Category Archives: Arctic

Episode 449: The Gloucester Sea Serpent

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This is a chapter of the Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie book, which you can buy or request at the library!

Further reading:

Debunking a Great New England Sea Serpent

A narwhal. I use this picture all the time:

The diseased black snake that was taken for a baby sea serpent:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to have a sea monster episode! This is actually a chapter of the book that I published a few years ago now, Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie, and it’s called the Gloucester Sea Serpent. We had a Patreon episode recently that was about a different sea serpent, and while I was researching that, it was driving me completely nuts, because I kept trying to find the episode where I talked about the Gloucester sea serpent, and I finally remembered that that wasn’t an episode at all. It was just a chapter in the book. Maybe it’s time to record it.

While the Gloucester sea serpent was first mentioned in a traveler’s journal in 1638, it really came to prominence almost two centuries later. On August 6, 1817, two women said they’d seen a sea monster in the Cape Ann harbor. A fisherman said he’d seen it too, but neither the fisherman nor the women were believed. A 60-foot, or 18-meter, sea serpent in the harbor? Ridiculous!

Only a few days later, though, the monster started showing up in Gloucester Bay and attracted major attention—not because it was elusive, but because it was so commonly seen. Sailors, fishers, and even people on shore saw what was described as a huge serpent in the waters of Gloucester Bay, Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. On one occasion more than two hundred people watched it for nearly four hours.

The creature’s length was described as anywhere up to 150 feet long, or 46 meters, and many people said it had a horse-sized head. Some people described its head as being about the same shape as a horse’s too, although with a shorter snout. The body was snake-like and about the thickness of a barrel.

Many people thought the sea monster had humps along the back, usually referred to as bunches or occasionally joints. Others said it undulated through the water in an up-and-down motion, which looked like humps. Others said it had no bunches or humps at all. Most people agreed that its back was dark brown.

One of the earlier witnesses, a man named Amos Story, watched the sea serpent from shore for an hour and a half. He was adamant that it had no bunches, that he only saw at most about 12 feet of its length at one time, or 3.6 meters, and that its head resembled that of a sea turtle. It was also fast, with Story claiming it covered a mile in only three minutes or so. That’s about 20 miles per hour, or 32 kilometers per hour—an incredible speed for an animal in the water.

As it happens, the leatherback sea turtle has been recorded as swimming that fast, and it can grow over 7 feet long, or 2.2 meters, and possibly much longer. It lives throughout the world’s oceans and is just as happy in cold waters as it is in tropical waters. In other words, it’s possible Story actually saw a huge leatherback turtle, which would explain why it had a turtle-like head that it held above the surface of the water at least part of the time. This is something leatherback turtles do. Then again, the leatherback has distinctive ridges and serrations on its back that Story didn’t mention.

So many people reported seeing the sea serpent that the Linnaean Society of New England decided it needed to investigate. The society had only formed a few years before, in 1814, to promote natural history. By 1822 it had disbanded, but in those eight years it accomplished quite a bit, including opening a small museum in Boston. Its most controversial endeavor was the sea serpent investigation.

Members of the Linnaean Society interviewed witnesses, making careful notes that were signed by the interviewees to indicate the details were accurate. These statements tell us a lot about what people saw, although it hasn’t helped us determine what the sea serpent actually was.

For instance, Captain Solomon Allen saw the creature more than once and gave a clear description of it. It was at least 90 feet long, or 27.5 meters, with as many as fifty joints, or bunches. Its head was snake-like—specifically rattlesnake-like, presumably meaning it was wider at the back and had a narrower snout—but the size of a horse’s head. It was dark brown, plain in color, and swam with an undulating side-to-side motion. It dived by sinking straight down, moved quickly, and sometimes seemed to play in the water by swimming in circles.

All this is great information, but it doesn’t resemble any known animal. It also doesn’t necessarily resemble the other witness statements. Let’s go over some of the more detailed sightings and see if we can come to some conclusions.

A man named William Foster reported bunches along the monster’s length, although he also described them as rings. When the animal’s head rose from the water, the first thing Foster saw was what he described as a prong or spear. It was about a foot long, or 30 centimeters, and tapered to a point. His interviewer asked if the spear might have been a tongue, but Foster didn’t think so.

Three men on a schooner named the Laura, becalmed in the mouth of the harbor, witnessed the monster in late August. Sewall Toppan, master of the ship, reported that the monster’s head was the size of a 10-gallon keg, which would have been about 18 inches tall, or 46 centimeters, and 16 inches in diameter, or 40 centimeters. He said its head was held about 6 inches out of the water, or 15 centimeters, and that he could see 10 or 15 feet of its length disappearing into the water, or 3 to 4.5 meters. He didn’t see any kind of prong, but two of his sailors did.

One of the two sailors was Robert Bragg, who reported that the monster was swimming rapidly toward the ship with its head and about 15 feet of its body out of the water, or 4.5 meters. As it drew closer he saw its tongue, which he described as looking like a harpoon about 2 feet long, or 61 centimeters. He even reported that the animal raised its tongue almost straight up several times. He also said it was dark brown and smooth.

The third Laura witness, helmsman William Somerby, corroborated Bragg’s details, including the animal’s tongue, which he mentioned was light brown. As the monster passed within 40 feet of the ship, or 12 meters, Somerby even saw one of its eyes clearly. He said it was the size of an ox’s eye and was completely dark brown or possibly black. He and Bragg both noted that the animal had a bunch above its eyes, presumably meaning a bump or knob of some kind.

All three men said that they were familiar with whales and the animal was not a whale.

August 14 was a warm day and the water was calm. A man named Matthew Gaffney, a ship’s carpenter by trade but in his heart a monster hunter, borrowed a boat and took his brother and a friend with him to row. He also took a musket.

As the small boat approached cautiously, the monster was spiraling around in the water, as various people reported it doing on and off throughout the day. Gaffney waited until the boat was as close as it could safely approach without risking being capsized, then fired a shot at the monster’s head.

He was a good marksman and was certain he hit the animal, which sank immediately below the surface and vanished. Worried that the wounded monster would be enraged once its initial shock wore off, Gaffney and all the other boats on the harbor took off for shore. But when the sea monster resurfaced some distance off, it was obviously unbothered by being shot at. It continued its apparently playful circling around in the harbor.

Several witnesses who saw the monster on August 14, before and after Gaffney’s attempt to shoot it, gave statements. William H. Foster said it at first moved slowly, but then sped up and twisted and turned through the water. Sometimes its head would bend around toward its tail, and Foster specifically said that when that happened, parts of its body between the bunches would raise up as much as 8 inches out of the water, or 20 centimeters, showing that the animal was at least 40 feet long, or 12 meters.

Lonson Nash saw the sea serpent and reported that it moved quickly and left a long wake, and that while it swam underwater sometimes, it didn’t seem to be very far under. He could track its progress underwater by the disturbance it made on the surface. He also saw it double around so that its head was sometimes near its tail, but he mentioned that when it was swimming forward, it appeared perfectly straight.

Later that day, a shipmaster named Epes Ellery saw the monster’s head through a spyglass. He reported that it was flattened on top like a snake’s and that its mouth resembled a snake’s mouth—presumably meaning it had a thin lower jaw. He reported that its joints were the size of two-gallon kegs and rose about 6 inches above the surface, or 15 centimeters. He said the animal swam with a vertical motion, not a side-to-side motion.

An unnamed woman reported that the sea monster’s bunches looked like gallon kegs tied in a line. Another man said he saw the creature’s bunches at the surface as it lay still for a while, and that around 50 feet, or 15 meters, of its length was visible although he couldn’t see its head or tail. Other witnesses that same day reported much the same thing.

Captain Elkanah Finney saw the sea monster from shore later in August, after his son reported seeing something strange in the harbor. Finney first thought it was a bunch of seaweed, but when he looked at it through his spyglass he realized it was an animal moving quickly through the water. He said it might have been 100 feet long, or 30 meters, with 30 or 40 bunches down its length. In fact, he said it looked like a string of buoys and that each bunch was about the size of a barrel.

There are lots of other reports, all of them similar to these. The sea monster, whatever it was, spent a lot of time in and around Gloucester Bay that summer and even returned the following two summers. People were obviously seeing something. The question is what.

Let’s look at the sightings where the monster had a prong or that it stuck out a long, straight tongue. This sounds a lot like a narwhal. A narwhal can grow up to about 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and males, and some females, have a brown or brownish spiral tusk that can grow just over 10 feet long, or 3 meters. Many people think the narwhal’s tusk is a horn that sticks up from its forehead, but it’s actually an elongated tooth that grows through the upper lip. That would explain why some of the witnesses thought it was a tongue.

A young narwhal is black or dark brown, although it grows lighter throughout its life so that old narwhals are almost white. A young animal would also have a short tusk. A narwhal often swims with its head out of the water and a male will sometimes lift his tusk up and down in the air. He can do this easily because, unlike most whales, the narwhal’s neck vertebrae aren’t fused and can bend the head around.

Most importantly, the narwhal is an Arctic animal and isn’t typically found as far south as Massachusetts, although it’s certainly been seen in that part of the ocean on rare occasions. Its rareness, together with its odd appearance compared to other whales, might lead witnesses to think it wasn’t a whale at all but some kind of monster.

That doesn’t explain the bunches, though. The witnesses on the schooner Laura didn’t report seeing any bunches on their sea monster (whose “tongue” reportedly looked like a harpoon), but William Foster’s pronged sea monster did have bunches.

Some researchers have dismissed the bunches, or humps, as a string of narwhals or other small whales traveling in a line. That’s definitely a possibility, but too many witnesses described the bunches as being always partially out of the water, not moving up and down. Not only that, the bunches were seen when the sea monster was lying quietly on the placid surface, not moving, often for long stretches.

Remember, though, that many witnesses described the bunches as resembling a line of buoys or kegs tied on a line. The animal often seemed to swim in circles until its head nearly touched its tail. William Foster reported that when it did this, its body between the bunches would rise several inches out of the water. Lonson Nash said when it was swimming forward, its body appeared perfectly straight.

Maybe witnesses weren’t seeing a long serpentine animal with bumps along its back. Maybe they were seeing a string of kegs used as buoys to keep fishing nets afloat, that had become tangled around a small whale’s tail.

Small kegs or large pieces of cork were sometimes used for this purpose at the time, including in Newfoundland and Norway. If a net tangled around a narwhal’s tail, the animal might have become used to dragging its burden around until the net eventually rotted away and freed the whale. This is something that still happens to whales today with nets and other fishing gear, although these days the nets are all plastic and won’t rot.

Narwhals mostly eat fish and squid, and often dive deeply to find food along the ocean floor. Our entangled narwhal chasing fish underwater might appear to be traveling in playful circles as the net dragged along behind and above it. Pulling all the buoys underwater would probably be difficult for the whale, which would explain why it mostly stayed near the surface.

It’s not a perfect match, of course, but the tangled-narwhal hypothesis fits a lot of the details reported for the Gloucester sea serpent. Narwhals also often travel in small groups, so if the entangled narwhal was with a few friends, that would explain why not every witness saw the bunches.

As for the Linnaean Society of New England, their investigation of the sea monster was excellent for the time. They took the sightings seriously and tried to remain impartial, although the members did seem to start from an assumption that the animal was an actual serpent of some kind.

Unfortunately, they made one fatal blunder. In late September 1817, someone found and killed a snake 3.5 feet long, or a little over a meter, that had bunches all down its spine. It was found only a few miles from Gloucester Harbor. The Linnaean Society decided it had to be a baby sea serpent.

They said so loudly and even proposed a scientific name for the sea serpent. But it wasn’t long before the “baby sea serpent” was identified as a common black snake. The body was dissected and the bunches turned out to be tumors from a diseased spine. The society’s investigation became a joke. But at least we still have the eyewitness accounts they gathered.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 435: The Narwhal and the Unicorn

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Thanks to Owen and Aksel, and Dylan and Emily for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Where did the unicorn myth come from?

The narwhal is my favorite whale:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to look at an animal suggested by Owen and Aksel, and a related suggestion by Dylan and Emily.

Owen and Aksel suggested we talk about the narwhal, which we haven’t really discussed since episode 5 even though it’s one of my favorite animals. Dylan and Emily suggested we learn about animals that might have inspired legends of the unicorn. These two topics are definitely linked!

The narwhal is a toothed whale, but it doesn’t have very many teeth—in fact, most narwhals don’t have any teeth at all. It swallows its food whole and doesn’t need to chew, mostly small fish but also squid and other small animals. Male narwhals do have one tooth, a tusk that can be almost 10 feet long, or over 3 meters. The tusk is a spiral shape, developed from what would have been the left canine tooth, but instead of growing downward like a regular tooth, it grows forward, directly through the front of the lip. A lot of times people get confused and think the tusk is a horn that grows from the narwhal’s forehead, and that’s mainly because the narwhal is closely related to the unicorn legend.

That sounds weird at first, since the narwhal is a whale that can grow up to 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and lives in cold waters of the Arctic Circle. The unicorn is supposed to be a horse-like animal with a spiral horn growing from its forehead, although it’s also sometimes depicted as more goatlike in appearance, with cloven hooves and a little beard. It also usually has a long tail with a tuft at the end like a donkey or zebra.

In the olden days in Europe, the unicorn’s single spiral horn was supposed to have curative properties. If you ground up a little bit of the horn, known as alicorn, people thought it acted as a medicine to cure you of poisoning or other ailments. The alicorn was actually the tusk of the narwhal, but traders claimed it was a unicorn horn because they could charge more for it. The legend of the unicorn having a long spiral horn doesn’t come from ancient stories, it comes from the appearance of the narwhal’s tusk.

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.

The biggest question about the narwhal is what its tusk is used for. Most males have one, and occasionally a male will grow two tusks. Most females don’t have one, although about 15% of females will grow a tusk, usually smaller than the male’s. Females live longer than males on average, so obviously the tusk isn’t helping males survive. Most scientists assume that it’s just a way for males to attract mates.

But the narwhal’s tusk seems to be useful for more than just decoration. It contains high concentrations of nerve endings, and scientists think it might help the whale sense a lot of information about the water around it. Narwhals have been observed smacking fish with their tusks to stun them, so that the whale can slurp them up more easily. And even though it’s technically a tooth, the narwhal’s tusk can bend up to a foot, or about 30 cm, in any direction without breaking.

The narwhal is 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. This can make them easy to confuse with another small whale that’s closely related, the beluga, which shares other characteristics with the narwhal. The beluga is white, has a small rounded head and doesn’t have a dorsal fin, and has a neck so that it can bend it head around. Most whales have lost the ability to move their heads. The beluga also lives in the same areas as the narwhal and both are the only two living members of the family Monodontidae. They even interbreed very rarely. But only the narwhal has a tusk.

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, 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. These days, Biblical scholars translate re’em as a wild ox, or aurochs. You can learn more about the aurochs in episode 58, about weird cattle.

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.

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, you can listen to episode 61.

It’s probable that all these stories stem from the rhinoceros, which we talked about in episode 346. Basically, it’s a big, heavy animal with relatively short legs, a big head that it carries low to the ground like a bison, and at least one horn that grows on its nose. It’s usually gray or gray-brown in color with very little hair, and its skin is tough. It eats plants.

The rhinoceros is actually most closely related to the horse and the tapir, which are odd-toed ungulates. The rhino has three toes on each foot, with a little hoof-like nail covering the front of each toe, but the bottom of the rhino’s foot is a big pad similar to the bottom of an elephant’s foot.

The rhino’s nose horn isn’t technically a horn because it doesn’t have a bony core. It’s made of long fibers of keratin all stuck together, and keratin is the same protein that forms fingernails and hair. It’s not an elegant spiral horn like the unicorn is supposed to have, and the rhino itself isn’t a delicate horse-like animal. It’s big and strong and can be extremely dangerous—but the original unicorn stories said it was a huge, fearsome beast.

In the 13th century, the Italian explorer Marco Polo visited Asia and saw a unicorn. He wrote later that “it is a hideous beast to look at, and in no way like what we think and say in our countries.” He probably saw a rhinoceros, so the unicorn legend and real life rhinos have been disappointing people for more than seven centuries.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 429: Foxes!

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Thanks to Katie, Torin, and Eilee for suggesting this week’s topic, foxes!

Further reading:

Meet the Endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox

Long snouts protect foxes when diving headfirst in snow

Black bears may play important role in protecting gray fox

The red fox:

A black and gold Sierra Nevada red fox [photo taken from the first link above]:

The extremely fluffy Arctic fox:

The gray fox [photo by VJAnderson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115382784]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have an episode about foxes, a suggestion by Katie, and we’ll talk about fox species suggested by Torin and Eilee.

Foxes are omnivorous canids related to dogs and wolves, and just to be confusing, male foxes are sometimes called dogs. Female foxes are vixens and baby foxes are cubs or kits. But even though foxes are related to dogs and wolves, they’re not so closely related that they can interbreed with those other canids. Plus, of course, not every animal that’s called a fox is actually considered a fox scientifically.

The largest species of fox is the red fox, which also happens to be the one most people are familiar with. It’s common throughout much of North America, Eurasia, and the Middle East, and even parts of northern Africa. It’s also been introduced in Australia, where it’s an invasive species. It’s a rusty-red in color with black legs and white markings, including a white tip to the tail. It has large pointed ears and a long narrow muzzle.

There are lots of subspecies of red fox throughout its natural range, including one suggested by Eilee, the Sierra Nevada red fox. It lives in the Sierra Nevada and Oregon Cascades mountain ranges in the western United States, in parts of California, Nevada, and Oregon. It’s smaller than the red fox and some individuals are red, some are black and gold, and some are a mix of red and gray-brown. Its paws are covered with long hair that protects the paw pads from snow, and its coat is thick.

The Sierra Nevada red fox was first identified as a subspecies in 1937, but it took more than half a century until any scientists started studying it. It used to be common throughout the mountain ranges where it lives, but after more than a century of trapping for fur and shooting it for bounty, it’s one of the rarest foxes in the world. Fewer than 100 adults are known to survive in the wild, maybe even fewer than 50.

For a long time, scientists thought the Sierra Nevada red fox had been extirpated from California, and that it might even be completely extinct. Then a camera trap got pictures of one in 2010. It’s fully protected now, so hopefully its numbers will grow.

Torin suggested we learn about the Arctic fox, which lives in far northern areas like Greenland, Siberia, Alaska, and parts of northern Canada. The Arctic fox’s muzzle is relatively short and its ears are rounded, and it also has a rounder body and shorter legs than other foxes. This helps keep it warm, since it has less surface area to lose body heat.

During the summer, the Arctic fox is brown and gray, while in winter it’s white to blend in with the snowy background. There are some individuals who are gray or brown-gray year-round, although it’s rare. The Arctic fox’s fur is thick and layered to keep it warm even in bitterly cold weather, and like the Sierra Nevada red fox, it has a lot of fur on its feet.

The Arctic fox is omnivorous like other foxes, although in the winter it mostly eats meat. In summer it eats bird eggs, berries, and even seaweed along with fish and small animals like lemmings and mice. It also eats carrion from dead animals and what’s left from a polar bear’s meal. It has such a good sense of smell that it can smell a carcass from 25 miles away, or 40 km. Its hearing is good too, which allows it to find mice and other animals that are traveling under the snow. Like other foxes, it will poke its nose into the snow quickly to grab the little animal, an activity called mousing. A study from 2024 revealed that the fox’s snout shape helps keep it from getting injured in deep and compacted snow.

The grey fox lives throughout North and Central America, although it’s less common than it used to be due to habitat loss and hunting by humans. It’s a grizzled gray in color with reddish or tan legs, and a black stripe down its tail ending in a black tail tip.

It’s actually not that closely related to what are called true foxes. Its pupils are rounded like a dog’s instead of slit like other foxes, which have eyes that resemble cats’ eyes. The grey fox also has hooked claws that allow it to climb trees like a cat, and when it’s in a tree it can climb around in it just fine. A vixen may make her den in the hollow part of a tree to have her babies, sometimes as much as 30 feet, or 9 meters, above the ground, although most of the time gray foxes den on the ground, in a burrow, hollow log, or even in an abandoned human building.

The gray fox is small, not much bigger than a domestic cat, and it eats a lot of the same things that coyotes eat. If a coyote feels like a grey fox is encroaching on its territory, the coyote will kill the fox. Naturally, foxes are cautious around coyotes as a result. A study published in 2021 discovered that in areas where black bears live alongside coyotes and gray foxes, the foxes spend a lot of time hanging out near bears. In winter when the bears are hibernating, the foxes leave because coyotes will move into the area until the bears re-emerge in spring. Coyotes are afraid of bears, so the presence of bears protects the foxes as long as the fox doesn’t annoy the bear. I feel like this would make a great basis for a cartoon.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 419: The Elephant Seal

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Thanks to Charlotte, Clay, and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Seal whiskers, the secret weapon for hunting

Elephant seals drift off to sleep while diving far below the ocean surface

Scientists Discover Remains of Antarctic Elephant Seal in Indiana River

The elephant seal and its proboscis:

The bunyip carving:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have an animal suggested by three different listeners, Charlotte, Clay, and Richard from NC. So, by popular demand, let’s learn about the elephant seal, including some elephant seal mysteries.

The elephant seal gets its name because it’s big, grayish-brown, and wrinkled. Adult male elephant seals even have a proboscis, although it’s not anywhere near as long as an elephant’s trunk. It’s basically an enlarged and elongated nose that allows the animal to make loud roaring noises to intimidate other males. This is what that sounds like:

[elephant seal roars]

There are two species of elephant seal, the northern and southern. The southern elephant seal is larger on average while the northern male has a larger proboscis on average. We talked about elephant seals briefly in episode 155, about sexual dimorphism, because males and females are much different in size. A big male southern elephant seal can grow up to 20 feet long, or 6 meters, and can weigh about 9,000 lbs, or 4,000 kg. Females are about half that length and much lighter in weight. A big male northern elephant seal can grow up to 16 feet long, or almost 5 meters, and weigh around 5,500 lbs, or 2,500 kg, while females are much smaller.

There are many reasons why male elephant seals are bigger than females, but it’s mainly because the males spend a lot of energy fighting each other. The bigger and stronger a male is, the more likely he is to win a fight and the more likely it is that other males won’t bother to challenge him. Meanwhile, females are smaller so they need less food.

The elephant seal has thick fur that helps keep it warm, but it also has a layer of blubber like whales do. The blubber also helps make the seal streamlined so it can swim faster. Since the elephant seal spends most of its life in the water, and it does a lot of diving, it needs to be as streamlined as possible. It eats animals like fish, squid, and octopuses, but it especially likes sharks and rays.

Since a lot of the elephant seal’s favorite prey lives on or near the ocean floor, it has to dive to find it. The deepest recorded dive of an elephant seal was almost 5,700 feet, or about 1,700 meters. That’s just over a mile deep, the deepest dive made by a mammal that isn’t a whale. The elephant seal can hold its breath for well over an hour and a half. To conserve energy and maximize its time, quite often an elephant seal will actually sleep while it’s swimming downward, since a really deep dive can take a long time to descend. It might only wake up when it bumps into the sea floor, but sometimes it’s sleeping so soundly that it will just lie there at the bottom of the ocean and continue to sleep. I guess that’s why the sea floor is sometimes called the seabed.

Because the elephant seal hunts for food where there’s not much light, it often can’t rely on its vision to find its prey. Instead, it has really good hearing underwater, and it has whiskers on its upper lip that are extremely sensitive, with more nerve fibers in each whisker than in any other mammal studied. Its whiskers can sense tiny movements of water that indicate an animal moving around nearby.

Once a year, the elephant seal molts and new fur grows in, but unlike most mammals it doesn’t just lose its fur. The outer layer of its skin peels off too. It takes a lot longer for its fur to regrow because blubber doesn’t contain any blood vessels. New blood vessels have to grow around the blubber to supply the skin with extra nutrients, and during that time the seal can’t spend time in the water or it will get too cold. It stays on land during molting, cuddled up with its friends so they can all stay warmer.

It can take a month to complete the molt, and the seals don’t eat the whole time. The males also don’t eat during mating season and the females don’t eat once their pups are born, not until the pup is a month old and doesn’t need its mother constantly. Elephant seals are adapted to be able to fast for long periods, but they do lose a lot of weight and have to eat plenty of extra food afterwards to regain it.

The elephant seal is well adapted to cold. The southern elephant seal lives in the southern ocean, around Antarctica, the southern tip of Patagonia, and south of New Zealand. The northern elephant seal lives in the eastern Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Canada and Alaska. Sometimes they roam farther, though, into warmer waters, and sometimes an elephant seal will investigate a river mouth and end up traveling far inland in the river. But sometimes a seal will make a really, really long journey.

About 1,260 years ago, one particular southern elephant seal started swimming north. It swam from the Southern Ocean along the South American coast, crossed the equator, and just kept swimming. It swam into the Gulf of Mexico and eventually came to the mouth of the Mississippi River. It swam up the mighty Mississippi and into a tributary river, and eventually it ended up in what is now Indiana, where it died.

We know all this because in 1965, construction workers found a jawbone near the Wabash River and donated it to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It wasn’t properly studied until decades later except to test its age. In 2020, a team of three scientists examined what was left of the jawbone after destructive radiometric testing in the 1970s, and they were shocked to realize it came from a southern elephant seal.

There are a lot of questions associated with the discovery. Why did the seal keep swimming? Was it lost and confused, and thought it was swimming back to its home? Was it just a ramblin’ seal, tryin’ to make a livin’ and doin’ the best it could feel? There’s no way to know, but there is a clue about what happened to it at the end. There are marks on the jawbone that might be cut marks.

At the time, over 1,500 years ago, that part of North America was inhabited by the Mississippian culture, a vast empire and the ancestor of many of the modern indigenous North American peoples. This was the culture who made giant earth mounds that still exist today in parts of North America, and when they were still being used, the mounds had grand buildings on top. Scientists aren’t sure if fishers or hunters spotted the elephant seal and killed it, or if someone found it already dead and decided to not let perfectly good meat go to waste. There’s even a theory that the animal didn’t swim to North America but that its skull was brought there by traders and at some point it ended up in the river.

The two elephant seal species do look very similar, and the scientists didn’t have the full original jawbone to study, so they also suggest it might actually have been a northern elephant seal. For a northern elephant seal to travel to Indiana without human help would be just as hard or even harder than a southern elephant seal, because there is no easy water passage from the Pacific coast of North America to Indiana. The seal would actually have to travel through the Arctic Ocean to the North Atlantic, then swim south to the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

There is a big possibility that at least some stories of river monsters from the olden days were actually elephant seals that swam so far upstream in a river that the people who saw it didn’t know what the animal was. Even today, when many of us carry around tiny computers in our pockets that allow us to access all of humanity’s knowledge and also make phone calls, seeing an elephant seal in a place where it doesn’t belong would be terrifying.

We think that’s what happened long ago in Victoria in Australia. We talked about it in episode 351, in our episode about the bunyip. An Aboriginal sacred site near Ararat, Victoria once had the outline of a bunyip carved into the ground and the turf removed from within the figure. Every year the local indigenous people would gather to re-carve the figure so it wouldn’t become overgrown, because it symbolized an important event. At that spot, two brothers had been attacked by a bunyip. It killed one of the men and the other speared the bunyip and killed it. When he brought his family and others back to retrieve his brother’s body, they traced around the bunyip’s body.

The bunyip carving was 26 feet long, or 8 meters. Unfortunately it’s long gone, since eventually the last Aborigine who was part of the ritual died sometime in the 1850s and the site was fenced off for cattle grazing. But we have a drawing of the geoglyph from 1867. It’s generally taken to be a two-legged sea serpent type monster with a small head and a relatively short, thick tail. Some people think it represents a bird like an emu.

But if you turn it around, with the small head being the end of a tail, and the blunt tail being a head, suddenly it makes sense. It’s the shape of a seal.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 399: Bears

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Thanks to Anbo, Murilo, Clay, and Ezra for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about some bears!

Further reading:

Snack attack: Bears munch on ants and help plants grow

Extinct vegetarian cave bear diet mystery unravelled

Ancient brown bear genomes sheds light on Ice Age losses and survival

The sloth bear has shaggy ears and floppy lips [photo from this site]:

An absolute unit of a Kodiak bear in captivity [photo by S. Taheri – zoo, own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1118252]:

A polar bear:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re revisiting a popular topic, bears! We’ll talk about some bears we’ve never covered before, with suggestions from Anbo, Clay, Ezra, and Murilo. We’ll even discuss a small bear mystery which has mostly been solved by science.

To start us off, Anbo wanted to learn about bears in general. We’ve had bear episodes before, but our last episode all about bears was way back in 2017, in episode 42. Some of our listeners weren’t even born back then, which makes me feel super old.

Bears live throughout much of the world today, but they evolved in North America around 38 million years ago. These ancestral bears were small, about the size of a raccoon, but they were successful. They spread into Asia via the land bridge Beringia, where they were even more successful than in North America, so successful that by around 30 million years ago, descendants of those earliest bear ancestors migrated from Asia back into North America. But it wasn’t until the Pleistocene around 2 ½ million years ago that bears really came into their own.

That’s because bears are megafauna, and megafauna evolved mainly as an adaptation to increasingly cold climates. As the ice ages advanced, a lot of animals grew larger so they could stay warm more easily. Predators also had to grow larger as their prey became larger, since if you want to hunt an animal the size of a bison or woolly rhinoceros, you’d better be pretty big and strong yourself.

Bears mostly weren’t hunting animals that big, though. Modern studies suggest that overall, bears are omnivores, not fully carnivorous. Bears eat a lot of plant material even if you don’t count the panda, which isn’t very closely related to other bears. Even when a bear does eat other animals, they’re not usually very big ones.

Let’s take Murilo’s suggestion as an example, the sloth bear. The sloth bear lives in India and is increasingly vulnerable due to habitat loss and poaching. It’s probably most closely related to the sun bear that we talked about in episode 234, which also lives in parts of South Asia. Both the sun bear and the sloth bear have long black hair and a white or yellowish V-shaped marking on the chest. The sloth bear’s hair is especially long on its neck and shoulders, like a mane, and its ears even have long hair.

The sloth bear stands around 3 feet high at the shoulder at most, or 91 cm, and a big male can be over 6 feet tall, or almost 2 meters, when he stands on his hind legs. This isn’t gigantic for bears in general, but it’s not small either. Scientists think the V-shaped marking on its chest warns tigers to leave the sloth bear alone, and tigers mostly do. If tigers think twice about attacking an animal, you know that animal has to be pretty tough.

The sloth bear has massive claws on big paws. The claws can measure 4 inches long, or 10 cm, although they’re not very sharp. The bear has an especially long muzzle but its teeth aren’t very large. Like most bears, it’s good at climbing trees and can run quite fast, and it swims well too. It even has webbed toes.

With all this in mind, what do you think the sloth bear eats? I’ll give you some more hints. It has loose, kind of flappy lips, especially the lower lip. It doesn’t have any teeth in the front of its upper jaw. It mainly uses its huge claws to dig.

If you guessed that the sloth bear eats ants, termites, and other insects, you are right! It digs into termite and ant nests and uses its long, flexible lips to slurp up as many insects as it can, giving them a quick crunch with its back teeth before swallowing them down.

Insects are actually quite nutritious, and the sloth bear isn’t the only bear that eats them. All bears snack on ants and other insects sometimes. You may have heard that bears love honey and will tear open beehives to get it, and while that’s true, the bear is mainly after the larval bees because they’re so nutritious. The honey is just, you know, dessert.

Next, Clay wanted to learn about the Kodiak bear, which may be the largest bear in the world. It’s a subspecies of brown bear and is sometimes called the Alaskan brown bear since it lives on some Alaskan islands called the Kodiak Archipelago. It’s light brown or rusty-red in color.

The Kodiak bear has been restricted to these islands for at least 10,000 years, since the end of the Pleistocene when the sea levels rose as glaciers melted. It demonstrates island gigantism, which is actually quite unusual. Because islands have limited resources, but are relatively protected from large numbers of predators, small animals are the ones that generally adapt to island life by growing larger. Animals that start off large generally adapt by growing smaller, called island dwarfism. That’s why some islands have been home to dwarf elephants but giant rodents.

In the case of the Kodiak bear, it has a source of protein that helps it grow so incredibly large, salmon. Five species of salmon spawn in the freshwater on the islands, and the bears are able to put on lots of weight to survive the harsh winter by eating as much salmon as they can catch. They also have lots of nutritious plants to eat. They actually prefer some plants to eating salmon, which makes sense when you think about it. A wild animal needs to conserve energy, and it can take a lot of energy to catch fish. It’s a lot easier to eat berries, which can’t swim away.

So how big can a Kodiak bear get? A big male can stand up to 10 feet tall on his hind legs, or 3 meters, and be 5 feet tall, or 1.5 meters, when standing on all fours. Bears kept in captivity can grow even larger. That’s much bigger than a grizzly and about the same size as the closely related polar bear, which brings us to Ezra’s suggestion.

Ezra wanted to learn about the polar bear, which lives in the Arctic and areas near the Arctic. It doesn’t live near the Antarctic, or south pole, which means polar bears don’t eat penguins, because penguins live around the Antarctic. The polar bear does eat a whole lot of other animals, though, and is the most carnivorous of all bears. It especially likes eating seals, and will also catch and kill walruses, caribou, and beluga whales. That’s right, the polar bear can actually kill an entire whale. The beluga is fairly small for a whale and relies on breathing holes in the ice, and sometimes when it comes up to breathe, there’s a polar bear waiting for it. Most of the time, though, the polar bear eats much smaller animals.

The polar bear spends a lot of its time on sea ice, and a lot of the time in the sea. It swims incredibly well and spends so much time in the water that some people consider it a marine animal. It’s certainly semi-aquatic. Its kidneys are adapted to filter excess salt out of its blood from seawater, and its small eyes are closer to the top of its head than in other bears. This helps it see above water while swimming.

The polar bear is closely related to the brown bear and will sometimes interbreed with the brown bear where their ranges overlap. The resulting hybrid bear is usually light brown in color. The polar bear is famously white, although its fur becomes yellowish as the year goes on. It sheds its winter coat in the spring and the new hair that grows in is white.

Actually, the polar bear’s fur is transparent, but it looks white because of the way it scatters light. The guard hairs are long and coarse, protecting a shorter, softer undercoat that helps keep the bear warm even on bitterly cold nights. Unlike other bears, the polar bear doesn’t hibernate, except for pregnant females.

There used to be a bear of similar size that lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene and only went extinct about 24,000 years ago. The cave bear gets its name because so many of its remains have been found in caves. It may have hibernated in caves like some bears do today, or it might have used caves as shelters year-round.

Scientists think the cave bear was most closely related to brown bears and polar bears. The males were much larger than females, and a big male was as big as a Kodiak or polar bear. But this giant bear probably wasn’t too much of a problem for our ancient ancestors and Neandertal relations, because it was almost entirely vegetarian.

Scientists have studied the wear pattern on cave bear teeth and determined that it was eating a whole lot of fruit, especially berries. It probably did eat at least some meat, but it’s likely that most of it came from scavenged carcasses. The cave bear didn’t even have all the teeth that other bears have.

All this talk about huge bears brings us to a mystery. It may even be a mystery you were wondering about yourself. How did bears survive the end of the Pleistocene when so many other megafauna went extinct, from the mammoth and giant ground sloth to the dire wolf and sabertooth cat?

A team of scientists from Denmark and Japan decided to examine the genetics of ancient brown bears, to learn how individuals were related and therefore how bears migrated across the world over time. They extracted genetic material from the remains of bears that lived as much as 60,000 years ago and as recently as 3,800 years ago and compared them to each other and to bears alive today.

Scientists already knew that brown bears used to live in more parts of the world than they do today. The prevailing view was that as the climate warmed after the ice ages, the bears retreated into colder parts of the world where they were more comfortable. But the team learned something surprising from the study, which was published in January of 2024.

Brown bears that lived before the end of the Pleistocene, approximately 11,000 years ago, had much broader genetic diversity than the bears that lived more recently. That means that bears that lived as far south as Japan and Ireland during the Pleistocene didn’t move to colder parts of the world, they died out. Each population that went regionally extinct made the brown bear gene pool that much smaller.

Most likely it was a combination of luck and adaptability that allowed bears to survive the end-Pleistocene extinctions. Just think how sad it would be if I ended this episode by saying that bears went extinct 11,000 years ago. Instead, we can still go to the zoo and see all kinds of bears whenever we want to.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 328: Giant Ants

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Thanks to Richard from NC for suggesting Titanomyrma!

Further reading:

‘Giant’ ant fossil raises questions about ancient Arctic migrations

A fossilized queen Titanomyrma ant with a rufous hummingbird (stuffed) for scale:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a suggestion from Richard from North Carolina, who sent me an article about an extinct giant ant called Titanomyrma. This episode is short, but I think you’ll find it interesting.

We’ve talked about ants in previous episodes, most recently episode 185. Most ant colonies consist of a single queen ant who lays all the eggs for her colony, seasonally hatched males with wings who fly off as soon as they’re grown, and worker ants. The worker ants are all female but don’t lay eggs. Army ants have another caste, the soldier ant, which are much larger than the worker ants and have big heads and strong, sharp mandibles. In many species of ant, the worker ants are further divided into castes that are specialized for specific tasks.

The biggest species of ant alive today is probably the giant Amazonian ant. The workers can grow over 1.2 inches long, or more than 3 cm, which is huge for an ant. It lives in South America in small colonies, usually containing less than 100 workers, and unlike most ants it doesn’t have a queen. Instead, one of the workers mates with a male and lays eggs for the colony. The giant Amazonian ant can sting and its sting contains venom that causes intense pain for up to two days. Fortunately, you will probably never encounter these giant ants, and even if you do they’re not very aggressive.

Another contender for the biggest species of ant alive today is the Dorylus genus of army ants, also called driver ants, which we talked about in episode 185. It lives in Africa in colonies that have millions of members, and the queen is the largest ant known. A queen army ant can measure 2.4 inches long, or 63 millimeters, but worker ants are much smaller.

Around 50 million years ago, giant ants related to modern driver ants lived in both Europe and North America. The genus is Titanomyrma and three species are known so far, found in Germany, England, Canada, and the American states of Tennessee and Wyoming.

The Wyoming ant fossil was discovered years ago and donated to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where it was stored in a drawer and forgotten about. In 2011 a curator found it and showed it to a paleoentomologist named Bruce Archibald. Dr. Archibald recognized it immediately as a fossilized queen ant even though it was the size of a hummingbird. He also realized it was very similar to a type of giant ant that once lived in Germany.

The German discovery was the first Titanomyrma species discovered, and it’s also the biggest known so far. The queen Titanomyrma gigantea grew up to 2.8 inches long, or 7 centimeters. Males grew up to 1.2 inches long, or 3 cm. The fossilized queen ants found have wings, with a wingspan of over 6 inches, or 16 cm. The other two known species are generally smaller, although still pretty darn big for ants.While they’re not that much bigger than the living Dorylus queens, most of the size of a queen Dorylus ant comes from her enlarged abdomen. Titanomyrma ants were just plain big all over.

Titanomyrma didn’t have a stinger, so it’s possible it used its mandibles to inflict bites, the way modern army ants do. It might also have sprayed formic acid at potential predators, as some ants do today.

The biggest ants alive today all live in tropical areas, so researchers thought Titanomyrma probably did too. During the Eocene, the world was overall quite warm and parts of Europe were tropical. The northern hemisphere supercontinent Laurasia was in the process of breaking up, but Europe and North America were still connected by the Arctic. Even though the Arctic was a lot warmer 50 million years ago than it is now, it was still too cold for a tropical ant. If Titanomyrma couldn’t survive in cold weather, how did it spread from one continent to another when it had to go through the Arctic?

There were warming periods during the Eocene that lasted a few hundred thousand years at a time, so researchers thought the ants probably migrated through the Arctic while it was warmer than usual. Then, in early 2023, a fossilized Titanomyrma queen ant was discovered in Canada. Because the rock it was preserved in has been distorted over the years, we can’t be certain how big the ant actually was. What we do know, though, is that the ant lived in a mountainous area that could get quite chilly, very different from the tropical climate scientists thought the giant ants needed.

As a result of the new finding, researchers are reconsidering whether the giant ants that lived 50 million years ago were really all that similar to modern giant ants. Just because the biggest ants alive today require tropical climates doesn’t mean that ancient giant ants did.

Hopefully more giant ant fossils will turn up soon, so we can learn more about where they lived, how they lived, and precisely how big they could get.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 249: Strange Seals

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Thanks to Richard from NC for his suggestion that leads us to learn about some interesting seals!

Further reading:

Mystery of Siberian freshwater seal food choice solved

Under Antarctica’s ice, Weddell seals produce ultrasonic vocalizations

Further listening/watching:

Rarely-heard Weddell Seal Sounds in Antarctica

The bearded seal Wikipedia page with audio so you can listen over and over and over

The Baikal seal, the world’s only fully fresh water seal species:

Baikal seal, round boi:

The Baikal seal’s teeth have teeth:

A Weddell seal mama with her pup who seems to be practicing singing:

Look ma, no ears!

The bearded seal. Can you tell where its name comes from? (Moustachioed seal might be more accurate.) (Also, note the ear opening with no external ear flap.)

Show transcript:

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

This week let’s learn about some interesting seals. Thanks to Richard from NC who suggested freshwater seals, which is where we’ll start.

Most seals live on the coast and spend most of the time in the ocean. But there’s one species of seal that lives exclusively in fresh water. That’s the Baikal [bay-CALL] seal, and the only place it lives is a big lake in Siberia called Lake Baikal.

Lake Baikal formed where two sections of the earth’s crust are being pulled apart by continental drift. That’s called a rift lake or rift valley lake. The lake gets bigger every year, but only by a tiny amount—just under an inch, or 2 cm. Since this has been going on for an estimated 25 to 30 million years, though, it’s an extremely big, deep lake. It is, in fact, the deepest lake on earth, and is also the oldest lake on earth. It’s more than twice as old as Lake Tanganyika in East Africa, which is also a large, deep rift lake but only about 12 million years old at the most.

Lake Baikal is almost 400 miles long, or 636 km, and nearly 50 miles wide, or 80 km. At its deepest point, it’s 3,893 feet deep, or 1,186.5 meters. That’s from the surface of the water to the muddy bottom. But that mud and sediment on the bottom has been building up for a very long time and there’s a lot of it—4.3 miles of it, in fact, or 7 km. The water is very clear and very oxygenated, but the surface freezes for several months out of the year. Then again, there are some hydrothermal vents, especially in the deepest areas, that heat the water around them to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 Celsius.

Because Lake Baikal is so deep, so big, so oxygenated, and so old, lots of species of animal live in and around it that live nowhere else in the world. That includes the Baikal seal.

The Baikal seal is related to the Arctic ringed seal but has lived in the lake exclusively for probably two million years. It only grows five and a half feet long at most, or 1.65 meters, and is usually closer to four feet long, or 1.2 meters. It’s gray in color and has no external ears, so that its head appears smooth. It can still hear, but because it doesn’t have ears sticking out of its head, it’s more streamlined than seals with external ears. It has large eyes, a pair of front flippers that it uses to maneuver in the water and on land, and a pair of hind flippers that act like a tail instead of legs.

That’s actually the main difference between earless and eared seals. Earless seals are more streamlined in general and more adapted for life in the water and for deep diving, but they’re awkward on land because they can’t use their hind limbs for walking. Eared seals have little flaps of external ears and while their hind flippers act as a tail in the water, the seal can turn its hind flippers over to walk on them on land.

The Baikal seal is quite small for a seal, which keeps it from needing as much food as a bigger animal. For a long time people thought the Baikal seal mostly ate fish, but a study published in late 2020 determined that it eats a whole lot of amphipods. Lake Baikal is home to a species of amphipod that grows up to about 10 millimeters long. Amphipods are a type of crustacean and all other freshwater amphipods known are bottom-dwellers. Only the Lake Baikal amphipod is free-floating.

The seal catches these tiny amphipods by sucking them up in a big mouthful of water, closing its teeth tightly, and using its tongue to force the water out through its teeth. The amphipods get caught against the teeth and the seal swallows them, yum. This is a type of filter feeding used by some other species of seal too, including the crabeater seal. Like the crabeater seal, it’s so well adapted to filter feeding that it has specialized teeth with curved projections all around their edges. These projections interlock closely when the seal closes its mouth. Because it doesn’t have to depend on eating fish, the Baikal seal isn’t threatened by commercial fishing. As long as it has plenty of amphipods to eat, it’s happy.

While the Baikal seal is the only truly freshwater seal species, a subspecies of ringed seal lives in a lake in Finland. Unlike the Baikal seal, though, which are numerous and doing just fine, the Saimaa ringed seal is endangered, with only around 400 individuals left in the wild. They’re strictly protected these days, fortunately, and the population is growing after it reached a low of only about 100 animals in 1983.

During the Pleistocene, the land mass that is now Finland was pressed down by the weight of glaciers. Once the glaciers melted, the land began to slowly rise back up until the lake where a population of ringed seals lived was cut off from the ocean.

Some other seals live in lakes that are cut off from the sea, including a population of harbor seals in Iliamna Lake in Alaska and a subspecies of harbor seal in northern Quebec, Canada, but let’s move on to seals that live in the ocean instead of fresh water.

Specifically, let’s discuss two earless seals that make interesting sounds. You may think you know what a typical seal sounds like, such as this kind of barking call:

[barking sound]

That’s actually not a seal but a closely related pinniped called a sea lion. Even though it’s not a seal, it is sort of technically a seal because it shares a family with fur seals and walruses, Otariidae, also called the eared seals that we talked about earlier. Some seals bark like sea lions and make lots of other noises, but it’s the earless seals that can really make weird sounds.

For instance, listen to this eerie sound:

[Weddell seal call]

That’s not a whale, it’s a seal. The Weddell seal lives around Antarctica and can grow quite large, up to 11 ½ feet long, or 3.5 meters. Males and females look alike although females tend to be slightly larger. It eats fish, squid, crustaceans, and pretty much anything else it can catch. It dives deeply and can stay underwater for up to 80 minutes, and while it has good eyesight, it doesn’t need to see to find food. The whiskers on its snout are incredibly sensitive and can sense tiny movements of water that indicate exactly where a fish or other animal is swimming.

Both male and female Weddell seals make various vocalizations, including some that can be described as songs, although the songs seem to be rare and researchers aren’t sure what the seals communicate with them. There’s still a lot we don’t know about these seals. Because Antarctica is so far away from most human activity, it’s extremely quiet most of the time. The seals can hear each other without having to compete with the noise from cars and boats and things like that. A seal sitting on the ice can hear other seals calling from deep in the water below the ice, and in fact the ice can amplify the sounds so well that scientists living in the Antarctic report being able to feel the sounds as well as hear them.

Here’s another clip of Weddell seals. These sounds are taken from an amazing youtube video I’ve linked to in the show notes. It’s short and has two scientists talking a little bit about their experiences hearing the seals, and then there’s about a minute of seal calls afterwards.

[Weddell seals calling]

Another seal with a loud, amazing vocalization is the bearded seal. It lives on the other side of the world from the Weddell seal, in the Arctic Ocean, and can grow almost nine feet long, or 2.7 meters. It eats fish and squid but mostly eats animals that live on the sea floor, including clams, polychaete worms, sea anemones, and many others. Like the Weddell seal and many other seals, its whiskers are incredibly sensitive. The bearded seal uses its long whiskers to feel around in the soft mud at the bottom of the ocean, looking for food.

In the spring, male bearded seals sing loudly and rhythmically, either to attract a mate or to defend a territory, or maybe both or something else—we don’t know. This is what the bearded seal sounds like underwater. I grabbed this audio off Wikipedia if you need to listen to it on repeat for a very long time. It’s an incredible sound.

[bearded seals singing]

This is what a bunch of bearded seals sound like when they’re singing together. This audio was taken on land although the seals sing underwater.

[more bearded seals singing]

These vocalizations sound so much like whale calls that I wondered if some seals can echolocate the way whales and dolphins can. There are quite a few studies into this topic, but right now most of the evidence points to no, seals don’t use echolocation to navigate underwater. Of course, studies in the future might discover something new about potential echolocation in seals. It’s only been very recently that sophisticated studies on bats have discovered that many species use different types of echolocation.

Conclusions of a two-year study published at the very end of 2020 show that a lot of Weddell seal vocalizations are ultrasonic, meaning they’re much higher than humans can hear. While the study doesn’t show any evidence of echolocation, they weren’t actually looking for it either. So you never know.

It’s possible, of course, that even if seals don’t echolocate right now, they might one day evolve the ability. Earless seals are well adapted to the water but still spend part of the time on ice or on land, especially to give birth. Many millions of years from now, the descendants of today’s seals might be completely aquatic the way whales and dolphins are. Because most scientists today think that seals can’t echolocate because their ears need to be useful on land as well in water, a fully aquatic seal that doesn’t need to hear well in the air might then develop echolocation to help it navigate underwater.

I’ll do a follow-up episode about seals and echolocation in a few million years when we can determine whether that’s happening.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 238: The Pink Fairy Armadillo and Two Adorable Friends

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This week we’ve got three adorable little animals to learn about! Thanks to Simon and Thia, Elaine, and Henry for their suggestions!

Further reading:

Turning the spotlight on the rusty-spotted cat (Wildlife SOS)

The cute and fuzzy pink fairy armadillo:

The cute and fuzzy rusty spotted cat:

The cute and fuzzy baby Arctic tern:

Adult Arctic terns:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’ve got three strange and adorable animals for you, all listener suggestions because I’m getting really behind on those. Thanks this week to Simon and Thia, Elaine, and Henry!

First, Simon and Thia suggested the pink fairy armadillo. That’s one we covered briefly in a Patreon episode back in 2018, but it deserves to be featured in the main feed because it’s so strange and cute. It lives in deserts and grasslands of central Argentina, South America, but since its range is so restricted and it spends most of its life underground and is rarely seen by humans, we don’t know much about it.

The pink fairy armadillo is the smallest armadillo species known. It only grows about 4.5 inches long, or 11.5 cm, small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. It’s protected by a leathery shell that runs from its nose along the top of its head and down its back to its bottom, and the shell is segmented like a regular armadillo’s shell except that it’s a delicate pink. The fluffy fur on the animal’s sides and tummy is white. It has a short spade-shaped tail, but the rear of its body is flattened, and it uses its flat bottom to compress dirt in the tunnels as it digs. It has a small head, short legs, and gigantic front claws. Its hind claws are big too.

It spends almost all of its life underground, digging shallow tunnels and eating small animals like worms, insect larvae, snails, and insects like ants, which it probably hunts by scent. It has a good sense of smell but its eyes are tiny and its ears don’t show at all, although it does have good hearing. It can dig extremely quickly. It loosens the soil with its huge front claws, kicks it back with its hind claws, and then does a quick reverse to tamp the new dirt heap into a firm column with its flat bottom. This keeps the floor of its burrow clear so the armadillo can breathe properly and helps keep the burrow from collapsing.

Almost the only time the pink fairy armadillo surfaces is when it reaches an obstacle it can’t dig through or around, and then its claws are so big it has trouble walking on hard surfaces. This is bad if it tries to cross a road. Most sightings of pink fairy armadillos are of roadkill animals. Sometimes it surfaces after heavy rain when its burrows are flooded.

The reason the pink fairy armadillo’s shell is pink is that blood vessels show through it. Researchers think it can regulate its temperature according to how much blood flows through the vessels beneath the shell. The shell is only attached to the body by a membrane along the spinal column and doesn’t protect it as well as other armadillo shells do, but then it’s almost always underground so the shell probably mostly protects it from rocks and roots.

The pink fairy armadillo doesn’t do well in captivity, usually dying from stress within a day or two of capture, and since it’s almost always underground it can be hard to find and study. It’s threatened by habitat loss, climate change, poaching, and the use of pesticides. It’s extremely sensitive to changes in temperature and soil.

The pink fairy armadillo has a similar-looking but slightly larger relative, the greater fairy armadillo, which can grow up to 7 inches long, or 17.5 cm. It’s also a burrowing armadillo that lives in South America, which has an additional conservation problem. It’s considered by locals to be the spirit of a dead baby, so if a local sees it they usually kill it.

Next, Elaine suggested the rusty spotted cat. It’s a tiny cat that lives in forests and grasslands in South Asia, especially in India and Sri Lanka, and although it resembles a tiny domestic cat, it’s not all that closely related to domestic cats or their wild cousins.

The rusty spotted cat is reddish-gray with darker stripes on the face and small rusty-red spots over most of its body. It’s about half the size of a domestic cat and grows up to 19 inches long at most, or 48 cm, not counting its tail, which adds another 12 inches or so to its length, or 30 cm. This is where I tried to measure my cats with the soft plastic tape measure I use for sewing, but they thought it was a toy so I never did figure out how long they are. Also, my tape measure has holes in it now from claws and teeth. The rusty spotted cat only weighs up to about 4 pounds, or 1.8 kg. Keep in mind that these numbers are for the biggest possible rusty spotted cats. Most are much smaller. They’re basically kitten-sized.

The rusty spotted cat is mostly nocturnal and eats small animals like mice and other rodents, birds, lizards, and insects. It mostly hunts on the ground and mostly only climbs trees to escape predators. It’s a fierce hunter and can be very aggressive despite its small size, so even though it’s really cute and some people want to keep it as a pet, it’s very wild and not friendly. You’re way better off adopting a small domestic cat. Besides, the rusty spotted cat is endangered in the wild due to habitat loss and hunting for its fur, so we shouldn’t be keeping it as pets.

Conservationists are working to protect the rusty spotted cat by educating people who live in the area about what the cat is. While a mother rusty spotted cat is out hunting, she leaves her kittens in a little nest in long grass. If she makes her nest in a cultivated field, like a tea plantation, sometimes a worker harvesting or caring for the plants will find the kittens. People are basically good at heart and want to help baby animals, so a lot of times the worker will take the kittens home thinking they’re abandoned. A conservation group called Wildlife SOS is working to teach people to leave the babies alone, and when they hear about someone who’s found a kitten, they send someone out to learn where the kitten was found and when, and will reunite the kittens with their mother. Wildlife SOS also helps other animals in India, including leopards and elephants. There’s a link in the show notes if you want to find out more and maybe donate to the program to help these adorable teeny-tiny wildcats.

Finally, Henry suggested the Arctic tern, a bird that lives…pretty much everywhere, in fact, not just the Arctic. It breeds along the coasts in the northern parts of the northern hemisphere, including parts of Canada, Greenland, northern Europe, and Siberia, but after its babies are grown and the short northern summer comes to an end, it takes off for the southern hemisphere and spends the winter—which is summer in the southern hemisphere—around South Africa and Australia and New Zealand, all the way down to the Antarctic. When that summer ends, it flies back north to breed again. That’s an astoundingly long migration.

The Arctic tern spends most of its life flying above the ocean, hunting for small animals like fish, krill, amphipods, and crabs. It’s not a picky eater, though. It will also eat worms, insects, and berries, although it mostly eats these land foods when it’s nesting. It’s a beautiful bird that looks a little like a seagull, but is more lightly built and slender than most gulls. It’s white and pale gray with a black cap that extends down the back of the neck, a red bill, and short red legs and webbed feet. Its tail is forked like a swallow’s tail and it has long wings, which allow it to catch even the smallest sea breeze and fly extremely fast. Its wingspan is about 2.5 feet across, or 75 cm.

The Arctic tern mates for life. Even though the male and female have traveled literally around the world separately for most of the year, they both return to the same nesting ground, find each other, and start their summer courtship. The pair will fly high together with the female chasing the male, and then they’ll fly lower where the male will catch a little fish and offer it to the female. On land, they’ll do a little courtship dance where they raise and lower their tail and wings while strutting around together. Finally the pair decides where they want to build a nest.

The nest isn’t fancy, just a little scooped out place in the ground with maybe some grass in it. Parents take turns keeping the eggs warm and defending the nest from potential predators. It’s an aggressive bird and will even attack polar bears and drive them away, even though it’s just a delicate little bird. It will dive at the predator’s face and peck with its strong, sharp bill. Once the babies hatch, both parents feed the chicks until they learn how to fly.

An Arctic tern chick is possibly the cutest bird you will ever see, at least today. It’s gray and white with short legs, and it’s super super fluffy. The coloration helps it blend in with the rocks around the nesting site.

The Arctic tern travels over 40,000 miles every single year, or more than 70,000 km, and still manages to find its way back to the same breeding colony. How does it know where it is and where it’s going? Like many birds, it can sense the earth’s magnetic field. It combines this sense with where the sun is in the sky and can pinpoint exactly where it is in the world and where it needs to go. It’s like having built-in Google Maps.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. There are links in the show notes to join our mailing list and to our merch store.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 162: Some Seals and the END OF THE WORRRRLLLDDDD

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Thanks to Kim and Pranav for their unsettling suggestions for this episode! I swear the reason I decided to do this episode this week was to celebrate getting over my cold, but then I realized I needed to address the virus everyone is talking about right now. I hope you all stay well and safe out there!

The Hawaiian monk seal OMG LOOK YOU CAN SEE ITS BELLY BUTTON, SO CUTE:

Show transcript:

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

I’m finally over my cold, so to celebrate let’s do a little bit of an unusual episode. Last year Kim suggested we do an episode about zoonotic diseases and diseases found in polar ice, and Pranav suggested an episode about what happens after humans go extinct. Those two topics seemed to go together, muahahaha.

Zoonotic diseases are diseases that humans can catch from other animals. Rabies is a good example, since it affects all mammals and is passed from one animal to another. In fact, let’s learn a little bit about rabies since naturally people are afraid of catching it but most people don’t know much about it.

Rabies is caused by a virus, specifically the lyssavirus. It acts on the body’s central nervous system, eventually infecting the brain. After that, it infects the salivary glands in order to be transmitted to other animals through a bite wound.

When an animal is infected with rabies, it may not show symptoms for a long time—sometimes years, although it’s more usually a few days to a few months. It starts as a fever and a headache, which are also symptoms of many other diseases. But within a few days of the first symptoms, the animal becomes aggressive, attempting to bite any other animal that it encounters. It has difficulty swallowing, which is why in cartoons animals with rabies are shown foaming at the mouth. This actually happens, but it doesn’t look like shaving cream and you’re not fooling anyone. The foam is just saliva that the animal can’t swallow. In the old days, rabies was called hydrophobia, which means fear of water, because in addition to not being able to swallow, the infected animal actually shows a fear of water. This all happens because the virus wants to be transmitted to other animals, and it does so through contact with infected saliva. If an infected animal could swallow its saliva and drink water, it would be much less likely to transmit rabies. So the virus hijacks the central nervous system to make the animal afraid of water and unable to swallow.

Of course, mammals can only live a few days without water, so once an animal reaches this stage it dies within a few days. Occasionally a human who contracts rabies and starts showing symptoms is rushed to the hospital and treated, but once they’ve reached the final stages of hydrophobia, it’s extremely rare that they survive even with the best medical care available.

So that’s horrifying. Some species of mammal are resistant to rabies and while they may get sick, they don’t usually die from it, including the vampire bat and the Virginia opossum. Birds can catch rabies but usually don’t show symptoms and recover without spreading it. Rabbits and hares, and many small rodents like guinea pigs and rats, almost never catch rabies and as far as researchers know, don’t pass the disease to humans.

And, of course, a vaccine was developed as long ago as 1885, with a more effective vaccine developed in 1967. The vaccine is mostly given to dogs, cats, and other pets, but humans who work with certain wild animals, like bats, are also given the vaccine. In some areas with widespread rabies among wild animals, vaccine-laced baits left for animals to find and eat have helped limit the spread of the disease.

If you are bitten by an animal, even if the animal doesn’t show symptoms of rabies, you should get the rabies vaccine and treatment as soon as possible. Rabies is most commonly spread to humans by dogs, especially stray dogs.

Feeling nervous yet?

What about diseases that spread from animals to humans that aren’t as well-known as rabies, or which appear to be new diseases? This is what has happened with the COVID-19 virus, also called the coronavirus, that has people worried at the moment. If you’re listening to this long after it came out and have no idea what COVID-19 is, at the time of release it’s March of 2020. Also, what’s the future like? Do we have flying cars yet?

The COVID-19 virus was first reported in China and researchers think it may have originated in bats, since it’s very similar to another coronavirus found in bats. There’s also some discussion that it may have originated in pangolins, or that there may be two strains of the disease. It’s still so early in the disease’s study that we don’t know for sure, but it does appear to be a zoonotic disease.

But how would a bat virus get into a human? It’s not like rabies where infected animals are trying to bite and infect others. I mean, when’s the last time a bat sneezed on you? Well, in parts of China people still catch and eat wild animals, including bats. Most of the initial cases of COVID-19 were in people who had gone to a market where bats and other animals were for sale as meat.

Wildlife trafficking is a source of many zoonotic diseases, and it doesn’t matter whether the animal is caught to be shipped live or killed and sold as meat or body parts. Not only is it really bad for endangered species, and of course for the individual animal killed, it also puts people at risk. China has put some stricter guidelines in place to limit the practice, and hopefully other countries will do the same.

COVID-19 is a virus with flu-like symptoms, spread the same way colds and flu are spread. While most people who catch it recover after a few weeks, it can be especially dangerous for people who already have other health issues. I know you’ve been told this constantly the last few weeks, but wash your hands with soap and hot water before you eat or rub your eyes or chew on that fingernail or pick your nose. Your mouth, nose, and eyes are lined with mucus membranes, which are easy for viruses to penetrate. Regular skin is too tough for the virus to get through. That’s also why you should cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze, so no one breathes in the germy droplets you just sneezed out. Hopefully it won’t be long before a vaccine is developed, but until then, if you feel sick the best thing is to stay home and take care of yourself, and not go out and potentially get other people sick.

Right, that’s enough about your run-of-the-mill zoonotic diseases because we’re all feeling icky and nervous now. Let’s move on to diseases found in polar ice!

As you probably also know, right now the earth’s overall global temperature is rising. This is causing more ice to melt at the poles, including some of what’s called the permafrost. The permafrost is a layer of soil that remains frozen and never thaws out, or at least it doesn’t thaw completely for years—sometimes thousands and thousands of years. That kind of permafrost is mostly found near the north and south poles. But now that the earth is warming, more permafrost is starting to melt. That means everything in the permafrost is thawing out too. That includes bacteria and viruses that were frozen thousands of years ago.

Some bacteria and viruses can remain dormant in ice, then thaw out and be just fine. Researchers have found active viruses in dead bodies that are thawing after sometimes hundreds of years. The only known outbreak so far has been a case of anthrax in Siberia that spread to living reindeer from a thawed corpse of a reindeer that died some 75 years ago. The infected reindeer herd then spread the disease to some people living nearby, and one twelve-year-old boy died.

But anthrax is a well-known disease that’s still around today. What makes us all uneasy about this is that there might be unknown diseases or especially dangerous strains of known diseases that could spread to animals and people. So could that happen? Are we all DOOMED?

No, we’re not all doomed, no matter what you keep hearing on the news. Even if a virus or bacterium is fine after being thawed out, it still needs to find a host quickly or it will degrade and die anyway. The reason the anthrax virus was able to infect reindeer was because they were grazing in the area where the dead reindeer thawed out. That virus got lucky, but most don’t. The areas of the world with permafrost are ones that are difficult to live in, so there aren’t as many animals around in the first place. There are even fewer people. Instead of being worried about catching a disease from permafrost, we should probably worry about other issues stemming from climate change. If you’re like me, of course, you can manage to worry about EVERYTHING at once, but you can put polar ice diseases near the bottom of the list.

Of course, there is another aspect of melting ice and disease. In 2004 some sea otters in Alaska were diagnosed with a version of distemper that was only known from eastern North America and Europe. This population of sea otters had never been anywhere but in Alaska, so how did they catch the virus? It wasn’t until researchers noticed that outbreaks of distemper corresponded with the melting of Arctic sea ice that they realized that infected animals from other parts of the country were moving west into newly ice-free territories, spreading the virus to otters that wouldn’t have been exposed otherwise. This particular strain of distemper affects otters, seals, and other marine mammals. It’s dangerous enough that conservationists are now vaccinating Hawaiian monk seals against distemper just in case it spreads to them, since only about 1,400 Hawaiian monk seals are alive to start with.

We haven’t talked about any particular kind of animal yet this episode, so let’s learn about those seals. The Hawaiian monk seal lives around the Hawaiian islands in the Pacific Ocean, but its closest relatives, the Mediterranean monk seal and the extinct Caribbean monk seal, are both native to the Atlantic Ocean.

Hawaii, of course, is an archipelago of 137 volcanic islands, most of them quite small, that span 1,500 miles, or 2,400 km. Seven of the eight biggest islands are the ones where humans live, and many of the islands are part of a protected marine wildlife reserve. The oldest island in the archipelago is probably 28 million years old, while the youngest, which is actually called Hawai’i or just the Big Island, is only about 400,000 years old and is still volcanically active. There’s another volcanic island southeast of Hawai’i that’s still growing underwater, too.

All the islands are so far away from any continent that there are only two mammals native to the area, the Hawaiian monk seal and a species of bat. The bat probably colonized the islands after being blown there by storms, but how did seals whose ancestors were native to the Atlantic reach these islands in the middle of the Pacific? The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are separated by two big continents on either side. Even humans didn’t settle on Hawaii until 1700 years ago at most.

Before around 3 or 4 million years ago, though, North America and South America were separate continents with a seaway between. It wasn’t until around 3 million years ago that the Isthmus of Panama formed as two tectonic plates collided, forming volcanic islands and pushing the land up. When the oceans were finally separated by this new land, it stopped marine animals from being able to pass back and forth, but of course it also allowed land animals to pass between North and South America, the Great American Interchange which we’ve talked about in previous episodes from time to time. The Hawaiian monk seal’s ancestors probably lived in the shallow seaway between North and South America, and around three million years ago one population was cut off from the rest. That population eventually migrated to the Hawaiian islands and evolved into the seals that live there today.

The Hawaiian monk seal mostly lives around the smaller islands, although sometimes it comes to the larger ones. It’s gray with a pale belly, and a big female can grow up to 8 feet long, or 2.4 meters, while males are a little smaller. Babies are born with black hair. Most of the time the seal is in the water, hunting fish, cephalopods, and crustaceans, but for about ten days out of the year it spends most of its time on land because that’s when it molts. It doesn’t just shed its hair, it also sheds the outer layer of its skin. This is probably itchy and uncomfortable until the new hair and skin grow back. The seal can hold its breath for up to 20 minutes and can dive deeply, but it usually hangs out in shallow water around the islands. It usually sleeps on the beach but sometimes in underwater caves where there’s trapped air to breathe. It also gives birth on the beach. I have to say, it sounds like it has a pretty sweet life, except the part where sharks eat it.

In the 19th century many species of seal, including the Hawaiian monk seal, were either driven extinct or nearly driven extinct by hunters. The hunters wanted the oily fat that seals produce to keep them warm in cold water, which burns really well. Fortunately, once electricity was invented and became widespread, no one wanted to burn stinky whale and seal oil for light. But many species of seal, just like many species of whale, are still having trouble recovering. The Hawaiian monk seal is so endangered that conservationists provide veterinary care when appropriate, especially to young seals that are injured by aggressive older males and by fishing equipment. And, of course, they also provide vaccines to protect the seals from diseases like distemper.

Let’s finish up with Pranav’s question. What will happen after humans go extinct?

That won’t happen for a very, very long time—hopefully millions of years, if we’re careful with our resources and wash our hands. But everything ends eventually. One day we’ll all be gone but the earth will continue without us until the sun burns out and becomes a red giant, destroying the inner planets of our solar system. That won’t be for another 5 billion years or so, so you don’t need to lie awake and worry about it happening any time soon. The earth is only about 4 ½ billion years old now so it’s probably not even halfway through its lifespan.

In the meantime, continental drift will continue to happen just as it always has. Australia will eventually crunch into eastern Asia. Africa will merge into Europe. The Americas might end up squished up with Europe and Africa again, or they might end up merging with Asia on the other side of the landmass. Either way, there will probably be another supercontinent for a while, until the tectonic plates start separating again in their constant, slow dance. Oceans will expand and contract, mountains will build up and wear down, and through it all, for thousands of millions of years, animals of all kinds will continue to evolve.

When I was a kid, I had a book called After Man by Dougal Dixon, which speculated about what animals would look like in the future. I remember being kind of disappointed that they mostly didn’t look too different from the animals we have today. Rabbits were going to do well, I remember that. But of course that’s just speculation, and we can’t possibly know what will evolve in the future. It is fun to wonder, though. Mammals have been going strong for a long time now, but that doesn’t mean they always will. Various extinction events will occur as they always have, wiping out the dominant species and opening up ecological niches for new species to evolve. It might be birds next instead of mammals. It might be reptiles again. It might be something else that hasn’t even evolved yet.

I know we all secretly want to go back in time to see what dinosaurs and other extinct animals really looked like. But we’re very lucky to be alive right now. Travel is reasonably safe, quick, and inexpensive compared to how it used to be in the olden days, so we can go to different parts of the world and see animals where they live. If we can’t travel far, we can go to zoos where animals are usually kept in habitats that mimic their natural habitats as much as possible. We can watch high-quality videos of animals in the wild. We can listen to podcasts that talk about how we’re all going to die one day, sorry about that. We even happen to live at the same time as the largest animal ever known to live, the blue whale, which always just blows my mind. We are so lucky that the blue whale is still around and wasn’t killed off for whale oil along with all those seals!

And, best of all, we know a lot more about how the world works these days. We know the mistakes we’ve made in the past, like killing whales and seals for oil, and we know how to make things better in the future for everyone, people and animals alike. So instead of worrying too much about what horrible things might happen, do your best to make the world a better place every day and wash your hands with soap and warm water. Whenever you do start to worry, just think about a blue whale swimming around in the ocean happily eating krill, or a Hawaiian monk seal lounging on a sunny Hawaiian beach. I think I need a vacation.

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 117: The Linsang and the Walrus

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Thanks to Sam and Damian this week for their great suggestions! This week we’re going to learn about the Asiatic linsang (both banded and spotted linsangs) and the walrus!

The banded linsang looks like a realllly stretched-out cat:

The walrus is not so stretched out:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about two mammals that are not related and have nothing to do with each other, but they’re both really interesting. Thanks to Sam and Damian for your suggestions!

First, Sam suggested the banded linsang, describing it “as if someone took a particularly pointy cat and just stretched it reaaaaaaaallly far while also squishing it down”

The banded linsang does look a lot like a cat with a very long ringed tail, but what is it really? Before we answer that, let’s find out a little more about it.

The banded linsang is about the size of a slender cat, but with shorter legs and a much longer body, just as Sam described. It lives in many parts of southeastern Asia and prefers forests, where it hunts for small animals like rodents, lizards and other reptiles, small birds, and insects. It’s nocturnal and secretive, which means we don’t know a whole lot about it, but we do know that it spends a lot of its time in trees. It has a face that somewhat resembles a weasel’s or cat’s, but with a longer muzzle. Its ears are small, its eyes are large, and it has small, neat paws with retractable claws like a cat. It’s tan or cream-colored with a darker face, and has a pattern of large black or dark brown spots that make rows down its back and sides, with smaller spots on its legs. Its catlike tail is as long as its body and its neck is really long too. It sort of looks like a weasel mixed with a cat.

The banded linsang is closely related to the spotted linsang, which looks very similar but instead of big blotchy spots, it usually has smaller spots all over its body. The spotted linsang lives farther north than the banded linsang but still in southeastern Asia.

Together, both the spotted and banded linsangs are called Asiatic linsangs. There are two species of linsang that live in Africa, but they’re actually not closely related to the Asiatic linsangs.

Until genetic studies were conducted a few years ago, researchers thought both African and Asiatic linsangs were related to genets. That wasn’t a bad guess since genets look a lot like linsangs, slender, spotted catlike animals with long ringed tails, and they even have claws that are partly retractable. But DNA studies show that while the genet and the African linsangs are fairly closely related, the Asiatic linsangs are more closely related to the cat family.

Because we don’t know much about the Asiatic linsangs, that’s just about all I’ve got for you. So let’s move on to Damian’s suggestion, the walrus!

We do know a lot about the walrus, and it’s an amazing animal. It lives in the Arctic Circle in shallow water just off the coast and spends most of its time in the water or sitting on ice floes like it doesn’t even notice its skin is touching ice.

The walrus is a pinniped, which means it’s related to seals and sea lions, but it’s the only member of its own family currently alive today. There are two subspecies, one that lives on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, one that lives on the Pacific side of the Arctic.

The walrus is enormous. A big male can grow up to about 16 feet long, or almost 5 meters, and some unusually large males are estimated to weigh as much as 5,000 lbs, or 2,300 kg. That’s 2 ½ tons, or almost twice as much as my car weighs. Females are smaller, typically only 12 feet long, or 3.6 meters, and only weigh up to about 1,800 pounds, or 800 kg.

The walrus’s skin is thick and wrinkly—really thick. Like, almost four inches thick in places, or ten cm. Underneath the skin, the walrus has a thick layer of blubber just like whales do, which keeps it warm in cold water. Its skin looks bare of fur, but it does have some thin hair that isn’t very noticeable, like the hairs on your arm. It does have bristly whiskers that help it find food underwater. The bristles are very sensitive, so that the walrus can find clams and other mollusks even if it can’t see them.

The walrus eats a lot of things, including crabs, sea cucumbers, and shrimp, but it especially likes clams. Its mouth is specially adapted to eat clams, which is does by clamping its mouth over the clam and sucking in so hard that it actually sucks the clam’s body right out of its shell, no matter how hard the clam tries to keep its shell closed.

The walrus is so big that the only animals that eat it are polar bears and orcas, and they don’t eat it very often. Polar bears will sometimes charge at a bunch of walruses on a beach, startling them into rushing toward the ocean. The polar bear isn’t actually trying to catch one of the walruses, it’s just trying to get them to trample a smaller or already injured walrus and leave it behind. Then the bear can kill and eat it. But for the most part, a full-grown walrus is a match for a polar bear. Both male and female walruses have tusks that can grow over three feet long, or one meter, with those of the male being slightly thicker and longer than the females’.

Those tusks were a big part of why walruses are endangered these days. The tusks are ivory, the same material that elephant tusks are made of, and for some reason humans really like ivory. In the 18th and 19th centuries, so many walruses were killed for their tusks and the fatty oil in their bodies that they almost went extinct. Fortunately, the hunting of walruses is now banned except for native populations, who only kill small numbers of walruses using traditional hunting methods.

A walrus uses its tusks for more than just defending itself against polar bears and orcas. It drags them through the sediment at the bottom of the ocean to stir up any small animals that may be hiding there. It uses them like ice picks to help haul itself out of the water onto land or just move around on land, and it even props the tusks on a piece of ice to help keep its head above water while it sleeps. It also has an air sac in its throat that it can inflate to help its head stay out of water, like a built-in life jacket. It even uses its tusks to break holes through ice.

The walrus has flippers instead of arms and legs, which means it can swim quite well but is awkward on land. It dives to find its food and can stay underwater for half an hour at a time, but it isn’t a deep diver. Its hind flippers look like a tail at first glance, but the walrus actually only has a short little nub of a tail. What looks like a tail in the water are its hind flippers, which are modified feet and still have five claws. When the walrus gets out of the water, it rotates its hind flippers around so it can walk on all fours.

Researchers once believed that an ancient walrus that went extinct 13 million years ago was a so-called killer walrus, a carnivore that preyed on small whales and seals. We don’t know much about Pelagiarctos because all we have are some jaw bones and not a full skeleton, but the teeth in those jaws resemble carnivore teeth. But according to a study published in 2016, researchers examined the teeth and compared them to those of modern seals and sea lions, and discovered that they weren’t nearly as strong as they look. They certainly weren’t strong enough to bite through bones without cracking, so researchers now think that Pelagiarctos probably ate small animals like fish and squid.

The common ancestor of the walrus and other pinnipeds lived on land but spent a lot of time in the water, and probably looked a lot like an otter. It lived around 20 million years ago but may have still been around as recently as five million years ago. It lived in the Arctic, but back then the climate in the Arctic was more temperate than it is today. It had webbed feet, grew about three and a half feet long, or 110 cm, and had a long tail and short legs.

Fossils of a more recent ancestor of the walrus have been found in Japan, dating to around 10 million years ago. It probably looked a lot like the modern walrus with two big exceptions. It was about half the size of the walrus and it didn’t have tusks, just regular sharp teeth like seals have.

We’re still learning about the ancestors of pinnipeds, with a number of walrus ancestor fossils discovered in the last decade or so. Researchers think about ten million years ago, the ancestors of walruses started to diversify into many different species. At the time, ocean levels were lower than they are today. When the sea levels rose, the various species of walrus became separated from each other by deep water. Some of the species went extinct, but one survived and evolved into the modern walrus. Thank goodness we didn’t kill them all off for their tusks!

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