like a regular plump shark-like fish, but it has great big round green eyes, relatively long pectoral fins, and a very long tail that tapers to a point. The tail gives it its common name, since it kind of resembles a rat’s tail. It eats whatever it can catch on the ocean floor, including crustaceans and echinoderms.

Ratfish, and other chimaeriformes, are most closely related to sharks, and like sharks they have skeletons that are made of cartilage instead of bone. Since they’re rarely seen and look really weird, every so often someone catches one and posts about it online, and then my aunt sends me a link. They are really interesting fish, though.

Simon also sent me an article about an interesting fish a while back, the hoodwinker sunfish. We talked about the sunfish, or mola mola, in episode 96. The hoodwinker sunfish, or mola tecta, was only discovered in 2017 despite its large size. So far it’s known to live in the South Pacific around New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and Chile, but only off the southernmost parts of those countries. But in early 2019 one washed up in Southern California.

The mystery sunfish was measured at almost 7 feet long, or 2.1 meters. An intern at the University of California at Santa Barbara found it, but didn’t know what it was. But once photos of the fish were posted online, two experts from Australia recognized it immediately—but because it showed up so far out of its known range, they were cautious about IDing it from just a photo. That’s despite the fact that one of the experts, Marianne Nyegaard, was actually the person who named the species. She asked for samples and more photos, and when she got the results, it really was a hoodwinker sunfish. But what was it doing in the warm waters of the northern Pacific instead of the cold southern waters? No one knows except the sunfish.

Let’s finish with another mystery animal you may have heard of. On July 12 or 13, 2008, depending on which source you consult, three friends visited Ditch Plains Beach, two miles away from the little town of Montauk in New York state in eastern North America. It was a hot day and the beach was crowded, and when the three noticed people gathered around something, they went to look too. There they saw a weird dead animal that had obviously washed ashore. One of the three took a picture of it, which appeared in the local papers and then the local TV news along with an interview with the three. From there it went viral and was dubbed the Montauk monster.

The monster was about the size of a cat, but with shorter legs and a chunkier body, and a relatively short tail. It didn’t have much hair but it did have sharp teeth, and the front part of its skull was exposed so that it almost looked like it had a beak. Its front paws were elongated with long fingers, almost like little hands.

So what was the monster? People all over the world made guesses, everything from a sea turtle without a shell to a diseased dog or just a hoax. Some people thought it was a mutant animal that had been created in a lab on one of the nearby islands, escaped, and died trying to swim to the mainland.

But while no one knows what happened to the animal’s body, scientists have studied the photo and determined that it was probably a dead raccoon that had been washed into the ocean. The waves had tumbled the animal’s body around through the sand long enough to rub off most of its remaining fur and some of its facial features, and then it washed ashore during the next high tide. It was also somewhat bloated due to gases building up inside during decomposition. It’s the animal’s teeth and paws that made the identification possible, since both match a raccoon’s exactly. Remember that raccoons have clever front paws that help them open locking trash bins, as we learned in episode 138.

So the Montauk monster isn’t actually a mystery, except what happened to it, but don’t be discouraged. There are still lots of genuinely mysterious animals in the ocean, from misplaced sunfish to creatures no one has ever seen yet. Maybe you’ll be the one to discover them.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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 and get twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 151: Fossils with other fossils inside

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Thanks to Pranav who suggested this week’s amazing topic, animals that fossilized with the remains of their last meal inside!

Indrasaurus with a lizard inside. Yum!

Baryonyx:

Rhamphorhynchus (left, with long wing bones) and its Fish of Doom (right):

The fish within a fish fossil is a reminder to chew your food instead of swallowing it alive where it can kill you:

The turducken of fossils! A snake with a lizard inside with a bug inside!

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a listener suggestion from Pranav, who has sent me so many amazing suggestions that he has his own page on the ideas spreadsheet. When he emailed me about this one, he just suggested cool fossils, but the links he provided had a really interesting theme that I never would have thought about on my own. This week we’re going to learn about some fossil animals that have fossils of their last meal inside them!

We’ll start with a recent discovery of a new microraptor species, Indrasaurus wangi, which lived about 120 million years ago. It was an interesting animal to start with, because it had arms that were very similar to bird wings, although with claws, but its hind legs also had long feathers that made it almost like a four-winged animal. It was found in 2003 in northeastern China, but when researchers were studying it in 2019 they found something amazing. Not only did it have an entire lizard skeleton where its stomach once was, showing us that it swallowed its prey whole, the lizard itself was a species new to science.

We know what else Indrasaurus ate because more Indrasaurus fossils have been found in the area, many of them so well preserved that its fossilized stomach contents have been preserved too. It ate mammals, birds, lizards, and fish—basically anything it could catch.

Another species that was similar to Indrasaurus, called Anchiornis, also called a four-winged bird-like dinosaur, was found with what appears to be a gastric pellet in its throat. The pellet contains the bones of more than one lizard and was probably ready to be horked up the way many carnivorous birds still regurgitate pellets made up of the indigestible parts of their prey, like bones, scales, and fur.

The fossilized remains of food inside a fossilized organism has a term, of course. It’s called a consumulite. It’s a type of bromalite, which is a broader term for any food or former food found in a fossilized organism’s digestive tract. The term bromalite also includes coprolites, which are fossilized poops.

Naturally, it requires a high degree of preservation for consumulites to form, and a high degree of skill to reveal the often tiny and delicate preserved details. And consumulites are important because they let us know exactly what the animal was eating.

Consumulites aren’t limited to prey animals, either. A small armored dinosaur, a type of ankylosaur, called Kunbarrasaurus, which lived around 115 million years ago in what is now Australia, was a herbivore. The type specimen of the species, which was described in 2015, was incredibly well preserved—almost the entire skeleton, most of its body armor, and the contents of its stomach. Paleontologists can determine not just what kinds of plants it had eaten—which include ferns and seeds—but how it was processing its food. Most herbivorous dinosaurs swallowed leaves and other plant parts whole, then crushed the food in a powerful gizzard or gizzard-like organ along with rocks or grit. The rocks helped break up the plant material, and we have lots of these rocks associated with fossilized dinosaurs. The rocks are called gastroliths and are usually worn smooth. But Kunbarrasaurus didn’t have any gastroliths, and the plant material was so well preserved that researchers could see the cut ends of the plants where Kunbarrasaurus had bitten them. And all the pieces were small. Kunbarrasaurus therefore probably chewed its food, which meant it also probably had lips and cheeks of some kind to help keep the food in its mouth while it was chewing.

Another example of an animal with a consumulite that helped solve a mystery about its diet is Baryonyx. Baryonyx is a type of spinosaurid, a theropod dinosaur that grew at least 33 feet long, or 10 meters. It was discovered in 1983 in Surrey, England, and was described in 1986. It lived around 125 million years ago. It walked on its hind legs and probably used its arms to tear its prey into bite-sized pieces, because its first finger had a huge claw 12 inches long, or 31 cm.

But its skull was the real puzzle. Most theropods are meat-eaters, although a few evolved to eat plants. But Baryonyx had a long, relatively slender snout with a lot of close-growing teeth, and a sort of bulb at the end of its snout called a rosette. It looks more like the skull of a crocodilian called a gharial than a theropod. But as far as anyone knew when Baryonyx was discovered, there were no fish-eating theropods.

Until 1997, that is, when paleontologists studying Baryonyx spotted some overlooked details. In addition to a gastrolith in its belly area, they found some fish scales and teeth that showed evidence of being damaged by digestive acids. It probably hunted by wading through shallow water like a heron, catching fish and other animals with its long toothy snout.

It’s not just dinosaurs that are found with consumulites. Animals of all kinds eat all the time, so as long as the conditions are right to fossilize the remains of an animal, there’s a chance that whatever food was in the digestive tract might fossilize too. For instance, the same part of China that has yielded amazingly well preserved feathered dinosaurs has also produced other animals—including a carnivorous mammal called Repenomamus that grew more than three feet long, or one meter. I think we’ve talked about Repenomamus before, because we have evidence that it actually ate dinosaurs—at least baby ones, or it might have scavenged already dead dinosaurs. Either way, it lived around 125 million years ago and was shaped sort of like a badger with a long tail, although it wasn’t related at all to badgers or any other modern mammal. It probably laid eggs like monotremes still do. The reason we know what Repenomamus ate is because one specimen was found with pieces of a young Psittacosaurus in its stomach.

In at least one case it’s hard to tell which animal should be considered the eater and which should be considered the eaten. A fossil slab found in Southern Germany and described in 2012 contains a Rhamphorhynchus associated with two different fish.

Rhamphorhynchus lived around 150 million years ago and was a type of pterosaur with a long tail. Its wingspan was about six feet across, or 1.8 meters. It mostly ate fish, which it probably caught not by flying down to grab fish out of the water, like eagles do, but by floating like a goose and diving for fish. It had large feet and short legs, which would have helped it take off from the water just like a goose.

A fish that lived at the same time as Rhamphorhynchus was called Aspidorhynchus, and it grew up to two feet long, or 60 cm. It had long jaws filled with teeth, with the upper jaw, or rostrum, extending into a pointy spike.

In the fossil found in Germany, a Rhamphorhynchus has a small fish in its throat that it had probably just caught. While it was still swallowing it, an Aspidorhynchus fish attacked! But things obviously went wrong for everyone involved. Researchers suggest that the fish’s rostrum cut right through the flying membrane of Rhamphorhynchus’s left wing. The fish bit down but its teeth became tangled in the tissue. It started thrashing to free itself and Rhamphorhynchus was thrashing around too trying to get away, which only got them more tangled up together. The fish dived, drowning Rhamphorhynchus, and the weight of its body dragged Aspidorhynchus into deep water where there wasn’t enough oxygen for it to survive. It died too, and its heavier body lay partially across Rhamphorhynchus, holding it down so it wouldn’t drift away. The fossil shows Rhamphorynchus, Aspidorhynchus, and the tiny fish that Rhamphorhynchus never did get to finish swallowing.

Another fish, Cimolichthys, lived around 75 or 80 million years ago and grew a little over six feet long, or two meters. Its body was heavily armored by large scutes and it had several rows of teeth. It may have been related to modern salmon. It lived in what is now North America and Europe, and ate fish and squid. We know it ate fish and squid because, of course, we have the remains of various last meals found with preserved fossil Cimolichthys. For instance, one specimen was found with the internal shell of a cephalopod lodged in its throat. Researchers suspect the fish had tried to swallow a Tusoteuthis that was too big to fit down its throat. The Tusoteuthis got stuck and blocked the flow of water over the fish’s gills, basically drowning it. Tusoteuthis, by the way, could possibly grow up to 36 feet long, or 11 meters, although that depends on whether it had long feeding tentacles like modern squid or not. If it didn’t have long feeding tentacles, it was probably only about 19 feet long, or 6 meters, which is pretty darn big anyway. I wouldn’t want to have to swallow that thing whole. Not even if it was deep-fried first.

Another fish called Xiphactinus, which grew up to 20 feet long, or 6 meters, lived in the late Cretaceous period. It died out at the same time as the non-avian dinosaurs. It had massive fangs and was a terrifying predator, but sometimes that backfires. The fossil of a 13 foot, or 4 meter, Xiphactinus was found with a 6 foot long, or 1.8 meter, fish called Gillicus inside it. Paleontologists think Xiphactinus swallowed its prey whole, which thrashed around so much inside it that it ruptured an organ and killed the predator fish. Both fish sank to the bottom of the shallow Western Interior Seaway in North America until it was discovered in 1952.

Let’s finish with two even more incredible fossils. In 2008 paleontologists found a fossilized freshwater shark they dated to 250 million years ago. Right before it died, it had eaten two animals called temnospondyls. Temnospondyls were common animals, with many species found throughout the world, and researchers still aren’t sure if they were the ancestors of modern amphibians or a similar type of animal that died out without any descendants. One of the temnospondyls that the shark ate had the well digested remains of a spiny fish in its stomach.

But a few years later researchers in Germany found something even better. It’s a fossilized snake called a Palaeopython, related to boas. It was about three feet long, or one meter, and was still young. If it had lived to grow up, it would have doubled in size. It lived in trees but also hunted along the edges of rivers and lakes. About 48 million years ago, this particular snake caught a lizard that’s related to modern basilisk lizards. It swallowed the lizard headfirst. But then the snake died, possibly asphyxiated by a cloud of carbon dioxide from the volcanic lake nearby. We have a lot of incredibly detailed fossils from that lake, known as the Messel Pit.

Researchers aren’t sure how the snake made it into the lake. Maybe it was already in the shallow water when it died, or on the bank, and a wave washed it into the water. Maybe the wave was actually what killed the snake, washing it into the lake where it drowned. However it died, it sank into deep water and was covered in sediment that preserved it. Then, 48 million years later, paleontologists found it.

When the fossil was cleaned and prepared for study, researchers found that the lizard was preserved inside it. But there was another surprise inside the lizard! Right before it had been eaten by the snake, the lizard had eaten an insect. And the insect was so well preserved that researchers could tell it had an iridescent exoskeleton.

If I was fossilized right now, paleontologists from the far future would find a lot of chocolate in my stomach. Happy holidays to everyone, whatever your reason for celebrating at this time of year!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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 if you’d like to support us and get twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 150: Hamsters, Gerbils, and Ferrets

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This week we venture into the land of CUTE to learn about hamsters, ferrets, and some other small domesticated animals. Thanks to Kim and the Angel City Ferret Club for the suggestions!

Hamsters are SO CUTE:

Hamsters have giant cheek pouches to carry food in:

Gerbils are also SO CUTE:

Ferrets are SO CUTE in a totally different way:

The black-footed ferret does not want anything to do with the domestic ferret, thank you:

An extremely complicated but neat way to use your pet’s exercise wheel to generate power:

Hamster-Powered Night Light

Show transcript:

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

Back in episode 106 we learned about domestication, especially the domestication of dogs and other canids. But recently, Kim suggested an episode about the domestication of other animals, like hamsters and ferrets. Then the Angel City Ferret Club suggested I talk about ferrets too. So this week, let’s learn about hamsters, gerbils, and ferrets.

Hamsters are rodents, and there are lots of different species. The most common domesticated hamster is the golden hamster, also called the Syrian hamster, which is indeed from Syria. A DNA study of domesticated golden hamsters indicate that they’re all descended from a single female captured in Syria in 1930 and kept as a laboratory animal. It wasn’t long before some of her babies became pets, because hamsters are incredibly cute.

The golden hamster is about five inches long, or 13 cm, and is a chunky little rodent with a little nub of a tail, short legs, and rounded ears. And a little pink nose and shiny black eyes. I had a pet hamster named Wembley when I was little. It’s a golden tan in color with lighter fur underneath, and some breeds of domesticated golden hamsters may have white spots on the body or long fur.

Some other hamster species, most of which aren’t kept as pets, can grow much larger than the typical golden hamster. The European hamster, which lives in parts of eastern Europe, can grow up to 14 inches long, or 35 cm. It’s mostly brown with white patches. One of the smallest hamster species is Campbell’s dwarf hamster, which is sometimes kept as a pet but is originally from Mongolia. It grows about three inches long, or 8 cm. It’s brown-gray in color with a darker stripe down the middle of its back and pale gray fur underneath.

All hamsters have cheek pouches that extend down to their shoulders. In the wild, a hamster tucks food into its cheek pouches to carry back to its burrow, where it pushes the food out by pressing its forefeet against its sides and pushing them forward. Campbell’s dwarf hamster has cheek pouches that are big even compared to other hamsters. They extend all the way down the sides of its body.

Hamsters in the wild like warm areas without a lot of rain, like deserts and dry grasslands. They dig well and spend most of their time underground when they’re not out searching for food. They’re most active at dawn and dusk, although they’re nocturnal to some degree also. In cold weather some species hibernate for short periods of time, generally only a few days. A hamster’s burrow can be pretty elaborate, with several entrances, a cozy sleeping burrow, a pantry where the hamster stores food, and even a bathroom where the hamster urinates. Hamsters are hindgut fermenters, and like some other rodents and rabbits, some of the poops they produce aren’t waste material, they’re partially digested food that the hamster eats again to gain as much nutrients from it as possible.

Hamsters are omnivores, eating seeds and other plant material as well as insects and other small animals. Occasionally wild hamsters hunt together to catch insects, although in general the hamster is a solitary animal. In addition to its ordinary diet of hamster food, a pet hamster likes seeds and nuts, green vegetables, root vegetables like carrots, a little bit of fruit, and other plant foods, but shouldn’t be given people food since it can contain too much salt, sugar, or other additives that can harm it. Give your hamster deep bedding that it can burrow into to sleep and dig around in, but cedar shavings can be bad for their lungs. Paper bedding made for small pets is safest. And, of course, your hamster needs to chew to keep its teeth from growing too long, since like other rodents its teeth continue to grow throughout its life. It also needs an exercise wheel and toys designed for hamsters so it can get exercise and have fun. You can find good books about how to care for a hamster in the library. I mean you can find a book on hamster care in the library, not how to turn your hamster into a tiny furry librarian.

Hamsters don’t see very well but have a good sense of smell and hearing, and in fact they communicate mostly in the ultrasonic range—too high-pitched for humans to hear most of their calls. Generally hamsters only call to each other during courtship, when a male and female are trying to decide if they’ve found a good mate.

I tried to find audio of hamster calls, pitched down so humans could hear it, but had no luck. I guess the sound of their calls is a secret only hamsters know.

Gerbils are also closely related to mice and therefore to hamsters, and have a lot in common with the hamster. Both are about the same size but the gerbil is smaller, less chunky, and has a much longer tail. The tail has fur on it and helps the gerbil retain its balance while climbing.

There are a lot of gerbil species, all of them native to dry areas like deserts and grasslands in parts of Asia and Africa. The Mongolian gerbil was domesticated in the late 19th century but wasn’t well known until the 1950s when it became a popular pet. In the wild the Mongolian gerbil is a gray-brown color but pets have been selectively bred to produce colors from white to black with various patterns. Unlike the hamster, the gerbil is a social animal and is healthier when it lives with at least one other gerbil. It also likes to burrow in its bedding and needs to chew to keep its teeth from growing too long. It’s important to get an exercise wheel that’s solid instead of having rungs, since otherwise the gerbil could catch its tail between the rungs and get injured.

In the wild, gerbils live in groups with extensive burrows, sometimes connected with the burrows of other groups. It has a good sense of smell and if a gerbil whose smell it doesn’t recognize approaches, the two will probably fight. The Mongolian gerbil grows about 2 ½ inches long, or 6 cm, not counting its tail, which is about the same length as its body. But the biggest species of gerbil is the great gerbil from central Asia. It grows up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm, not counting its tail. That’s the size of a squirrel.

If a gerbil feels threatened or nervous, it may thump its hind legs on the ground to warn other gerbils. Other gerbils that hear the thumping may also start thumping. Sometimes pet gerbils will start thumping in response to rhythmic sounds in a house, like a washing machine on a spin cycle. This is hilarious, but of course if your pet gerbil is thumping you should look around to see if there’s something near its cage that it finds frightening, like a pet dog or a light that’s too bright. This is what a gerbil sounds like when stamping its tiny feet.

[gerbil thumping sound]

Next, let’s look at the ferret. The ferret isn’t a rodent. It’s a type of weasel called the European polecat, which has been domesticated. Unlike the hamster and gerbil, which are small and somewhat delicate animals, the ferret is much larger and more robust. It grows nearly two feet long, or almost 60 cm, with a long, slender, flexible body, long neck, and short legs.

The ferret is generally a crepuscular animal, meaning it’s most active at dawn and dusk. It’s solitary in the wild, but domesticated ferrets are much more social. It likes to burrow, and in the wild it sleeps in a burrow during the day.

No one is sure when the ferret was domesticated, but it may be descended from animals kept to hunt for rats and rabbits. Like other members of the weasel family, ferrets are carnivores and evolved to be slender and short-legged to fit into burrows of smaller animals. There’s even a term for hunting with a ferret, called ferreting. It was also used to keep mice and rats out of grain stores. Ferret breeders selected for white or albino ferrets because they were easier for their handlers to see, so many pet ferrets are albinos.

The ferret makes a good pet although it’s an intelligent, active animal and will get into all sorts of mischief if it doesn’t have enough to do. It likes to climb, explore, and solve puzzles, and needs lots of exercise and a safe place to play. The ferret can be litter trained like a cat and trained to wear a harness and walk on a leash like a dog. It’s sociable so it’s always better to have more than one ferret if you can.

The ferret needs to eat frequently, so it’s a good idea to keep a feeder full of ferret kibble where your pet can eat whenever it’s hungry even if you’re not home. Since ferrets are carnivores like cats are, your pet’s diet should be high in animal-based protein and fat. If you can’t find ferret food in your area, you can feed high-quality cat kibble, but food formulated just for ferrets is best. For treats, ferrets like cooked eggs, freeze-dried liver treats that you can get for dog training, and small pieces of cooked meat. You shouldn’t feed fruit to your ferret, since it can lead to digestive issues.

Ferrets are illegal to own in some areas because escaped and released ferrets can breed in the wild and cause a lot of problems as an invasive species. This is particularly true in small, fragile ecosystems like islands, so it makes sense that Hawaii doesn’t allow ferrets or many other animals as pets, including gerbils and hamsters.

Ferrets occupy the same ecological niche as the black-footed ferret, and the black-footed ferret is the most endangered mammal in North America. It was even declared extinct in 1979, but a small population was re-discovered in 1981 in Wyoming. Some of these animals were captured for a captive breeding program, so even though the black-footed ferret was declared extinct in the wild in 1996, the breeding program was able to reintroduce ferrets in parts of its original range in the western part of North America. It’s now considered an endangered species, which is still pretty bad but not as bad as extinct.

The black-footed ferret primarily eats prairie dogs, and prairie dogs are also on the decline due to habitat loss, poisoning and killing of them by ranchers and farmers, and disease. So saving the black-footed ferret also means saving the prairie dog. However, pet prairie dogs are legal to own in most states even though they’re not really domesticated animals and they can spread diseases fatal to humans, like bubonic plague. And since prairie dogs don’t breed well in captivity many animals sold as pets were captured in the wild, and many of them die soon after being captured.

But while feral domesticated ferrets are a problem in some areas, there don’t seem to be any feral populations of ferrets in the United States. It looks like ferret owners in North America take good care of their pets and make sure they don’t get out and cause problems for wildlife.

California has a lot of restrictions about what animals can be kept as pets. Ferrets are not allowed. Neither are gerbils, prairie dogs, or hedgehogs. But you can keep hamsters and chinchillas as pets in California, rabbits, camels, wolf-dog hybrids, and most birds including ostriches. The only reason I even mention California’s restrictions on pets is because the Angel City Ferret Club is working to get the ferret ban changed, and they told me all about it.

I don’t live in California so I don’t want to get involved in the debate. But wherever you live and whatever pet you have, always make sure that you know how to take care of it properly and that you only buy your pet from an ethical and reputable breeder. And, of course, never release a pet into the wild if you can’t take care of it anymore. Most of the time your pet will die of cold, starvation, injury, or predation from a wild animal. If you can’t find someone who can take your pet, contact your veterinarian who can give you information about rescue services in your area.

That is a super depressing way to end an episode, so let’s finish up with something cute and interesting. If you’ve ever watched a hamster or other small pet run on an exercise wheel, you may have wondered how much energy the little fuzzball was generating and if it could charge your phone or power a light. Well, other people have wondered the same thing. I found a how-to article at Otherpower.com detailing how they made a working power generator from a hamster wheel. Their pet hamster Skippy was easily able to power a nightlight while running on his wheel. I’ve put a link to the article in the show notes. It looks really complicated but if you’re an engineer type of person you might look at it and think, “Oh, that’s simple and fun! Let’s try it!”

There’s even a new company based in Taiwan that’s marketing exercise equipment that generates energy as people use it. People are a lot bigger and stronger than hamsters, so we can generate a lot more energy by running on a treadmill or working out on a stationary bike, enough to power the lights in the room where the equipment is. Gyms that have installed the equipment report that users feel more motivated to exercise longer and harder when they know they’re generating power. That’s good for the person and helps reduce energy use for the gym. And that’s good for everyone, including our small pets.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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 if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 149: A Zebra with SPOTS

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SOMEONE forgot their flash drive at work, so here’s a short but hopefully interesting episode about a mystery animal, a zebra with spots instead of stripes!

Ordinary zebras:

A SPOTTED ZEBRA?!??

A BABY SPOTTED ZEBRA?!?

Show transcript:

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

This episode was going to be another listener suggestion, but I left my flash drive at work that has all my research and the half-written script on it. So that episode will be next week, and instead this week we’re going to learn about the mysterious spotted zebra.

Spotted zebras are occasionally, uh, spotted in the wild. They’re very rare but it’s well documented. A spotted zebra was photographed in a herd of ordinary plains zebras in Zambia in 1968, and much more recently, in September of 2019, a spotted zebra foal was photographed in Kenya.

A tour guide named Antony Tira in the Masai Mara National Reserve saw an unusual-looking zebra foal in the herd. Instead of the familiar black and white stripes of other zebras, with white belly, the foal was black all over except for small white spots. The foal has been nicknamed Tira after its discoverer.

Zebras, of course, are famous for their black and white stripes. But if a genetic mutation causes the ordinary striped pattern to be broken up, it can look like spots, or in some individuals narrow streaks. The only problem is, the spots on the zebra are white on a black background. You’d think that it would be the black stripes that would end up as black spots on a white background.

But, it turns out, we’re looking at zebras wrong. Zebras aren’t white with black stripes, they’re black with white stripes. So when a rare zebra is born with spots instead of stripes, the spots are white on a black background.

When a zebra embryo is developing inside its mother, its coat is entirely black. It develops its stripes late in its development, when skin cells form the pigments that will give the hair its color. The white fur grows from cells that contain less pigment than cells that grow black hair. Not only that, underneath the zebra’s hair, its skin is black.

Zebras live in parts of southern Africa on grasslands and savannas in both tropical and temperate areas. The common plains zebra is one of three species alive today, with a number of subspecies. It typically grows a little over four feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.3 meters, or about 12 hands high if you are measuring it the way you measure its close relation, the horse. It eats grass and other tough plants and lives in small herds. Each zebra’s stripe pattern is as unique as a fingerprint.

A zebra’s stripes serve several purposes. It helps camouflage the animal, which sounds absurd at first since there’s nothing quite as eye-catching as a zebra. But a bunch of striped animals milling about together can make it hard to figure out where one zebra ends and the next one begins. The pattern disrupts the body’s outline, too, which means a predator may have trouble figuring out where exactly the zebra is, especially when it’s partially hidden by tall grass and brush.

Not only that, the white hair helps reflect some of the sun’s heat away from the zebra. Dark colors absorb heat, and the zebra spends a lot of time in the hot sun. But having dark hair and skin helps keep the zebra from getting sunburned. That’s right, animals can get sunburned just like humans, although their fur generally helps block much of the sun’s infrared rays, which are the part of the light spectrum that causes sunburn. The dark pigment in the skin, called melanin, also helps block some of the infrared, stopping it from penetrating deeper into the skin.

Results of a study published in early 2019 shows that the cooling effects of the zebra’s coat are more complicated than just color, though. The zebra can raise the black hairs of its coat while the white hairs remain flat. The researchers propose that this helps transfer heat from the skin to the surface of the hairs by causing tiny air currents to form, which helps the zebra’s sweat evaporate more quickly and cool the body.

But another, more surprising reason for the stripes is to deter biting flies, especially the tsetse fly and the horsefly. Both carry diseases that can be fatal to zebras and other animals. Researchers had long noticed that zebras seem to be bitten less by flies than other animals are, and studies show that this is actually the case. In a study published at the beginning of 2019, some horses were given zebra-striped coats and monitored to see how flies reacted. It turns out that while the flies still approached the horses, they didn’t land on them nearly as often as they should have. Sometimes they’d even bump into the horse before flying away again without landing.

Researchers are still working out why. One hypothesis is that the tiny air currents caused by the raised black hairs make the air around the zebra just unstable enough that flies have trouble landing on the animal. Another is that the flies are attracted to linearly polarized light, which is disrupted by the stripes and make it hard for a fly to land on the zebra. In effect, they can’t actually see where the surface of the body actually is because their little fly eyes are dazzled by the pattern.

All this means that spotted zebras are at a disadvantage compared to ordinary striped zebras. The genetic mutation that causes the spots is called pseudomelanism, which basically causes more skin cells to produce more pigment than they should. The opposite of pseudomelanism is partial albinism, where the skin cells produce less pigment than they should. This results in a zebra that looks like it has cream-colored or pale gold stripes on a white background. Occasionally true albino zebras are born, where none of the cells produce pigment and the zebra is pure white without stripes at all.

Hopefully, little Tira will be fine despite having spots instead of stripes. The spotted zebra foal is definitely getting a lot of attention from photographers, tourists, and scientists.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any Es. 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 and get twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 148: Gastric Brooding and Other Frogs

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Thanks for Merike for suggesting the gastric brooding frog and to Hally for suggesting newly-discovered frogs!!

The Gastric brooding frog:

Darwin’s frog, round boi:

The Surinam toad carries her eggs and tadpoles in the skin of her back:

Kermit the frog and a newly discovered glass frog:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have another fantastic listener suggestion, about frogs! Merike is a herpetologist from Estonia, who suggested the gastric brooding frog, and another listener, Hally, also wanted to learn about some of the new frog species discovered recently.

The gastric brooding frog is native to eastern Australia, specifically Queensland. There are two species, and both of them live in creeks in separate rainforests. The habitat is specific and small, and unfortunately both species went extinct less than forty years ago. Researchers aren’t sure why they went extinct, but it was probably due to pollution and habitat loss.

The gastric brooding frog was a slender frog, with the northern gastric brooding frog being about three inches long, or about 8 cm, while the southern gastric brooding frog was about half that size. Females were larger than males. It was grey or brown-gray in color with some darker and lighter patches on the back with a lighter belly. During the day it spent most of its time at the water’s edge, hidden in leaf litter or among rocks, although it generally only fully came out of the water when it was raining. It ate insects and may have hibernated in winter.

As you may have guessed from its name, the gastric brooding frog had a unique way of taking care of its eggs. After the eggs were fertilized, the female would actually swallow the eggs and keep them in her stomach while they developed. Even after the eggs hatched into tadpoles, they stayed in the mother’s stomach. As they grew larger, the stomach also grew larger, until it pretty much filled up the mother’s insides, to the point where she couldn’t even use her lungs to breathe. Fortunately many frogs, including the gastric brooding frog, can absorb a certain amount of oxygen through the skin. Finally the tadpoles metamorphosed into little frogs, at which point the mother regurgitated one or a few of them at a time, or sometimes all of them at once if she felt threatened.

So how did the mother keep from digesting her own eggs or tadpoles? How did she eat when her stomach was full of babies? How did the babies eat?

The jelly around the gastric brooding frog’s eggs contained prostaglandin E2, also called PGE2, which causes the stomach to stop producing hydrochloric acid. That’s a digestive acid, so once the eggs were inside the stomach, the stomach basically stopped stomaching. There is some speculation that the first eggs the mother frog swallowed actually got digested, but then the acid production stopped and the rest of the eggs remained. Once the eggs hatched, the tadpoles also produced PGE2 in the mucus in their gills.

The tadpoles continued to live off the yolk sac from their eggs as they developed, and in fact their mouths weren’t even connected to their gut yet. As for the mother, she just didn’t eat until the babies were developed and released into the water on their own, which took about six weeks.

The gastric brooding frog is the only frog known to raise its babies this way, but other frog species have interesting variations of the usual way frogs reproduce. Most female frogs lay their eggs, and then the male fertilizes them. But about a dozen species of frog have developed internal fertilization, where the female retains the eggs in her body until the male fertilizes them. The tailed frog from California in the United States, in North America, gets its name from a structure that looks like a tail, but is actually an extension of the cloaca. That’s the opening used for both excretion and reproduction. Only males have the tail, and it works like a penis to fertilize the female’s eggs without her needing to lay the eggs first. Once they’re fertilized, she can choose just the right spot to lay the eggs.

Another weird way frogs take care of their eggs is something that Darwin’s frog does. Darwin’s frog lives in Chile and Argentina in South America, and grows to a little over an inch long, or 3 cm. It has a pointy snout that gives its head a wedge  shape something like a leaf, which helps keep it camouflaged on the forest floor. The female lays her eggs in damp leaf litter, and after the male fertilizes them he guards them for several weeks. When they start to move as they develop, the male swallows them—but instead of his stomach, he stores them in his vocal sac. That’s the expandable sac in the frog’s throat that males use to make their croaking sounds by filling the sac with air.

The eggs hatch into tadpoles, which the male carries around as they grow. They live off their egg yolks, but they also eat secretions from the lining of the vocal sac. Once the tadpoles metamorphose into little frogs, they hop out of the male’s mouth and are on their own. Until then, the male doesn’t eat.

The Surinam toad is a species of frog. Remember that all toads are frogs but not all frogs are toads. It lives in wetlands and forests in northern South America, and has a radically different way of keeping its eggs safe. The Surinam toad is a flattened, broad toad that can grow up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm, and looks a lot like a dead leaf. It lives in slow-moving water. Unlike other frogs it doesn’t have a tongue, so instead of catching insects with its sticky tongue, it grabs them with its hands. It’s sometimes called the star-fingered toad because its long, thin fingers have tiny star-shaped appendages that help it catch prey. Instead of croaking, male Surinam toads make a clicking noise by moving a small bone in the throat back and forth.

When the female is ready to lay her eggs, a male clasps her around the middle like most frogs do while mating. But instead of just releasing her eggs and letting the male release sperm to fertilize them, the female makes a sort of flipping movement in the water as she releases a few eggs at a time. The male fertilizes them, then presses them onto her back. The skin of the female’s back grows up over the eggs, embedding them in the skin in little pockets. When the tadpoles hatch they stay in these little pockets as they develop. They only leave when they’ve metamorphosed into tiny toads, at which point they emerge and live on their own. The mother then sheds the layer of skin on her back where her babies lived.

A frog described in 2014 that lives in parts of South Asia gives birth to tadpoles instead of laying eggs. It’s a species of fanged frog, which are frogs that do actually have teeth unlike most frogs. Limnonectes larvaepartus grows about 1 ½ inches long, or just under 4 cm. The eggs are fertilized internally, but instead of laying them the female keeps them in her oviducts until they hatch. They remain inside her until they no longer have any yolk left to nourish them, at which point the mother releases them into a slow-moving stream.

Lots of other interesting frogs have been discovered recently. A new frog discovered in southern India in 2018 was recently determined to be a member of its own genus. It’s called the narrow-mouthed frog and had gone unnoticed even though it lives in an area that’s been extensively explored by scientists. It only comes out into the open for less than one week out of the year during the short breeding season, and the rest of the time it hides. Obviously, we don’t know much about it yet.

In 2016 in the same area as the narrow-mouthed frog, researchers discovered a new species of frog with a tadpole that burrows through sand. It’s a member of the Indian dancing frog family, and not only do the tadpoles burrow through wet sand at the bottom of streams, they have ribs that help them move around more easily. Tadpoles are usually just squidges without bones. Dancing frogs get that name because the males wave their feet to attract females during mating season.

There are so many recently discovered frog species that it’s hard to know which ones to highlight. You know, like the new glass frog from Costa Rica described in 2015 that honestly looks just like Kermit the Frog, if Kermit had a translucent belly that showed his organs. Scientists don’t know why glass frogs have no pigmentation at all on their bellies. Or the three tiny frog species discovered in Madagascar and described earlier in 2019, all of them smaller than your thumbnail, that belong to a new genus, Mini. Their scientific names are therefore Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini ature. The three are related to one of Madagascar’s biggest frogs, which grows over four inches long, or 10.5 cm, as opposed to the Mini frogs which top out at about 15 mm long. Hally sent me an article about eleven new species of frog discovered recently in the Andes, including the multicolored rain frog. It’s sometimes yellow, sometimes brown, sometimes green, speckled, splotched, spotted–so variable that at first scientists thought they were different related species. All eleven of the Andes frogs lay their eggs on land, and instead of hatching into tadpoles the eggs hatch into tiny froglets.

Frogs and other amphibians are sensitive to environmental change, which means a lot of species have either recently gone extinct or are critically endangered. Habitat loss and an amphibian fungal disease that has spread around the world are also making things hard for frogs and their relations. Scientists have been working hard lately to find species that are rare, suspected to be extinct, or are unknown to science, to learn about them while we can and do our best to preserve the species, either in the wild or in captivity. There are even multiple genetic resource banks, or biobanks, to preserve genetic material of frogs and other animals so that future scientists might be able to clone them.

There’s always the possibility that the gastric brooding frog isn’t actually extinct. The southern gastric brooding frog hasn’t been seen since at least 1981 despite extensive searches, though, with the last captive individual dying in 1983. The northern gastric brooding frog was only discovered in 1984 but hasn’t been seen since 1985.

But even if there aren’t any left in the wild, all hope isn’t lost. The gastric brooding frog is a good candidate for de-extinction, and cloning has actually been successful to a limited degree already. In 2013 a living embryo was produced from preserved genetic material, although it didn’t survive. Researchers are still working to clone the frogs and keep them alive. With luck the attempt will be successful, and not only can a population of the frogs be kept in captivity, they can be reintroduced to their former habitat one day.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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 if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 147: Snails and the Gooseneck Barnacle

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Thanks to Kim and Richard E. this week for two awesome suggestions! We’re going to learn about land snails and about the gooseneck barnacle!

Some baby snails and a mama snail, or at least an adult snail that is probably ignoring all those babies:

A giant African snail:

Unlocked Patreon episode about giant African snails (and other stuff)

A rare Polynesian tree snail, white-shelled variety:

A grove snail:

Gooseneck barnacles:

A barnacle goose. Not actually related to the gooseneck barnacle:

Show transcript:

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

We’re getting to some more excellent listener suggestions this week, this time about some interesting invertebrates. Thanks to Kim who suggested snails, and to Richard E for suggesting the gooseneck barnacle.

We’ve talked about various snails before, in episodes 27, 57, 81, and 136, but let’s dig in and really learn about them.

Snails are in the class gastropoda, which includes slugs, whether terrestrial, freshwater, or saltwater. Gastropods appear in the fossil record way back in the late Cambrian, almost 500 million years ago. Snails and slugs are so common that no matter where you live, you can probably find one within seconds, if you know where to look.

Snails have shells while slugs don’t, but there’s a third type of gastropod called a semi-slug. It has a shell, but one that’s too small for it to live inside. It’s more of a little armor plate than a snail shell. Slugs also have shells, but they’re vestigial and are actually inside the slug so you can’t see them.

Scientists have long tried to figure out if mollusks developed shells early or if they started out as a wormlike creature that later evolved a shell. A discovery of a 400 million year old mollusk fossil in Wales shows a wormlike body but also a shell—actually seven plate-like shells—which suggests that the shells developed early and that shell-less mollusks later lost them.

The snail has a spiraled shell that it can retract its body into, although not all snails can retract all the way into their shells. Snails that live on land are called terrestrial snails, or just land snails, and those are the ones we’ll talk about today. Land snails have lungs, or rather a single lung, although some land snails have gills instead and live in wet areas, although they’re not technically water snails.

Most land snails eat plant material, which they scrape up using a radula. You may remember from other episodes that the radula is a tongue-like structure studded with tiny chitinous teeth, microscopic ones in this case. Snails are sometimes so numerous that they can cause damage to gardens, so often people buy poison to kill the snails in their yard. But a 2014 study shows that killing snails isn’t very effective. The best way to get rid of snails, or at least minimize the damage they do to gardens, is to pick the snails up and transport them at least 30 yards away, or about 20 meters. Snails have a homing instinct, but distances more than about 20 meters are hard for them to navigate. The snails will probably just make a home where they end up. Also, no throwing them into your neighbor’s garden. That’s cheating.

Most land snails are hermaphrodites, which means the snail fertilizes the eggs of other snails and also produces eggs for other snails to fertilize. Some snails bury their eggs in soil while some hide them in damp leaf litter. The eggs hatch into teeny snails with teeny shells, and as the snail grows, its shell grows too by adding layers at the opening.

Snails need moisture to survive, so a snail secretes mucous that helps it retain moisture. The mucus is also thick enough to protect the snail from sharp objects as it travels around on the flat underside of its body, called a foot. Until recently researchers thought that the mucous also helped the snail move, but it turns out that gastropods move entirely due to muscular motions of the body, which start at the tail and travel in a sort of wave motion to the head. This isn’t the most rapid way to move—a typical snail can only advance about one millimeter per second—but it works for the snail. It can also climb walls and other vertical surfaces since the mucous helps it stick, even if it’s upside-down. The mucus a snail leaves behind in its track is visible until it dries after a few hours, usually called a snail trail or a slime trail.

If a snail’s environment becomes too dry, it will retract itself into its shell and secrete a layer of mucous that hardens, protecting its body from drying out. Later, when the environment is wetter, it softens the mucous and goes about its normal snail activities.

Scientists of all kinds study snails. One recently published study investigated the properties of snail mucous to try to develop an adhesive that can be turned from sticky to non-sticky and back to sticky. Another study from 2011 examined the way snails move to see if that can be adapted to various technologies.

Because snail shells are so common in the fossil record, scientists can measure the oxygen isotopes in shells to learn how dry or wet the environment was during the snail’s life. A recent study of snail shells from the Canary Islands indicates that 50,000 years ago the islands were much wetter than they are now. Also, there were more snails then than now.

The largest living snail known is the giant African snail, which can grow almost a foot long, or 30 cm. It’s native to East Africa but it’s an invasive species in many parts of the world. I actually covered this species of snail in a Patreon episode a few months ago, so I’ll unlock that episode and put a link to it in the show notes if you want to learn more about it. It’s kind of a weird episode and I spend entirely too much time at the end talking about my recent eye surgery, but you’ll learn about the giant African snail and a marine snail called the periwinkle.

New species of snail are discovered all the time, since snails are usually small, often hard to find, and many snails look sort of alike except to the trained eye. In 2012, two species of tiny snails were discovered in a cave in northern Spain. They’re called thorn snails and are less than 2 mm in size. Since they live in caves, like many cave animals they’ve lost pigment and are essentially transparent. More thorn snails new to science were discovered in Panama a few years ago. A snail specimen collected in South America in the 19th century was finally examined a few years ago and described as a new species in 2015. Those are just a few examples; so many snails have been described in the last few decades that it would get boring if I talked about all of them.

Not all snails are brown, of course. Some have lovely shells in different colors, patterns, and shapes. A colorful snail called the Polynesian tree snail, found in Tahiti and a few nearby islands, has been a puzzle to researchers for over a century, since they couldn’t figure out how the snail came to be on the islands. Not only that, but a few of the islands have a variety of the snail with a white shell, which isn’t found on Tahiti. It turns out that the people of the area just liked the white shells, which they used to make jewelry, so they introduced the snails to their islands for a better supply of the shells. The Polynesian tree snail is critically endangered now, but some zoos have started a captive breeding program.

People have eaten snails for thousands of years, and certain species of snail are considered delicacies today. A type of grove snail that lives in Ireland and southern France but not anywhere in between may be evidence that humans brought the snails with them when they first colonized Ireland. Researchers suggest humans arrived in Ireland by boat from southern Europe around 8,000 years ago and brought the snails with them, possibly to farm. They’re actually really pretty snails with a yellow or yellowy-white shell striped with brown.

Another invertebrate humans like to eat is the gooseneck barnacle, also called the goose barnacle. It’s actually a crustacean, and I’m glad I checked because I was honestly certain that it was another mollusk. I think I had it mixed up with certain types of clams with long siphons. But the gooseneck barnacle is a crustacean like last week’s roly poly, but unlike the roly poly, it actually tastes really good—if you can get it.

The gooseneck barnacle attaches itself to rocks and other hard objects in intertidal areas of the Atlantic and Pacific, and it prefers rough water. It can be dangerous to gather. Richard E., who suggested the topic, specifically mentioned the variety known as percebes, which is a delicacy popular around the Iberian peninsula, especially in Portugal and Spain. He mentions that people have died trying to get them, and that his own grandparents have a saying about them, “If you want to get, you have to get your backside wet.”

The gooseneck barnacle attaches itself to an object by its stalk, called a peduncle, which is strong and tough enough to withstand rough waves. At the end of the stalk is the capitulum, which contains the body and is protected with five plates. It extends its legs, which are called cirri and resemble feathers, from an opening in the capitulum, and uses them to filter tiny organisms out of the water that it eats.

Like the land snail and many other invertebrates, the gooseneck barnacle is a hermaphrodite. It mates with the nearest other gooseneck barnacle, and since it literally cements itself to its rock and can’t move afterwards, it’s a good thing that barnacles live in clusters or there wouldn’t be any new ones, since the gooseneck barnacle can’t fertilize its own eggs. The barnacle keeps its fertilized eggs inside its body until they hatch into tiny larvae, which it releases into the water. The larvae live in the sea as plankton for a few months, moulting six times before they metamorphose into cyprid larvae. You may remember that term from the horrifying zombie animals episode last month, but these cyprid larvae are just looking for a nice rock to cement themselves to.

The gooseneck barnacle gets its name from its long stalk, which resembles a goose’s neck, and the protective plates on the capitulum do kinda-sorta look like a goose’s beak from the right angle. Now, back in the olden days people didn’t know that birds migrate. People knew that some birds lived in their area in the winter or summer, but they didn’t know what happened to the birds the rest of the year. Some people believed some birds hibernated, others actually believed they flew to the moon during the winter. In the case of a goose called the barnacle goose, which mostly breeds on remote Arctic islands and then spends the rest of the year in various parts of Europe, in the early medieval days people actually thought it didn’t actually lay eggs or have babies. They thought it and the gooseneck barnacle were the SAME ANIMAL, but that the gooseneck barnacle was a young barnacle goose that was still developing. Therefore, people rationalized, they weren’t actually geese but some sort of fish so could be eaten during Christian fast days when meat wasn’t allowed. This lasted until 1215 when the pope said no, actually, wherever they come from, those things are birds and you can’t eat them on fast days.

The gooseneck barnacle is still causing consternation these days. In 2016, some pieces of driftwood washed up on a few New Zealand beaches, covered with gooseneck barnacles. No one knew what in the heck those things were. A species of gooseneck barnacle is native to the area, but they aren’t usually seen on sandy beaches where people like to swim. A picture of the barnacles caused a lot of speculation as to what they were until scientists and naturalists identified them. Fortunately, though, no one suggested they were baby geese.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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. You can also support the show and get two bonus episodes a month by signing up as a patron at Patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 146: Three strange animals

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The next few weeks will be all listener suggestions! This week, Dylan and Genevieve of What Are You? Podcast request a strange fish, Kim suggests a strange invertebrate, and Callum suggests a strange bird. Thanks for the great suggestions!

An archerfish, pew pew pew:

A regular roly poly and a spiky yellow woodlouse. Can you spot which is which??

A nightjar. Turn out light pls, is too bright:

A white-winged nightjar showing off his wings:

Show transcript:

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

I’m really, really behind in getting to suggestions, as you will probably know if you have sent in a suggestion and you think I’ve forgotten all about it. So before the end of the year, which is coming up frighteningly fast, I’m going to try to get to a lot of the older suggestions. So this week we’re going to learn about a fish, an invertebrate, and a bird.

We’ll start with the archerfish, suggested by Dylan and Genevieve, who are part of the What Are You? Podcast. If you don’t already listen to What Are You?, I really recommend it. It’s a new animal podcast that’s especially for younger kids. If you like Cool Facts About Animals, you’ll like What Are You? Anyway, Dylan and Genevieve both really like the archerfish, so let’s find out why it’s such a weird and interesting fish.

The archerfish isn’t one fish, it’s a family of fish who all catch insects in an unusual way. Most archerfish species are small, maybe 7 inches at the most, or 18 cm, but the largescale archerfish can sometimes grow up to 16 inches long, or 40 cm. All archerfish live in Asia or Australia, especially southeast Asia. They like rivers and streams, sometimes ponds, and a few species live in mangrove swamps and the mouths of rivers where the water is brackish. That means it’s saltier than ordinary fresh water but not as salty as the ocean.

The reason the archerfish is so weird is the way it catches insects. Think about its name for a minute. Archer-fish. Hmm. An archer is someone who uses a bow and arrow, but obviously the archerfish doesn’t have arms and hands so it can’t shoot tiny arrows at insects. But it can shoot water at insects, and that’s exactly what it does.

The archerfish has really good eyesight, and it learns to compensate for the way light refracts when it passes from air to water. When it sees an insect or other small animal, maybe a spider sitting on a branch above its stream, it rises to the surface but only far enough so that its mouth is above water. Then it forms its tongue and mouth to make a sort of channel for the water to pass through. Then it contracts its gill covers, which shoots a stream of water out of its mouth. But because it shapes it mouth in a really specific way, the stream of water turns into a blob as it flies through the air, like a tiny water bullet. The water hits the spider, which falls from its branch and into the stream, where the archerfish slurps it up.

But the archerfish has to learn how to aim. Young archerfish aren’t very good at it, and they have to practice to shoot accurately and far. They can even learn by watching other archerfish shooting water, which is rare among all animals but practically unheard-of in fish.

Sometimes the archerfish will shoot underwater, sending out a jet of water instead of a bullet. It does this mostly to expose small animals hidden in the silt at the bottom of a pond or stream. And sometimes, of course, if the insect is close enough to the surface of the water, the archerfish will just jump up and grab it.

The archerfish shoots water with a force that’s actually six times stronger than its muscles would allow, and it does this by taking advantage of natural water dynamics. This means it uses a lot less energy to shoot water than if it was only using its muscles, and it gets a better result. It can shoot water up to ten feet away, or three meters, to bring down an insect or other small animal, although of course it prefers closer targets.

Archerfish do well in aquariums, so they’ve been studied by scientists to find out how smart they are. It turns out, they’re pretty darn clever. The archerfish takes into account the size of its target to adjust how strong a blob of water it needs to shoot. It also recognizes individual humans by their facial features. So it’s probably a good thing that they don’t have little arms and hands.

Next, Kim sent me some great suggestions way back in August, and I feel terrible that I’ve taken so long to get to any of them. We’ll look at one of those today, an invertebrate officially called a terrestrial isopod, although you may know it by one of a lot of different names. My preferred name for it is roly poly, but it’s also called a sowbug, a wood louse, a pillbug, a doodlebug, and many others.

You have probably seen roly polies, because they’re really common. The most well-known family are the various species that can actually roll up into a ball when threatened, Armadillidiidae, and someone with a sense of humor came up with that name. They’re native to Europe, but they’ve been introduced all over the world. They’re gray or brown-gray in color, armored on the back with overlapping segments, with seven pairs of little legs underneath and a pair of little antennae.

Roly polies eat decaying plant material and sometimes living plants, especially if the plant is wet. In a pinch, they will also eat dead insects and other decaying matter, but mostly they just want that yummy rotting leaf. As a result, they’re valuable decomposers in the food web. They also need moisture to breathe, so they’re often found in soil, under rocks and leaf litter, and in moss.

But Armadillidiidae isn’t the only family of roly polies. Most roly polies actually can’t roll up at all, so I should start using one of their other names, woodlouse. Technically, woodlice are crustaceans. You know, related to crabs and lobsters. But they are infinitely cuter than other crustaceans. And if you’re curious about whether they taste like lobster, apparently they taste awful, like urine. I don’t even want to think about how anyone knows what a woodlouse tastes like, or how anyone knows what urine tastes like. Yuck. Anyway, they’re descended from marine isopods that ventured out on land over 300 million years ago, but a few species have returned to the water and are aquatic.

All woodlice have segmented, flattened bodies with seven pairs of legs. When a woodlouse molts its exoskeleton, it does it in two stages. It molts the back half first, then the front half a few days later. This means that it’s not as unprotected as other arthropods that shed the whole exoskeleton at once.

There’s another arthropod called a pill millipede that looks a lot like a woodlouse, including being able to roll into a ball. But it’s actually not very closely related to the woodlouse. Pill millipedes have 18 pairs of legs and a smoother appearance.

Almost all woodlice are gray or brown, although a few may have small yellow spots. But one is actually yellow and looks very different from other woodlice. It’s called the spiky yellow woodlouse, which is a perfect description. It’s critically endangered, because it only lives in one part of the world, a volcanic tropical island in the South Atlantic, Saint Helena. It lives in trees, but it’s so threatened by habitat loss and introduced rats and other non-native species of woodlice that a captive breeding program is underway to save it. There may be as few as 100 individuals left in the wild, but fortunately it’s a lot easier to keep in captivity than, say, 100 rhinoceroses.

Let’s finish with a bird. Callum suggested caprimulgiformes, which includes nightjars, potoos, oilbirds, and whippoorwills. We’ve talked about a few of them before in previous episodes, including the oilbird in episode 121 and the Nechisar nightjar in episode 70. I know we’ve talked about the tawny frogmouth somewhere, but I can’t remember which episode. Maybe it was a Patreon episode. But we’ve never looked at most caprimulgiformes, so let’s do that now, because they are weird birds. We’ll focus on the nightjars, which are also sometimes called goatsuckers, not to be confused with the chupacabra, which also means goatsucker. In the olden days people used to think nightjars snuck into barns at night and suckled milk from dairy goats. They don’t, though. Birds can’t digest milk.

Nightjars and their close relatives are nocturnal, although some species are mostly crepuscular, which means they’re most active at dawn and dusk. Like the owl, the nightjar’s feathers are very soft so that it can fly silently. It eats insects, especially moths.

There are three subfamilies of nightjars: the typical nightjars, the eared nightjars, and the nighthawks, with lots of species in each group. They live throughout most of the world and they all look similar. We’ll take one typical nightjar as an example, the European nightjar. It lives throughout most of Europe and part of Asia, although it migrates to Africa for the winter. It’s brown and gray mottled with lighter and darker speckles, which makes it really hard to see when it’s sitting on a branch or on the ground in dead leaves. Its head appears flattened and it has a short, broad bill. Its feet are small. It has large eyes and sees well even in darkness. It grows to about 11 inches long, or 28 cm, with a wingspan of about two feet, or 60 cm.

The female nightjar lays her eggs directly on the ground instead of building a nest. Usually she’ll pick a spot where long grass or other vegetation hangs over to form a little hidden alcove. Since the nightjar is so well camouflaged, it can incubate its eggs on the ground in plain sight and probably won’t be seen. If a predator does approach the nest, the parents will pretend to be injured, so that the predator follows the supposedly injured bird hoping for an easy meal. Once the nightjar has drawn the predator far enough away from the nest, it flies away. Some nightjars can even pretend to be injured while flying.

Some nightjars have beautiful, haunting songs while some are nearly silent. The male chuck will’s widow, which lives in the southeastern United States and much of Mexico, sings at night and also claps his wings to show off for females. His song sounds like this.

[chuck will’s widow song]

Because nightjars are so well camouflaged and mostly nocturnal, they’re hard for birdwatchers and scientists to spot. As a result, there are undoubtedly nightjar species still unknown to science. This is the case with the Nechisar nightjar, which we talked about in episode 70. It’s only known from a single wing found on an otherwise squashed dead bird that was hit by a car. And until 1997, the white-winged nightjar from South America was only known from two museum specimens.

Since the first white-winged nightjar nest was discovered in 1997, researchers have learned a lot about it. It’s only been found in a few places in Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay, and it likes open lowlands and savannas. The male has white markings on his wings, and during breeding season he finds a termite mound to stand on, spreads his wings to show them off, and then flies up. As he does, his wings make a distinctive sound. Since most nightjars fly silently like owls, the beating of the male’s wings is intended to attract a female. This is what it sounds like:

[white-winged nightjar wings beating]

Like other nightjars, the white-winged nightjar female lays her eggs directly on the ground. Some researchers think she times the eggs to hatch around the full moon so the parent birds have more light to forage for insects. In years where there’s lots of food, the female may lay eggs in a second nest near the first one and incubate them while the male feeds the babies of the first nest.

Many nightjar species are endangered due to habitat loss, but it’s also killed by cars more often than other birds because of its habit of sitting in the road. That does not strike me as being very smart. Maybe it needs to talk to the archerfish for some advice.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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 if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

This is what the little nightjar sounds like. It lives in South America:

[little nightjar calls]

Episode 145: The Cheetah

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This week is another suggestion from Wyatt, all about the cheetah!

The cheetah moves fast and can zigzag at the same time:

Baby cheetahs have silvery manes on their backs:

Cheetahs and dogs get along well in captivity:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re talking about cheetahs! This is a suggestion from Wyatt, and it’s also an animal I’ve had on my list to cover for a long time.

You may think the cheetah is just another big cat, but it’s different from other felids in some interesting ways. It’s most closely related to the puma, also called the cougar, and to the jaguarundi, both of which live in the Americas, but the Cheetah mostly lives in Africa. It was once also common throughout parts of Asia, but there are probably fewer than 50 Asiatic cheetahs left alive in the wild today.

The cheetah’s genetic profile shows a bottleneck that occurred about 12,000 years ago. That means the worldwide population of cheetahs dropped so low that it became inbred, which lowered its genetic variability. This is about the same time that a lot of animals went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, so we’re very lucky the cheetah survived. Since it migrated into Africa about 12,000 years ago, it’s possible that it only survived because it found the right combination of habitat and prey animal at just the right time. The cheetah’s genetic profile actually shows another bottleneck that happened around 100,000 years ago, which researchers think may have occurred as it migrated across Asia. Whatever caused these genetic bottlenecks, the result is that all cheetahs are genetically nearly identical.

Ordinarily, low genetic diversity means an animal is vulnerable to disease and infection due to a weak immune system. But cheetahs hardly ever get sick in the wild. A long-term study of cheetahs on protected land in Namibia found that zero of the 300 cheetahs showed symptoms of infection or disease. The team studying the cheetahs captured some of the cheetahs long enough to perform immunological tests on them—which didn’t hurt them—and compared the results with those of leopards also living in the region. They found that while the leopards had a stronger overall immune system, the cheetahs had a much stronger initial immune response.

The cheetah is tan or yellowish with a white belly and throat. It has black spots over most of its body, and partial or complete rings at the end of its long tail. It has black streaks on its face called tear streaks since they start at the inner corner of the eyes and trace down the sides of the nose and over the cheeks. No other felid has tear streaks, and some researchers think it may help the cheetah see better in bright sunlight.

The cheetah has a small head, long legs, and a long tail and stands about three feet tall, or 90 cm. Its tail is almost as long as it is tall. It’s lightly built. In fact, you might say it’s built for speed.

Because, of course, the cheetah is the fastest land animal alive. The fastest cheetah ever reliably clocked ran at 70 mph, or 112 km/hour. That’s as fast as a car racing down the interstate. Of course, the cheetah can’t keep up that pace for very long, but it can run at around 40 mph, or 64 km/hour, for longer. It has the real-life equivalent of a turbo button in some video games. If it’s chasing an antelope, which is mostly what it eats, and it’s close but not gaining, it hits that turbo speed and zoom! It accelerates long enough to catch the antelope. And it only needs about two seconds to reach its maximum speed. Not only that, it can run that fast while twisting and turning through brush, since antelopes also switch direction frequently to try to outmaneuver the cheetah.

Wyatt specifically wants to know how cheetahs run, and it’s definitely worth going into. The cheetah is incredibly well-adapted for high-speed hunting. It looks more like a greyhound than a big cat, with a deep chest and long slender limbs. The deep chest allows room for the cheetah’s oversized heart and lungs. It also has large nasal passages so it can get plenty of oxygen with every breath. Its long tail acts as a rudder, helping it turn quickly without slowing down. The cheetah also can’t retract its claws all the way like most felids. It can extend the claws somewhat, but they’re always partially extended. This means the cheetah has better traction, since the claws bite into the ground as it runs.

But there are other adaptations that aren’t so obvious. Its leg bones are arranged so that they’re more stable, reducing the risk of a cheetah putting a foot down wrong and wrecking. The cheetah’s spine is long and flexible, and it actually stretches as much as 30 inches, or 76 cm, while the animal is running, to give it an even longer stride.

Its inner ear is also unique. The inner ear is what allows a mammal to balance and move without getting disoriented or falling over. The inner ear consists of three tiny canals filled with fluid and sensory hair cells. The canals are oriented in different directions, so when you move your head around, the liquid in the canals moves too, and the sensory cells tell the brain which direction the liquid is moving, and the brain puts it all together and then you know exactly where you head is in comparison to the ground. And the best thing of all is, you don’t actually have to think about it, your brain just does it automatically. That’s good, because it sounds really complicated.

But the canals in the cheetah’s inner ear are different from those of all other felids. They’re bigger and longer, which allows the cheetah’s brain to fine-tune exactly where its head is even when it’s moving so fast that if it was a car, it would be pulled over for speeding. This means that the cheetah can adjust the position of its head as it runs so that it can get a better view of its surroundings, called visual stability.

We know so much about how cheetahs run because cheetahs in captivity enjoy chasing an artificial lure. Think of it like a scary version of your pet cat chasing the red dot. This allows scientists to study how the cheetah moves while running, using high-speed cameras and equipment called force plates that measure pressure. In a study published in 2012, researchers compared cheetahs and greyhounds and discovered that even when the two animals run at the same speed, the cheetah keeps its feet on the ground slightly longer than the greyhound. Even though the difference is small, it’s enough to reduce overall stresses on the cheetah’s legs, which means it can run faster without risking an injury. Its toe beans, also called foot pads, are also large and tough, more like a dog’s than a cat’s.

In fact, a lot of the cheetah’s adaptations for running make it resemble a canid more than a felid. That’s a good example of convergent evolution, since dogs and other canids mostly hunt by pursuing their prey while many felids use ambush tactics instead. Because of its adaptations to running, the cheetah can’t climb very well. It’s also active during the day, called diurnal, unlike most felids which are nocturnal.

It’s a social animal too. Males often live together in small groups called coalitions, either brothers or unrelated males. Females are more solitary, but when a female doesn’t have cubs to take care of, she usually spends at least part of her time with other cheetahs.

The cheetah can’t roar, but it makes a lot of other noises. Last week we heard a clip of a chirping cheetah that sounded like a bird, but that’s not the only sound a cheetah makes. It can purr, meow, chirp, growl, yowl, and so forth. Here are some of the sounds cheetahs make. I’ll put more at the end of the episode.

[cheetah sounds]

Cheetah cubs have a mane of silvery-gray fur on the back, which might act as camouflage but which also makes the cubs look a lot like tiny honey badgers. If you remember episode 62, about the honey badger, you may remember why. But even so, lots of animals eat cheetah cubs. Researchers estimate that in some habitats, only about 4% of all cheetahs born actually live long enough to grow up.

The cheetah is fast, but larger, stronger predators live in the same areas where it lives. Lions, leopards, hyenas, and other animals will wait until a cheetah kills an antelope, then will try to take the kill from the cheetah. Habitat loss is also a major factor in the survival of the cheetah. And, of course, people hunt cheetahs, either as trophies or because they mistakenly believe cheetahs kill livestock. Studies have proven that cheetahs actually much prefer antelopes and other wild animals.

Young cheetahs are also sometimes captured to sell as exotic pets. This isn’t a good thing, since quite often the cheetahs aren’t properly cared for, but it has been going on for a very long time. The cheetah isn’t a very aggressive animal and becomes tames fairly easily. In Egypt, tame cheetahs were used to hunt game as far back as 1500 BCE, and probably earlier, although only royalty owned them.

Despite this, cheetahs don’t do very well in captivity. They need a lot of space to move around, and if they don’t have enough space, they suffer from stress-related illnesses. Even the best zoos have trouble taking care of cheetahs properly. The reason you see so many photos of cheetahs and dogs together is that zoos have discovered that dogs make good companions for cheetahs, helping them stay calm. Cheetahs rarely breed in captivity.

So, while we’re talking about really fast animals, what’s the fastest living animal known? The cheetah is the fastest land animal, but the fastest flying animal is the peregrine falcon, which can dive at a recorded speed of 242 mph, or 389 km/hour. For regular flying, the white-throated needletail swift can fly at 105 mph, or 169 km/h, while the Brazilian free-tailed bat has been clocked at more than 99 mph, or 160 km/hour. The fastest swimming animal known is the black marlin, which can swim at 82 mph, or 132 km/h. But, of course, we haven’t measured every living animal to see how fast they can all run, swim, or fly. We didn’t even know about the Brazilian free-tailed bat’s speed until a study a few years ago. The researchers didn’t believe their data at first. But it seems pretty clear that the cheetah doesn’t have a whole lot of competition in the fastest land animal race.

[more cheetah sounds]

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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 if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!