Category Archives: animals

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!

Episode 008: The Loneliest Whale and Other Strange Recordings

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This week’s episode is a collection of strange animal sounds, some unknown, others identified. We start with “the loneliest whale.”

A blue whale. Not the loneliest whale, as far as anyone knows.

A tarsier:

This fox can see into your soul and does not like you:

Show transcript:

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

One of the great things about making my own podcast is that I’m the one who gets to decide what topics to cover. I love podcasts about unexplained sounds captured on audio, so this week’s episode is just that.

With one or two exceptions, I’ve tried to keep to sounds that are definitely or probably made by animals. I’ve also tried to dig a little deeper to explore some sounds that I haven’t heard covered in other podcasts. I waded through a million pop-up ads so you don’t have to.

First, let’s talk about a whale you’ve probably heard of. It’s frequently called the loneliest whale. The story goes that this whale is lonely because its voice is too high to be heard or understood by other whales. It calls but never gets a response.

But that’s actually not the case. Its voice is higher than other blue whales, fin whales, and humpback whales, but they can certainly hear it, and for all we know, they answer. Since the individual whale hasn’t actually been spotted, we don’t know if it travels alone or with other whales.

The loneliest whale was first detected in 1989 by the US Navy listening for submarines in the North Pacific, then again in 1990 and 1991. At that time the recordings were classified due to the cold war, but in 1992, some were partially declassified, and word about the whale got out. The calls vary but are similar to blue whale calls. The main difference is the voice’s pitch. The loneliest whale calls at 52 hertz. That’s slightly higher than the lowest notes on a piano or tuba. Blue whale songs are typically around 10 to 40 hertz. The whale’s voice has deepened over the years to around 49 hertz, suggesting that it has matured.

Suggestions as to why this whale has a different call include the possibility that the whale is deaf, that it’s malformed in some way, or that it’s a hybrid of two different species of whale. Fin whales and blue whales do interbreed occasionally, but no one has successfully recorded a hybrid’s calls.

Whale researchers think the recordings seem to be of one individual whale, but in 2010, sensors off the coast of California picked up lonely whale type calls that might have been made by more than one whale at the same time. One suggestion is that blue and fin whale hybrids might be common enough that they band together. This seems a little far-fetched to me, but I’m not a whale expert.

The loneliest whale’s migratory patterns suggest it’s a blue whale. So do its call patterns, if not its actual voice, but no one has recorded the whale’s song since 2004.

A documentary called “52: The Search for the Loneliest Whale” is currently in production. There aren’t any dates listed on the official site, 52thesearch.com, but it’s supposed to be released some time this year, 2017. [Note from 2020: it doesn’t appear that this has ever been released.] The film’s expedition has concluded, although we don’t know yet whether the scientific and film teams actually identified the loneliest whale or recorded it.

Here is the call of the loneliest whale. This recording has been sped up 10x to make it easier to hear. The original recording is barely more than a rumble, depending on how good your hearing is and how good your speakers are.

[whale call]

And just for fun, here’s a recording of an ordinary blue whale, also sped up:

[another whale call]

Now let’s go from the largest mammal alive to one of the largest land mammals alive, the elephant. In 1984, biologist Katy Payne, a pioneer in the field of bioacoutics, was at a zoo in Portland, Oregon to give a talk about whale songs. While she was there, she visited the elephant exhibit and noticed that every so often she felt what she called a throbbing in the air. She got some recording equipment and came back to the zoo, recorded the elephants, and sped up her recording. Sure enough, the elephants were making sounds below 20 hertz.

She pursued the finding with wild elephants in Africa. It turns out that elephants communicate not only with the familiar trumpets and squeaks, but in infrasound—that is, sounds below the lower limits of human hearing.

Infrasound can travel a long distance, especially useful in forested areas with limited visibility, and at dusk and dawn when atmospheric conditions help propagate the sound waves so they can travel as far as six miles away [9.6 km]. Females in estrus make a special call to bull elephants, for instance, attracting potential mates from a long way away.

Here’s a recording of elephant rumbles—again, sped up so we can hear it:

[elephant sounds]

Other animals communicate in infrasound, generally large animals like rhinos, hippos, giraffes, and of course whales. Many more communicate in ultrasounds, sounds above the top hearing range of humans, about 20 kilohertz. Bat radar navigation and sonar navigation sounds made by many species of dolphins and toothed whales register in the ultrasonic range, as do many insect calls. But there are other much more surprising animals that communicate in ultrasound.

The Philippine tarsier is a tiny primate only about five inches tall [13 cm], a big-eyed nocturnal fluffball with long fingers. Researchers studying the tarsiers wondered why the animals frequently opened their mouths as though to make calls but produced no sound. Sure enough, they’re communicating at ranges far too high for humans to detect—higher, in fact, than has been discovered for any terrestrial mammal.

The Philippine tarsier most often communicates at 70 kHz and can hear sounds up to 90 kHz. Researchers think the tarsier uses its ultrasonic hearing to track insects, and communicates in frequencies too high for predators to hear. Here’s a tarsier call, slowed down so we can hear it. I’ll keep it short because it’s super annoying.

[tarsier call]

Another animal that uses ultrasound is the cat. Domestic cats can hear sounds up to 85 kHz. Some kitten calls fall in the ultrasonic range, so the mother cat can hear her babies but many predators can’t. Cats have evolved to hear such high sounds because many rodents communicate in ultrasound. Male mice, for instance, sing like birds to attract mates. Here’s an example, slowed down so we can hear it:

[mouse singing]

But so far these are all known animals, or in the case of the loneliest whale, probably known. What about truly mysterious sounds?

Probably the most famous mystery sound is the bloop. It was recorded by NOAA in 1997 off the tip of South America. It’s an incredibly loud sound, much louder than the loudest animal ever recorded, the blue whale, and for a long time, people speculated that it might be an enormous unknown animal. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately because no one wants to awaken Cthulhu, NOAA has identified the bloop as the sound of an icequake. That is, massive iceburgs breaking apart. Here’s a clip of the bloop, sped up so we can hear it:

[the bloop]

Another solved mystery sound has been dubbed “bioduck,” since it sounds sort of like a robotic duck. It’s been recorded since the 1960s, when it was first reported by submarine operators in the southern ocean off the Antarctic. It’s common, heard almost year-round near Antarctica and Australia, and was not from any known human-made source. Then, in 2013, whale researchers attached suction-cup tags to two Antarctic minke whales. While the tags remained in place, they recorded not only where the whales went, but the sounds they made. And to the research team’s astonishment, both whales made bioduck calls. This finding is important, not just because it cleared up a longstanding mystery, but because it tells us a lot about the Antarctic minke whale that wasn’t known. Researchers thought the whales only lived in Antarctic waters part of the year. Now they know that some whales remain year-round while some migrate near Australia. They can also make better estimates of whale populations now that they can identify this distinctive call.

The Antarctic minke whale is a baleen whale that grows to around 40 feet [12 m], but usually much smaller. It’s gray with white belly and mostly eats krill. This is what they sound like:

[minke whale call]

In our sea monster episode a couple of weeks ago, I shared another baleen whale call, this one from an unidentified species. It’s been dubbed the bio-twang and has been recorded in the Mariana trench in the western Pacific year-round in 2014 and 2015. Researchers suspect the dwarf minke whale, but they don’t know yet.

[mystery whale call]

To get out of the water for a moment, in 2012 a supposed bigfoot recorded started going around the internet. It was supposedly recorded on a cell phone in the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon. It’s more likely to be nothing more exotic than a red fox.

Here’s the unknown scream:

[creepy animal sound]

And here’s a recording of a red fox:

[equally creepy red fox sound]

To me the sounds are very similar. If you want to know how I know the red fox scream is actually a red fox screaming, google “red fox scream.” The first hit is a YouTube clip of a fox screaming. I pulled the audio from that one.

In 2014, an unknown animal was recorded in Lake Champlain in Vermont. Dennis Hall, who claimed to have spotted the lake monster known as Champ in 1985, and Katy Elizabeth, who runs an organization known as Champ Search, made the recording and thought it might be from a beluga whale.

But while Lake Champlain is connected to the ocean, a whale would have a hard time reaching the lake due to canals, and would most likely have been spotted either on its way to the lake or once it arrived. Certainly it would have been spotted once it died from trying to live in fresh water.

Other recordings of clicking and squeaking sounds like those of beluga whales have been recorded in the lake in the past, including by a Discovery Channel team researching Champ. In 2013, Dr. Lance Barret Lennard from the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Center, and an expert on whale acoustics, examined some of the echolocation patterns. He determined that not only are the recordings not of beluga whales, they’re not from any kind of whale. They’re probably not mammalian in origin.

Some turtles have been found to produce underwater signals that may be a form of echolocation, and many fish make clicking and drumming sounds. But we don’t know what’s making the sounds recorded in Lake Champlain.

Here’s the 2014 recording:

[Lake Champlain sounds]

Finally, here’s a sound that’s not mysterious, I just really like it. It’s the song of the veery, an attractive but rather plain thrush. I’ve heard it in person while hiking at high elevations in the Smoky Mountains, and it’s completely ethereal.

If you listen closely, you can hear that the veery is actually making two sounds at the same time. The avian vocal mechanism, called a syrinx, is much different from a mammal’s larynx, and allows a bird to product more than one tone at a time.

[veery call]

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!

EXTRA: The Ozenkadnook Tiger HOAX?

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New information came out today about the infamous Ozenkadnook Tiger photo! Here’s all the breaking news!

The photo in question, taken in 1964.

Someone please tell me how to pronounce Ozenkadnook.

Further reading:

The Ozenkadnook Tiger Photo Revealed as a Hoax

Is the Ozenkadnook Tiger a Cardboard Cryptid?

Show transcript:

It’s a Strange Animals Podcast special! I have breaking news and want to get it out to everyone now rather than wait to include it in a full episode a few weeks down the line.

I’d never heard of the Ozenkadnook tiger until today, but I follow zoologist Darren Naish on Twitter and this morning he tweeted, “Suspicion confirmed! As I hinted in 2016, Rilla Martin’s Ozenkadnook tiger photo was a hoax.” He attached a photo to a column in an Australian newspaper.

Here’s the story as it stands, or stood until today, anyway. In 1964 in western Victoria, Australia, Rilla Martin took a black and white photo of a striped animal with her Brownie box camera. As she told reporters later, she’d been visiting her cousin, Graham Martin, in Goroke and was driving along a dirt road near Ozenkadnook, presumably on her way home. Her camera was on the seat beside her since she’d been taking pictures of her cousin earlier. When she noticed an unusual animal near the edge of the road, she stopped the car and took a photo right before it ran away.

It’s not clear how the photo got into the newspapers. Stories vary. Either Martin took it to the local paper herself or she sent a copy to her cousin and he took it to the paper. Either way, it caused a brief sensation and has been debated ever since.

The original photograph and negative was lost long ago. The picture we have these days is a scan of the newspaper article, which is why it looks pixelated. When I first saw it, I assumed it had been taken through a window screen, but that’s just an artefact of how newspapers printed photos back then.

There’s a copy of the picture in the show notes. It shows a long-bodied animal, doglike but with short legs, a long tail, and erect ears. The neck is thick, the chest deep. The lower legs and paws are hidden behind brush and a dead log. The animal’s forebody is dark with broad pale stripes, while the haunches are pale without stripes and the tail is pale with thin ringed stripes.

In some ways it looks similar to a thylacine, which you might remember from episode one. Martin herself said that the animal was about the size of a dog, specifically a Labrador, and it had a piglike snout.

My first thought on seeing the photo was that it was a fakey-fake-fake. The stripes look painted, the eye definitely looks painted. In a 2010 blog post, Darren Naish noted a structure just visible in front of the hind limbs that he thinks might be a support of some kind for an animal cut-out.

Suggestions as to what the animal might be include a marsupial lion or a thylacine, both most likely extinct, or a hoax. Thylacine sightings had been made in the area before the photo was taken, which is why the photo is usually referred to as the Ozenkadnook tiger. That’s what the locals called the mystery animal they’d seen.

Then today, March 24, 2017, a column appeared in the Weekend Australian. The paper’s editorial cartoonist, Bill Leak, died on March 10, and the column is a tribute to him. It’s mostly a reminiscence of the ongoing battle of practical jokes between Leak and another cartoonist, but it mentions an interesting event in the 1960s. Leak’s father and a friend were aware of the thylacine sightings near Goroke. One day they cut a thylacine-shaped animal out of cardboard, painted it, and propped it up in the scrub to take a picture.

It was only meant to be a joke among friends, according to the column, but the photo made its way to the papers. Bill Leak was quite young at the time and remembered his father told him he must never reveal the prank to anyone. Leak kept the secret until his father’s death.

That’s all the column says about the hoax. I hit a paywall with the Australian every time I tried to read Leak’s obituary. I love my listeners, but not enough to pay $4 to read an obituary that likely wouldn’t have told me anything Wikipedia couldn’t. Bill Leak was born in January 1956, so he would have been around eight when the photo was taken. His father was apparently named Reg Leak, but Wikipedia’s citation linked to the Australian article was, you guessed it, behind a paywall. An AusLit biography of Leak is also behind a paywall. Googling “Reg Leak” gets me a lot of information about leaking radiators and what I should do about them.

Googling Rilla Martin brings up umpteen near-identical articles about the photo, but nothing about the woman who took it. According to the articles, Martin was from Melbourne. The only mention I could find of a Rilla Martin from Melbourne was in a 1946 wedding announcement in the Argus, which mentions a flower girl named Rilla Martin. It’s not that I don’t believe Martin exists, I just wanted to tie her to Bill Leak’s father, but I’ve had no luck. (I was also at work, so I didn’t have time to do as much as I should have.)

Bill Leak was a known practical joker. This can cut both ways in this situation. On the one hand, he might have invented the story about the cardboard thylacine to see if anyone would believe him. On the other hand, it might have shaken out just as he said and people around him remembered it as just another goofy thing that Bill was involved in.

Here’s another point in favor of the story being true. If the animal is a fake, and I personally think it is, it took a great deal of artistic skill to make it look so realistic. Bill Leak was an artist and it’s quite possible his father was too.

That’s all I have for the moment. With luck I can get this extra episode uploaded tonight. If you have any comments, or if you can dig up a connection between Reg Leak and Rilla Martin, drop me an email at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. This has been your host, Kate Shaw, bringing you all the hot takes in the world of cryptozoology.

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 007: Strange Birds

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This week we look at three strange birds: a red-tailed Canadian raven that may or may not exist, the pied-billed grebe that definitely does, and New Zealand’s takahē.

A common raven. No red markings:

Here’s the Cryptodominion page with the red-tailed raven report.

Here’s Karl Shuker’s post about the red-tailed raven.

Precious smol baby pied-billed grebes riding on their mom or dad’s back:

The takahē, hooray!

Show transcript:

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

For this week’s episode we’ll look at three unusual birds, because birds are awesome. This is a re-record to improve audio quality and bring some information up to date.

It may be a tall tale, but a big red-tailed raven supposedly living in remote areas of British Columbia, Canada sounds oddly plausible. Loggers report that there’s a particular valley where huge ravens exist. They’re bigger than golden eagles but otherwise look like ordinary ravens except for their tails, which are reddish. They’re also nearly flightless. The loggers say the birds can be dangerous and will tear up campsites.

The only known raven found in Canada is the common raven. It’s much bigger and heavier than the crow, over two feet long, or 61 cm, including the tail, with a wingspan of over four feet, or 1.2 meters. The golden eagle, in contrast, can have a wingspan of nearly eight feet, or 2.4 meters, although the body length is not much more that of a raven’s.

The common raven is an intelligent, curious bird, black all over with a purplish sheen in the right light. It’s omnivorous and is happy to eat roadkill, food scraps found in unsecured garbage cans, and the eggs and hatchlings of other birds.

So could there be an unknown raven in British Columbia? I dug around online to see if I could find more details. In fact, I checked Allaboutbirds.com first since that’s a really good resource about North American birds. I wanted to see if there are any corvid species in North America that have red markings, but there aren’t. The only corvid in the world with red markings is the blue magpie, which has a rusty red head and wings. It’s a lovely bird, but it lives in Sri Lanka, and anyway its tail is blue.

I couldn’t find much online at all about the red-tailed raven story. It first appeared in 2012 or shortly before on a site called Cryptodominion. I’ll read the entry in its entirety, since it’s very short.

“British Columbian giant raven (Interior of B.C. NA): A piece of local folklore, the bush mechanics who worked in the interior of B.C. claim that here is a valley, rich in timber, which is populated by enormous raverns bigger than golden eagles. They say these ravens are dangerous animals, very opportunistic, and will not hesitate to tear someones camp apart. they are nearly flightless, and have much red in their tail plumage. These are obviously a specialized species of raven which developed in the isolation of this valley. However, if any introduced predators like dogs or cats make it there these ravens might become threatened.”

I learned about this story from zoologist Karl Shuker’s blog, Shukernature. He says that in 2012 a French reader emailed him asking him if he’d seen the entry and if he knew anything about the bird. He had never heard of the story before. Also in 2012, “The Corvid Enthusiast” posted about the Cryptodominion entry on an unexplained mysteries forum, asking if anyone in British Columbia had heard the story. One person did indicate they’d heard of it but gave no details, so I’m a bit skeptical of that reply. Responses from a few people from British Columbia indicate that the area is too populated and well explored to have any isolated valleys.

British Columbia is an enormous region, from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains, from Vancouver’s mild climate to a northern border with the Yukon. The original entry says the valley is found in the interior of the British Columbia, which I take to mean as not coastal or on an island. I have absolutely no doubt there are pockets of wilderness in B.C. where any number of mystery birds might live.

So do I believe the red-tailed raven is a real bird? No. I think someone planted that story to see how far it would go. But if anyone wants to fund a birding expedition to British Columbia to look for the raven, I am standing by with my binoculars in one hand and my passport in the other.

Our second bird also lives in North America, although it’s just as common in South America and shows up occasionally in Europe and other places. The pied-billed grebe, also called a dabchick, isn’t an especially strange bird, but I’m including it just because I love it. I see them frequently while birding, especially in winter, and they’re so small and brownish-yellow that I frequently mistake them for ducklings at first glance.

They’re about a foot long from bill to tail, or 30 cm, but they sit so low in the water they look smaller. Actually they don’t even really have a tail. They just have some tufty feathers on their hind end.

Grebes aren’t ducks, although they do spend most of their time on the water. They don’t have webbed toes like ducks do. Instead, they have lobed toes but you probably won’t ever see them because grebes don’t like to get out of the water. Their legs are set so far back on their bodies that they don’t balance well while walking. If they have to, they’ll fly, but again, they’d rather just stay on the water. Some populations migrate, especially if they live where ponds freeze in winter, but populations in more temperate climates stay year-round.

They prefer freshwater ponds and small lakes with plenty of cover, like cattails, reeds, and other vegetation. They’re diving waterfowl, which means they spend a lot of time underwater, catching fish, frogs, insects, and crustaceans like crawdads, which they crush with their blunt bills. They also eat their own feathers. That sounds weird, but it’s actually something all grebes do. They even feed feathers to their babies. The feathers help keep pieces of bone or shell from traveling from the stomach to the intestines. Instead, the feathers and hard pieces of non-food form pellets which the bird horks up safely.

Baby grebes are the smallest of the small. They can’t swim right away like ducklings can, which you’d think would be a problem since grebes build floating nests on vegetation. But (you’ll love this) they ride around on their parents’ backs for a few weeks until they learn to swim on their own.

Oh, and the most interesting thing about the pied-billed grebe? It can sink. The first time I saw this happen, I really didn’t believe my eyes. I was birding along the edge of a slow-moving river, looked down at the water through the trees, and saw two tiny duck-like birds which promptly vanished into the water as though they’d been abducted by a submerged alien. One second they were there, the next they were literally just gone. The pied-billed grebe does this by trapping water in its feathers, which gives it incredible control over how far down it sinks and may also reduce drag while it swims underwater.

Now let’s talk about another bird, this one halfway around the world, definitely real, and completely flightless. The takahe was a chicken-sized bird with a greenish back, iridescent purple head and neck, and heavy red bill and legs. It lived in New Zealand’s swamps and grasslands. The white settlers introduced red deer, cats, ferrets, stoats, hunting for sport, and all the usual things. In 1898 four birds were caught…and that’s the last anyone saw of the takahe.

Of course there were rumors that the birds survived. There always are. But as with so many other animals driven to extinction by habitat loss, hunting, and introduced animals, hope for a surviving population of takahe gets smaller every year.

Wait a minute.

I’ve just been handed a piece of paper by my research assistant, who I just now invented. It says here that the takahe was discovered alive and well in the Murchison Mountains on November 20, 1948!

The takahe now lives in the Murchison Mountains and on five small islands, chosen as habitats because they’re free from predators. The birds mate for life and breed slowly, but they can live up to 25 years in captivity. They mostly eats seeds, insects, and the tender parts of grass stems, but one bird was caught eating a duckling. I like to imagine it wore a really guilty expression while chowing down.

Takahe chicks are fuzzy and gray with yellowish legs. The adults are about 20 inches tall, or 50 cm.

For a long time it wasn’t clear if the birds would even survive. In 1981 there were only 118 known individuals. The population now stands at over 400 with a careful breeding program in place to keep the species as genetically diverse as possible. When I first put together this episode in spring of 2017, there were only just over 300 takahes, so that’s a big improvement in only three years.

There’s not a lot more to say about the takahe. I’m just really happy that sometimes there are persistent rumors about an extinct species’ survival because it really has survived. Stay strong, takahe. Eat ducklings if you have to.

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 006: Sea Monsters

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This week’s episode is all about sea monsters: mysterious sightings, possible solutions, and definitely discovered monsters of the world’s oceans!

The giant oarfish! Try to convince me that’s not a sea serpent, I dare you.

The megamouth shark. Watch out, krill and jellyfish!

The frilled shark. Watch out, everything else including other sharks!

A giant isopod. Why are you touching it? Stop touching it!

Sorry, it’s just a rotting basking shark:

Recommended reading:

In the Wake of Bernard Heuvelmans by Michael A. Woodley

In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents by Bernard Heuvelmans

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

Episode 005: The Unicorn

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Everyone knows the legend of the unicorn and most of us know unicorns don’t really exist. But how did the legend get started? And more importantly, can we talk about narwhals a whole lot? Narwhals are rad.

Narwhal. So rad.

I haven’t seen this show but apparently it’s pretty good. I love that elasmotherium.

Unicorns are (sort of) real. Unicorning certainly is.

Thanks to Jen and Dave for suggesting this week’s topic!

Show transcript:

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

This week’s episode is about the unicorn, or at least about almost-unicorns. This is a re-record of the original episode to improve sound quality and update some information.

When I was a kid, I was convinced unicorns were real. I’m not alone in this, apparently. A lot of people assume the unicorn is a real animal. Take away the magical trappings and it’s just a horse-like animal with one spiral horn. It seems a lot more plausible than squids, for instance.

I’m sorry to tell you that that kind of unicorn doesn’t exist, and never has, or at least we have no fossil or subfossil evidence that an animal resembling the classical unicorn actually existed. But the animals that probably inspired the unicorn legend are fascinating.

Everyone knows that the unicorn has one spiral horn growing from its forehead. The horn was supposed to have curative properties. If you ground up a little bit of the horn, known as alicorn, it acted as a medicine to cure you of poisoning or other ailments. If you actually made a little cup out of alicorn, you could drink from it safely knowing any poison was already neutralized. People in the olden days were really worried about being poisoned, probably because they didn’t understand how food safety and bacteria worked and they didn’t have refrigerators or meat thermometers and so forth. I suspect a lot of so-called poisoning cases were actually food poisoning. But this re-record is already off the rails, so back we get to the main topic.

All this about alicorn wasn’t legend, either. You could buy alicorn from apothecaries up until the late 18th century. Doctors prescribed it. It was expensive, though—literally worth its weight in gold. Pharmacies kept their alicorns on display but chained down so no one could steal them.

The alicorn, of course, was actually the tusk of the narwhal, and the narwhal is as mysterious as the unicorn in its own way. In fact, the narwhal seems a lot less plausibly real than a unicorn and a lot of people actually don’t realize it’s a real animal. I had that discussion with a coworker last year and had a lot of fun astonishing her with science facts, or maybe boring her. It’s a fairly small whale, some 13 to 18 feet in length not counting the tusk. That’s about four to five and a half meters long. It’s pale gray in color with darker gray or brown dapples, but like gray horses, many narwhals get paler as they age. Old individuals can appear pure white.

The narwhal and the beluga whale are similar in size and physical characteristics, such as their lack of a dorsal fin. They live in the same areas and are the only two living members of the family Monodontidae. They even interbreed very rarely.

But the narwhal is the one with the horn, or more accurately a tusk. It’s not a horn at all but a tooth. Most males and about 15% of females grow a tusk. Occasionally an individual grows two tusks, but almost always it’s the left canine tooth that pierces through the lip and continues to grow, sometimes up to ten feet long, or 3 meters.

It’s a weird, weird tooth too. It can bend as much as a foot without breaking, or 30 cm, not something teeth are generally known for. It also grows in a spiral. And we still don’t know what the narwhal uses its tusk for.

For a long time, researchers assumed that male narwhals used their tusks the same way male deer use their antlers, to show off for females and to battle other males. Males do exhibit behavior called tusking, where two individuals will rub their tusks together in what researchers once assumed was a ritual fight display. But that seems not to be the case.

A 2005 study discovered that the tusk is filled with nerves and is extremely sensitive. Through its tusk, the whale can identify changes in water temperature and pressure, water salinity, and the presence of fish and other whales. It even acts as an antenna, amplifying sound. The study was led by Martin Nweeia of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Nweeia is a dentist, basically, which delights me. Okay, he’s a clinical instructor in restorative dentistry and biomaterials scientist, but dentist is funnier.

I liked Nweeia even more when I found this quote: “Why would a tusk break the rules of normal development by expressing millions of sensory pathways that connect its nervous system to the frigid arctic environment?” As someone who has trouble biting ice cream without wincing, I agree.

In other words, the narwhal’s tusk has scientists baffled. You hear that a lot in a certain type of article, but in this case it’s true. Especially baffling in this case is why the tusk is found mostly in males. If having a tusk confers some advantage in the narwhal’s environment, why don’t all or most females grow one too? If having a tusk does not confer an advantage beyond display for females, why does the tusk act as a sensory organ?

The narwhal lives in the Arctic, especially the Canadian Arctic and around Greenland, and it’s increasingly endangered due to habitat loss, pollution, and noise pollution. Overall increased temperature of the earth due to climate change has caused a lot of the sea ice to melt in their traditional breeding grounds, and then humans decided those areas would make great oil drilling sites. The noise and pollution of oil drilling and exploration threatens the narwhal in particular, since when a company searches for new oil deposits it sets off undersea detonations that can deafen or even outright kill whales. But it’s hard to count how many narwhals are actually alive, and some recent studies have suggested that there may be more around than we thought. That’s a good thing. Now we just have to make sure to keep them safe, because narwhals are awesome.

The narwhal eats fish and squid and shrimp and sometimes accidentally rocks, because instead of biting its prey the narwhal just hoovers it up, frequently from the sea floor, and swallows it whole. It does that because it doesn’t actually have any teeth. Besides the one.

As a final narwhal mystery, on December 17, 1892, sailors aboard a ship in the Dundee Antarctic Expedition spotted a single-horned narwhal-like whale in the Bransfield Strait. But narwhals don’t live in the Antarctic…as far as we know.

One of the reasons why so many people believe the unicorn is a real animal is because it’s mentioned in some English-language versions of the Bible. When the Old Testament was first translated from Hebrew into Greek in the third century BCE, the translators weren’t sure what animal the re’em was. It appeared in the texts a number of times but wasn’t described. The translators settled on monokeros for their translation, which in English is unicorn. The King James Version of the Bible mentions the unicorn seven times, giving it a respectability that other animals (like squids) can’t claim.

These days, Biblical scholars translate re’em as a wild ox, or aurochs. You can learn more about the aurochs in episode 58, Weird Cattle. The aurochs was the ancestor to domestic cattle and was already extinct in most parts of the world by the third century BCE, but lived on in the remote forests north of the Alps until its final extinction in 1627.

So while the Greek translators didn’t know what the re’em was, why did they decide it was a unicorn? It’s possible they were drawing on the writings of Greek physician Ctesias, from the fourth century BCE. Ctesias described an animal from India he called a type of wild ass, which had “a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length.” But it seems clear from his writing that he was describing a rhinoceros.

In fact, any description of a rhino given by someone who hasn’t actually seen one, just heard about it, comes across as a unicorn-like animal. So it’s quite likely that the translators made a wild guess that the fierce re’em was a rhinoceros, which they would have known as a horse-like animal with one horn.

But while the unicorn is mentioned in the Bible, it isn’t a specifically Christian legend. The karkadann is a huge monster in Muslim folk tradition, with a horn so big it could spear two or three elephants on it at the same time. In Siberia, some tribes told stories of a huge black ox with one horn, so big that when the animal was killed, the horn alone required its own sledge for transport. In some Chinese tales, the kilin was supposed to be a huge animal with one horn. For more information about the kilin, or kirin, you can listen to episode 61.

It’s probable that all these stories stem from the rhinoceros, which is a distinctive and unusual animal that we only take for granted today because we can go visit it in zoos. But some researchers have suggested a more exotic animal.

Elasmotherium was an ice age animal sometimes called the steppe rhino, giant rhino, or Siberian unicorn. The largest of the three species of elasmotherium was the size of a mammoth, some seven feet tall at the shoulder, or 2.1 meters. It was a grazer like horses and cattle today, and like them it had long legs, much longer than living rhinos. It could probably gallop at a pretty good clip. It lived at the same time as the smaller woolly rhino, but while the woolly rhino resembled modern rhinos in a lot of respects, notably its large horn on the nose with a smaller horn farther up, elasmotherium only had one horn…one enormous horn. On its forehead.

We don’t actually have any elasmotherium horns to look at. Rhino horns aren’t true horns at all but a keratin structure. Keratin is an interesting fiber. It can be immensely tough, as it is when it forms rhinoceros horns, but it’s also what our nails and hair are made of. It doesn’t fossilize any more than hair fossilizes. The main reason we know elasmotherium had a horn is because of its skull. While rhino horns are made of keratin fibers instead of bone, the skull shows a protuberance with furrows where blood vessels were that fed the tissues that generated the horn. In elasmotherium, the protuberance is five inches deep, or 13 cm, and three feet in circumference, or just over a meter. Researchers think the horn may have been five or six feet long, or 1.5 to 1.8 meters.

Researchers have also found an elasmotherium fossil with a partially healed puncture wound. It’s possible the males sparred with their enormous horns and sometimes inflicted injuries. At least it happened once.

For a long time researchers thought elasmotherium died out 350,000 years ago, much too long ago for humans to have encountered it. But a skull found a few years ago in Kazakhstan was radiocarbon dated to about 29,000 years old. If elasmotherium and humans did cross paths, it wouldn’t be at all surprising that the animal figured in stories that have persisted for millennia. More likely, though, our early ancestors found carcasses partially thawed from the permafrost the way mammoth carcasses are sometimes found today. This might easily have happened at the end of the Pleistocene, a relatively recent 11,000 years ago or thereabouts. A frozen carcass would still have a horn, and while the carcasses are long gone now, it’s not unthinkable that stories of a massive animal with a monstrous single horn were passed down to the present.

Of course, this is all conjecture. It’s much more likely that the stories are not that old and are about the modern rhinoceros. But it’s definitely fun to think about our ancestors crossing a vast hilly grassland for the first time in search of new hunting grounds, and coming across a herd of towering monsters with five-foot horns on their foreheads. That would definitely make an impression on anyone.

One final note about the unicorn. When I was a kid, I read a book called A Grass Rope by William Maine, published in 1957 so already an oldie when I found it in my local library. It concerns a group of Yorkshire kids who hunt for a treasure of local legend, which involves a unicorn. I was an American kid from a generation after the book was written, so although it’s set in the real world it felt like a fantasy novel that I could barely understand. When one of the characters discovers a unicorn skull, it didn’t seem any more extraordinary to me than anything else. But on rereading the book in my late teens, I was struck by a character at the end who tells the children “it’s not very hard to grow unicorns.”

By that time, I pretty much had Willy Ley’s animal books memorized, including the chapter about unicorns. In it, he talks about unicorning animals that have two horns.

The practice of unicorning has been known for centuries in many cultures, but the first modern experiment was conducted in 1933 by Dr. Franklin Dove in Maine. He removed the horn buds from a day-old bull calf and transplanted them to the middle of the calf’s forehead. The calf grew up, the horn buds took root and grew into a single horn that was almost completely straight and which sprouted from the bull’s forehead.

Dr. Dove reported that the bull was unusually docile, although I suspect his docility may have come from being handled more than the usual bull calf, so he became tamer than most bulls. Either way, the experiment proved that unicorning wasn’t difficult. Any animal that grows true horns, such as sheep, goats, and cattle, can be unicorned.

More recently, in the 1980s, neopagan writer Oberon Zell Ravenheart and his wife Morning Glory unicorned mohair goats that looked astonishingly like the unicorns of legend. So technically, kid me was right. Unicorns are sort of real.

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 004: The Irish Elk

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(re-recorded audio)

In which your host calls her own podcast by the wrong name! And doesn’t catch it until it’s too late to change (i.e. five minutes ago). This week’s episode of Strange Animals Podcast is about the Irish Elk specifically and the Pleistocene era in general, especially as regards to humans spreading out across the world from Africa. Did the Irish elk’s enormous antlers really have anything to do with its extinction? And is it really for-sure extinct? (Spoiler alerts: no and yes.)

The Irish elk (more accurately called the giant deer) could stand as tall as seven feet high at the shoulder.

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This is a re-record of the original episode to improve audio quality and bring some of the information up to date.

This week’s episode is about the Irish elk, the first of many episodes about Ice Age megafauna. But before we learn about the Irish elk, let’s start with the span of time popularly known as the ice age, along with information about how humans spread across the world.

The last two million years or so of history is known as the Pleistocene, which ended about 12,000 years ago. The end of the Pleistocene coincides roughly with the extinction of a lot of the Pleistocene megafauna and the beginning of modern historical times.

During the Pleistocene, the earth’s axis tilt and plane of orbit resulted in reduced solar radiation reaching the earth. The process is due to what is called Milankovitch cycles, which I won’t go into since I don’t actually understand it. To grossly oversimplify, the earth got colder for a while because there wasn’t as much sunshine as usual, and all of these glaciers formed, and then it would warm up again and the glaciers would melt. This happened repeatedly throughout the Pleistocene, which was actually a series of ice ages with interglacial times in between.

Our current era is called the Holocene, and it’s considered an interglacial period. But if you’re hoping that the next ice age is a neat solution to global warming associated with climate change, the next glacial period isn’t expected for another 3,000 years.

The word megafauna means “giant animals.” You might hear dinosaurs referred to as megafauna, and that’s accurate. It’s a general term applied to populations of animals that grow larger than a human. Humans are also considered a type of Ice Age megafauna. high five, all my ice age peeps yes I kept that dumb line in this re-record

During the Pleistocene, humans migrated from Africa and spread across the world, rubbing shoulders with Neandertals, making awesome stone tools, and killing megafauna whenever they could. Humans are good at killing animals. In elementary school, I remember reading about ancient tribes of people stampeding mastodons over cliffs, eventually killing them all off. I didn’t believe it, but that’s actually true. We have lots of evidence that many types of animals were killed in this way, and it may have led to the extinction of some of the megafauna. It certainly didn’t help them. Wherever humans showed up, extinctions followed. The only exception is Africa, probably because the animals in Africa evolved alongside humans and knew how to deal with us. But when the first bands of humans showed up in Eurasia and the Americas, the native animals didn’t even know we were predators. They certainly didn’t know how to avoid being stampeded over cliffs. That’s a skill you don’t get many chances to practice.

Many people, especially Europeans, think that native peoples of whatever part of the world are natural conservationists. They live in harmony with nature, taking only what they need and using, for instance, every part of the buffalo. But human nature is human nature. Sure, when you live in a comfortably established village with a set territory, and your hunters and fishers start noticing that there’s not much game left, you learn conservation or you starve. But when you’ve got an entire world ahead of you—vast continents that have never seen a tool-using great ape with wicked intelligence and an insatiable appetite, you don’t need to live in harmony with nature. Our ancestors would find a nice area, settle there for a while, and when all the easily obtainable food was gone, they’d move on.

Humans still act this way. That’s why we leave trash all over the place. But the good news is that we are also good at recognizing when we’re causing a problem and deciding to fix it. So even though our first impulse might be to throw trash everywhere, we can also stop doing that and clean up trash already on the ground.

By the beginning of the Pleistocene, the continents were in their current spots. The world looked about the way it did now. But during the glacial periods, so much water froze that sea levels dropped around 300 feet. This exposed huge areas of continental shelf, making the continents bigger and joining some of them together. For instance, during glaciation, Alaska was connected to Asia. In some books you’ll see this talked about as a land bridge, which I always imagined as narrow and muddy. But it wasn’t just a bridge, it was a huge chunk of continent, and it stayed that way for thousands of years.

Then the temperature would warm up, sometimes dramatically. Within a few decades, the glaciers had mostly melted, the sea levels rose and flooded the low-lying land, and animals scrambled to find a comfortable habitat. It’s easier for an animal to move than to adapt to a changing habitat.

Even though a lot of land was flooded, other land opened up as glacial barriers disappeared. Animals that had traveled to Alaska on a land bridge from Asia could now move deeper into North America. Animals from deeper in North America could enter Alaska.

This colder-warmer-colder pattern happened a few dozen times during the Pleistocene, shaking the climate up repeatedly and leading to extinctions, with or without human help, and animals that look strange to us now because we don’t fully understand the environments they adapted to. But one thing is for sure. The megafauna were all awesome.

Fast forward to a few hundred years ago. European humans are in the middle of a territorial war with North American humans, and as they pushed their way farther into North America, they started to find interesting things: giant bones in the southerly areas, actual frozen carcasses in the permafrost of the northerly areas. Some of those carcasses looked so fresh, and the interior of North America was so little explored by Europeans that a lot of people assumed they’d find living mammoths if they looked in the right spot. When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their turn of the 19th century expedition, one of their goals was to find mastodons and other megafauna.

They didn’t, of course. Instead they almost died repeatedly and had to be rescued by Sacajawea, who I like to imagine kept sighing with exasperation but who at least got to hang out with the expedition’s Newfoundland dog. Newfies are the best. (I miss you, Jasper.)

So, now we have a little bit of background about Ice Age megafauna. If you’re interested in learning more about how humans evolved and spread across the world, and our extinct close cousins, you can listen to episodes 25 and 26.

The Irish elk was the reason I started this podcast. I happened across the so-called fact I learned in elementary school, that the Irish elk died out because its antlers became so big that it couldn’t escape from predators.

I hadn’t thought of the Irish elk in literally decades. But that antler thing didn’t sound right. I caught myself thinking about it on and off, even getting angry. It didn’t make sense. It’s not like evolution is a power-up in a video game, and as soon as one elk got extra super gigantic antlers, suddenly all elk had them. If overlarge antlers were an issue, only stags with the biggest antlers would die. Does would mate with the remaining stags with smaller antlers and their offspring would be more likely to have small antlers. Besides, deer of all kinds shed their antlers every year and regrow them, which means the stags with biggest antlers wouldn’t have to deal with them for more than a few months of the year.

I did some research, which I found so much fun I decided to turn it into a podcast. Then I realized I couldn’t really make an ongoing podcast exclusively about Irish elk, which is pretty obvious now that I think about it.

So, it turns out that the Irish elk is neither exclusively Irish nor an elk. It did live in the area now called Ireland, but it also lived all across Eurasia and even in northern Africa. Like many deer it liked open woodland and was a browsing animal, meaning it didn’t eat grass but did eat lots of other plants, including green twigs and bark, and if it lived nowadays it would undoubtedly come to my yard and eat my garden.

Recent genetic analysis suggests it’s more closely related to the fallow deer than to elk. For these reasons, many publications these days refer to it as the Giant Deer. Officially it’s Megaloceros giganteus.

Megaloceros did have huge antlers, that’s for sure, sometimes as much as a twelve-foot span, or 3.7 meters. If you’re sitting in an ordinary house, the ceiling is probably eight feet high, maybe nine, or 2.4 to 2.7 meters. The biggest male giant deer could stand about seven feet at the shoulder, or 2.1 meters, and weigh as much as 1500 pounds, or 680 kg. That’s the size of a bull Alaskan moose, although moose antlers are maybe six feet across, or 1.8 m.

So, giant deer had giant antlers, the biggest of any known deer species. But were they really that big relative to the animal’s size? Stephen Jay Gould published a study in 1974 that concluded that compared to the deer’s body size, Megaloceros’s antlers weren’t actually out of proportion at all. They’re just big animals. Sexual selection did encourage antler size—the ladies liked stags with big racks, and stags with bigger antlers could intimidate rival males more easily. But since Megaloceros shed and regrew their antlers every year, in years where the foraging wasn’t as good, everybody’s antlers tended to be smaller.

So why did Megaloceros die out? When did it happen? And are there pockets of giant deer still living in Siberia?

Those questions are all interrelated and surprisingly hard to answer—although I’m not going to lie, if you’re packing your bags for Siberia to look for giant deer, you’re probably going to be disappointed. But there is evidence that Megaloceros survived much later than formerly thought.

Until recently, the last known remains of Megaloceros were dated to the end of the Pleistocene, about 11,000 years ago. Then a partial giant deer skeleton was found on the Isle of Man, and an antler was found in southwest Scotland. Both were dated to about 9,000 years ago, as published in a year 2000 paper in Nature. In 2004, another paper in Nature revealed that giant deer remains found in western Siberia had been dated to about 7,700 years ago.

So, giant deer were around several thousand years later than previously thought, at least in Siberia. Back in the mid-19th century, some naturalists thought Megaloceros might even have survived well into modern days and been hunted to extinction by modern humans. Well preserved skulls were sometimes found in Irish peat bogs, and it wasn’t uncommon for the antlers to be mounted and displayed. I would.

In 1846, a huge cache of bones was found on a small island in a lake near Limerick in Ireland. Among the bones were Megaloceros skeletons. What interested researchers at the time were the Megaloceros skulls. The stags’ skulls were normal. The smaller skulls, thought to be from females, had holes in the front. They looked for all the world like the skulls of cows that had been slaughtered by being poleaxed in the head—a common butchering practice in the area up until recent times. Researchers thought they might have found evidence of limited domestication of giant deer, where the less dangerous females were raised in captivity while stags were hunted in the wild.

Unfortunately, excavation methods in those days left a lot to be desired. There’s no way now to determine whether the Megaloceros bones were actually mixed in with more recent domestic animal bones or whether they were in older deposits. There’s also doubt that the doe skulls were actually Megaloceros. It’s more likely they were elk or moose skulls. Both animals lived in the area well into the Holocene before going extinct, and the skulls are very similar to those of Megaloceros. As far as I can find out, the bones are gone so they can’t even be DNA tested or radiocarbon dated to see how old they are.

As to why the giant deer went extinct, I’m not saying it was humans…but it was humans. Actually we don’t really know. In some places extinction may have been caused by environmental pressures, including a shortened growing season that would have made food scarce. In other places humans may have been at least a partial cause. But isolated pockets of Megaloceros remained for thousands of years afterwards. Why aren’t they still around?

Hopefully, as more remains are found we’ll learn more. It’s likely that the Siberian deer, which survived longest, migrated onto the plains as the foothills of the Urals became more heavily forested about 8,000 years ago. But that coincided with a dry period and with settlers moving into the area. A combination of reduced fodder, loss of habitat, and hunting may have finally driven the giant deer to extinction.

But don’t be sad! Even if we don’t have Megaloceros in zoos these days, we do have a lot of fascinating deer and relatives of deer—moose, reindeer, elk, and so forth. You can still appreciate them.

I do sometimes think that being extinct makes an animal seem more interesting, just because we know we can never see a living specimen. If moose were extinct, this episode would probably be about the moose, and how awesome it was, and how little we know about it, and how it’s a shame they’re all dead. But hey, moose are still around. Take a little time out of your day today to appreciate the moose. (Also, you can check out episode 30 for lots more information about moose and reindeer.)

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. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!