Category Archives: animals

Episode 018: Some mystery elephants and the tapir

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This week’s episode is about a couple of mystery elephants and a non-mysterious animal, the tapir…but there might be some mystery associated with that little-trunked cutie too.

The tapir and its weird snoot:

The Moeritherium probably looked something like this:

Some super cute Borneo elephants with super long tails:

A baby tapir omgimgoingtodieofcuteomg

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re looking at some animals with snoots. Specifically, a couple of mysterious elephants, and the tapir, which looks like what you might get if a pig and an elephant had a baby.

Usually I start episodes with the facts about a known animal and finish up with a mystery, but this week we’re starting with a strange and mysterious animal called a water elephant.

There’s only been one reported sighting of a water elephant and it’s not a recent one. In 1912, an article appeared in the Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society. It was written by R.J. Cuninghame but concerned a Mr. Le Petit.

Now, before I go on to discuss the water elephant, let me just say that I have a great big problem with someone named M. Le Petit. No pun intended. Going by the name, and the secondhand nature of the account, and the fact that a lot of stories about strange African animals from this era are hoaxes of one variety or another, I’m taking this whole thing with a grain of salt. But it’s an interesting story, and if there really was a guy saddled with the name of little mister man, I can see why he spent a lot of time exploring the Congo instead of becoming a Shakespearian actor or something.

Anyway, I was able to find the original article, which has been digitized. It’s quite short, so instead of paraphrasing it I’ll just read the whole thing. It’s from the July 1912 issue of the journal, volume two number four, pages 97 through 98.

[read article]

There is no known animal that precisely fits Le Petit’s description. The closest is possibly the tapir. You can pronounce it taper if you want. It’s spelled T-A-P-I-R and no one seems to know how it’s supposed to be pronounced. Anyway, there are five species of tapir still around, four in Central and South America and one in Asia.

While the different species vary in size and coloring, generally a tapir is about 3 feet high at the shoulder and up to 8 feet long with short fur. The ears are oval-shaped with white tips. Its body is rounded with a pronounced rump, a stubby little tail, and a long head with a short but prehensile trunk. Superficially the tapir looks kind of like a piggy but it’s actually much more closely related to horses and rhinos. It has four toes on its front legs, three on its hind legs, and each toe has a little hoof. Depending on the species, the tapir may be gray, reddish-brown, black and white, or if it’s a baby, stripey. Females have a single pair of teats and males have a remarkably long, somewhat prehensile penis with flaps on the end that helps make a seal so it can mate underwater. You won’t get this information on National Geographic Kids, no sirree.

The tapir is a shy, largely solitary, mostly nocturnal animal that prefers forests near rivers or streams. It can bite like heck if it needs to, but it much prefers to run away from danger. Its favorite method of hiding is to submerge in water. It spends a lot of time in water, in fact, eating water plants and cooling off when it’s hot. It swims well and can use its snoot as a snorkel.

Technically its snoot is called a proboscis. It’s like a short elephant trunk although tapirs and elephants aren’t closely related. When it’s not snorkeling, the tapir uses its snoot to help gather plants. I just like saying snoot.

Tapir fossils have been discovered in Europe, China, and North America, but not Africa. So whatever M. Le Peti saw, assuming the account wasn’t a hoax or a mistaken identity, it probably wasn’t a tapir. So what else might fit the water elephant’s description?

There is an extinct animal that fits the description pretty well as far as we know. The Moeritherium lived about 35 million years ago and its fossils have been found in many parts of Africa. It was related to modern elephants although it wasn’t a direct ancestor, just an offshoot that as far as we know died out without descendants.

It wasn’t a very big animal—like the tapir, it looked more like a pig than an elephant. It stood between 2 and 3 feet high at the shoulder but was long-bodied, almost 10 feet long. Its legs were short, it may have had a tapir-like trunk, and it had small tusks more like those of a hippo, nothing like elephant tusks. Studies of its teeth indicate it ate a lot of aquatic plants, so it probably lived a lot like a hippo.

So could the water elephant be a descendant of Moeritherium? It sure sounds like a possibility, but there are two important facts to keep in mind.

First of all, the hippo evolved about 16 million years ago. If the Moeritherium had lived and continued to evolve, it’s possible it would have ended up looking a lot like the modern hippo. But the hippo is most closely related to whales—I’m not even kidding, and somehow I always manage to bring up whales no matter what animal I’m researching, huh?—and the hippo wouldn’t have become so wide-spread if the Moeritherium had a lock on the big aquatic freshwater herbivore niche.

Second, the date of the article is suspicious if you look at the discoveries of Moeritherium fossils. The Moeritherium was first described in 1901 from fossils found in Egypt. More fossils were discovered in 1902 and 1904. In 1911 the fossils were examined more closely and divided into two species. During this time, discoveries in palaeontology were popular subjects in magazines and newspapers. Dinosaurs and other extinct animals were even more a part of popular culture as they are now. Arthur Conan Doyle’s book The Lost World was published in 1912, continuing a tradition already well established by Jules Verne of science fiction stories where people discover supposedly extinct animals in remote areas. Scientists and explorers were still hopeful that living dinosaurs or ice age megafauna would be found alive and well. So it’s not a bit outlandish to suggest that the author of the water elephant story made it up with the best possible intentions—perhaps he expected to find the Moeritherium living in the Congo and wanted to excite interest in more expeditions. Or perhaps he was hoaxed by someone who’d read about the Moeritherium and thought it would make a plausible subject of a tall tale.

Clearly, I’m skeptical about the water elephant being a real animal, although I’d love to be proven wrong. But there is another definitely real elephant that might be a mystery that’s been hiding in plain sight for hundreds of years.

In 1750 or thereabouts, according to locals, a pair of elephants was given to the Sultan of Sulu who brought them to Borneo. At some point the elephants were released into the wild and their descendants now live throughout the western and northern parts of the island. This story sounds straightforward and interesting, but there are a lot of confusing details that make it less certain. Supposedly, the Raja of Java gave a pair of elephants to Raja Baginda of Sulu, but that was around 1395. We do know that in 1521, tame elephants were part of the palace’s wonders, but by the 1770s there were no tame elephants, only feral ones. Supposedly, the elephants were released into the wild at some point to keep them from being captured for use in war in the event of an invasion.

Whenever and however it happened, it sounds plausible that the elephants still living in Borneo are descendants of elephants gifted to a local ruler. Elephants have long been considered appropriate royal gifts. The story is given more weight by the fact that no elephant fossils have ever been found in Borneo, which suggests the elephants were introduced recently. The Bornean elephants have a very low genetic diversity, which would be the case if they were descendants of a single pair.

But here’s why these smallish, rather tame elephants in Borneo are such a big deal. Locals, and some researchers, think they’re the only surviving members of an otherwise extinct subspecies of Asian elephant, called the Java elephant. And they are different in appearance and behavior from other Asian elephant subspecies. They’re slightly smaller, although they’re not actually pygmy elephants as they’re sometimes called. A big male Borneo elephant may stand about eight feet tall at the shoulder while a big male Asian elephant may reach close to 10 feet. The Borneo elephant’s tusks are straighter than other Asian elephants—some males don’t have tusks at all—and their tails are so long that in some individuals, they actually touch the ground. Roughly 2,000 Borneo elephants remain on the island, although their habitat is increasingly being lost to palm oil plantations. Poaching is also a problem.

Borneo and Java are both part of the Malay Archipelago in southeast Asia, which is full of islands and nations I’ve mostly only ever heard about in songs and stories, like Singapore and Sumatra, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. I bet it’s beautiful out there, wow. Java is over 800 miles south of Borneo, so it’s not like the elephants could get there without human help. And the Java elephant was extinct by the 1800s.

In 2003, DNA testing on the Borneo elephants indicated they were not related to other Asian subspecies of elephant and were either from Java or native to Borneo. Since Borneo was cut off from the Asian mainland and the rest of the Malay Archipelago around 18,000 years ago, when sea levels rose due to melting glaciers, that means the elephants must have been on the island for at least 18,000 years if they truly are a native subspecies. But if that’s the case, where are the fossil and subfossil remains? Why do the locals insist that the elephants were introduced only hundreds of years ago?

I tried very hard to find information about DNA testing supposedly underway in 2015, but without luck. It could be that the results haven’t yet been analyzed or that the analysis hasn’t yet been published. But my bet is that the locals are right and these are Java elephants, once owned by kings.

To bring things back around to where we started, more or less, in November of 1975 a young tapir was supposedly captured in Borneo. Unfortunately, no one knew what they’d caught—the papers were described as a mixture of various types of animals, such as a tiger’s body, an elephant’s trunk, a goat’s legs but claws like a chicken’s, and so forth. Put that way it sounds absurd and made up. The papers dubbed it a tigelboat. But as zoologist Karl Shuker points out in his blog, everything about the tigelboat fits the characteristics of a young Malayan tapir. Tapir babies are stripey, and while tapirs have hooves, they do have a claw-like appearance since the toes are widely spread and the hooves pointed.

Unfortunately, no one in the scientific community followed up on the animal’s capture and it’s not known what happened to it. It was kept at a prison but wasn’t cared for and eventually disappeared. Someone probably ate it, that’s my guess. But it’s possible that tapirs still live in the swamps and rainforests of Borneo. We know they lived on the island during the Pleistocene.

Finally, one last mystery tapir was supposedly seen in New Guinea in 1906, when two New Guinea natives were employed as scouts for an expedition. The two were sent ahead to check on a trail but had to be rescued after a terrifying encounter with what they called devil-pigs. There were two of the animals, and the description sounds exactly like dark gray or black tapirs. But tapirs don’t live in New Guinea—as far as we know.

Papua and Papua New Guinea make up an island about 1,900 miles away from Borneo, so it’s not a close neighbor by any means, but it is part of the same archipelago. During the ice ages of the Pleistocene, when so much of the world’s water was locked up in glacial sheets and the sea levels were therefore much lower, the 25,000 or so islands that make up the Malay Archipelago were connected to each other and to the Asian mainland. When the oceans rose again some 18,000 years ago animals were stranded on the islands and have since either died out or adapted to their smaller territories. Who knows what secrets these little pockets of the ancient world may still hide?

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 017: Thunderbird

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We’re talking about Thunderbird this week and the huge North American birds that may have inspired Thunderbird’s physical description. Thanks to Desmon of the Not Historians podcast for this week’s topic suggestion!

Further listening:

While I was in the middle of researching this episode, Thinking Sideways did a whole episode on Washington’s Eagle.

Further reading:

“The Great Quake and the Great Drowning”

“The Myth of 19th Century Pterodactyls”

Depiction of Thunderbird on a Pacific Northwest totem pole:

A wandering albatross hanging out with a lot of lesser birds. Biggest wingspan in the world right here, folks!

A California condor. #16, in fact.

An adult bald eagle with a juvenile.

Washington’s eagle as painted by James Audubon

Model of a teratorn. We don’t actually know what colors they were.

Show transcript:

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

This week’s episode about Thunderbirds was suggested by Desmon of the Not Historians Podcast, a fun, fascinating podcast about history. If you haven’t given it a listen yet, I recommend it.

Despite my interest in birds, before I started research for this episode, I didn’t know much about the Thunderbird. I knew it was an element in First Nations lore but I didn’t know which tribes or regions, just assumed it was out west somewhere. Since I live in East Tennessee, “out west” to me is a vague wave of the hand and a mental image of wide-open plains and buffalo and maybe John Wayne. But it turns out that the Thunderbird is an important element in Northeastern and Pacific Northwest tribal lore, as well as being well known among the Great Plains societies and beyond. Thunderbird, in fact, is one of the most widespread figures in Native American lore.

I’m always cautious when mystery animal research points me to religious lore. Many cryptozoologists like to mine myths, legends, folktales, and religious stories of all kinds to find corroboration for the existence of their personal pet cryptid, but if you aren’t extremely well versed in the culture, it’s easy to misinterpret elements of a story. Worse, some cryptozoologists do this on purpose, running roughshod over sacred beliefs and yanking out one mention of, for instance, a giant human and then shouting about how this tribe clearly knows all about Bigfoot. Not to pick on the Bigfoot hunters, but guys, you need to calm down.

Thunderbird is associated with storms but it’s not accurate to say he’s a storm god. He’s more of a representation of the uncontrollable power of nature. In many Plains societies, Thunderbird is associated with trickster figures and a deep belief in the dual aspect of nature—that things in nature often hold their own opposites, that everything found in nature is reflected and represented in the human world.

Thunderbird is not necessarily a single being, either. Many tribes have stories about four different varieties of Thunderbird represented by different colors. Sometimes the different colored Thunderbirds correspond to the cardinal directions, sometimes not. And while Thunderbird is generally supposed to be an enormous eagle-like bird, the difference between bird and human is frequently blurred in the stories. This blurring of human and animal traits in stories is true across all cultures, incidentally, and if you doubt me, think about “what big eyes you have, granny.” Animal beings in traditional stories of all types are allegories, not real animals or real people.

The Thunderbird is also an allegory, a spiritual being, and it’s a disservice to the rich and sophisticated First Nations cultures to strip those trappings away and try to find nothing but a bird underneath. That’s not to say the physical form of Thunderbird wasn’t inspired by eagles or other birds. Just don’t dismiss a culture’s spiritual world to root out so-called proof of a natural explanation.

But. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any gigantic honkin birds in North America and throughout the world.

Going by wingspan, the biggest known living bird is the wandering albatross. Its wingspan can exceed 12 feet, with unconfirmed rumors of individuals with wingspans topping 17 feet. That is an enormous wingspan, seriously. I’d love to see one. The wandering albatross looks like an enormous seagull, white with black wings and a pink bill and feet. Males have more white on the wings—sometimes only the wingtips are black—and a peach-colored spot behind the head. Like many seabirds, albatrosses have a salt gland in their nostrils that helps filter excess salt from the body.

The wandering albatross spends most of its life on the wing far out at sea. It can soar for hours without needing to flap its wings. It eats fish and other animals it can catch at the surface of the ocean or in shallow dives, and sometimes will eat so much it can’t fly and has to sit in the water while it digests. I feel that way every time I go to a buffet.

But since the wandering albatross, as well as its somewhat smaller relatives, lives around the southern sea at the south pole, I think we can safely say that it wasn’t an inspiration for Thunderbird. Besides, it’s basically a giant seagull. Not exactly Thunderbird material.

The California condor’s wingspan is ten feet, and many people point at it as a possible Thunderbird model. But the condor is a type of vulture, which means it has a bald head and mostly eats carrion. Vultures evolved bald heads to reduce bacterial growth in their feathers, since yeah, they sometimes stick their heads in dead animal carcasses to get at those yummy soft parts. No matter how magnificent a wingspan the condor has, it doesn’t fit the stories of Thunderbird battling creatures like Horned Snake, since vultures aren’t raptors and their bills and claws are relatively weak. The same holds true for the Andean condor, with a wingspan of eleven feet, not to mention that bird lives in South America.

The trumpeter swan has a wingspan of over ten feet and lives in North America, but while swans can be aggressive, they eat aquatic plants and act like gigantic ducks, not exactly fierce Thunderbird material. The American white pelican likewise has a ten-foot wingspan but, well, it’s a pelican.

So what about North American eagles? We only have two known species, the bald eagle and the golden eagle. Both have wingspans that can reach more than eight feet and, tellingly, both are common throughout the Pacific Northwest and throughout most of North America. It’s entirely possible that admiration of these large eagles gave form to descriptions of the Thunderbird.

But while an eagle with a nine foot wingspan is impressive, let’s not fool ourselves. We all want to know about GIANT HECKIN HUGE BIRDS. Like, twice that size! This is what cryptozoologists so often dig around for in Native Thunderbird legends, hints that there was once and maybe still is a bird so enormous that it inspired terror and awe in people who saw it, to the degree that they immortalized it in cultures throughout North America as the Thunderbird.

In cultures without written language, stories impart knowledge of everything—history as well as religion, warnings of real-life dangers as well as rituals to ward off the danger—and many stories serve dual purposes. Among the Pacific Northwest peoples, certain stories about Thunderbird battling Whale commemorate a cataclysmic event now known to science, a violent earthquake on Jan. 16, 1700. It was probably a magnitude 9 quake that dropped the coast as much as six and a half feet and resulted in tsunami waves drowning villages from northern California to southern Vancouver Island. In the 1980s a team of researchers studying the geology of the area looked closely at stories of the Makah people in Washington state. Soon they learned that all the indigenous peoples along the coast had stories about the earthquake.

The difference between that study and cryptozoologists looking for Bigfoot or a real-life Thunderbird is one of training and intent. The 1980s team consisted of anthropologists, geologists, and indigenous scholars. And they weren’t cherrypicking information that matched what they had already decided was the truth. What they discovered among the Pacific Northwest peoples guided their research and helped them learn more about the infrequent but violent earthquakes in the area. They even uncovered stories that may be about older quakes and tsunamis.

The problem is that stories about events that happened a long time ago tend to fall out of circulation eventually, especially if the events are no longer relevant. The earthquake stories were hard to gather in the 1980s because the event that inspired them happened almost 300 years before. How much can you remember about the year 1700 without looking it up online? And in the meantime, other cataclysms, notably invading Europeans bringing diseases like smallpox, destroyed much of the native culture.

In other words, even if you’re a trained anthropologist with a deep understanding of the cultures you’re studying, teasing historical information about giant birds from Native American stories is next to impossible. We know truly gigantic birds used to exist in North America because we’ve found their remains, but we can never know for certain if any of those birds inspired Thunderbird legends in any way or if the birds were ever even seen by humans.

Some of the largest flying birds that ever lived are known as pseudotooth birds because their beaks had toothlike spines. They were big, slender birds that probably looked a lot like albatrosses although at the moment they’re classified as more closely related to storks and pelicans. While we don’t have any complete skeletons, researchers estimate the birds’ wingspans may have been as much as 20 feet. One species, Pelagornis sandersi, may have had a wingspan as wide as 24 feet. I just went outside and measured the road in front of my house, and it’s only about 18 and a half feet wide, just to put that into perspective. It’s probable the pseudotooth birds weren’t actually able to flap their wings, just soar.

Like albatrosses, the pseudotooth birds probably covered vast distances in flight. Their remains have been found in North and South America, New Zealand, parts of Africa and Europe, Japan, even the Antarctic. They ate whatever they could scoop up from the water with their long bills. The toothlike projections on their bills weren’t very strong and just helped the bird keep hold of wriggly fish, but they certainly look impressive.

But from what we know from the fossil record, the pseudotooths all died out by the early Pleistocene, some two million years ago. Homo habilis may have seen them flying off the coast of Africa, and if so I bet our distant ancestors thought something like, “Wow, that’s a huge bird!”

The group of North American birds that a lot of cryptozoologists want to call the Thunderbird is the teratorns. Some of them were as big as pseudotooth birds with 20-foot wingspans, but they looked much different. They’re related to the New World vultures, but their bills are more eagle-like, indicating that teratorns were active hunters that could probably swallow prey as large as rabbits whole. Formerly some researchers thought the biggest teratorns couldn’t fly, but new discoveries of fossils with contour feather attachment marks indicate they could. But since teratorns had long, strong legs as well, they might have sometimes stalked their prey on foot the way golden eagles occasionally do.

We have a lot of teratorn remains from the La Brea tar pits. Teratornis merriami had a wingspan of about 12 feet and lived until only about 10,000 years ago. The biggest teratorn is Argentavis magnificens, which lived in South America and probably went extinct around 6 million years ago. It had a wingspan of at least 20 feet, possibly more than 25 feet, but we don’t have very many fossils of this bird. Only one humerus has been discovered—that’s the upper arm bone, and it’s the length of an entire human arm.

It would be truly magnificent if a teratorn descendent still existed. Some people think it did, at least until a few hundred years ago. We might even have a depiction of one by the most famous bird artist in the world, James Audubon.

In February 1814, Audubon was traveling on a boat on the upper Mississippi River when he spotted a big eagle he didn’t recognize. A Canadian fur dealer who was with him said it was a rare eagle that he’d only ever seen around the Great Lakes before, called the great eagle. Audubon was no slouch as a birdwatcher and was familiar with bald eagles and golden eagles. He was convinced this great eagle was something else.

Audubon made four more sightings over the next few years, including at close range in Kentucky where he was able to watch a pair with a nest and two babies. Two years after that, he spotted an adult eagle at a farm near Henderson, Kentucky. Some pigs had just been slaughtered and the eagle was probably coming by to look for scraps. Audubon shot the bird and took it to a friend who lived nearby, an experienced hunter, and both men examined the body carefully.

According to the notes Audubon made at the time, the bird was a male with a wingspan of 10.2 feet. Since female eagles are generally larger than males, that means this 10-foot wingspan was likely on the smaller side of average for the species. It was dark brown on its upper body, a lighter cinnamon brown underneath, with a dark bill and yellow legs.

Audubon named the bird Washington’s eagle after George Washington and used the specimen as a model for a lifesized painting. Audubon was meticulous about details and size, using a double-grid method to make sure his bird paintings were precisely exact. This was long before photography, remember.

So we have a detailed painting and first-hand notes from James Audobon himself about an eagle that…doesn’t appear to exist.

Now, this isn’t the only bird Audubon painted that went extinct afterwards. He painted the ivory-billed woodpecker, subject of our episode nine, and the passenger pigeon, along with less well known birds like Bachman’s warbler and the Carolina parakeet. Yeah, North America used to have its very own budgie that was cute as heck, but it’s long gone now.

To add to the confusion, though, Audubon also made some mistakes. Selby’s flycatcher? Nope, that was just a female hooded warbler. Many people think Washington’s eagle was just an immature bald eagle, which it resembles.

I don’t actually agree. I’m just going to say that right out. Let me explain why.

There are reports of bald eagles with wingspans of nine feet, although I couldn’t find any verified measurements that long. A bald eagle will actually have a slightly wider wingspan as a juvenile than as an adult because of the way its feathers are arranged, but that difference is a matter of a few inches, not feet. In addition, the largest bald eagles are found in Alaska; individuals in the southeastern United States are usually much smaller. And female bald eagles are typically as much as 25% larger than males.

But here we have a male eagle shot in Kentucky with a measured wingspan of 10.2 feet. Juvenile bald eagles do travel widely, but even if that happened to be an outrageously large individual who’d flown down from Alaska, consider that Audubon had seen the same type of eagle nesting a few years before near the same area. He’d watched a pair feeding two chicks. Immature bald eagles don’t nest or lay eggs. There are other differences too, notably the color and size of the nostril area and the type of scaling on the legs.

Golden eagles also resemble juvenile bald eagles to some degree, but they don’t nest in Kentucky. Their winter range just barely touches Kentucky, in fact. They nest in Canada and in the western half of the United States. And the largest golden eagle ever measured was a captive-bred female with a 9.3 foot wingspan, and like bald eagles, golden eagle females tend to be considerably larger than males. A male with a wingspan of over ten feet is probably not too likely; but even if an aberrantly large male golden eagle decided to vacation a little farther south than usual, it’s clear from many details in Audubon’s painting and in his notes that the bird he shot can’t be a golden eagle.

Audubon kept diaries of his birding trips so we know he was familiar with juvenile bald eagles—he even painted one. We also know he differentiated between juvenile bald eagles and Washington’s eagle, which he wrote was about a quarter larger than the juvenile bald eagle.

And Audubon wasn’t the only person to have reported the eagle. From other reports we know it hunted differently from bald eagles, including no reports of it stealing fish from ospreys the way bald eagles frequently do (the jerks). Washington’s eagle reportedly preferred to nest in rocky cliffs near water, not in trees like bald eagles.

So I don’t think Audubon was mistaken or lying. I think he really did paint a type of eagle that was already rare in the early 19th century and which went extinct soon after. Unfortunately, Audubon’s mounted specimen has been lost, but it’s always possible there are other specimens floating around in personal collections or museum storage rooms, possibly mislabeled as juvenile bald eagles.

There’s not a very good chance that Washington’s eagle survived into the present day just because its immense size would make it easy to spot. Then again, size is really hard to estimate without something of known size to compare it to. Is it a gigantic eagle that’s really high up or an ordinary eagle at a closer distance? Combine that with Washington’s eagle looking so much like a juvenile bald eagle and there could be a remote population hiding in plain sight.

There are, of course, lots of reports of giant birds in North America. Most take place along roads or in back yards, where people catch glimpses of eagles of unbelievable proportions—literally unbelievable, in fact, 15 or 20 or even 25-foot wingspans and birds that pick up deer and fly off with them. Most of these are probably misidentifications of known birds of prey with size exaggerated due to alarm, poor visibility, or just an inability to estimate size correctly. Some may be hoaxes. But there’s always the possibility that in this case we might really have a very rare, very large eagle still living in remote areas of Canada or Alaska, and occasionally one flies into more populated areas.

Let’s hope someone finds some remains, either taxidermied specimens or a collection of bones and feathers in some protected cave, so they can be tested and we can find out if there’s a real live teratorn still flying around—or at least learn if there are three species of eagle in North America instead of just two.

I don’t know if Washington’s eagle has anything to do with the Thunderbird. In my mind they feel like two completely separate entities: a flesh and blood eagle circling high above a lake in search of prey, and a terrifying being wrapped in storm clouds soaring somewhere between reality and the spirit world. Some birds are bigger than others, and some birds have to be taken on faith.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 016: Jellyfish

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If you look at this episode and think, “Oh, ho hum, think I’ll skip this one because snore, jellyfish,” you are so wrong! Jellies are fascinating, creepy, and often beautiful. Come learn all about our squishy friends in the sea!

A Portuguese man o’war. Creepy as heck:

A lion’s mane jelly. You do not want this guy on your ship. Incidentally, a lot of the photos you find of divers with enormous lion’s mane jellies are fakes that make the jellies look gigantic.

The cosmic jelly, a deep-sea creature:

The creepy Stygiomedusa gigantea, guardian of the underworld:

A newly discovered golden jelly.

Further reading:

Jelly Biologist (I’ve been enjoying browsing this site)

Show transcript:

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

This week’s episode is about jellyfish—also called jellies, which is more accurate since they’re not fish at all.

Originally, I was going to focus on the Portuguese man o’war, another in the ongoing feature of “animals that scared me as a kid” and technically not even a jelly. But there’s so much to learn about jellies that we’re going to cover a whole lot more than that.

Jellies are interesting animals, to say the least. Their bodies have radial symmetry, meaning they’re the same in all directions. While the body shape varies, most jellies have a bell-like shape. The bell is generally rather thin, made up of an external covering, an internal covering, and an elastic gel-like material in between. Inside, the jelly has a digestive cavity with four to eight oral arms surrounding the mouth and long tentacles hanging beneath. The jelly also has a simple nerve net that can detect light and react to other stimuli, and which takes the place of a brain.

Jellies don’t have brains. They don’t have hearts, specialized sensory organs, or much of anything else. But they’ve been around for some 650 million years, possibly much longer, so clearly it all works.

The jelly’s life cycle is pretty weird. Most start out as polyps that stick to rocks or shells and use their little tentacles to catch microscopic organisms. A polyp can bud, producing new polyps that are clones of the original. Eventually, a polyp will constrict its body and develop into a stack of larvae. Each larva develops into a tiny jelly, which separates from the stack and swims away.

Once it’s grown, a jelly reproduces by releasing sperm, if it’s male, which the water carries to the female to fertilize her eggs. Some female jellies have brood pouches on the oral arms, some just carry the fertilized eggs inside the body while they develop. The embryos develop into swimming larvae called planula, which leave the female and attack themselves to something firm, where they transform into polyps.

This seems needlessly complicated, but again, it works for the jelly.

Polyps can live for years, while adult jellies, which I’m delighted to report are called medusas, usually only live a few months. The immortal jellyfish throws another step into this process. It can transform back into a polyp from any stage of its life if it needs to. As a polyp, the immortal jellyfish is tiny, only about a millimeter long. As a full-grown medusa it’s not all that much bigger, less than four millimeters in diameter. Because it can transform back into a polyp as many times as it needs to, apparently without any kind of degradation or injury, the immortal jellyfish is effectively, well, immortal.

Before you get too excited, though, keep in mind that there’s not a whole lot of research into the immortal jellyfish yet. It’s not even known if they will transform back into polyps in the wild, since it’s only ever been observed in captivity.

Almost all jellies have stinging cells, usually concentrated on the tentacles or oral arms, which they use to stun and kill prey. The stinging cells contain venom-filled nematocysts, which are coiled structures that uncoil and sting when touched. Humans are not jelly prey, but jelly stings can still be uncomfortable—and sometimes fatal—to humans.

You’ve probably heard of the infamous box jellyfish, the most dangerous species of which is common around Australia. Unlike most jellies, box jellyfish have true eyes and a relatively well-developed nervous system. They’re active, hard for humans to detect while swimming since they’re nearly transparent, and in the case of Chironex fleckeri, their venom can kill a human in as little as two minutes. Most fatalities occur in children, but most stings don’t result in death.

Another vicious and occasionally fatal stinger is the Portuguese man o’war, although it isn’t actually a jelly. It’s not even a single animal, it’s a colony. One member is the float, another the feeding polyps, and so forth. The man o’war takes its name from a type of ship, which the float somewhat resembles. The float is bluish or purplish, generally under a foot long [30 cm], and filled with gas. Underneath the float are feeding polyps from which hang purple tentacles, typically around 30 feet long [9 m] but sometimes up to 200 feet long [61 m]. If something attacks the man o’war, it can vent some of the gas in its bladder and submerge temporarily.

When I was a kid, my family occasionally went to the beach in North Carolina. Man o’wars are tropical animals but they do occasionally drift farther north. I was fully aware of this as a kid and did not want to get in the water farther than my waist. My grandfather and one of my aunts reassured me that they’d both been stung by a man o’war once, and it wasn’t any more painful than a wasp sting.

That did not make me feel any better. In fact, it made me even more scared because then I KNEW there were man o’wars out there. I wasn’t afraid of being stung, I was afraid of touching those creepy tentacles.

As it happens, my grandfather and Aunt Barbara probably had not encountered a Portuguese man o’war but a smaller animal called a by-the-wind sailor, which is now my favorite name of anything. It has a blue bladder float like the man o’war, but its sting is much milder, A man o’war sting is incredibly painful, more of a shock, that can lead to intense muscle and joint pain, open wounds on the skin at the sting site, headache, chills and fever, nausea, and can cause victims to faint and drown. Occasionally the venom travels to the lymph nodes and causes even more serious symptoms, including swelling of the larynx, an inability to breathe, and cardiac distress. Even a dead man o’war can sting if you touch its tentacles. Why would you touch its tentacles.

I’m not the only one who feels this way about man o’wars, clearly, because one of its other names if the floating terror. That sounds like the title of a pulp science fiction novel.

The bluebottle is a smaller related species found in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The man o’war is found in those oceans and the Atlantic. A few weeks ago, in early May 2017, hundreds of man o’wars washed ashore in Georgia and South Carolina. Man o’wars are pretty common around Florida, especially in winter, and occasionally they wash ashore in the thousands.

The man o’war eats fish and other organisms that get caught in the stinging tentacles, but there are some fish that live among the tentacles, even feeding on them, like the man o’war fish and the clownfish. Not a lot of things eat Portuguese man o’wars, but the loggerhead turtle and ocean sunfish do. I like them both. The blanket octopus is immune to the man o’war’s venom and may carry broken-off tentacles to deter predators.

If you’re stung by a man o’war, treat the sting the same way you’d treat other jelly stings. Rinse with vinegar to remove any remaining bits of tentacle or nematocysts, then apply heat for 45 minutes, either with a hot pack or by immersing in hot water. Don’t rinse with urine or vodka; it can make the stings worse—and definitely don’t rinse with fresh water. If you don’t have vinegar, rinse with sea water, but keep in mind that you may be pouring nematocysts back onto the patient with the water. This treatment is from a very recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, released only a few weeks ago as this episode goes live, so if you’ve heard differing advice for jelly stings, it may be out of date.

Jellies are related to some surprising things: coral, sea anemones, a rare parasitic worm, the freshwater hydra—a ten mm long tubular animal with stinging tentacles at one end that it can stretch four or five times the length of the body to catch its tiny prey. Like jellies, the hydra can regenerate parts of its body if they’re injured or bitten off. And the hydra doesn’t appear to age, making it biologically immortal, although in a different way than the immortal jellyfish.

So what’s the largest jelly known, not counting ridiculously long tentacles like the man o’war’s? That would be the lion’s mane jellyfish. Its bell can have a diameter of over seven feet [2 m] and it has pretty darn long tentacles, too—sometimes over 120 feet long [36.5 m]. It likes cold water and the biggest individuals live where it’s coldest. While small individuals are brown or tan in color, the big ones are usually red or purple. The sting of a lion’s mane jellyfish isn’t usually that bad, but it has a lot of tentacles, so it can inflict thousands of stings upon contact.

In 1973, the Australian ship Kuranda collided with a huge jelly in the South Pacific while traveling through a storm on her way to the Fiji Islands. The jelly was so enormous that the deck was covered in jellyfish goo and tentacles up to two feet deep [61 cm]. One crew member died after getting stung. The weight of the jelly was so great, an estimated 20 tons [18 metric tons] that it started to push the ship nose-down and the captain, Langley Smith, sent out an SOS. The salvage tug Hercules arrived and sprayed the Kuranda’s deck with a high-pressure hose, dislodging the jelly. Samples were sent to Sydney and tentatively identified as a lion’s mane jelly.

But remember, lion’s mane jellies don’t live in the warm waters near Fiji and Australia. There are other reports of lion’s mane jellies seen in the area, though, so it’s possible there’s a gargantuan warm-water variety that hasn’t been discovered yet.

Most jellies live near the surface of the ocean, but there are some deep-sea species known, with more being discovered every year. A gorgeous jelly, dubbed the cosmic jellyfish by the press, was spotted 9,800 feet [2987 m] below the surface near American Samoa this February. It has an umbrella-like bell with short tentacles that point both downward and upward. You may have seen it in the news described as looking like a flying saucer, which it does. A similar jelly was discovered in the Mariana Trench in 2016, almost two and a half miles underwater [4 km]. These are lovely jellies with translucent bells and glowing red and yellow innards, but there are less lovely ones down there.

The big red jellyfish discovered in 2002 is an ugly cuss. It lives in waters up to 4900 feet deep [1493 m] and is over a foot in diameter [30 cm]. It’s dull red in color and doesn’t have tentacles, just thick oral arms.

Stygiomedusa gigantea, also known as the guardian of the underworld by at least one website, and now by me, isn’t so much ugly as horrifying. Its bell is some three feet across [1 m], and while it doesn’t have tentacles or even stinging cells, it does have four 30-foot-long [9 m] oral arms that resemble dark brown or reddish strips of cloth that drift in the ocean currents.

Some deep-sea jellies don’t have tentacles or oral arms. Deepstaria enigmatica, a rare jelly described in 1967, basically just looks like a big mesh bag. Its close relative, Deepstaria reticulum, is very similar, but it’s reddish instead of whitish. The Deepstaria hangs motionless in the deep with its three-foot-wide [1 m] bell open, waiting for something to swim into it. When it does, the bell contracts like a bag, the fish or other organism is stung by nematocysts lining the bell, and the jelly pushes its stunned prey into its mouth with tiny cilia inside the bell.

Isopods, which are small crustaceans, frequently hitch rides inside Deepstaria bells. It’s not known if they’re parasites or confer some benefits to the jellies, but they don’t seem to be affected by the stings.

There are plenty of mysteries associated with enormous jellies, although the two most famous ones I dug into started to seem less and less likely once I got closer to the primary sources. According to Eric Frank Russell in his 1957 book Great World Mysteries, in 1953 a diver testing a new type of deep-sea diving suit in the South Pacific saw an enormous jelly-like monster kill a shark. The diver had been testing how deep he could dive in the suit and noticed a fifteen-foot [4.6 m] shark following him down. I’m going to quote the relevant section instead of paraphrasing, because it’s pretty amazing.

“The shark was still hanging around some 30 feet [9 m] from me and about 20 feet [6 m] higher, when I reached a ledge below which was a great black chasm of enormous depth. It being dangerous to venture farther, I stood looking into the chasm while the shark waited for my next move. Suddenly the water became distinctly colder. While the temperature continued to drop with surprising rapidity, I saw a black mass rising from the darkness of the chasm. It floated upwards very slowly. As at last light reached it I could see that it was of a dull brown color and tremendous size, a flat ragged-edged thing about one acre in extent. It pulsated sluggishly and I knew that it was alive despite its lack of visible limbs or eyes. Still pulsating, this frightful vision floated past my level, by which time the coldness had become most intense. The shark now hung completely motionless, paralyzed either by cold or fear. While I watched fascinated, the enormous brown thing reached the shark, contacted it with its upper surface. The shark gave a convulsive shiver and was drawn unresisting into the substance of the monster. I stood perfectly still, not daring to move while the brown thing sank back into the chasm as slowly as it had emerged. Darkness swallowed it and the water started to regain some warmth.”

I am skeptical, I admit. Eric Frank Russell was primarily a science fiction writer and this sounds like something from a novel, probably one called The Floating Terror. If he described the monster as 20 feet across or even 30 or 40 [6, 9, 12 m], I’d be going, “Hmm, but hey, the deep sea is full of amazing things.” But an acre? That’s 208 feet 9 inches across. 43,450 square feet. A lot of meters [4,046 square meters]. It’s three times the size of my yard, which takes me like an hour to mow. It’s just too big to believe, not without corroborating details—like a first-hand account of the actual diver. We don’t even know his name. And what about the diver’s buddy? Divers don’t go down alone, although maybe they did back in 1953. The whole story is just too thin, too fantastical to be believed.

The other promising mystery I looked into is a supposed legend from Chile, a sea monster that resembles a cow hide stretched flat but with eyes all around the edges and four big eyes in the middle. It rises to the ocean’s surface and swallows animals it encounters.

At first glance this sounds ridiculous, until you realize that many jellies have semi- or fully transparent bells and their internal organs, such as they are, may resemble eye-like blobs in the center of their bodies. Some jellies do have light-sensitive eye spots near their edges too. But the research I did to follow up this story, which I took from Karl Shuker’s blog, but which is originally from Jorge Luis Borges’ 1969 book called The Book of Imaginary Beings, indicated that the actual legend is much different and much less jelly-like.

El Cuero is a cowhide monster called Threquelhuecuvu among the Mapuche of Patagonia. It lives in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. It’s nearly circular, has claws around its edges, and one pair of red eyes. It also has tentacles on its head and a mouth in its middle, which it uses to suck bodily fluids from its prey. It’s supposed to come out of the water and come on land, and when an animal steps on it, it wraps its body around the animal and suffocates it. Then it drags its prey into the water to eat it. The only way to kill it is to throw cacti into the water. When the monster grabs the cacti, it’s pierced through with spines and dies.

It’s generally supposed that the monster is based on freshwater stingrays, although they’re not known to live in Patagonia. But in 1976, after a bus full of tourists ended up on the bottom of Lake Moreno, divers who retrieved the drowned victims reported enormous rays in the depths.

There is a freshwater stingray species in South America which has thorn-like denticles on its body and a closely related species, also with denticles, sometimes travels upriver from the ocean off the Chilean Patagonian coast. That might be the source of the cowhide monster.

So those two mysteries are almost certainly bust. But don’t feel discouraged. Not only was that 20-ton ship-sinking 1973 lion’s mane jelly a real, documented thing that happened [note from episode 248: sorry, it turns out it wasn’t real], there are lots of jelly species being discovered all the time.

Not all are deep-sea species. In 2013, a fisherman in northeast Italy hauled up a net full of golden jellies he’d never seen before. He contacted the local university, and a researcher came out and determined that the lovely golden jellies were completely unknown to science. In 2015, a 9-year-old boy caught a new species of box jelly that’s only around an inch long [3 cm].

There are freshwater jellies too, but not a lot is known about them. To add to the confusing and complex life cycle of marine jellies, many freshwater jellies also have a dormant stage where they basically turn into tiny jelly seeds, tough and capable of surviving even if dried out.

And back in the Cambrian era, some 500 million years ago, some jellies actually had skeletons. Fossil impressions show plates, spines, and spokes from comb jellies, which today are completely soft-bodied. Comb jellies are different from the kind of jellies I’ve mostly talked about in this episode, and not even closely related to them. I’d dig into them next, but we’re already pushing 20 minutes and there’s a limit to how much jellyfish information I can expect my listeners to tolerate in one sitting. We’ll save the comb jellies for another episode.

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 015: Hammerhead shark and Megalodon!

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This week’s episode is all about some awesome sharks: the hammerhead shark, which used to scare the poop out of me when I was a kid, and the unbelievably huge but fortunately for all the whales extinct megalodon! Thanks to Zenger from Zeng This! for recommending such a great topic!

The great hammerhead, a huge and freaky-looking shark.

A ray leaping out of the water to escape a hammerhead. The article I pulled this from is here.

A guy with a teeny adorable bonnethead, a newly discovered species of hammerhead.

Hello there. I am a great white shark.

Show transcript:

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

This week’s episode was suggested by Zenger from the fun pop culture podcast Zeng This!, which I recommend if you don’t already subscribe. He suggested megalodon as a topic, so since I was already researching hammerhead sharks, I decided to put together a shark episode.

We’ll start with the hammerhead shark, because hammerheads scared the crap out of me as a kid. They just look so weird! You know what else scared me as a kid? Skeletons. It’s a good thing no one ever showed me the skeleton of a hammerhead shark.

There are a lot of species of hammerhead shark, some of them small like the new species of bonnethead discovered earlier this year that’s only about as long as your forearm, and some of them huge, like the great hammerhead, which can grow up to 20 feet long [6 meters]. One of the biggest sharks ever caught was a great hammerhead. At fourteen feet long [4.2 meters], it wasn’t the longest shark ever, but it weighed 1,280 pounds [580 kg]. It was caught in 2006 off the coast of Florida.

If it weren’t for its weird head shape, the hammerhead wouldn’t seem all that interesting. It’s mostly plain gray in color, hardly ever attack humans, and is common all over the world. But they’ve got that head! The shape is called cephalofoil, and not only are the shark’s eyes on the end of the stalks, the head is flattened.

Researchers think the shape serves two purposes. A hammerhead shark can see really well since its eyes are so far apart, and the shape actually provides a certain amount of lift when water flows over it, like an airplane’s wing, which helps the shark maneuver. Plus, of course, a wide head allows for even more electroreceptor cells so the shark can sense prey better.

Hammerheads have relatively small mouths compared to many other sharks. They do a lot of feeding on the ocean floor, snapping up rays, fish, crustaceans, octopus, even other sharks. Oh yeah, and a hammerhead will actually use its head as a weapon. Hammerheads like eating stingrays and will pin one to the ocean floor with its head to keep it from escaping until the shark can bite it. In February of 2017, tourists surfing near Panama saw a spotted eagle ray escape a hammerhead shark by leaping out of the water like a bird. The stingray actually beached itself on an island, too far up the beach for the shark to reach. After it gave up, the ray managed to catch a wave that carried it back out to sea. That’s pretty epic.

Hammerhead sharks are considered a delicacy in many countries, but since their fins are the most valuable part of the fish, fishermen sometimes catch a shark, cut its fins off, and toss the still-living shark back in the ocean. It always dies, because it can’t swim without fins. The practice is horrific and banned in many countries. Overfishing has also threatened many hammerhead species. Researchers estimate that the great hammerhead in particular has decreased in numbers some 80% in the last 25 years.

Ironically, recent studies have found repeatedly that shark fins and meat contain high levels of mercury and a neurotoxin called BMAA, which is linked to neurodegenerative diseases in humans. The frequent eating of shark fin soup and other dishes made of shark meat, and cartilage pills which some people take as a diet supplement, may increase the risk of developing diseases like Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease. (I ate shark once, a shark steak. It was terrible.)

You may think a 20-foot hammerhead is a really big shark, and it is. Great white sharks aren’t much bigger. But before the great white and the hammerhead, a 60 foot [18 meter] shark ruled the oceans. Megalodon is first found in the fossil record around 23 million years ago, and died out about 2 ½ million years ago. Because shark skeletons are made of cartilage instead of bone, they don’t fossilize well. We have a whole lot of megalodon teeth, but except for some vertebrae we don’t know much about the rest of the shark.

Researchers generally compare megalodon with the great white, since while they’re not necessarily closely related, they occupy the same ecological niche. We do know how the teeth were arranged, since associated teeth in formation as they had been in the jaw, although the jaw itself wasn’t preserved, have been discovered in North Carolina and Japan.

At a rough estimate, megalodon probably grew 60 or even 70 feet long [18 to 21 m]. Its jaws were over six feet across [1.8 meters] with some 276 teeth in five rows. Due to the size of its teeth and jaws, it probably mostly preyed on large whales, and was probably a lot blockier looking than the great white. If the great white is a racecar, megalodon was that bus from Speed.

Some researchers want to classify megalodon as a close relative of the great white shark, which has serrated teeth like megalodon’s. But others argue the great white is more closely related to the mako shark, which does not have serrated teeth. For a long time the megalodon hypothesis was more accepted, but a study published in the March 12, 2009 issue of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology concluded that mako sharks and great whites probably share a recently discovered fossilized ancestor some 4 to 5 million years old. Its teeth have coarse serrations, which researchers think are a transitional point between no serrations and the serrations in modern great white shark teeth. The similarities between the great white and megalodon are due to convergent evolution.

This points to something many people don’t understand about science. It’s messy. It’s incomplete. Our collective body of knowledge is being added to, adjusted, reinterpreted, and hopefully corrected all the time. From the outside it can look like people arguing over ridiculous minutiae, or a bunch of eggheads who can’t make up their minds. In reality, as new information is added to what we know, what we used to think was true has to be changed to fit new facts. It’s exciting!

For a long time researchers though megalodon died out around the beginning of the Pleistocene because the world grew colder as the world entered into the ice ages. New findings suggest that climate change didn’t push the megalodon into extinction, other sharks did. Newcomers like the great white and the orca, which of course isn’t a shark but a whale, starting expanding into new territory, out-competing megalodon around the same time that a lot of marine mammals were also going extinct. Megalodon needed a lot of food to survive—more than the much smaller upstarts.

Back when megalodon was king, though, there was plenty of food to go around. It wasn’t even the only mega-predator hunting the oceans. In 2008, fossils of an ancestor of today’s sperm whale were discovered in Miocene beds dated to around 12 or 13 million years ago. The whale has been dubbed Livyatan melvillei and estimates of its length, from the partial skull, lower jaw, and teeth that were found is around 57 feet [17 meters]. Since modern sperm whales are frequently some 60 feet long [18 m] and 80-foot [24 m] monster males were reported in the past, it’s possible the newly discovered Leviathan could attain similar lengths. Its biggest teeth were two feet long [61 cm] compared to modern sperm whales’ 8-inch teeth [20.5 cm]. It also apparently had teeth in its upper jaw as well as its lower. The sperm whale only has teeth in its lower jaw, and since it mostly eats squid, it doesn’t really need teeth at all. Individuals who have lost their teeth survive just fine.

The Leviathan, though, used its teeth. Like megalodon, it may have preyed on baleen whales. Megalodon teeth were found in the same fossil deposits where the Leviathan was discovered. I bet they battled sometimes.

So how do we know Megalodon isn’t still around, cruising the oceans in search of whales? After all the megamouth shark was only discovered in 1976 and it’s almost 20 feet long [6 m]. Well, we have two big clues that there isn’t a population of Megalodon sharks still living. Both involve its teeth.

Sharks have a lot of teeth, and they lose them all the time as new teeth grow in. Shark teeth are among the most common fossils around, and any dedicated beachcomber can find shark teeth washed up on shore. If megalodon still lived, we’d be finding its teeth. We’d also probably be finding whales and other large marine animals with scars from shark attacks, the way we find scars on sperm whales from giant squid suckers.

Wait, you may be saying, no one was talking about megamouth shark teeth found on beaches before it was discovered. Well, megamouth sharks have tiny, tiny teeth that they don’t even use. They gather food with gill rakes that filter krill from the water. Megalodon teeth can be seven inches long [18 cm]. Great white teeth are only two inches long [5 cm]. Occasionally a fossilized megalodon tooth washes up on shore, and when it does, it makes the news.

So okay, you might be saying, you fractious person you, what if megalodon survived into modern times but has died out now. Well, we’d probably still know. Not only would the non-fossilized teeth still be found, since nothing is going to eat them and they don’t decay readily, but a lot of cultures have incorporated shark teeth into weapons over the centuries. A seven-inch serrated tooth is a weapon worth having.

Consider the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific. Sharks were important in the Kiribati culture there, and the people crafted amazing weapons with shark teeth. Anthropologists studying the weapons discovered that some of the teeth used in older weapons come from sharks that are now extinct in the area.

So no, I’m going to insist that whatever you saw on Shark Week, megalodon is not out there and hasn’t been for a couple of million years. But what about other mystery sharks?

There aren’t very many reports, surprisingly. Even Karl Shuker comes up empty, with just one mention of a reportedly hundred-foot [30 m] shark called the Lord of the Deep by Polynesian fishermen, but I can’t find any additional information about it.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t mystery sharks out there, of course, just that they’re probably not gigantic or radically different from known shark species. In fact, new sharks are discovered all the time. In just the last few months, a three-foot [1 m] ghost shark with rabbit-like teeth, and a tiny hammerhead called a bonnethead have been described. And yeah, I’d love to be wrong about the megalodon’s existence.

Researchers are studying the genetics of sharks’ rapid healing, which could have important medical applications for humans. A recent study published in the January 2017 BMC Genomics Journal provides evidence that the genes linked to the immune system in sharks and rays have evolved in ways that their counterparts in humans have not. One gene is involved in killing cells after a certain amount of time, which is something cancer cells manage to avoid. It’s possible that as researchers learn more, new therapies for treating cancer in humans could be developed.

So maybe we should stop eating so many sharks. Shark meat isn’t good for you anyway.

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 for as little as one dollar a month.

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Episode 014: Giant Salamanders

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In episode 14, we discuss the big three of giant salamanders–and some possible mystery relatives.

The Chinese giant salamander. An orange one. Enormous. Mostly harmless. Just wants to eat a snail.

The Japanese giant salamander:

The HELLBENDER reverb reverb reverb

The Pacific giant salamander. Not as giant but has an angry:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re looking at giant salamanders. Yup.

Salamanders are amphibians. Think “wet lizards” or “skinny frogs with tails.” A lot of people think snakes are slimy, but they’re not. Snakes are reptiles and their scales are satiny smooth and dry. Amphibians don’t have scales and they do have slimy skin, which they need to keep moist.

Some salamanders are completely aquatic but most live at least part of their lives on land, usually in wet areas. When I was a kid, I used to like turning over rocks in the creek behind our house, because frequently I’d find a salamander underneath. I wouldn’t catch it, just look at it, which is what you should do if you find a salamander—partly because it’s not good to disturb a wild animal that’s just trying to live its life, and partly because salamanders secrete toxins through their skins. The toxins won’t kill you, but if you get any in your eyes or mouth you could be in for some unpleasant symptoms.

There are two species of salamander known to be venomous, in a way, but they don’t inject venom with special fangs. When the sharp-ribbed salamander is attacked, it pushes its pointed ribs through tubercules along its sides. The tubercules secrete toxins that coat the rib points, which then pierce right through the salamander’s skin and into its attacker.

There are hundreds of salamander species throughout the world, some of them tiny, most of them a few inches long [about 5 or 6 cm], but there are three that are much bigger than that. The biggest is the Chinese giant salamander. The biggest ever found was just shy of six feet long [two meters]. Six feet long! The closely related Japanese giant salamander is almost as big, some five feet long [1.5 meters].

There’s a third giant salamander right here in the southeastern United States where I live, and while at two and a half feet long [76 cm] it’s not nearly as long as its cousins, it has a much better name. The Chinese giant salamander’s local name is infant fish, because some of the sounds it makes remind people of babies crying, which is creepy as heck. The Japanese giant salamander is called the giant pepper fish, because when it’s disturbed it secretes a whitish mucus that smells like pepper. But the North American giant salamander? We call that thing the H E L L B E N D E R.

I did try to find audio of the Chinese giant salamander crying. I had no luck, which is probably a good thing actually, because it’s a distress call. I did find this awesome audio of a Pacific giant salamander. Despite the name giant in its name, it’s not very big compared to the other giants, only about a foot long at most [30 cm], but it does have a cute vocalization.

[Pacific giant salamander call]

(He’s so mad.)

The Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders are so closely related that they readily interbreed. We know that because some fool decided to introduce some Chinese salamanders into streams in Japan. Hellbenders are not as closely related to the Asian salamanders.

All three of the giant salamanders are endangered, mostly due to habitat loss and pollution. They like clean, swift-moving mountain streams with rocks of just the right size—not too big, not too small. But the Chinese salamanders are also considered a delicacy, so they’ve been overhunted as well. Poaching is a major issue, ironically to stock salamander farms. The adults breed readily in captivity, but farmers haven’t had much success getting captive-born individuals to breed, so they continue to capture adults from the wild.

Giant salamanders are fully aquatic, although they can and do get out of the water occasionally for short periods. All three have thick folds of skin along their sides, which increases their surface area, and that’s important because they breathe through their skins. Larval giant salamanders have gills, but when they mature they lose those gills. The hellbender may retain a gill slit but it no longer functions.

While giant salamanders do have a single lung, they don’t use it to breathe. They use it for buoyancy. They like fast-moving water because it’s well oxygenated. A salamander will also rock gently to increase the amount of water moving over its skin, and male salamanders will wave fresh water over their eggs. Males dig and defend the nests. In Japan, they’re called den-masters.

Giant salamanders are flattish in shape with broad bodies and wide heads. Their feet have stubby little toes. They eat fish, snails, crawdads, worms, insects, small mammals, snakes, frogs—basically anything they can catch. They snap up prey fast, sucking it in my creating a vacuum when they open their huge mouths. They range in color from slate gray to black to brownish with dapples. Occasionally an orangish or pink individual is discovered.

All the giant salamanders have poor eyesight, but they have a good sense of smell. In addition, the Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders have sensory cells along the sides of their bodies that detect vibrations in the water. The hellbender doesn’t have that kind of sensory cells as far as I’ve been able to find out, but it does have light sensitive cells on its body, especially the tail. This lets it know when its tail is safely hidden, rather than sticking out from under a rock.

Larval hellbenders look a lot like another large salamander in the area, called the mudpuppy or water dog. The mudpuppy can grow a bit over a foot in length [31 cm], but it retains its gills throughout its life. Don’t be fooled by fake hellbenders.

So those are the three giant salamanders in the world, but there are rumors of other giants in the streams and rivers of California. In the 1920s, an attorney named Frank L. Griffith, who was hunting in the area, spotted five salamanders in a lake in the Trinity Alps in northern California. The salamanders ranged in size between five and nine feet long [1.5 and 2.7 m]. He hooked one with a line, but he wasn’t strong enough to land it and it escaped. In the 1940s, animal handler Vern Harden claimed he’d seen eight-foot [2.4 m] salamanders in Hubbard Lake.

Thomas L. Rodgers, a biologist at Chico State College, conducted four expeditions to the Trinity Alps in 1948 in search of the giant. The expeditions didn’t find anything bigger than foot-long [30 cm] Pacific giant salamanders, but Rodgers suggested that the Trinity Alps giant might be a subspecies of the Pacific giant that grows to an enormous size, or might be a cryptobranchid like the eastern hellbender or the Asian giant salamanders.

In 1951, herpetologist George S. Myers published a paper about his own sighting. He said that in 1939 he was contacted by a commercial fisherman who had dredged up a two and a half foot [76 m] salamander in a catfish net from the Sacramento River. Myers described the salamander as dark brown with dull yellow spots, and said that it resembled the Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders but appeared to be a different species.

In 1960, Bigfoot hunter Tom Slick convinced an expedition looking for Bigfoot to hunt for the salamander too, with no luck. Also in 1960, Tom Rogers mounted another expedition, this time with some zoology professors and ten interested laymen. Again, they only found the foot-long Pacific giant salamander.

Rodgers decided he was wrong about the existence of a new giant salamander, and in 1962 denounced the previous sightings as misidentifications and hoaxes. More recently, a 1997 expedition led by Japanese-American writer Kyle Mizokami likewise came up with no sightings.

It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a giant salamander lives in the Trinity Alps and just hasn’t been found. It’s the right climate with the right conditions. And new salamanders are occasionally discovered in the United States. In 2009, a new species of lungless salamander was discovered in the Appalachian foothills. Yeah, that’s near where I live!

But that one is barely an inch long [2.5 cm]. It should be a little easier to spot a salamander longer than a grown man is tall, not to mention that two of the Trinity Alps giant salamander sightings report salamanders in lakes. If they’re cryptobranchids, they need running water to survive—streams or shallow rivers.

And as for the third sightings, the one where George Myers actually got a first-hand look at a giant salamander caught in the Sacramento River, there’s more to the story. Tom Rogers, the biologist who led five different expeditions to search for the salamander, also saw the Sacramento specimen. The fisherman had managed to keep it alive in his bathtub. Rogers identified it as a Chinese giant salamander, and in fact it turned out to be a lost pet named Benny that had escaped while being taken to Stockton Harbor by steamer.

If these were the only sightings of giant salamanders in North America that aren’t hellbenders, it wouldn’t be looking good for them. But we’re definitely not done. In his blog, zoologist Karl Shuker reports hearing from a woman who sighted a huge salamander in Redwood Park in Arcata, California in 2005. She described it as several feet long [1 meter] with a rounded head instead of flat like known giant salamanders, no skin folds along its sides, and reddish markings. She spotted it walking on land after a rain. Shuker suggests she might have seen an unusually large coastal giant salamander, which can reach almost a foot and a half in length [45 cm] and which she said her salamander resembled in many respects. Remember that Pacific giant salamander sound I played earlier? The coastal giant salamander is a type of Pacific giant salamander.

California isn’t the only state with a mystery giant salamander, though. Three other states have interesting reports, and all of them are pink.

Pink salamanders actually aren’t all that uncommon. Alibinism in salamanders is well known and not rare, and they frequently look pink due to blood vessels visible through their unpigmented skin.

In the early 1960s, biology student Mary Lou Richardson was bowhunting along Florida’s St. Johns River with her father and a friend. All three saw an animal the size of a donkey with a big flat head and a small neck. Other tourists saw the animal that same day, and local fishermen were familiar with it going back to 1955. It’s not clear from the description if the animal was a salamander or something else.

Then, on May 10, 1975, five people on a fishing trip on the St. Johns River saw a weird pink animal’s head and neck on the water. It was only 20 feet [6 m] from their boat and watched them for about eight seconds before diving again. One witness, Dorothy Abram, described it as having a head the size of a human’s with small horns like a snail’s. Another witness, Brenda Langley, also noted it had “this little jagged thing going down its back.” Presumably she meant serrations of some kind. The party also said the animal had large dark eyes and gills or gill-like flaps on either side of its head.

In Ohio, the first white settlers near Scippo Creek, called Catlick Creek Valley at the time, discovered what they called giant pink lizards living in the area. They were three to seven feet long [1 to 2.1 m] and lived in and around water. They also had moose-like horns, pretty big ones apparently. But after a drought followed by a devastating wildfire, by 1820 the pink lizards seemed to have died out.

And in South Carolina around 1928, nature writer Herbert Sass and his wife were boating on Goose Creek near Charleston when Sass saw something big under the water. He lifted it with an oar and although it almost immediately slipped back into the water, they were able to get a good look. Their description sounds a lot like a hellbender or other giant salamander, in this case as thick around as a man’s thigh and five or six feet long [1.5 to 2 m]. It was salmon pink and orange.

The St. Johns River monster might have been a manatee. The area where it was spotted is a manatee refuge and manatees have been responsible for other mystery animal sightings in the past. Then again, manatees don’t have snail horns, serrated backs, or gills, and known giant salamanders don’t either. It’s important to note too that in the 1975 sighting of the monster, dubbed Pinky because of course it was, witnesses described it as being dinosaur-like and said the skin appeared to be stretched so tightly over its head that the shape of the bones were visible. That doesn’t sound like either a manatee or a salamander, more like a reptile of some kind.

The Ohio and South Carolina sightings are much more interesting in regards to giant salamander sightings. Ohio is historically part of the hellbender’s range, and a population of hellbenders have recently been reintroduced there. Shuker suggests the horns described on the so-called pink lizards might actually have been branching external gills seen underwater. Most species of salamander lose their gills after they grow out of their larval stage, but not all, including mudpuppies. Mudpuppies aren’t as big as hellbenders, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t once a variety that grew much larger.

South Carolina is also part of the hellbender’s range, and Sass’s pink and orange animal might very well have been an exceptional large specimen. Sass himself called it a hellbender.

Even if none of these mystery salamanders are ever discovered, or if they turn out to be known animals, we still have hellbenders around, and the Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders too. The best thing we can do is keep their habitats as pristine as possible, since salamanders need clean streams to thrive. Next time you go hiking, pick up any trash you find and pack it out with you. The salamanders will thank you.

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 for as little as one dollar a month.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 013: The Chupacabra

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This week we’re taking a close look at the legend of the chupacabra! It’s not what you may expect, but it’s definitely an interesting story.

Ben Radford’s sketch of the chupacabra Madelyne Tolentino described in 1996:

The Texas chupacabra taxidermied by Ayer:

A happy, healthy Xolo dog:

A coywolf without mange:

Mange can be cured! Above is a poor sad mangy pup before treatment and a happy happy pup after treatment.

Further reading/listening:

Tracking the Chupacabra by Benjamin Radford

Museum of Modern Mystery podcast, episode 8

Episode 012: The Wyvern, the Basilisk, and the Cockatrice

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This week we range across the world to solve (sort of) the mystery of the wyvern, the basilisk, the cockatrice, and crowing snakes! Thanks to listener Richard E. for suggesting this week’s topic!

From left to right, or whatever since the three have been confused since at least the middle ages: the basilisk, the cockatrice, and the wyvern:

The king cobra, or maybe the basilisk:

The Egyptian mongoose/ichneumon, or maybe the cockatrice:

Basilisk!

Further reading:

Extraordinary Animals Revisited by Karl P.N. Shuker

Gode Cookery: The Cockentrice – A Ryal Mete

Show transcript:

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

This week’s episode was inspired by listener Richard E., who suggested the wyvern as a topic. He even attached some photos of wyverns in architecture around Leicester, England. I forgot to ask him if he lives in Leicester or just visits the city, but I looked at the photos and was struck by how much the wyvern resembles the cockatrice. Next thing I knew, I was scouring the internet for audio files of howling snakes. It all makes sense by the end.

Before we jump in, I’d like to apologize to a guy named Mike W. who is from Leicester. Mike, if by some crazy coincidence you’re listening, I am so, so sorry for the way I treated you in London in 1996. I was a jerk in my 20s, to put it mildly. You were such a great guy and I have felt awful ever since.

Okay, my oversharing out of the way, let’s talk about wyverns.

The word wyvern is related to the word viper, and originally that’s what it meant, but by the 17th century the word had lost its original meaning and was attached to a heraldic animal instead. The wyvern has been popular in heraldry since the middle ages.

In video games, the wyvern is usually a two-legged dragon with wings. In heraldry, it’s less dragonlike and more snakey, but it almost always has one pair of legs and one pair of wings. Frequently it wears a crown or has some sort of crest, and quite often its head looks a lot like a rooster’s.

The heraldic wyvern doesn’t seem to have ever been considered a real animal, but the cockatrice was. The cockatrice is usually depicted as a snakelike animal with a one pair of legs, one pair of wings, and a rooster-like head. You see the connection. But here’s the really confusing thing. The words cockatrice and basilisk were used more or less interchangeably as early as the 14th century. In fact, in the King James Version of the Bible, Isaiah 14 Verse 29 mentions a cockatrice, while the same verse in the English Revised Version uses the word basilisk instead.

Those two words don’t even sound alike. And if like me you grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons and reading books like Walter Wangerin Jr.’s The Book of the Dun Cow, you think of the cockatrice and the basilisk as totally different animals.

I’m going to talk about the basilisk first. Then I’ll come back to the cockatrice.

The basilisk has an old, old pedigree. A lot of online sources claim that Pliny the Elder was the first to describe the basilisk in his natural history in about 79 CE, but it was already a well-known animal by then. We know because the Roman poet Lucan, who died in 65 CE, makes reference to the basilisk twice in his epic poem Pharsalia in a way that implies his audience was completely with the animal’s supposed abilities.

The basilisk was supposed to be deadly—so deadly, in fact, that if a man on horseback speared a basilisk, the venom would run up the spear and kill not only the rider, but the horse too. That’s one of the stories Lucan references in his poem. Pliny also includes it in his natural history.

All the basilisk had to do was look at you and you’d die or be turned to stone. Birds flying in sight of a basilisk, no matter how high above it they were, would die in midair. The ground around a basilisk’s home was blighted, every plant dead and even the rocks shattered.

So what did the basilisk look like? Pliny describes it this way. I’ve taken this quote from a site called “The Medieval Bestiary,” which has a much clearer translation than Wikipedia’s and other sites that seem to have copied Wikipedia.

“It is no more than twelve inches long [30 cm] and has white markings on its head that look like a diadem. Unlike other snakes, which flee its hiss, it moves forward with its middle raised high.”

In other words, the basilisk was a snake, and not even a big snake. And according to Pliny, the weasel was capable of killing the basilisk. “The serpent is thrown into a hole where a weasel lives and the stench of the weasel kills the basilisk at the same time as the basilisk kills the weasel.”

In other words, someone would pick up a basilisk—which was supposed to be deadly to touch—and toss it down into a weasel’s burrow, and the weasel and the basilisk would both end up dead. Pliny, did you even think about what you were writing?

But back up just a little and the story starts to make more sense. We all saw “Rikki Tikki Tavi” as kids, right? The mongoose does look like a weasel. It’s also resistant to the king cobra’s venom and will prey on it and other snakes. The king cobra has an expandable hood with light-colored false eye spots on it. Its venom is so potent that it can kill a human in half an hour, and one of the final symptoms is paralysis, which may account for reports of the basilisk turning people to stone. King cobras can’t spit their venom, but many other cobras can. And most importantly, the weird notion that the basilisk moves forward with its middle raised high maybe explained by the king cobra’s habit of rearing up when threatened. It can still move forward when its front is raised.

But the king cobra is a big snake. Its average length is about twelve feet [3.7 m] and it can grow as long as 18 feet [5.5 meters]. Pliny describes a snake only a foot long [30 cm]. It’s possible Pliny just wrote the length wrong, conflated the cobra with some smaller snake, or scribes made a mistake copying the original writing. But the idea that the basilisk is actually a cobra seems cemented not by Pliny but by Lucan. Let me quote from book nine of Pharsalia, verses 849 to 853:

“There upreared his regal head

And frighted from his track with sibilant terror

All the subjects swam

Baneful, ere darts his poison. Basilisk.

In sands deserted king.”

A hissing poisonous crowned animal that rears up? It sounds like a king cobra to me. And the fact that stories about the basilisk mention its terrible hissing makes it even more likely.

The king cobra’s hiss sounds more like a growl. It has low-frequency resonance chambers in its windpipe that enhance and deepen the sound of its hiss. Here’s a clip of one, and I would not want to hear this coming from a snake the length of a truck:

[scary hissing]

At some point, though, the basilisk became a more lizard-like animal in western culture and took on rooster-like characteristics. The Venerable Bede, an English monk who lived from about the year 672 to 735, was the first to write down the story of the basilisk as many of us know it today. He said the basilisk was born from an egg laid by an old rooster. Hens do occasionally change sex and take on male characteristics, such as growing a pronounced crest and wattles, long tail feathers, and crowing. Sometimes they stop laying eggs but sometimes they don’t.

Incidentally, the other chickens take all this in stride and do not make a big deal about where the new rooster can go to the bathroom.

Other details got added to the basilisk story over the centuries. Sometimes the egg is described as round and leathery, which is true of many reptile eggs, and sometimes a toad is supposed to brood the egg until it hatches. Sometimes the rooster has to lay the egg at a certain time of year or moon phase. Whatever the circumstances surrounding the egg being laid, the animal that hatches from it is supposed to be a deadly serpent or lizard.

These are all details not described by Pliny. My guess is that the story of a rooster’s egg hatching into a deadly reptile was already a folktale in England when Pliny wrote his Natural History. The stories got conflated, probably by scholars who thought they described the same animal. That might also explain why the word cockatrice got grafted onto the rooster-egg legend. Let’s go back to learn about the cockatrice to figure out how.

The word cockatrice comes from a medieval Latin word that was a translation of the Greek word ichneumon from our old friend Pliny’s Natural History. It’s the same name used for the mongoose, although it can also mean otter. According to Pliny, the ichneumon will fight a snake by first covering itself with several coats of mud and letting it dry to form armor. Pliny also describes the ichneumon as waiting for a crocodile to open its jaws for the little tooth-cleaning birds to enter. When the crocodile falls asleep during the bird’s ministrations, the ichneumon runs down its throat and eats the croc’s intestines, killing it.

So the word that inspired the cockatrice wasn’t a snake at all. It was something that killed snakes and crocodiles. The confusion seems to be etymological. Ichneumon means something like “tracker” from a Greek word I can’t spell, track or footstep. Translated into Latin, it becomes cockatrix [probably spelled wrong] for the word for “tread.” Cockatrice is the corruption of cockatrix. But a cockatrice to English-speaking ears no longer sounds like any kind of snake-killing mammal. It sounds like the word cock, a rooster, combined with a slithery-sounding ending. So it’s very possible the confusion came from the word change mixed with confused tellings of the basilisk story. And when you consider that Chaucer referred to the basilisk as a basilicock, it’s easy to see that English speakers, at least, have been confusing the words and monsters for many centuries.

So it seems we’ve solved this mystery once and for all. The basilisk was a king cobra, the cockatrice was a mongoose, the wyvern was a fanciful heraldic animal, and we’re done.

But wait. Not so fast.

There are widely spread stories of snakes with combs and wattles that can crow like roosters. But those stories aren’t from England. They’re from Africa, with related stories in the West Indies.

The story goes that there’s a snake in east and central Africa that can grow up to twenty feet long [6 meters]. It’s dark brown or gray but has a scarlet face with a red crest that projects forward. Males also have a pair of face wattles and can crow, while females cluck like hens. Supposedly they have deadly venom and will lunge down from trees to attack humans who pass beneath.

At this point I got a little frantic and started trying to find out more about snake sounds. I didn’t think snakes could do anything but hiss, but it turns out that snake vocalizations are a lot more interesting than that.

In addition to the cobra’s deep hiss, bull snakes grunt. That’s how they get their name; they sound a little like cows. And at least one snake makes a sound no one would expect. That’s the Bornean cave racer, Orthriophis taeniurus grabowskyi, native to Sumatra and Borneo. It’s a lovely slender blue snake, not poisonous, also called the beauty ratsnake, and can grow some six feet long [1.8 m]. Some subspecies are kept as pets, but not grabowskyi as far as I know.

The snake has been known to science for a long time, but in 1980, a scientific exploration of the Melinau cave system in Borneo heard an eerie hoarse yowling in the dark, something like a cat. After the scientists no doubt wet their pants, they spotted a beauty ratsnake coiled on the cave floor. It was clearly making the sound.

I tried so hard to find audio of this snake. I really, really wanted to share it. But I’ve had no luck so we’ll just have to imagine it.

Most snakes don’t have vocal cords. That’s the name given to folds of tissue above the larynx. Snakes do have a larynx, and the bull snake, also called the pine snake or gopher snake, and native to the southeastern United States as far north as New Jersey, has a single vocal cord and a well-developed glottis flap. They’re noisy little guys for snakes. They grunt, hiss, and rattle their tails against dead leaves to scare potential predators away. Here’s a sample:

[hissing snake]

There are also stories from all around the world, from every region where snakes live, about snakes mimicking prey to draw it near. The stories come from people from every walk of life who are in position to observe nature closely: farmers, hutners, fishers, explorers—but unfortunately not any scientists. Not yet, anyway. Here’s one of the many examples given in Karl Shuker’s excellent book Extraordinary Animals Revisited, an excerpt I’ve chosen for reasons that will shortly become clear. It’s from an African report from 1856.

“The story of the cockatrice, so common in many parts of the world, is also found among the Demares. But instead of crowing, or rather chuckling like a fowl when going to roost, they say it bleats like a lamb. On its head like the guinea fowl it has a horny protuberance of a reddish color.”

It’s entirely possible that many snakes make sounds that mimic other animals, although whether they do it to lure prey near or whether it’s just a coincidence is another thing. But what about the whole issue about snakes not being able to hear airborne sounds? When I was a kid, I remember reading many books that said snakes can’t hear, they can only detect vibrations from the ground through their jaw bones.

Well, that’s not actually true. Snakes can hear sounds quite well, although their range of hearing is limited compared to mammals. In fact, a survey published in 2003 by the Quarterly Review of Biology confirms that snakes are more sensitive to airborne sounds than they are to ground-borne sounds. So it’s not that ridiculous to imagine a snake that makes sounds people might interpret as crowing or clucking.

But what about the wattles? A lot of snakes have head decorations, including many species of horned vipers that have modified scales above the eyes that really do look like horns. The rhinoceros viper has two or three horns on its nose. I couldn’t find any snakes with wattle-like frills, but it’s not out of the range of possibility. Plus, sometimes snakes don’t fully shed their skins and end up with bits and pieces of old skin left behind, which can stick out from the body.

Whether the African crowing snake legends have anything to do with the European legends of basilisks hatched from rooster eggs, I have no idea. The stories are different enough that I’m inclined to think they’re not related. Then again, reports of crowing snakes might have influenced the basilisk legend.

Incidentally, there’s a real-life lizard given the name basilisk, also called the Jesus lizard because it runs on water to escape predators. It lives in tropic rain forests in Central and South America and can run as fast as seven miles per hour [11 km/hr] on its hind legs, and when it reaches water it just keeps going. It’s big webbed feet and its speed keep it from sinking immediately.

The name ichneumon has been given to a few modern animals too: a type of mongoose that ancient Egyptians believed ate crocodile eggs, and various types of flies and wasps that parasitize caterpillars.

I was hoping that the cockatrice and wyvern would have lent their names to modern real animals too, but I couldn’t find any. But I did find something almost as good. In the middle ages there was a fancy dish called a cockatrice. I found this at a site called “Gode Cookery dot com” where good is spelled g-o-d-e. The site has it listed under cockentrice, with an N. I’ll put a link in the show notes.

Here’s a sample recipe, which the site took a book published in 1888 titled “Two Fifteenth Century Cookery-Books.”

“Take a capon, scald it, drain it clean, then cut it in half at the waist. Take a pig, scald it, drain it as the capon, and also cut it in half at the waist. Take needle and thread and sew the front part of the capon to the back part of the pig, and the front part of the pig to the back part of the capon, and then stuff it as you would stuff a pig. Put it on a spit and roast it, and when it is done, gild it on the outside with egg yolks, ginger, saffron, and parsley juice, and then serve it forth for a royal meat.”

A capon, incidentally, can mean either a castrated rooster or an old rooster. Either way, roast cockatrice sounds better than turducken, and way better than being the guy who has to throw the basilisk into the weasel den.

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 011: The Vampire Squid and the Vampire Bat

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This week we’re going all goth in April for the vampire squid and the vampire bat. They’re so awesome I want to die.

The vampire squid looking all menacing even though it’s barely a foot long.

“I love you, vampire bat!!” “I love you too, Kate.”

Thanks for listening! We now have a Patreon if you’d like to subscribe! Rewards include patron-only episodes and stickers!

Show transcript:

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

I thought about waiting to run this episode in October, but that’s a really long way away. So we’ll have Halloween in April and talk about the vampire squid and the vampire bat.

The vampire squid has one of the coolest Latin names going, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which means “vampire squid from hell.” It’s a deep-sea squid and until recently, not a lot was known about it. It was discovered in 1903 and originally classified as an octopus. Its body is about six inches long [15 cm], with another six inches or so of tentacles, which are connected with webbing called a cloak. Actually I’m not sure if scientists refer to this as a cloak, but if you’ve called your animal the vampire squid from hell, you can’t complain if podcasters, for instance, refer to web-connected octopus legs as a cloak.

So is it an octopus or a squid? It’s both, in a way. The vampire squid is the last surviving member of its own order, Vampyromorphida, which shares similarities with both.

The vampire squid’s color varies from deep red to velvety black. The inside of its cloak is black and the parts of its legs inside the cloak are studded with spines. Its beak is white. Basically the only thing this little guy needs to be the world’s ultimate goth is a collection of Morrissey albums.

It lives in the lightless depths of the ocean below 3,000 feet [914 meters]. There’s not a lot of oxygen down there so there aren’t very many predators. The vampire squid doesn’t need oxygen because it’s a vampire—or at least it can live and breathe just fine with oxygen saturations as little as 3%. Its metabolic rate is the lowest of any cephalopod.

The vampire squid doesn’t move a lot. It drifts gently, aided in buoyance because its gelatinous tissues are roughly the same density as seawater. Adults have two small fins sticking out from their mantle, which they flap to propel them through the water.

If something threatens a vampire squid, it brings its legs up to expose the spiny insides of its cloak and hide its body. If something really threatens a vampire squid, even though it doesn’t have ink sacs, it can eject a cloud of bioluminescent mucus, and can flash its photophores in a dazzling display of lights. These photophores are concentrated on the outside tips of its arms. If the end of an arm is bitten off, the vampire squid can regenerate it.

So we have a creepy-looking, if small, cephalopod that lives in the deep, deep sea called a vampire squid. WHAT. DOES. IT. EAT?

I hate to disappoint you, but the vampire squid eats crap. In fact, it eats the crap of animals that eat crap. There’s not a lot of food in the ocean depths. Mostly there’s just a constant rain of fish poop, algae, bits of scales and jellyfish, and other waste. Lots of little creatures live on this stuff and their poop joins the rain of barely-food that makes it down to the abyssal depths where the vampire squid waits.

The squid had two retractable filaments—not the same thing as the two feeding tentacles true squids have, but used for feeding. The filaments are extremely long, much longer than the vampire squid itself. It extends the filaments, organic detritus falls from above and sticks to them, and the vampire squid rolls the detritus up with mucus from its arm tentacles into little sticky balls and pops the balls into its mouth.

That’s not very goth. Or it might be incredibly goth, actually.

Most cephalopods only spawn once before they die. A 2015 paper in Current Biology reports that the vampire squid appears to go through multiple spawning phases throughout its life. It may live for a long time too, but we don’t know for sure. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the vampire squid.

Because squids and octopuses are soft bodied, we rarely find them in the fossil record. In 1982, though, a beautifully preserved octopus body impression was found in France in rocks dating to 165 million years ago. And guess what kind of octopus it turned out to be! Yes, it’s related to the vampire squid.

If the vampire squid is the kind of pensive goth who listens to The Smiths and reads Poe in cemeteries, the vampire bat is out clubbing with its friends, blasting Combichrist, and spending its allowance in thrift shops. There are three species of vampire bat, but they’re different enough from each other that each belongs to its own genus. They’re native to the Americas, especially tropical and subtropical environments, although they haven’t been found any further north than Mexico. And yes, vampire bats do actually feed on blood. It’s all they eat.

Vampire bats are small, active, and lightweight. They’re only about 3 ½ inches long [9cm] with a 7-inch wingspan [18 cm], and weigh less than two ounces [57 grams]. They live in colonies that consist of big family groups: a small number of males and many more females and their babies. Males without a colony hang out together and probably never clean up their apartments.

Vampire bats belong to the leaf-nosed bat family, and like other leaf-nosed bats they sleep during the day and hunt at night. But the vampire bat doesn’t actually have a nose leaf. That’s a structure that aids with echolocation, and vampire bats don’t need the high level echolocation ability that insect-eating bats do. They get by with a reduced ability to echolocate, but they have another highly developed sense that no other mammal has: thermoreception. They use it to determine the best place to bite their prey. The warmer, the better. That’s where the blood is.

The vampire bat also has good eyesight, a good sense of smell, and hearing that’s attuned to the sound of breathing. A bat frequently remembers the sound of an individual animal’s breathing, and returns to it to feed night after night. What vampire bats don’t have is a very good sense of taste. They don’t really need it. In fact, they don’t have the kind of bad food avoidance that every other mammal has. In a study where vampire bats were given blood with a compound that tasted bad and made them throw up, the next time they were offered the bad-tasting blood, they ate it anyway.

Most bats are clumsy on the ground. They’re built for flying and for hanging from perches. But vampire bats are agile. They crawl around and even run and jump with no problems.

Two species of vampire bat prey mainly on birds, while the third—the common vampire bat—feeds on mammals. Bird blood has a much higher fat content than mammal blood, which is higher in protein. But results of a study released in January 2017 found that hairy-legged vampire bats, which usually prey on large wild birds, had started feeding on domestic chickens as their wild prey became scarcer—and then they started feeding on human blood.

A vampire bat doesn’t suck blood. It makes a small incision with extremely sharp fangs and laps up the blood with its grooved tongue. It may even trim hair from the bite site first with its teeth. Its saliva contains an anti-coagulate called draculin that keeps the blood flowing. The bat doesn’t eat much, because let’s face it, it’s just a little guy. In order to hold more blood, as soon as it starts to feed its digestion goes into overdrive. Within some two minutes after it starts to eat, the bat is ready to urinate in order to get rid of the extra fluid so it can hold more blood. A feeding session may last about 20 minutes if the bat isn’t disturbed, and the bat may drink about an ounce of blood in all.

A vampire bat needs to eat at least every two days or it will starve. A bat that hasn’t found prey in two nights will beg for food from its colony mates, which often regurgitate a little blood for the hungry bat to eat. New mother bats may be fed this way by her colony for as much as two weeks after she’s given birth so that she doesn’t have to hunt. Baby vampire bats drink their mother’s milk just like any other mammal.

If a mother bat doesn’t return from hunting, other colony members will take care of her baby so it won’t die. Colony members groom each other and are generally very social. Even the male bats that aren’t part of the colony are allowed to roost nearby. Nobody fights over territory. These are nice little guys.

Vampire bats do sometimes carry rabies, but it’s pretty rare compared to infection rates in dogs. They are more dangerous to livestock than to humans. Attempts to kill off vampire bat colonies to stop the spread of rabies actually has the opposite effect, since bats from a disturbed colony will seek out another colony to join.

Vampire bats have considerable resistance to rabies and frequently recover from the disease, after which they’re immune to reinfection, and there’s some preliminary evidence to suggest that native human populations in areas where vampire bats are common may also have developed some resistance to rabies. Researchers hope that this finding will lead to better treatment of rabies in the same way that the draculin anticoagulant in vampire bat saliva led to advances in blood-thinning medications.

I like to imagine a vampire bat hanging out with a vampire squid. The bat would sip blood from a tiny wineglass and fidget with its jewelry while it tries to conversation. The squid would just stare at the bat. Then it would eat a globule of crap. The bat would pee on itself and the whole evening would just be a bust. Also, one of them would drown but if I can imagine a tiny wineglass I can imagine a tiny bat-sized bathysphere or something. Never mind.

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 for as little as one dollar a month.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 010: Electric Animals

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This week’s episode is about electric animals! There are so many of them that I could only touch on the highlights.

We start with the electric eel. It’s not actually an eel but it is most definitely electric. This one has just read some disturbing fanfic:

The oriental hornet is a living solar panel:

The platypus’s bill is packed with electricity sensors. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried:

Amphisbaenids are not electric AS FAR AS WE KNOW. Bzzt.

Thanks for listening! We now have a Patreon if you’d like to subscribe! Rewards include patron-only episodes and stickers!

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re looking at electric animals! You’ve probably heard of the electric eel, but you may not know there are a lot of fish, insects, and even a few mammals that can sense or generate electric impulses. This is a re-record of the original episode with some updated information.

All animals generate electric fields in their nerves and the contracting of muscles. Animals that can sense these fields are called electroreceptive. An electroreceptive animal can find hidden prey without using its other senses.

To take that a step further, many electroreceptive animals can also generate weak electrical fields, usually less than a single volt—small electrical pulses or a sort of wave, depending on the species, that can give them information about their environment. Like a dolphin using echolocation, a fish using electro-location can sense where potential prey is, where predators, plants, and rocks are, and can even communicate with other fish of its same species. Of course, those same electric pulses can also attract electroreceptive predators. It’s hard being a fish.

But in some cases, the animal can generate an electric shock so strong it can stun or kill other animals. The most famous is the electric eel, so let’s start with that one.

The electric eel isn’t actually an eel. It’s a type of knife-fish related to carp and catfish. Some other species of knife-fish generate electric fields, but the electric eel is the only one that uses it as a weapon.

The electric eel is a weird fish even without the electric part. It can grow over eight feet long, or 2.5 m, lives in freshwater in South America, and gets most of its oxygen by breathing air at the surface of the water instead of through its gills. It has to surface for air about every ten minutes or it will drown. That’s a weird habit for a fish, but it makes sense when you consider that many electric eels live in shallow streams or floodplains with a tendency to dry up between rains. Oh, and electric eels frequently swim backwards.

A male electric eel makes a foam nest for females with his spit, and the female lays her eggs in it—as many as 17,000 eggs, although 1,200 is more common. The male defends the nest and hatchlings until the rainy season starts and the young electric eels can swim off on their own.

The electric eel has rows of some 6,000 specialized cells, called electrocytes, that act like batteries to store energy. When all the electrocytes discharge at the same time, the resulting shock can be as much as 860 volts, although it’s only delivered at about one amp. I have no idea what that means because I don’t understand electricity.

Since the electrocytes are all found in the animal’s tail, and electric eels are mostly tail, the fish will sometimes curl up and hold its prey against its tail to increase the shock it receives. This honestly sounds like something a villain from a superhero movie would do. The electric eel will also sometimes leap out of the water to shock an animal it perceives as a threat.

You do not want to be in the water when an electric eel discharges. It probably won’t kill you unless you have a heart problem, but it could stun you long enough that you drown. And if more than one electric eel discharges at the same time, the danger increases. There’s a River Monsters episode about electric eels that shows a whole bunch of them in water so shallow that they’re barely covered. Walking through that pond would probably be deadly. I also really love that show.

How does the electric eel not shock itself? Well, it probably does. All of its vital organs are in the front fifth of its body, and well insulated by thick skin and a layer of fat. But its discharges are extremely fast. Think taser, not sticking a fork in a wall socket, which by the way is something you should not do. The charge naturally travels away from its tail and into the nearest object, usually its prey.

There are three known species of electric eel, all of which live in the Amazon basin in South America. Two of the three species were only identified in 2019 after DNA studies of 107 specimens. One of the new species, Electrophorus voltai, can discharge up to 860 volts of electricity, higher than the well-known E. electricus. Researchers think E. voltai has evolved to generate higher jolts because it lives in the highlands of the Brazilian Shield, where the water is clear and doesn’t conduct electricity as well as the mineral-rich water in other electric eel habitats.

One last thing about the electric eel. It can shock people who touch it up to eight hours after it dies.

Most electric animals are fish since water conducts electricity well. Some other notable electric fish are the stargazer, a venomous bottom-dwelling ocean fish that generates shocks from modified eye muscles; the paddlefish; the electric catfish; and of course sharks.

Sharks are the kings of electroreceptive animals. Some sharks can sense voltage fluctuations of ten millionths of a volt. Sharks only sense electricity; they can’t generate it. But some of their cousins, the electric rays, can generate an electric shock equivalent to dropping a toaster in a bathtub, which by the way is another thing you shouldn’t do although why would you even have a toaster in the bathroom?

Scientists are only just discovering electric use in insects. It’s probably more widely spread than we suspect, and it’s used in ways that are very different from fish. The oriental hornet, for instance, converts sunlight into energy like a tiny flying solar panel. Researchers think the hornet uses that extra energy for digging its underground nests.

Flying insects generate a positive charge from the movement of air molecules, which is basically what static electricity is. It also happens to moving vehicles, and which is why you should touch the metal of your car to discharge any static electricity before pumping gasoline so you don’t spark a fire. This episode is full of safety tips. In the case of bees, this static charge helps pollen adhere to their bodies. You know, like tiny yellow socks stuck to a shirt you’ve just taken out of the dryer. When a bee lands on a flower, its charge also temporarily changes the electrical status of the flower. Other bees can sense this change and don’t visit the flower since its nectar has already been taken.

Spiderwebs are statoelectrically charged too, which actually draws insects into the web, along with pollen and other tiny air particles. This helps clean the air really effectively, in fact, so if you have allergies you should thank spiders for helping keep the pollen levels down. The webs only become electrically charged because the spider combs and pulls at the thread during the spinning process.

Only three living mammals are known to be electroreceptive. The South American Guiana dolphin has a row of electroreceptors along its beak, visible dots called vibrissal crypts. They’re basically pores where whiskers would have grown, except that marine mammals no longer grow whiskers. The vibrissal crypts are surrounded by nerve endings and contain some specialized cells and proteins. Researchers think the dolphins use electroreception to find fish and other prey animals in murky water when the animals are so close that echolocation isn’t very effective. A lot of toothed whales, including other dolphins, show these dots, and it’s possible that the Guiana dolphin isn’t the only species that is electroreceptive.

The platypus and its cousin the echidna are the other two electric-sensing mammals. These two are both such odd animals that they’re getting their own episode one day—and that episode is # 45! They are weird way beyond being the mammals that lay eggs deal. So I’ll just mention that their bills are packed with electroreceptors. The platypus in particular uses electroreception as its primary means of finding prey in the mud at the bottom of ponds.

There are undoubtedly more animals out there that make use of electrical fields in one way or another. One possible addition to the list, if it exists at all, is called the Mongolian death worm.

Nomadic tribes in the Gobi Desert describe a sausage-like worm over a foot long, or 30 cm, and the thickness of a man’s arm. Its smooth skin is dark red and it has no visible features, not even a mouth, which makes it hard to tell which end is the head and which is the tail. It squirms or rolls to move. It spends most of its life hidden in the sand, but in June and July it emerges, usually after rain, and can kill people and animals at a distance.

In his book The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals, zoologist Karl Shuker discusses the death worm at length, including the possibility that it might be able to give electric shocks under the right conditions. Among the reports he recounts are some that sound very interesting in this regard, including that of a visiting geologist poking an iron rod into the sand, who dropped dead with no warning. A death worm emerged from the place where the geologist had been prodding the sand. I’m going to add “don’t poke an iron rod into the sand of the Gobi Desert” to my list of warnings.

The Gobi is a cold desert and has bitter winters, but it’s still a desert, which means it’s arid, which means the death worm probably isn’t a type of earthworm or amphibian—nothing that needs a lot of moisture to stay alive. On the other hand, two types of earthworms have recently been discovered in the Gobi, and there are a few amphibians, especially frogs, that have evolved to live in areas that don’t receive much rain. In episode 156, about some animals of Mongolia, we talk about the Mongolian death worm again if you want to know a little more. Some parts of the Gobi get more moisture than others and may be where the death worm lives.

Shuker suggests it might be a kind of amphisbaenid. Amphisbaenids are legless lizards that look more like worms than snakes. They move more like worms than snakes too, and spend a lot of their lives burrowing in search of worms or insects. No known species of amphisbaenid can generate electric shocks, but then again, only one of the over 2,000 known species of catfish generates electricity.

It’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that electrogenesis might develop in a reptile, assuming that’s what the death worm is. Sand isn’t a good conductor of electricity, but wet sand is. The death worm might ordinarily use weak electrical pulses to stun its small prey, but if it emerges after rain because its tunnels are temporarily flooded, it might feel vulnerable above ground and be more likely to discharge electrically as a warning when approached.

Of course, as always, until we have a body—until we know for sure that the Mongolian death worm is a real animal and not a folktale, we can’t do more than speculate. But it is interesting to think about.

As far as I can find, no living reptiles or birds show any electrical abilities akin to those in fish and other aquatic animals. But electroreceptors in fish were only discovered in the 1950s. There’s a lot we still don’t know. Always another mystery to solve!

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 009: The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

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This week we take a look at (and listen to) the ivory-billed woodpecker and its close relative, the imperial woodpecker. Is it alive? Is it extinct?

Further viewing:

Ivory-billed woodpecker footage from 1935

A pair of ivory-billed woodpeckers. Photo taken in 1935:

Frames from the alleged ivory-billed woodpecker video taken in 2004. Not super clear there, guys.

left to right: imperial woodpecker, ivory-billed woodpecker, and pileated woodpecker:

A pair of stuffed imperial woodpeckers:

A still from the 1958 video of a female imperial woodpecker. She’s so cute! Her crest bobs around as she moves.

Show transcript:

A lot of people who aren’t otherwise into birds have heard of the ivory-billed woodpecker because of the 2004 and 2005 sightings, which were widely reported in the press. Before we talk about that, let’s get some background and discuss the bird itself.

There are actually two ivory-billed woodpeckers, the American bird and the Cuban. Originally they were listed as separate species. They’re big birds, glossy black in color with white markings. The male has a red crest with a black stripe up the front while the female’s crest is all black. They need vast areas of undisturbed forest to thrive, something that’s in short supply these days.

By the early 20th century, the Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker was already restricted to pine forests in the northeast of Cuba due to habitat loss. By the late 1940s it was rare. In 1956 some small populations were still around, but while conservation was urged, the Cuban revolution in 1959 stopped any conservation progress. The last positive sighting was in 1989. The Cuban government designated the area of its sighting as protected, but no one’s seen one since.

Another bird, the imperial woodpecker, is the largest woodpecker in the world. It lives in Mexico and is over two feet long, or 61 cm, with a wingspan of probably around three feet, or about a meter—maybe more. The female’s crest curls forward.

Until the early 1950s, the imperial woodpecker was reasonably widespread although people did shoot it sometimes. Then companies started logging in the imperial woodpecker’s territory. One old man remembered a forester telling locals that the birds destroyed trees and even gave them poison to spread on feeding sites. But the imperial woodpecker only feeds and nests in trees that are already dead or dying. It was never a threat to healthy trees. The last confirmed sighting of the imperial woodpecker was in 1956.

No photographs of a living imperial woodpecker exist. Then researcher Martjan Lammertink found mention in a 1962 letter of video taken of a bird in 1956 by dentist and amateur birder William Rhein. Rhein had become reclusive in his old age and moved with no forwarding address at least once, but Lammertink managed to track Rhein down in 1997, when he was in his late 80s. Rhein died in 1999.

Once Lammertink found him, Rhein produced 85 seconds of 16 mm movie footage he’d taken back in the 1950s, which showed a female imperial woodpecker hitching up a tree and flying away. From those 85 seconds, researchers learned a lot about the bird, helped by a 2010 expedition that pinpointed the exact location where the footage was shot.

There have been numerous sightings of imperial woodpeckers since the 1950s, but the list is discouraging. The sightings taper off slowly in different areas over the decades. The most recent was 2005, but it hasn’t been verified and no photographs were taken.

These days, the areas where imperial woodpeckers once lived are now dangerous to explore due to drug cartels, which grow marijuana and opium poppies in remote clearings with armed guards.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the American ivory-billed woodpecker’s story is pretty much the same as the others. It’s an impressive bird, as much as 21 inches long, or 53 cm, with a two and a half foot wingspan, or 76 cm. It likes hardwood swamps and pine forests and was once found throughout the southeastern United States. But as forests were cleared, its habitat grew smaller and more fragmented.

It was thought extinct as early as the 1920s, but then someone spotted a pair in Florida—and promptly shot them as trophies. Another bird was shot in Louisiana in 1932. By 1938, almost the only known ivory-billed woodpeckers were living in a forest in northeastern Louisiana.

To explain what happened, I need to back up a little. In 1913, the president of the Singer Sewing Machine Company bought almost 83,000 acres of timberland in Louisiana, with further purchases over the next few years that brought the total acreage to about 130,000. He designated the area as a refuge. By this he meant the trees could only be harvested with his permission, mostly for use in his sewing machines, and hunting was not allowed. It was called the Singer Tract, or just Singer by the locals, who continued to use the property as they had for decades—cutting trees for fuel and hunting game for food.

In 1920, Singer got tired of this and offered the property to the Louisiana Fish and Game Department, which hired wardens to enforce trespassing and game laws. The area is frequently called an old-growth forest, but in actuality much of it consisted of abandoned cotton plantations that had been reclaimed by forests.

Interest in the ivory-billed woodpecker had been growing ever since it had been discovered after its supposed extinction in the 1920s. In 1935, Cornell University sent a team of researchers to the Singer Tract to look for the birds. The team brought film and recording equipment instead of guns. They found the woodpeckers and took pictures and sound recordings.

The expedition was so successful that one of its members returned in 1937 to study the ivory-billed woodpecker for three years. Also in 1937, Singer sold 6,000 acres to a lumber company, and in 1939 he sold timber rights to the rest of the acreage to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company.

In 1940, the Audubon Society convinced a Louisiana senator to introduce a bill to establish a national park protecting what remained of the Singer Tract. There was no money to fund the bill, so John Baker, an Audubon Society member, got pledges of support from the heads of the U.S. Forestry Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service. He even got an endorsement from President Roosevelt for the bill. The governor of Louisiana pledged $200,000 for the purchase of the land, and in 1942 the head of the War Production Board confirmed that clearcutting the Singer Tract was not essential to the war effort. Governors of the neighboring states of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi sent a joint letter to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company asking that they release their lease on the remaining timber.

Senator Ellender reintroduced the bill in 1942 with private funding taken care of, but it failed to get out of committee. And in December of 1943, the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company basically said they had no interest in conservation. They clearcut the remaining land. The last ivory-billed woodpecker was dead by 1944.

I wish I could tell you that the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company foundered and that its president choked to death on a bite of roast chicken. Unfortunately, the company did very well selling timber in the post-war boom. In 1965 the remaining Singer acreage was bought by a company in Chicago, and the lumber company leased the woodlands to private hunting clubs for a few years. Then they bulldozed and burned what was left of the timber to make way for soybean crops.

And no, the locals were really not happy about all this. In 1980, what was left of the area was finally bought by the state. The Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge was dedicated in 1998 and looks like a nice place now, but its only ivory-billed woodpeckers are a pair of stuffed specimens on display.

Of course there were numerous sightings of the bird in different areas, but they didn’t amount to much. For instance, in 1971 someone took two grainy photos that might have been of an ivory-billed woodpecker. In 1999 a forestry student sighted a bird but didn’t get a picture. Things like that. Then, in 2004 sightings started trickling in from Arkansas.

It started quietly enough. A kayaker posted online about seeing an unusually large woodpecker in a wildlife refuge. A team led by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology conducted a secret intensive search of the area—secret so the place wouldn’t be inundated by birdwatchers.

That search resulted in more than a dozen sightings, possibly all of the same bird. The team even managed to catch a bird on video in April 25, 2004. Quietly, secretly, the Nature Conservancy and Cornell University bought up some of the land in the area to add to the wildlife refuge, just in case.

The sightings were made public in early 2005, when an article appeared in the journal Science. Cornell declared the bird rediscovered instead of extinct.

Unfortunately, the four-second video taken in 2004 is blurry. William Rhein’s 1956 footage of the imperial woodpecker is a lot clearer, and he shot it from the back of a mule. It’s impossible to determine from the 2004 footage whether the bird is an ivory-billed woodpecker or not. Skeptics believe it might be a pileated woodpecker, a crow-sized bird with similar markings but which isn’t actually very closely related to the ivory-billed.

The exchange of papers got heated, to say the least. Birders split into two camps: those who believed the sightings were of ivory-billed woodpeckers, and those who believed the sightings were of pileated woodpeckers.

The problem is, while the video evidence is not very persuasive, the audio is. The ivory-billed woodpecker’s calls were well documented by the 1935 expedition, and the 2004 and 2005 recordings seem to be of the same type of bird.

The 1935 recording was taken very close to the birds. In order to compare it with the new recording, the team took the original recording to the same area and played it back in the distance.

This is what the 1935 recording sounds like:

[bird call]

And this is what the modern recording sounds like:

[another bird call]

Personally, I am convinced that the 2004 and 2005 audio was of an ivory-billed woodpecker. There is no other bird in North America that sounds exactly like the recordings, and the audio also sounds identical to the 1935 audio.

Further searchers for ivory-billed woodpeckers turned up nothing. By 2010 the excitement had died down and searches were called off, although it’s been a boon to Arkansas’s tourist industry. Birders and conservationists continue the search, though, and occasionally record what might be the bird’s call.

It’s always possible the ivory-billed woodpecker still hangs on in various areas. The problem is whether any remaining populations have enough genetic diversity to survive even in ideal conditions in this point.

I don’t want to end this episode on a low note, so here’s a reminder that the pileated woodpecker is doing just fine. It’s not as big as the ivory-billed woodpecker, but it’s a large, handsome bird common in forested areas of the eastern United States and Canada, and parts of the west coast. Maybe you won’t ever get to see an ivory-billed woodpecker, but you can definitely appreciate the pileated woodpecker.

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!