Category Archives: Asia

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!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 110: Three mystery animals from India

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Thanks to Pranav for this week’s suggestion! We’re going to look at three mystery animals from India, ones you may not have heard of.

A photograph reportedly of a kallana pygmy elephant, although scale is hard to tell:

A pink-headed duck, deceased:

Show transcript:

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

It’s time for a mystery animals episode, and this one was a suggestion from Pranav, who suggested mystery animals from India. Pranav also gave me lots of other excellent suggestions that I’ll hopefully get to pretty soon.

When I got the suggestion, I realized the only mystery animal from India I really knew about was one we talked about in episode 55, the buru. I had no idea what else might be hiding in the forests and mountains of India. Apologies in advance for undoubtedly mangling names and places from India. I tried to look up pronunciations to at least make an effort to get them right.

India is in south Asia, and it’s a huge country. The area is often referred to as the Indian subcontinent because it mostly sits on its own tectonic plate. Around 100 million years ago it was connected with Madagascar, then split off around 75 million years ago and for many millions of years it was a giant island. But it moved northward slowly—and we’re talking only around 8 inches a year, or 20 cm, which is actually pretty fast for a tectonic plate—and slowly crashed into Eurasia, shoving beneath the Eurasian plate and causing it to crumple upwards, creating the Himalayas.

About half of India’s landmass projects southward into the Pacific Ocean like someone dipping their foot into a bath to see if it’s too hot. As a result, the country has a lot of coastland. So there are amazingly high mountains to the north, tropical coasts to the south, and everything from desert to tropical rainforest in between. It even has some volcanic islands off its coast. It pretty much has everything you could want in a country, and that means it has an amazing variety of animal life too.

Many of India’s animals are ones everyone is familiar with from zoos and storybooks: elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, cobras, pangolins, and lots lots lots more. But it also has its share of mystery animals. We’ll look at three of those mystery animals today. I think you’re going to like all three of them.

Let’s start with the mande burung. It’s supposed to be a giant ape-like animal as much as 8 or 10 feet tall, or up to 3 meters, with black hair. It lives in the remote forests of northeast India—specifically, in Meghalaya.

The mande burung has long been a creature of folklore in the area, until November 1995 when someone saw one. But I can’t find any information at all about what that sighting entailed. Interest in the mande burung has increased steadily since then, with cryptozoologists from India and other parts of the world mounting expeditions to look for it. They report finding footprints up to 15 inches long, or 38 cm, hair from unidentified animals, and nests made from leaves and grass. But there are no photographs of the animals, no mande burung feces, no dead bodies, and very few sightings, all of them within the last few decades and some of them decidedly questionable.

It’s certainly possible that there’s a mystery animal living in the area. Meghalaya is heavily forested outside of the cities and farmland. Some areas of forest are considered sacred, so they’ve never been logged, no one’s ever lived there, and no one hunts there. As a result, these sacred forests contain some of the richest habitats in all of Asia, containing plants and animals that live nowhere else. Meghalaya also has wildlife sanctuaries. So it’s pretty much guaranteed that there are animals living in Meghalaya that are unknown to science.

But while Meghalaya is primarily an agricultural region, tourism is becoming more and more important. A 2007 press release even talks about how the mande burung legend will bring more tourists to the area, and that a local group had started offering tours for people looking for the mande burung. That doesn’t mean the sightings aren’t genuine—I think most of them are—but as I’ve said many times, people see what they expect to see. The more people talk about the mande burung, the more likely people will think of it when they see a large animal they can’t identify. And there are lots of big animals living in the forests of Meghalaya, including an endangered species of gibbon, four species of macaque, and three species of bears. Any of these might resemble a bigfoot type of creature if seen in low light or poor conditions.

In 2001, a hair found in what’s called a “cedar tree root den” was DNA tested. Bear and human DNA was ruled out, and the DNA results didn’t match any known animals. But a follow-up test in 2008 gave a result that was just as surprising to scientists: the hair belonged to a Himalayan goral, a bovid that wasn’t known to live in the area until the DNA results came in. The goral is a small antelope-like animal with short horns that lives in the southern slopes of the Himayalas. It’s dark gray or gray-brown in color with a darker eel stripe along the spine. Generally, websites that like to talk about Bigfoots mention the first DNA test but don’t mention the follow-up, but I think the discovery of Himalayan goral hairs in Meghalaya is exciting. Who knows what else might be hiding in the forests too?

For instance, maybe a pygmy elephant! Well, okay, reports of a suspected dwarf elephant species called the kallana come from southern India, not northeastern. But it’s definitely a mystery animal.

The Indian elephant is a subspecies of Asian elephant that lives throughout much of mainland Asia. It’s smaller than the African elephant but still pretty big, with males standing as much as 11.3 feet at the shoulder, or 3.4 meters, although most are much smaller than this. Females are smaller than males and have smaller tusks, or sometimes no tusks. It was once common throughout India but is now endangered due to habitat loss and poaching. Tame elephants help with farming and with carrying heavy items and human riders across uneven terrain, but the elephants aren’t actually domesticated.

The kallana elephant reportedly only grows to around five feet high, or 1.5 meters, and while it looks like an ordinary Indian elephant except for its size, it doesn’t mix with Indian elephants and even appears to avoid them. It lives in rocky hills in and around the Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary in southern Kerala. It’s shy and can move much faster than regular elephants, and it doesn’t appear to have trouble with steep slopes the way elephants usually do.

In 2005, a wildlife photographer named Sali Palode got pictures of two kallana elephants, one alive, one a dead one they found by a lake. He took more photos in 2010, and in 2013 he got brief video footage. But there are no photos of a herd of kallana elephants, just solitary animals. Without being able to examine a kallana elephant in person, researchers don’t know if the elephant photographed is a new species or subspecies, or just an Indian elephant with a genetic anomaly similar to dwarfism in humans. The photos might even just be of young elephants that haven’t grown to their full size yet.

Until someone gets definitive footage of a herd of Kallana elephants, an individual is captured and studied, or someone takes samples of the elephant dung found throughout the hills and sends it for DNA testing, there’s no way of knowing if the small elephants Sali Palode has photographed and the local tribespeople report seeing are something special. Not that regular elephants aren’t special enough already, but if there is a population of anomalous elephants in the area, it’s important to learn about them so they can be further protected.

Our final mystery animal of India is the pink-headed duck. It lives in wetlands in parts of eastern India and a few nearby countries, and it gets its name because the male has a pink head and neck. It builds its nests in dense elephant grass and its eggs are almost completely round. It’s shy and prefers remote, isolated areas with deep ponds or lakes and thick grass.

So why are we talking about the pink-headed duck in a mystery animals episode? Well, unfortunately, there hasn’t been a single confirmed sighting of the duck since 1949. Some researchers push this back ever farther to 1935. The main reason it hasn’t been classified as extinct is that the occasional report of one occasionally trickles in.

The difficulty in knowing whether there really are pink-headed ducks still alive out there is that the areas where they are known to have lived are really hard to get to. I mean, unless you’re a duck. Then they’re great. The decline of the species started in the 19th century when British big game hunters would come through and basically just shoot everything that moved. It was already considered rare by the turn of the 20th century, which made hunters even more eager to shoot it so they’d have a rare trophy. Habitat loss and trophy hunting drove it nearly to extinction even if it’s not actually already extinct.

Recent expeditions by conservationists and birders hoping to find some pink-headed ducks haven’t found any definitive proof that any are still alive. A 2017 expedition to Myanmar didn’t find any of the ducks, but the team did interview locals who said they’d seen the ducks as recently as 2010.

We don’t know a whole lot about the pink-headed duck. Researchers think it was a diving duck, but it may have been a dabbler. A dabbling duck tips its body forward, head underwater and tail sticking up, to forage in shallow water, often on plants. A diving duck dives for its food, usually small animals of various kinds. We know the pink-headed duck ate snails and plants, but it probably ate other things too that we don’t know about.

A study of a taxidermied pink-headed duck’s feathers in 2016 determined that the pink color came from carotenoids, a pigment that also gives the flamingo its pink color. The only other duck with feathers pigmented by carotenoids is the pink-eared duck of Australia, which is only distantly related to the pink-headed duck. It has a tiny pink spot on each side of its head.

Conservationists and birdwatchers hold out hope that the pink-headed duck is still alive, hiding its round eggs in clumps of elephant grass far away from humans. Some researchers have even suggested it might be nocturnal, which would explain why it’s always been hard to find. It was never much of a duck for moving around, preferring to stay put instead of flying off to other areas. Hopefully someone will discover a healthy population one day, possibly somewhere no one’s even looked yet, and we can protect it and learn about it before it’s too late. Once a duck is gone, a duck is gone forever.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 101: Flying Without Wings

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What better way to start out the new year than by learning about some animals that fly (or glide) without wings! Thanks to Llewelly for suggesting the colugo!

Colugo looking startled:

A colugo, flying, which startles everyone else:

Flying fish! ZOOM!

A flying gurnard, not flying:

Flying squid! ZOOM!

Flying squid close-up, mid-zoom:

Show transcript:

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

It’s the first week of a new year, so let’s start it off right and learn about some animals that fly without wings.

The first of our non-winged flying animals is a suggestion from Llewelly, who sent me some links about it and we both freaked out a little because it’s such an awesome animal. It’s called the colugo, and technically it doesn’t fly, it glides. It looks kind of like a big squirrel and kind of like a small lemur, and in fact it’s also sometimes called a flying lemur. But it’s not closely related to squirrels or lemurs. It’s actually not related closely to anything alive today.

Before we learn about the colugo specifically, let me explain a little bit about gliding animals. Gliding animals have a flap of skin called a gliding membrane or patagium. In the case of gliding mammals, like the flying squirrel or the colugo, the patagium connects each foreleg with the hindleg on that side. When the animal wants to glide, it stretches its legs out, which also stretches out the patagium. For a long time scientists assumed that the patagium was just skin and didn’t do anything except increase the animal’s surface area and act as a sort of parachute. But it turns out that the patagium contains tiny muscles like those recently discovered in the membranes of bat wings. And the skin between the fingers of the bat’s forelimbs, which creates the wings, are actually considered patagia. In fact, any gliding membrane, even if it’s part of a real wing, is considered a patagium, so birds actually have them too.

The colugo has a patagium between its legs like other gliding mammals, but it also has a patagium between its hind legs and its tail, and even its fingers and toes are connected with small patagia. It’s the most well-adapted mammal known for gliding, so well-adapted that it can glide incredible distances. One was measured as having glided almost 500 feet in one jump, or 150 meters. This is almost the length of two football fields.

The colugo lives in South Asia and is endangered mainly due to habitat loss. It grows to about 16 inches long, or 40 cm, with a small head, big eyes, and little round ears. It’s gray with some mottled white and black markings that help hide it against tree trunks, and its legs are long and slender. It eats plants. We don’t know a whole lot about the colugo, because it’s shy and lives in the treetops of tropical forests, but what we do know is really weird.

For instance, its babies. If you listened to episode 45 about monotremes, where we also discuss the differences between marsupial and placental mammals, you may remember that placental mammal babies are born mostly developed while marsupial mammal babies are born very early and finish developing outside of the mother, either in a pouch or just clinging to the mother’s fur. Well, the colugo is a placental mammal, but its babies are born extremely early, more like a marsupial. They finish developing outside of the mother, which takes six months or so, and the mother colugo keeps her tail curved up most of the time so that her patagium is wrapped around her babies like a pouch.

The colugo has weird teeth, too. The front teeth, or incisors, are shaped like tiny combs. This is similar to the incisors of lemurs, which look like tiny combs because the lemur uses them as tiny combs to groom its fur. But unlike any other mammal known, some of the colugo’s upper incisors have two roots instead of just one. Why? No one knows.

So what is the colugo related to? For a long time, no one was sure. Researchers even thought it might be a close relation of bats. These days, the two species of colugo make up their own order, Dermoptera. Order is the classification right below mammal so that’s kind of a big deal. While they’re not closely related to anything alive today, researchers place them in the same general group of animals that gave rise to the primates. But they’re about as closely related to rabbits as they are to monkeys.

In 2017 a team of scientists surveying bats in Malaysia picked up a recording of some unusual ultrasonic calls. They weren’t bat calls. Eventually they determined the calls came from colugos in the trees around the microphones, although some researchers have doubts and think the calls may actually be from other animals known to make ultrasonic sounds, like the tarsier. The colugo has been recorded making sounds audible to humans in other studies. There’s no evidence that the colugo uses echolocation like bats do.

Mammals took to gliding very early on. A few years ago, two fossils discovered in China and dated to about 160 million years ago—you know, 100 million years before the dinosaurs died out—show two different species of mammal that were able to glide. We know they could glide because the fossils are so well preserved that researchers can see the patagium between the front and hind legs of both. They’re the earliest known gliding mammals. Both the fossils belonged to a branch of mammals that have completely died out, so they’re not related to the colugo or anything else.

So what other animals fly, or glide, without real wings? You’ve heard of flying fish, of course. Do they really jump out of the water and glide on their fins? They do, and it’s a lot more awesome even than it sounds.

There isn’t just one species of flying fish but over 60, all of them with elongated pectoral fins that act like an airplane’s wings when they jump out of the water. Some species have two pairs of elongated fins. Back in the early 20th century, engineers studied flying fish fins to help design better airplane wings. But the flying fish has a lot of other adaptations that make it good at gliding, including a stiffened body and robust spine, and strong muscles that allow it to jump out of the water at high speeds.

So how well does the flying fish glide? This is where it gets crazy amazing. The longest recorded flight of a flying fish was 1,300 feet, or 400 meters. That’s way better than the colugo. It’s been recorded as reaching 20 feet, or 6 meters, above the water’s surface and flying at speeds of about 45 mph, or 70 km/h. And as if this wasn’t amazing enough, when the fish starts to descend, it can choose to slide back into the water or it can put its tail down and push off against the surface of the water to get back in the air for another glide. It can even change directions when it pushes back off. It will sometimes flap its fins like wings, but so far researchers haven’t found any evidence that this helps it fly. It may just flap its fins to stabilize its flight.

Most flying fish species are fairly small, although the biggest is a respectable 1 1/2 feet long, or about half a meter. Most flying fish live in the ocean, usually in warmer waters, and they’re all extremely slender and streamlined. They mostly eat plankton.

Sometimes flying fish land in boats or even on the decks of small ships. It’s considered a delicacy, with a taste similar to that of a sardine, and many species have started to decline as a result of overfishing.

Gliding flight has evolved in fish more than once in species that aren’t related, so there are more flying fish than there are flying fish, if you see what I mean. No, you don’t. That only made sense to me. The earliest known flying fish is a fossil dated some 240 million  years old, totally unrelated to the flying fish of today. And there are species alive today not related to the various flying fish species that can glide, if not as well as actual flying fish.

One fish that may or may not glide is called the flying gurnard. It’s a bulky fish that grows more than a foot and a half long, or 50 cm, and can weigh four lbs, or 1.8 kg. It lives in the warmer parts of the Atlantic Ocean in shallow coastal areas, where it mostly stays on the seafloor and eats crustaceans, bivalves, and other small invertebrates. It will also eat small fish if it can catch them. It has a face sort of like a frog’s and can be reddish, brown, or greenish, with spots and patches of other colors. But most importantly, its pectoral fins are extremely large, looking more like fan-like wings than fins. The so-called wings are shimmery, semi-transparent, and lined with bright blue. They sort of look like butterfly wings and can be more than 8 inches long, or 20 cm. The fins actually have two parts, a smaller section in front that looks more like an ordinary fin, and the larger wing-like section behind.

The flying gurnard’s popular name refers to its wing-like fins, which it uses to scare potential predators and to walk around on the sea floor with and poke into the sand to find food. But there are stories dating back thousands of years that not only can the flying gurnard jump out of the water to fly, its flight resembles a swallow’s swooping flight. But it’s much too heavy to fly, so those stories are only tall tales. OR ARE THEY? At least one ichthyologist, a Dr. Humphrey Greenwood, reports having seen a flying gurnard leap out of the water, spread its fins, and glide in a controlled manner for a short distance.

The last animal that flies, or glides, without wings is one I bet you would never guess. It’s the flying squid. And yes, I thought it was a made-up animal when I first heard about it. Squid can’t fly! But there one squid that does regularly leap out of the water and glide for short distances.

The Japanese flying squid lives near the ocean’s surface in schools, where it eats fish and crustaceans. Despite its name, it doesn’t just live around Japan but throughout much of the Pacific Ocean. It doesn’t live very long, less than a year, but has a complicated migratory life. Not as complicated as an eel, but pretty complicated. A squid hatches only five days or so after its mother lays the eggs. The baby squid, called a paralarva, eats plankton and doesn’t yet have arms or tentacles, since they’re fused together at first. The fused tentacles split once the baby has grown to about half an inch long, or some 10 mm, which gives you an idea of how tiny it is when it first hatches.

As the baby squid grows, it begins its migration with the other baby squids that hatched at the same time. The migration follows the ocean surface currents and different subspecies have different migration patterns. Males mature first and transfer their packets of sperm, called spermatophores, to the females for later. Then the males die and the females continue their migration back to the same area where they were hatched. They lay a few hundred to a few thousand tiny eggs and then die, leaving the eggs to hatch only a few days later and start the whole process again.

I can hear you thinking, Why yes, Kate, this is all very interesting BUT YOU HAVE NOT TOLD US HOW SQUIDS FLY. Okay, I’ll do that now.

The Japanese flying squid has a mantle, or main part of the body and head, with a pair of fins at the end that stick out quite a bit. Its eight legs and two feeding tentacles are relatively short, shorter than its mantle length of about a foot and a half long in a big female, or 50 cm. Males are smaller. Like all squids and octopuses, the flying squid moves by shooting water out of its siphon, making it jet-propelled. It travels mantle first with the legs trailing behind.

Well, the Japanese flying squid jumps out of the water and shoots through the air this way, with the fins on its mantle helping to stabilize the squid when it’s in the air and keep it flying straight. It also holds its legs and tentacles out so that the membrane between the legs is stretched taut, making a flat surface that it can angle to catch the most air. It can “fly” some 150 feet, or 50 meters, per jump, traveling at about 25 mph, or 11 meters per second. Researchers used to think it only jumped out of the water to avoid predators, but more recent studies show that it’s also a more efficient way to travel long distances than just staying in the water. Oh, and no one knew for sure that the Japanese flying squid could actually fly until about 15 years ago when researchers caught video of it happening.

Like other squids, the Japanese flying squid can change colors and release a cloud of ink to confuse predators. It also has three hearts.

There are other gliding animals and they’re all weird and interesting, so I’ll probably revisit this topic again in the future. In the meantime, if you want to learn about flying snakes, you can go back and listen to episode 56 about strange snakes. Since that’s currently my 8th most popular episode, you may have listened to it already. Thanks.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 100: The Centipede of Episodes!

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It’s our 100th episode! Thanks to my fellow animal podcasters who sent 100th episode congratulations! Thanks also to Simon and Julia, who suggested a couple of animals I used in this episode.

An Amazonian giant centipede eating a mouse oh dear god no:

The kouprey:

The Karthala scops owl:

A sea mouse. It sounds cuter than it is. Why are you touching it? Stop touching it:

A sea mouse in the water where it belongs:

Mother and baby mountain goats. Much cuter than a sea mouse:

A hairy octopus:

Further reading:

Silas Claiborne Turnbo’s giant centipede account collection

Show transcript:

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

This is our 100th episode! I’ll be playing clips from some of my favorite animal podcasts throughout the show, and I highly recommend all of them if you don’t already listen!

For our big 100 show, I’ve decided to cover several animals, some mysterious, some not so mysterious, and all weird. But we’ll start with one that just seems to fit with the 100th episode, the centipede—because centipedes are supposed to have 100 legs.

So do they have 100 legs? They don’t, actually. Different species of centipede have different numbers of legs, from only 30 to something like 300. Centipedes have been around for some 430 million years and there are thousands of species alive today.

A centipede has a flattened head with a pair of long mandibles and antennae. The body is also flattened and made up of segments, a different number of segments depending on the centipede’s species, but at least 15. Each segment has a pair of legs except for the last two segments, which have no legs. The first segment’s legs project forward and end in sharp claws with venom glands. These legs are called forcipules, and they actually look like pincers. No other animal has forcipules, only centipedes. The centipede uses its forcipules to capture and hold prey. The last pair of legs points backwards and sometimes look like tail stingers, but they’re just modified legs that act as sensory antennae. Each pair of legs is a little longer than the pair in front of it, which helps keep the legs from bumping into each other when the centipede walks.

Like other arthropods, the centipede has to molt its exoskeleton to grow larger. When it does, some species grow more segments and legs. Others hatch with all the segments and legs they’ll ever have.

The centipede lives throughout the world, even in the Arctic and in deserts, which is odd because the centipede’s exoskeleton doesn’t have the wax-like coating that other insects and arachnids have. As a result, it needs a moist environment so it won’t lose too much moisture from its body and die. It likes rotten wood, leaf litter, soil, especially soil under stones, and basements. Some centipedes have no eyes at all, many have eyes that can only sense light and dark, and some have relatively sophisticated compound eyes. Most centipedes are nocturnal.

Many centipedes are venomous and their bites can cause allergic reactions in people who also react to bee stings. Usually, though, a centipede bite is painful but not dangerous. Small centipedes can’t bite hard enough to break the skin. I’m using bite in a metaphorical way, of course, since scorpions “bite” using their forcipules, which as you’ll remember are actually modified legs.

The largest centipedes alive today belong to the genus Scolopendra. This genus includes the Amazonian giant centipede, which can grow over a foot long, or 30 cm. It’s reddish or black with yellow bands on the legs, and lives in parts of South America and the Caribbean. It eats insects, spiders, including tarantulas, frogs and other amphibians, small snakes, birds, mice and other small mammals, and lizards. It’s even been known to catch bats in midair by hanging down from cave ceilings and grabbing the bat as it flies by. Because it’s so big, its venom can be dangerous to children. A four-year-old in Venezuela died in 2014 after being bitten by one, but this is unusual, and bites generally only lead to a few days of pain, fever, and swelling.

You’ll often hear that the Amazonian giant centipede is the longest in the world, but this isn’t actually the case. Its close relation, the Galapagos centipede, is substantially longer. The Galapagos Islands have EVERYTHING. The Galapagos centipede can grow 17 inches long, or 43 cm, and is black with red legs.

Another member of Scolopendra is the waterfall centipede, which grows a mere 8 inches long, or 20 cm, but which is amphibious. The waterfall centipede was only discovered in 2000, when entomologist George Beccaloni was on his honeymoon in Thailand. Naturally he was poking around looking for bugs, and I trust his spouse was aware that that’s what he would do on his honeymoon, when he spotted a dark greenish-black centipede with long legs. It ran into the water and hid under a rock, which he knew was extremely odd behavior for a centipede. They need moisture but they avoid entering water. Beccaloni noted that the centipede was able to swim in an eel-like manner. He captured it and later determined it was a new species. Only four specimens have been found so far in various parts of South Asia. Beccaloni hypothesizes that it eats insects and other small animals found in the water.

There are stories of huge centipedes found in the depths of jungles throughout the world, centipedes longer than a grown man is tall. These are most likely tall tales, since centipedes breathe through tiny notches in their exoskeleton like other arthropods and don’t have proper lungs. As we learned in the spiders episode a few months ago, arthropods just can’t get too big or they can’t get enough oxygen to live. But some of the stories of huge unknown centipedes have an unsettling ring of truth.

There are stories from the Ozark Mountains in North America about centipedes that grow as long as 18 inches, or almost 46 cm. Historian Silas Claiborne Turnbo collected accounts of giant centipede encounters in the 19th century, which are available online. I’ll put a link in the show notes.

All the accounts come across as truthful and not exaggerated at all. I think it’s worth it to read the last few paragraphs of the centipedes chapter of Turnbo’s manuscript verbatim, because they’re really interesting and I kept finding garbled accounts of the stories in various places online. Whenever possible, go to the primary source.

“R. M. Jones, of near Protem, Mo., tells of finding a centipede once imprisoned in a hollow tree. Mr. Jones said that after his father, John Jones, settled on the flat of land on the east side of Big Buck Creek in the southeast part of Taney County, his father told him one day in the autumn of 1861 to split some rails to build a hog pen. Going out across the Pond Hollow onto the flat of land he felled a post oak tree one and one-half feet in diameter. There was a small cavity at the butt of the tree. After chopping off one rail cut he found that the hollow extended only four or five feet into the rail cut, and was perfectly sound above it. After splitting the log open he was astonished at finding a centipede eight inches in length, coiled in a knot in the upper part of the cavity. At first there appeared to be no life about it. ‘I took two sticks,’ said he, ‘and unrolled it and found that it was alive. It was wrapped around numerous young centipedes which were massed together in the shape of a little ball. The old centipede was almost white in color. After a thorough examination of the stump and the ground around it, I found no place where the centipede could have crawled in. Neither, in the log, was there any place where it could enter. How it got there I am not able to explain and how long it had been an inhabitant there is another mystery to me.’

“William Patton, who settled on Clear Creek in Marion County, Ark., in 1854 and became totally blind and is dead now, says that one day while his eyesight was good he was in the woods on foot stock hunting. When about 1 ½ miles west of where the village of Powell now is, he noticed something a short distance from him crawl into a hollow tree at the ground. ‘On approaching the tree to identify the object,’ remarked Mr. Patton, ‘I saw a monster centipede lying just on the inside of the hollow which was the object I had just observed crawl into the tree. I placed the muzzle of my rifle near the opening and shot it nearly in twain, and taking a long stick I pulled it out of the hollow and finished killing it with stones. I had no way of measuring it accurately, but a close estimation proved that it was not less than 14 inches long and over an inch wide.’

“The biggest centipede found in the Ozarks that I have a record of was captured alive by Bent Music on Jimmies Creek in Marion County in 1860. Henry Onstott an uncle of the writer and Harvey Laughlin who was a cousin of mine kept a drugstore in Yellville and collected rare specimens of lizards, serpents, spiders, horned frogs and centipedes and kept them in a large glass jar which sat on their counter. The jar was full of alcohol, and the collection was put in the jar for preservation as they were brought in. Amongst the collection was the monster centipede mentioned above. It was of such unusual size that it made on almost shudder to look at it. Brice Milum, who was a merchant at Yellville when Mr. Music brought the centipede to town, says that he assisted in the measuring of it, before it was put in the alcohol and its length was found to be 18 inches. It attracted a great deal of attention and was the largest centipede the writer ever saw. The jar with its contents was either destroyed or carried off during the heat of the war. Henry Onstott died in Yellville and is buried in the old cemetery one half a mile west of town.”

There are large centipedes around the Ozarks, including the red-headed centipede that can grow over eight inches long, or 20 cm. A hiker was bitten by a six-inch red-headed centipede a few years ago in Southwestern Missouri and had to be treated at a hospital. The red-headed centipede mostly stays underground during the day, although it will come out on cloudy days. It has especially potent venom and lives in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. And, interestingly, females guard their babies carefully for a few days after they hatch. Since the red-headed centipede is a member of the genus Scolopendra, the ones that grow so long, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if individuals sometimes grow much longer than eight inches.

One story of a giant centipede called the upah turned out to have a much different solution. Naturalist Jeremy Holden was visiting a village in western Sumatra in the early 2000s when he heard stories of the upah. It was supposed to be a green centipede that grew up to about a foot long, or 30 cm, and had a painful bite. It was also supposed to make an eerie yowling sound like a cat. Holden discounted this as ridiculous, since no centipedes are known to make vocalizations of any kind, until he actually heard one. He was in the forest with a guide, who insisted that this was the upah. The sound came from high up in the treetops so Holden couldn’t see what was making it. But on a later trip to Sumatra with a birdwatcher friend, Holden heard the same sound, but this time the friend knew exactly what was making it. It wasn’t a centipede at all but a small bird called the Malaysian honeyguide. The honeyguide has a distinctive catlike call followed by a rattling sound, but is extremely hard to spot even for seasoned birdwatchers with powerful binoculars. This is what a Malaysian honeyguide sounds like, if you’re curious:

[honeyguide call]

The worst kind of centipede is the house centipedes. I hate those things. I’d rather have a pet spider that lives in my hair than touch a house centipede. House centipedes are the really fast ones that have really long legs that sort of make them look like evil feathers running around on the walls.

Next, let’s take a look at the kouprey, a bovine that is rare and possibly extinct. Thanks to Simon who suggested this ages ago, after the mystery cattle episode, or at least he mentioned it to me while we were talking on Twitter.

The kouprey is a wild ox from Southeast Asia and may be closely related to the aurochs. It’s big and can stand over six feet tall at the shoulder, or almost two meters. It has long legs, a slightly humped back, and a long tail. Males have horns that look like typical cow horns, but females have horns that spiral upward like antelope horns. Cows and calves are gray with darker bellies and legs, while grown bulls are dark brown with white stockings. It lives in small bands led by a female and eats grass and other plants. Males are usually solitary or may band together in bachelor groups. It likes open forest and low, forested hills. Sometimes it grazes with herds of buffalo and other types of wild ox.

The kouprey wasn’t known to science until 1937, when a bull was sent to a zoo in Paris from Cambodia. It was already rare then. A 2006 study that showed the kouprey was actually a hybrid of a domestic cow and another species of wild ox, the banteng, was later rescinded by the researchers as inaccurate. Genetic studies have since proven that the hybrid hypothesis was indeed wrong.

Unfortunately, if the kouprey still exists, there are almost none left. In the late 1960s only about 100 were estimated to still remain. While it’s protected, it’s poached for meat and horns, and is vulnerable to diseases of domestic cattle and habitat loss. The last verified sighting of a kouprey was in 1983, and there are no individuals in captivity. But conservationists haven’t given up yet. They continue to search for the kouprey in its historical range, including setting camera traps. Since the kouprey looks very similar to other wild oxen, it’s possible there are still some hiding in plain sight.

Next up, let’s look at a rare owl. Thanks to Julia who suggested the Karthala scops owl, which only lives in one place in the world. That one place in the world happens to be an active volcano. Specifically, it lives on the island of Grande Comore between Africa and Madagascar, in the forest on the slopes of Mount Karthala.

It’s a small owl with a wingspan of only 18 inches, or 45 cm. Some of the owls are greyish-brown and some are dark brown. It probably eats insects and small animals, but not much is known about it. It’s critically endangered due to habitat loss, as more and more of its forest is being cut down to make way for farmland. It sounds like this, and if you don’t think this is adorable I just can’t help you:

[owl call]

The Karthala scops owl wasn’t discovered by science until 1958, when an ornithologist named C.W. Benson found a feather living a sunbird nest. He thought it might be a nightjar feather, but it turned out to belong to an unknown owl. At first researchers thought it was a subspecies of the Madagascar scops owl, but it’s now considered to be a new species. Unlike many other scops owl species, the Karthala scops owl doesn’t have ear tufts.

That’s pretty much all that’s known about the Karthala scops owl right now. Researchers estimate there are around 1,000 pairs living on the volcano, and hopefully conservation efforts can be put into place to protect their habitat.

The sea mouse has been on my ideas list from the beginning, so let’s learn a little bit about it today too. It’s not a mouse, although it does live in the sea. It’s actually a genus of polychaete worm that lives along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, although it doesn’t really look like a worm. It looks kind of mouse-like, if you’re being generous, mostly because it has setae, or hairlike structures, on its back that look sort of like fur. Some species grow up to a foot long, or 30 cm, but most are usually smaller, maybe half that size or less. It’s shaped roughly like a mouse with no head or tail, and is about three inches wide, or 7.5 cm, at its widest.

The sea mouse is usually a scavenger, although at least one species hunts crabs and other polychaete worms. It spends a lot of its time burrowing in the sand or mud on the ocean bed, looking for decaying animal bodies to eat. It also has gills and antennae, although these aren’t readily noticeable because of the setae covering the animal’s back.

Underneath the setae, the sea mouse is segmented. It doesn’t have real legs but it does have appendages along its sides called parapodia, which it uses like little leglets to push itself along. Sometimes a sea mouse is found washed ashore after a storm. Often it scurries through the wet sand and looks even more like a mouse.

The most interesting thing about the sea mouse is its setae. The setae are about an inch long and are dark red, yellow, black, or brown under ordinary circumstances, depending on species. But when light shines on them just right, they glow with green and blue iridescence. The setae are hollow and made of chitin. The setae are much thinner than a human hair, and nanotech researchers have used them to create nanowires.

Here’s a sweet little mystery animal I got from one of my favorite books, Karl Shuker’s Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals. In 1858, French missionary Emmanuel Domenech published a book called Missionary adventures in Texas and Mexico. A personal narrative of six years’ sojourn in those regions, and in that book he mentions an interesting animal. This event apparently took place in or near Fredericksburg, Texas, sometime before about 1850. The woman in question may have been Comanche. I’ll quote the relevant passage, from pages 122 and 123 of the book.

“An American officer assured me that he had seen an Indian woman, dressed in the skin of a lion which she had killed with her own hand—a circumstance which manifested on her part no less strength than courage, for the lion of Texas, which has no mane, is a very large and formidable animal. This woman was always accompanied by a very singular animal about the size of a cat, but of the form and appearance of a goat. Its horns were rose-coloured, its fur was of the finest quality, glossy like silk and white as snow; but instead of hoofs this little animal had claws. This officer offered five hundred francs for it; and the commandant’s wife, who also spoke of this animal, offered a brilliant of great value in exchange for it; but the Indian woman refused both these offers, and kept her animal, saying that she knew a wood where they were found in abundance; and promised, that if she ever returned again, she would catch others expressly for them.”

So what could this strange little animal be? It sounds like a mountain goat. Mountain goats live in mountainous areas of western North America, but might well have been unknown elsewhere in the mid-19th century. They’re pure white with narrow black horns and hooves, but an albino individual might have horns that appear to be pinkish, at least at the base where the horn core is, due to lack of pigment in the horns allowing blood to show through the surface. While male mountain goats can grow more than three feet tall at the shoulder, or 1 meter, females are much smaller and have smaller horns. Most tellingly, mountain goats have sharp dewclaws as well as cloven hooves that can spread apart to provide better traction on rocks. To someone not familiar with mountain goats, this could look like claws rather than feet. My guess is the woman had a young mountain goat she was keeping as a pet, possibly an albino one, which would explain its size and appearance. It’s nice to think that she cared so much for her little pet that she refused huge amounts of money for it.

Let’s finish up with a rare and tiny cephalopod called the hairy octopus. It’s tiny, only two inches across, or five centimeters, and covered with strands of tissue that give it its name. The so-called hair of the hairy octopus camouflages it by making it look like a piece of seaweed or algae. It can also change colors like other octopuses, to blend in even more with its surroundings. It can appear red, brown, cream, or white, with or without spots and other patterns. It’s only ever been seen in the Lembeh Strait off the coast of Indonesia, and then only rarely.

It’s so rare, in fact, that it still hasn’t been formally described by science. So if you’re thinking about becoming a biologist and you find cephalopods like octopus and squid interesting, this might be the field for you. You might get to give the hairy octopus its official scientific name one day!

Thanks so much to all of you, whether you’re a fellow podcaster, a Patreon subscriber, a regular listener, or someone who just downloaded your first episode of Strange Animals Podcast to see if you like it. I’m having a lot of fun making these episodes, and I’m always surprised at how many people tell me they enjoy listening. I tend to forget anyone listens at all, so whenever I get an email or a review or someone tweets to me about an episode, I’m always startled and pleased. I’ve been trying hard to make the show’s sound quality better, and while I don’t always have the time to do as much research for each episode as I’d like, I do my best to make sure all the information I present is up to date and as accurate as possible.

As always, you can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening, and happy new year!

Episode 098: River Dolphins

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This week let’s learn about some unusual cetaceans, river dolphins!

An Amazon river dolphin and the nose of another Amazon river dolphin:

Another Amazon river dolphin. Note the teeny eye and disk-like teeth:

A South Asian river dolphin. Note the almost nonexistent eye:

A Chinese river dolphin in better days:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about an animal I’ve wanted to cover for a long time but never got around to, the river dolphin.

All whales and almost all dolphins live in the ocean. They can survive for a short while in fresh water but need saltwater to thrive. But as the name suggests, the river dolphin lives in rivers, usually in fresh water and sometimes in the brackish water where rivers empty into oceans. Brackish just means a mixture of fresh and salt water, so it’s saltier than fresh water but not as salty as ocean water. When I was a kid I thought it meant ocean water with a lot of seeweed and dead leaves in it, because I thought the word brackish had something to do with bracken, which is a type of fern.

There are only a few species of river dolphin alive today. They live in warm water and have very little blubber as a result. They primarily use echolocation to navigate since river water tends to be muddy and hard to see through. Their flippers are broad and most have long snouts and flexible necks, or at least flexible compared to other cetaceans. All river dolphins are endangered due to pollution, habitat loss, and accidental drowning in fish nets, with the Chinese river dolphin only having been declared extinct in 2006.

River dolphins evolved from dolphins that once lived in the ocean, but most aren’t closely related to the marine dolphins alive today. Researchers think that when modern dolphins and other toothed whales evolved, they outcompeted their more primitive cousins, who moved into freshwater habitats as a result.

A few years ago, fossils of an extinct river dolphin that grew more than nine feet long, or almost three meters, were found in Panama. It lived around 6 million years ago in the Amazon River, but researchers don’t think modern river dolphins are closely related to it. In other words, freshwater dolphins have evolved repeatedly in different parts of the world to fit an available ecological niche.

In the case of the newly discovered fossil river dolphin, Isthminia panamensis, it probably lived in the warm, shallow Caribbean Sea between North and South America before the Isthmus of Panama formed. It took millions of years for the isthmus to form, with undersea volcanos first emerging from the ocean around 15 million years ago to form islands, then the land itself being pushed upward as the Pacific Plate slid underneath the Caribbean Plate. Researchers think the isthmus became fully formed around 3 million years ago, separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific and connecting North and South America. Because we have Isthminia panamensis’s fossil from the Amazon River, we can hypothesize that by around 6 million years ago, there wasn’t enough of the original Caribbean Sea habitat to support the dolphins and they had already moved into the Amazon River and adapted to life in freshwater.

The river dolphin isn’t the only cetacean that lives in freshwater. There’s a species of porpoise called the finless porpoise that lives around Asia in shallow coastal waters, but often spends at least part of the time in mangrove swamps and in rivers not too far from the sea. Porpoises and dolphins look very similar but belong to different families, which means they aren’t actually very closely related at all. Like, seriously not related at all. Like, the difference between horses and cows. The finless porpoise can grow almost seven and a half feet long, or over two meters, and is called finless because it doesn’t have a dorsal fin. Instead, it has a dorsal ridge lined with tubercles, or bumps, that contain nerve endings. Researchers don’t know what purpose the tubercles serve. Porpoises use echolocation but their clicks are much higher in frequency than dolphins’, so high that humans can’t hear most of them.

There are three families of river dolphins still living today, Platanistidae, Iniidae, and Pontoporiidae.

Platanistidae are the Indian dolphins, with only one species alive today. The South Asian river dolphin lives in South Asia. There are two subspecies, the Ganges River dolphin and the Indus River dolphin. Young South Asian river dolphins have sharp, thin teeth, but as the dolphin matures, its teeth become flatter and squarish, almost like disks. It eats fish, crustaceans like shrimp, and some dolphins may also eat water birds and even turtles. Its rostrum, the word for a cetacean’s beak, is considerably longer in females than in males, sometimes like 8 inches longer, or about 20 cm.

The South Asian river dolphin is sometimes called the blind dolphin because its eyes are basically only useful for sensing light. They don’t even have lenses. It has a very small dorsal fin, not much more than a bump, a powerful tail, and is brown in color, and grows up to ten feet long, or almost 3 meters. It uses echolocation to navigate in the murky river water and find prey. It also usually swims on its side, which also gives it the name side-swimming dolphin. It does this so it can trail the tip of a flipper along the river bottom to feel for shrimp and mollusks.

It’s such an unusual dolphin, even for river dolphins, that researchers are studying fossil dolphins to figure out how the South Asian river dolphin evolved. Two years ago, a fossilized dolphin skull found in 1951 in Alaska and held in the Smithsonian’s collection ever since was evaluated and determined to be a distant relative of the South Asian river dolphin. It lived about 25 million years ago, around the time that ancient whales were evolving into the two groups we have today, toothed whales, which includes dolphins, and baleen whales.

The South Asian river dolphin has been evolving separately from marine dolphins for at least the 25 million years since its relative was swimming around in the Arctic Ocean. Research on its echolocation suggests that the Ganges River subspecies of the South Asian river dolphin probably has biosonar that more closely resembles that of ancient toothed whales than modern toothed whale and dolphin echolocation does. It has a much deeper voice than marine dolphins of about the same size have.

I tried very hard to find a recording of a Ganges River dolphin, or any South Asian river dolphin, but all I found was this, the echolocation of an Amazon river dolphin:

[river dolphin sound]

The Amazon river dolphin is a member of the Iniidae family of river dolphins. It’s the biggest of the river dolphins, and adults are often pink in color. In all other river dolphins, and most cetaceans in general, females are larger than males, but male Amazon river dolphins are larger than females. Babies are dark gray, fading to lighter gray as they grow up. Adults can appear pink because the skin is often pale and in warm water, the blood shows through the skin. The Amazon river dolphin has small eyes, but it sees a lot better than the South Asian river dolphin.

Most river dolphin species aren’t nearly as sociable as marine dolphins and are usually only found singly or in groups of two or three. Male Amazon river dolphins often fight each other when females are around. If a male Amazon river dolphin meets some females, he will pick up a branch or stone and carry it around to impress them.

Amazon river dolphins eat fish, including piranhas, freshwater crabs, turtles, and other small animals. Sometimes a dolphin will participate in cooperative hunting with giant otters and the tucuxi, another species of dolphin that lives in the Amazon basin. The three species eat different types of fish so they all benefit from hunting together.

The tucuxi isn’t actually a river dolphin although at least some individuals live in rivers. It’s considered a marine dolphin, and you can tell the difference just by looking at it. It looks like a small bottlenose dolphin, about five feet long, or 1.5 meters, and unlike river dolphins its rostrum is relatively short.

The third family of river dolphin is Pontoporiidae, and there’s only one species alive today. Just to show that nature isn’t cut and dried, the La Plata dolphin doesn’t always live in fresh water. It lives around the coast of southeastern South America and while some do spend their whole lives in rivers, most La Plata dolphins live in the ocean.

Finally, let’s talk about the Chinese river dolphin, the one that’s recently extinct, also called the baiji. Technically it’s functionally extinct because although there may be one or two still alive, there aren’t enough to continue the species into another generation. River dolphins do very poorly in captivity, usually dying within months, so even if conservationists had billions of dollars and the cooperation of every single person on earth to save the Chinese river dolphin, there’s nothing they could do at this point. In fact, in 2006 a research team searched for the dolphin for six weeks to put a conservation action plan into place for it, but they didn’t find any. That’s when it was declared extinct.

The Chinese river dolphin lived in the Yangtze River and grew up to 8 feet long, or 2.4 meters. It was blue-gray with a paler belly, and like many other river dolphins, its rostrum was slightly upturned. It also had poor vision. It was once common along much of the Yangtze, some 1,100 miles of river, or 1,700 km, but massive increases in pollution of the river, collisions with boats caused by the noise of boats overwhelming the dolphins’ echolocation, poaching, entanglement in fishing nets, loss of habitat due to damming of the river, and overfishing drove it to extinction within about five decades. The last confirmed sighting of a Chinese river dolphin was in 2002, with an unconfirmed sighting in 2007.

This is a depressing way to end the episode, so let’s finish up with a long-ago relative of the South Asian river dolphin. Zarhachis flagellator lived during the Miocene, about 16 million years ago, and had a really long rostrum. Like, super super long. Its skull was about four feet long, or 1.2 meters, which makes it sound like it must have been a really big dolphin, but it wasn’t. Its actual braincase was less than a foot long, maybe 8 inches or so, or 20 cm. The rest of the length was rostrum. In other words, it had a head about the size of your head, and a long thin beak full of sharp teeth that was something like three feet long, or almost a meter. Tonight when you brush your teeth, think about that. Think about how hard it would be to reach all your teeth if you had a mouth that stuck out three feet from your head. You’d need a really long toothbrush.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 097: Unusual Reptiles

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Thanks to listeners Finn and Leo, who suggested this week’s topics of strange lizards, and the thorny devil and mata mata turtle, respectively! Join us this week to learn about those reptiles and a bunch more!

Thorny devil. Definitely do not eat.

The mata mata turtle. Big leafhead boi

A frilled lizard BWAAAAAMP

A Pinocchio lizard. Wonder where that name comes from.

Poke poke poke does this bother you? poke poke

om nom nom

A shingleback, or as I like to call it, an ambulatory poop:

Show transcript:

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

We have more listener suggestions this week! Ages ago, listener Finn suggested strange lizards, and more recently, listener Leo suggested a particular type of strange lizard and a strange turtle.

We’ll start with Leo’s suggestion, the thorny devil. He describes it as “a cool animal with spikes all around it,” which is definitely a good way to put it. The thorny devil is a lizard from Australia, and it does indeed have spikes all over its head, back, and tail, and smaller spikes on its legs. The spikes are modified scales and are sharp.

The thorny devil grows to around 8 inches long, or 20 cm, with females being larger than males on average. In warm weather its blotchy brown and yellow coloring is paler than in colder weather, when it turns darker. It can also turn orangey, reddish, or gray to blend in to the background soil. Its color changes slowly over the course of the day as the temperature changes. It also tends to turn darker if something threatens it.

It has a thick spiny tail that it usually holds curved upward, which makes it look kind of like a stick. It moves slowly and jerkily, rocking back and forth on its legs, then surging forward a couple of steps. Researchers think this may confuse predators. It certainly looks confusing.

As if that wasn’t enough, the thorny devil has a false head on the back of its neck. It’s basically a big bump with two spikes sticking out of the sides. When something threatens the lizard, it ducks its head between its forelegs, which makes the bump on its neck look like a little head. But all its spines make it a painful mouthful for a predator. If something does try to swallow it, the thorny devil can puff itself up to make itself even harder to swallow, like many toads do. It does this by inflating its chest with air.

The thorny devil eats ants and only ants, specifically various species of tiny black ants found only in Australia. It has a sticky tongue to lick them up. Because it has such a specific diet, it’s hard to keep in captivity. Only a few zoos in Australia have thorny devils on display. If you listened to episode 93, where we talked about invasive ant species having an effect on entire ecosystems, the thorny devil is an example of this. Fortunately the ants it eats are doing just fine, but if an invasive ant species were introduced to the areas where it lives, the thorny devil would probably be in trouble. So no moving ants around, everyone, I mean it.

The thorny devil lives in desert and scrubland regions, and in hot weather it digs a burrow to shelter in. Females lay their eggs in burrows. To get enough water in its desert environment, the thorny devil has microscopic grooves between its scales that suck up water by capillary action. At night dew condenses on the lizard’s body, and it also collects dew by brushing against dewy vegetation or just by standing or lying on damp sand. If it does happen across water in a puddle, it will put a leg in the water and the tiny grooves in its skin suck up water and funnel it to the mouth. It’s like a living straw.

While I was researching this, I found some information on how rattlesnakes drink. When it starts to rain, a rattlesnake will coil up tightly so that rainwater collects in its coils. Then it drinks the water. This sounds like something someone just made up, but it’s real.

Let’s skip right from a snake fact to a weird turtle, because Leo also suggested the mata mata turtle as a topic. This is where I got distracted while researching, and ended up with an entire episode about giant tortoises. If you were wondering, the main difference between a turtle and a tortoise is that turtles spend most or all of their time in water, while tortoises live only on land.

The mata mata turtle lives in shallow, slow-moving water in South America, especially swamps around the Amazon and Orinoco river basins. It isn’t closely related to the snapping turtle of North America, but it does resemble a snapping turtle in some ways. Its shell is brown or black, its skin is grayish, and its plastron, or the belly section of its shell, is yellow or brown. It grows to around two feet long, or 60 cm, with a long, broad neck and wide, triangular head. Its nose comes to a point like the stem of a leaf. In fact, if you look down on a mata mata in the water, the shape of its head looks exactly like a dead leaf. It has notches and ridges on its shell, and its knobbly skin has flaps that helps camouflage the turtle among dead leaves and sticks in the water. It also has claws and webbed toes.

Unlike the snapping turtle, the mata mata is harmless to humans and most animals. It doesn’t have a sharp bill and it won’t bite. It can’t even chew its food, just swallows it whole. It eats fish, water insects, and other small animals that it captures by opening its large mouth suddenly under the water. This creates suction, sucking a lot of water and the prey right into the turtle’s mouth.

The only time the mata mata leaves the water is to lay eggs. Unlike many other turtle eggs, the mata mata eggs have hard shells, more like bird eggs. It takes the eggs about 200 days to hatch.

The mata mata spends almost all of its time motionless in the water, waiting for prey to come near, and occasionally extending its ridiculously long neck so it can take a breath from the surface. Its pointy nose is a proboscis that it breathes through. It can swim, but it usually prefers to walk along the bottom of the pond or marsh. I bet its feet squish in the mud. Squish squish squish.

Speaking of pointy-nosed reptiles, the male Pinocchio lizard has a nose that points forward and slightly upward like a rhinoceros horn. But it’s not a horn, because it’s flexible, made of cartilage. It lives in the Mindo cloud forest in Ecuador, and was only discovered by scientists in 1953, when researchers collected six specimens. And that was the last time anyone saw the Pinocchio lizard—until 2005, when some birdwatchers saw a weird lizard, took pictures and posted them online, and herpetologists started freaking out.

The Pinocchio lizard blends in so well with its environment that it’s hard to spot. It turns white when it’s asleep, which helps it look like part of a tree branch. It always perches on the end of a branch to sleep, too. During the day, it climbs verrry slowly into the treetops. It’s not a big lizard, only about three inches long, or 7.5 cm, not counting its tail, which is as long as its body. We still don’t know much about it because it’s so hard to study.

It’s not the only lizard with a horn on its nose. For instance, the rough-nosed horned lizard lives in Sri Lanka and is an ordinary-looking lizard for the most part, although it’s covered with short bristly scales that make it look like it would work well for scrubbing out dirty pots and pans. But it has a really long nose, also covered in bristly scales. Oh, and yellow or orange markings on its face that make it look like it has a big orange clown mouth. Males have longer horns than females. Male mountain horned agamas, which also live in Sri Lanka, have a single white or cream-colored horn that sticks directly forward from their nose like a tiny unicorn horn, except it’s not spiraled. In fact, it’s not a horn at all, it’s a single big pointy scale. But those lizards aren’t related to the Pinnocchio lizard.

The La Gomera giant lizard doesn’t have any horns and it’s not all that giant, less than two feet long, or around 49 cm long, including the tail. It’s black or brown on its back with a white belly. Males also have a white throat, and during mating season males inflate their throat and bob their head to attract females. It mostly eats plants, although it will eat insects too, and it lives in the Canary Islands. It’s not the most exciting lizard to look at, but it has an interesting history.

The Canary Islands are a group of islands off the coast of Morocco. It was once called the Fortunate Isles, so if you ever see that in an old book you know what islands it’s talking about. Pliny the Elder, a historian from ancient Rome, said the name Canaria came from the number of dogs on the islands. The word for dog in Latin is canis. The people of the islands were supposed to worship dogs, and some modern historians believe the old accounts of dog-headed people may be a garbled account of the Canary Islanders. Oh, and the little yellow songbirds that live on the Canary Islands took their name from the islands, not vice versa.

The islands were probably visited in ancient times by Phoenician and Greek sailors, but reportedly no one lived there when the Romans explored it in the 1st century. But when Europeans returned in the late middle ages, there were inhabitants that may have been settlers from North Africa. The islands were invaded by Europeans, who then spent centuries fighting with each other over who ruled them. It’s Spain, currently. Scientific expeditions started in the late 18th century. One of the animals the expeditions reported seeing was the La Gomera giant lizard, but it disappeared sometime after about 1900. Researchers assumed it had gone extinct.

Then a 1999 expedition from the University of La Laguna on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, heard stories from local residents on the island of La Gomera. They said there was a big lizard living in a few places on the island. The biologists in the expedition checked it out…and sure enough, there were giant lizards. Specifically, six of them. Just six lizards. Later they found another small group of the lizards in another area, but the total population was still no more than fifty.

Fortunately, a captive breeding program has been successful and today there are around 250 of the lizards in the wild, living only on two hard to reach cliffs. They’re vulnerable to introduced predators, especially cats, which eat the eggs and young lizards. Another 300 or so live in a recovery center where they’re protected from predators before being released into the wild. So basically, the La Gomera giant lizard isn’t so much strange as just very, very lucky.

Another lizard that is definitely strange is the frilled lizard from northern Australia and southern New Guinea. It’s bigger than the La Gomera giant lizard, almost three feet long, or 85 cm, and eats insects, spiders, and small animals. It lives in trees and is well camouflaged with blotches and spots on a gray or brown background to help camouflage it among branches and against bark.

The frilled lizard gets its name from the frill on eitherside of its head. Most of the time it keeps the frill folded back against itsneck. When it’s threatened, though, it spreads the frill out and opens itsmouth wide. The inside of its mouth is bright yellow or pink, and the frill hasbright red or yellow scales that don’t show when it’s folded. It’s the lizardequivalent of a jump scare in scary movies. Regular lizard, regular lizard…BWAMP BIG SCARY BRIGHT LIZARD

The frill is made up of spines of cartilage that grow from the lizard’s jaw bones, with skin connecting the spines. It’s not small, either. When expanded, it can be almost a foot across, or 25 cm.

The frilled lizard isn’t dangerous, though, and if its threat display doesn’t scare off a predator, it runs away until it finds a tree to climb. It runs so fast, in fact, that it lifts its body up and just runs on its hind legs, which helps it navigate uneven ground and gives it a better view of what’s around it. It also holds its long tail out as a counterweight to keep its body upright.

That’s supposed to be all the strange details about the frilled lizard…but there are sightings of it doing something unexpected on rare occasions. People occasionally report seeing a frilled lizard fall or jump from a tree, and glide down using its frill as a parachute. There’s no proof that this actually happens, but it sounds plausible.

Another Australian lizard called the shingleback, or bobtail, looks kind of like a pinecone with legs. Or a poop with legs, just going to set that down and walk away. It’s brown with darker and lighter speckles or yellow splotches, large overlapping scales, a stubby thick tail, and a broad head. In fact, its head and tail look a lot alike, which confuses predators. It also stores fat in its tail for winter. It grows about a foot long, or 30 cm, and eats snails, insects, flowers, and other small animals and plants. It lives in arid and desert areas, and their tough skin and overlapping scales help reduce water loss. Its eyes are tiny, like little black beads.

The shingleback looks nothing like the frilled lizard, but it has one thing in common with it. When threatened, the shingleback will open its mouth wide and stick out its large, dark blue tongue. It is an impressively blue, impressively big tongue, and the inside of the shingleback’s mouth is otherwise pale, so it’s startling, to say the least.

The shingleback mates for life. Most of the year the shingleback is solitary, but in spring mated pairs find each other again and go around together while they hunt for food. The female gives birth to two live babies instead of laying eggs.

I could go on and on and on about all the weird reptiles in the world. There are just so many! We’ll definitely come back to this topic in the future, but for now, let’s finish up with a snake called Iwasaki’s snail-eater.

The snail-eater lives on a few small islands southwest of Japan’s main islands. It’s small, only about 7 inches long, or 22 cm, and is orangey in color with darker markings and bright orange eyes. And it only eats one thing: snails.

It’s so perfectly adapted to its diet of snails that its jaw is asymmetrical so it can more easily wedge it into the typical snail’s shell, which coils clockwise. If you remember from the little yard animals episode, some snails very rarely coil the opposite way, and the snail-eater snake is so specialized to eat ordinary snails that it has trouble with counter-clockwise coiled snail shells. It has more teeth on its right mandible. There are other snail-eater snakes closely related to Iwasaki’s snail-eater that have this same adaptation, and in some areas where the snakes are numerous, counter-clockwise snails are much more common than in areas without a lot of snail-eater snakes.

So that’s a reminder that whether you’re a little snail-eating snake or a regular human being, the things you do have an effect on the world around you, even if it’s in ways too small for you to notice without looking very closely.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 093: Insects Large and Small, mostly large

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Many thanks this week to listeners Bob, Nicholas, and Damian, who all suggested insects of one kind or another! So this week is an insect extravaganza, or at least we learn about some gigantic insects, the rarest insect in the world, and a tiny ant.

The Lord Howe Island phasmid:

The longest insect in the world:

The Queen Alexandra’s birdwing butterfly:

The Hercules beetle with random frog. Onward, my steed!

Further reading:

An article about phasmid eggs

Show transcript:

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

I’ve received a bunch of excellent topic suggestions this year and I’m getting behind on addressing them, so the next few weeks will mostly be listener suggestions. This week we’re going to look at a topic several listeners have suggested…insects.

Now, you know insects are not my favorite, but they are definitely interesting. So thanks to listeners Bob, Nicholas, and Damian, we’re going to learn about various horrifying, I mean fascinating, insects!

We’ll start with some very small insects. I could probably do a whole episode just about ants, and maybe one day I will, but right now let’s look at a type of ant suggested by Bob. Bob lives in California and mentioned that the type of ant common in that part of the United States is the Argentine ant. It’s native to South America, specifically lowlands around the Paraná River, but it’s spread to many other parts of the world.

The Argentine ant is only about 2 to 3 mm long and are brownish in color. The queen ants are about twice the size of the worker ants, and each colony has many queens, unlike other ant species that may only have one queen per colony. Queen ants are the only ones that lay eggs. Worker ants find food and bring it back to the colony, tend the queen and her eggs, and dig the shallow nest where the colony lives.

Argentine ants are omnivorous, eating pretty much anything, and are definitely pests. They get into people’s kitchens to find food and will even make nests inside houses. Because a colony has more than one queen, the colonies are hard to eradicate. They also displace native ant species, which can impact the entire ecosystem since other animals that depend on native ants as their primary food won’t be able to find enough to eat. Argentine ants also cause problems for farmers, partly because they eat the larvae of pollinating insects, partly because they tend aphids for the honeydew that aphids secrete. Aphids are a pest to many crops, and the last thing farmers want is more aphids around—but Argentine ants want all the aphids they can get.

Researchers have found out something really unusual about Argentine ants. The ants that still live in their native habitat are genetically diverse and territorial, with different colonies fighting each other for nesting sites and hunting grounds. This keeps the population under control naturally. But outside of its native habitat, all the Argentine ants in the world are so genetically similar that in many cases, ants from different colonies act as though they were from the same colony. They don’t fight for territory, and instead act like a supercolony that can stretch for hundreds of miles, killing off or displacing native ants and other insect species.

But in some parts of North America, the Argentine ant is facing an ant species that may end up beating it at its own game. The Asian needle ant has started taking territory from the Argentine ant, helped by its resistance to cold weather. Both species of ant become less active in winter, but the Asian needle ant starts reproducing and foraging much earlier in the spring than the Argentine ant. This gives it a head start every year. Plus, the Asian needle ant is aggressive and has a venomous sting. Unfortunately, the Asian needle ant is just as bad an invasive species as the Argentine ant, driving out native ant species—and, in fact, it’s worse because some people are allergic to its sting.

Now let’s go from tiny ants to an insect I was terrified of as a kid, the stick insect, also called walking sticks or phasmids. I like the word phasmid. I don’t know why the idea of a stick insect was so scary to kid me, except that I liked to climb trees and I think I thought one day I’d climb a tree and discover that some of those sticks were not actually part of the tree. Nicholas suggests the Lord Howe Island phasmid in particular, which isn’t just a stick insect, it’s the rarest insect in the world. AND it’s enormous! In fact, it’s sometimes called the land lobster or tree lobster.

The Lord Howe Island phasmid can grow eight inches long, or 20 cm, and can weigh a full ounce, or 25 grams. Males are smaller than females. It has a round head with short antennae, sort of like a cricket, but its body is long and heavy with big legs. It’s black in color with no wings. It’s thicker than most stick insects and doesn’t so much resemble a stick as a cricket on steroids. I’m looking at a picture right now of someone holding one on the palm of their hand, and the insect is literally longer than their palm and almost as long as their palm and fingers. Put it down. Don’t touch it.

These days the Lord Howe Island phasmid lives in one place. That place is not Lord Howe Island off the coast of Australia. That’s where it used to live, and it was so common and so large that fishermen used it as bait. But rats and mice invaded the island in 1918, and by 1920 they’d eaten all the phasmids, which were declared extinct in 1960. But in 1964, someone found a dead phasmid on Ball’s Pyramid, a volcanic islet 12 miles, or 20 km, away from Lord Howe Island.

Ball’s Pyramid is what’s known as a volcanic stack, the eroded remnant of a volcano which is part of the submerged continent of Zealandia. It’s basically a cliff rising straight up out of the ocean. It’s the tallest volcanic stack in the world, 1,844 feet high, or 562 meters, 3,600 feet long, or 1,100 meters, and 980 feet wide, or 300 meters. It’s surrounded by rough seas and barely submerged rocks, and there’s pretty much nothing on it, so not very many people have ever tried to land on the islet. A group of mountain climbers scaled it in 1965 and again in 1979, but in 1982 access to the islet was restricted. It’s now part of the Lord Howe Island Marine Park.

During the successful climbs of Ball’s Pyramid, and a few unsuccessful climbs, dead phasmids were photographed but no live ones found. In 2001, a couple of entomologists landed to make a survey of the islet, primarily to determine whether the Lord Howe Island phasmid was alive on the island or actually extinct. They were pretty sure it was extinct. They found some Melaleuca howeana shrubs growing in a few cracks in the rock, and incidentally that’s a subspecies of tea tree that only grows on Ball’s Pyramid and Lord Howe Island. It grows up to ten feet tall, or 4 meters, and almost as wide. And in one of the shrubs they found 24 live Lord Howe Island phasmids.

Since then, eggs have been collected from the wild and relocated to a captive breeding program, which has been successful so far. Hopefully Lord Howe Island phasmids will be rereleased onto Lord Howe Island, once the rats and mice are eradicated.

Researchers think the Lord Howe Island phasmid was able to survive in such low numbers because females are able to reproduce without being fertilized by males, called parthenogenesis. Researchers have compared DNA taken from the Ball’s Pyramid insects to museum specimens gathered from Lord Howe Island prior to 1920 and determined that they are the same species.

The term phasmid, of course, refers to an order of insects that are mostly camouflaged to look like twigs or leaves, and it contains the longest insects in the world. And that’s good, because listener Damian wants to know about the biggest insects alive today.

The longest insect is Phryganistria chinensis Zhao, a stick insect only discovered in 2014 by researcher Zhao Li of the Insect Museum of West China. Locals in the mountains had told him about a massively long phasmid and he finally tracked one down. He brought it back alive to the museum, where it laid six eggs. Can you possibly imagine how excited he must have been by those eggs? When they hatched, the smallest of the babies was 26 centimeters long, or over ten inches. The adult female measured 62.4 cm, or just over two feet long. HOLY CRAP. TWO FEET LONG. That’s more of a walking branch than a walking stick. Not only that, its legs are almost as long as its body.

Since then, the babies have grown up and one of them, another female, is now the longest living insect ever measured, at 64 cm, or 25 inches. So you know what this means. It means there are some of them in the wild that are probably even longer.

Before the discovery of Zhao’s phasmid, the longest insect known was called Chan’s megastick, which was 22.3 inches long, or 56.7 cm. It was discovered in 2008 in Borneo in Southeast Asia, and only six specimens have ever been found. That means it too probably has even longer individuals living in the wild.

Many stick insects lay eggs that look like seeds. For a long time researchers weren’t sure why. After all, birds eat seeds. Why would an insect lay eggs that might attract hungry birds? But it turns out that the eggs contain a deposit of fat that attracts seed-eating ants, and the ants carry the eggs back to their nest and bury them. The eggs are then safe from birds, parasitic wasps, and other predators. We have come full circle back to ants, notice? Not only that, but researchers in Japan tested whether the protective coating on some seed-mimicking phasmid eggs would protect the eggs if they were eaten by birds. Sure enough, when they fed the eggs to the brown-eared bulbul, a bird known to eat phasmids, a few of the eggs survived and hatched. So it’s likely that phasmid eggs resemble seeds to attract ants but it’s okay if they also attract birds—in fact, it might even be a good thing since the birds would spread the eggs to new areas. Special thanks to Nicholas, who sent me links to several articles about stick insects, including the article about phasmid eggs. I’ll put a link in the show notes if you want to read the article, because it’s really interesting.

So the longest insects are phasmids, but what is the heaviest insect alive? That would be the Little Barrier Island giant weta from New Zealand, also called the wetapunga, which has weighed in at 72 grams, or over 2 ½ ounces. That’s heavier than some songbirds and mice. The wetapunga is basically an enormous cricket and somewhat resembles a gigantic, rather elongated version of one of my least favorite bugs, the cave cricket. It’s that same sort of sickly orangey tan color. If you look at it from the right angle it looks kind of like a lobster, which I also don’t like. Not only can the wetapunga be really heavy, it’s also long—not stick insect long, but a respectable four inches or so long, or 10 cm, and even longer if you count the stretched-out legs.

It eats plants and is mostly nocturnal.

Like the Lord Howe Island phasmid, the wetapunga is vulnerable to introduced predators. It only survives in the wild on Little Barrier Island, and is now the subject of a successful captive breeding program. It’s been around for 190 million years so it would be a shame to let it go extinct now.

The insect with the biggest wingspan is a butterfly called Queen Alexandra’s birdwing, which can have a wingspan almost a foot across, or over 25 cm. Its body is just over 3 inches long, or 8 cm. The female is larger than the male and has brown wings with pretty white and yellow markings. The male looks much different, with iridescent blue-green wings and a bright yellow abdomen. The butterfly is a strong flyer that spends a lot of time flying much higher that typical butterflies do. Males court females with a spectacular aerial dance.

The Queen Alexandra’s birdwing lives in eastern Papua New Guinea in a coastal rainforest, a habitat that is only about 40 square miles total, or 100 square km. Not only is it threatened by habitat loss due to palm oil plantations, which are absolutely insidious and seriously, you should stop buying products that use palm oil, but a volcanic eruption in the 1950s destroyed part of its habitat too. It’s protected and no one is supposed to buy, sell, or trade individuals, live or dead. Hopefully conservationists can work out a way to breed the butterfly in captivity.

The biggest beetle alive today is probably the Hercules beetle, which lives in the rainforests of Central and South America. It’s only longer than the titan beetle that lives in the Amazon rainforest because of its long rhinoceros-like horns, which push its length to 7 inches, or 17 cm. A male uses his horns to fight by grabbing another male with his horns and throwing him. The male Hercules beetle is black with yellowish or yellow-green wing cases. Females are usually all black and don’t have horns. Hercules beetle larvae are humongous and weigh a whopping 100 grams, or 3.5 ounces. So technically the Hercules beetle larva is the heaviest insect, but I’ve disqualified it because it’s not fully grown and anyway, it eats rotting wood. I wouldn’t be surprised if half its weight is just all the rotten wood it’s eaten. The adult beetles eat fruit.

So what about extinct insects? Were there ever insects even bigger than the ones alive today? The answer, as you may already know, is a big loud YES. Back in the early Permian era, around 290 million years ago, two species of flying insect called a griffinfly, which resembled a dragonfly, had a wingspan of almost two feet across, or 71 cm, and a body length of 17 inches, or 43 cm. Researchers estimate they may have weighed as much as a pound, or 450 grams.

If you were brave enough to listen to the spiders episode a few weeks ago, you may remember that spiders, and insects, can’t grow too big or they literally can’t get enough oxygen to function. So how did a huge active flying insect of that size manage?

One theory is that the atmosphere in the Permian contained more oxygen than the current level, which made it easier for insects to get the oxygen they needed. Air today is made of about 21% oxygen, with the other 80% made up of other gases, mostly nitrogen, but in the early Permian oxygen content was around 30%, although that was down from a peak of 35% only ten million years before. By the late Permian oxygen content had plunged to 16% and even reached as low as 12% at the beginning of the Triassic, killing off many animals and fragmenting populations of the ones that survived. Because the oxygen content was so low, animals could only survive at or near sea level. Even the lowest mountains were deadly because the air at higher elevations naturally contains less oxygen. Researchers estimate that breathing air with only 12% oxygen at sea level would be like breathing air at 17,400 feet, or 5,300 meters. Humans can’t survive at elevations above about 19,500 feet, or 5,950 meters. The reduction of oxygen in the atmosphere led to a massive extinction event called the Great Dying, where 90% of all marine life and almost 75% of all life on land went extinct around 251 million years ago.

Researchers aren’t sure what caused the de-oxygenation of the atmosphere, but it’s possible the massive volcanic activity near the end of the Permian played a part by releasing carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. The rock record during the Permian shows the results in stark detail: limestone in the older rock strata that’s full of fossils and the fossilized burrows of little animals that lived in the soft mud at the bottom of shallow oceans. Then there’s a mineralized layer of rock full of pyrite, which forms in low atmospheric conditions. Above this are bands of clay full of minerals from volcanic eruptions but with no fossils present. Above that are mudstone layers where fossils finally start appearing again in small numbers as life rebounded after the extinction event.

I’ve sort of gotten away from huge insects here, so I’ll finish by pointing out that clearly the phasmids of today aren’t having any issues with growing really big. So, you know, watch out where you put your hands when you’re climbing trees.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 091: The Spookiest Owls

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It’s Halloween week! Join us this week for an episode about spooky, spooky owls…including the chickcharnie and the owlman.

I’ve unlocked a few Patreon episodes as a Halloween treat. Click through and you can listen on your browser:

The Hazelworm

VAMPIRE BIRDS

See-through animals

And a reminder that my fantasy novel Skytown is available now in ebook and paperback. Buy many copies!

The Eurasian eagle owl will murder you without remorse and look fabulous doing it:

The Eastern screech owl is tiny but has a loud, creepy call:

The barn owl is sometimes called the ghost owl FOR OBVIOUS REASONS:

A great horned owl:

Further reading:

The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales by Ruth Ann Musick

Show transcript:

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

It’s finally Halloween week, my favorite week of the year! Let’s learn about another animal frequently associated with Halloween spookiness, the owl!

First, though, a reminder that if you want a Strange Animals sticker, always feel free to contact me and ask for one. You can email me at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com or contact me through social media. If you’ve got an extra dollar or two a month just lying around, you can support the podcast on Patreon and get access to twice-monthly bonus episodes. And if you want to read a fun book that actually has very little to do with animals, my novel Skytown is now out in both paperback and ebook. I’ll put a link in the show notes for both my book’s Goodreads page and to the Patreon page. Not everyone knows what Patreon is, so briefly, it’s just a site where you can set up recurring monthly donations and in return get patron rewards.

I have unlocked two more patreon bonus episodes for anyone to listen to. I’ll put a link to them in the show notes too. You can click on the links and listen via your browser, without needing a Patreon login.

Now, with housekeeping out of the way, on to the owl episode!

Like bats, owls are mostly nocturnal animals and that makes many people afraid of them. They also look kind of weird, can sound really creepy, and fly so silently that they’re like ghosts. But we’re going to start this week’s episode off with an owl-like mystery animal in a place you might not expect.

The Bahamas is a country made up of over 700 islands, many of them tiny, located roughly between the Florida peninsula and Cuba. These days it’s famous for sunny beaches and warm waters. Tourism is a big part of its economy and lots of people take cruises to the Bahamas. But between about 500 years ago and 200 years ago, the Bahamas was a terrible place. The native people of the area, called the Lucayan, were enslaved by the Spanish and forced to work on plantations under horrific conditions. Most of them died. The British took over the islands around the mid-17th century, bringing enslaved people from Africa to work the plantations. Also during this time, pirates treated the area as a haven, leading eventually to one really good Pirates of the Caribbean movie and a lot of terrible sequels, although this is perhaps a little off topic. In 1807 the British came to their senses and abolished the slave trade, although they didn’t actually abolish slavery until 1834. British ships sometimes attacked slave ships and rescued the captives on board. Many of the captive people were brought to the Bahamas, where they made new homes. Freed and escaped slaves made their way to the Bahamas too, where they could live in relative peace.

The largest of the islands that makes up the Bahamas is called Andros Island, although it’s technically a collection of three main islands and some smaller ones that are all quite close together, protected by a barrier reef. It’s the only island in the Bahamas with a freshwater river, and naturally there are many animals found on Andros Island that live nowhere else. There used to be even more native animals, before the forests of Andros were chopped down.

The island has many spooky stories, of course. Most places do, and the darker the history of a place, the more spooky stories it’s likely to have. For instance, it’s said that a fisherman named James was caught in a hurricane one night and never arrived home. His fiancée, a woman named Anna, spent every night walking along the beach and waving a lantern, hoping against hope that he was alive and would be able to find his way home when he saw her light. But he never came home, and eventually Anna was found on the beach one morning, dead of a broken heart. Then, a year after James’s disappearance, another storm blew up. The fishermen of the island sailed for home as fast as they could, but the night was dark, the waves were enormous, and the rain pelted down so hard they couldn’t tell which way they were sailing. Then one sailor noticed a small light waving in the distance. All the fishermen turned their boats in that direction, and they all managed to reach land safely. But they couldn’t figure out what the light was that they had seen…until the morning, when the storm had blown over. On the beach they found the wreckage of James’s boat, lost the year before and finally blown ashore…and they also found Anna’s lantern lying on the sand although she had been buried months before. Oh my gosh, that is spooky.

But the Andros Island story we’re interested in today is that of a creature called the chickcharney. It’s sort of a bird, sort of a goblin. It was supposed to be about three feet tall, or almost a meter, with big round eyes—possibly only one eye in the middle of its face. It was covered with hairy feathers and could turn its head almost all the way around. Some versions of the story say it had a long prehensile tail that it used to climb trees. It was supposed to live in the pine forests and make its nest in trees that were so close together that the branches touched near the top.

The chickcharney was mischievous and would sometimes play tricks on people, but if people treated it with respect and left it alone, they would have good luck. If they bothered it, not only would they have bad luck, sometimes the chickcharney would grab the person and twist their head around backwards. The best way to keep the chickcharney from bothering you was to carry brightly colored cloth or flowers when you went into the woods.

You may think that the story of the chickcharney is a lot less believable than the one about James and Anna. But as it happens, Andros Island used to be home to a flightless owl that sounds a lot like the chickcharney.

The Andros Island barn owl stood over three feet tall, or about a meter, with long legs, and lived in the pine forests. It was a burrowing owl that nested in holes beneath the trees, but we don’t know much about it since it’s extinct. It probably went extinct in the 16th century when the pine forests on Andros Island were felled, but people still report seeing the chickcharney. So while it’s a slim chance, maybe a small population of the owl is still hanging on.

Another owl-like cryptid is called the owlman. Supposedly, in April of 1976 two sisters saw a huge winged creature hovering over a church tower during a family holiday in Cornwall, England. In July of that same year, two other girls who were camping near the church heard and saw a huge owl. They said it was the size of a grown man, had red eyes and pointed ears, and black claws. It hissed at them and flew straight up into the air. Other people reported seeing the owlman too.

The problem with this story is that it was initially reported and investigated by a man named Doc Shiels, who has been associated with hoaxes in the past. But if the owlman sightings are real, could the witnesses be seeing an actual owl?

One of the biggest owls alive today is the great grey owl, which lives throughout northern Eurasia and in parts of Canada and the northwestern United States. Its body is nearly three feet long, or 84 cm, and its wingspan can be up to five feet across, or 1.5 meters. It’s brown and grey with yellow eyes, and it mostly eats small rodents. It has incredible hearing and can hear animals moving around under up to two feet of snow, which it then dives into to catch its prey.

But the great grey owl doesn’t live in England, and it doesn’t really fit the sightings of owlman. The Eurasian eagle-owl does, and while it also doesn’t typically live in England, up to 40 pairs are estimated to live in the British Isles and it’s common throughout much of Eurasia.

The Eurasian eagle-owl has a shorter body than the great grey owl, but its wingspan is broader. Females are larger than males, so a big female might have a wingspan up to 6 feet 2 inches, or 1.9 meters. Females also tend to have darker plumage than males. The Eurasian eagle-owl has ear tufts and its eyes are orange or red-orange. It eats small mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, even large insects.

Like many owls, the Eurasian eagle owl will hiss when it’s disturbed. It will also fly during the day when it’s been disturbed, although it will sometimes hunt before it’s fully dark.

But could someone mistake an owl for a human-sized creature? No matter how big their wings are, owls just aren’t that big.

Then again, most people aren’t very familiar with owls. I’m an avid birder and I don’t see owls very often, so the average person who isn’t into birdwatching may never have seen an owl in person before. Owls look even bigger than you think they would because of how enormously fluffy their feathers are, and if they’re disturbed they may ruffle their feathers out to look even bigger. Their legs are much longer than you’d think too. Add in someone being startled and potentially really scared by a sudden owl, and possible poor light conditions, and you have a recipe for owlman reports.

Even if owlman is probably just a giant owl, owls in general are just kind of creepy. Creepy-cute, but definitely on the spooky end of the animal spectrum. And all those odds and ends of weird facts you know about owls? They’re probably true.

For instance, owls really can turn their heads around backwards and even farther, as much as 270 degrees. Owls have 14 neck vertebrae, twice as many as humans and most other mammals have, and they have other adaptations that allow them to turn their heads that far without injury. The reason owls need to be able to turn their heads so far is because they can’t move their eyes. Owl eyes are fixed in their sockets so they can only look straight ahead from wherever their head is pointing. This is actually the case for most birds.

Owls are nocturnal and can see extremely well even in low light. Owls that mostly hunt in darkness have black eyes, while owls that usually hunt at dawn or dusk have yellow or orange eyes. Most owls have good hearing too. The reason many owls have that circle of feathers around their eyes, called a facial disc, is to help focus the owl’s hearing. The owl can adjust the angle of the feathers in its facial disc to focus sounds. Not only that, some owls have asymmetrical ear cavities, which makes it easier for them to pinpoint the source of sounds. The ear tufts some owls have on their heads are not actually ears or anywhere near the ear cavities. They’re just decorations.

Owl feathers are shaped so that the owl can fly silently, not only softening the edges of the feathers so sound is reduced, but lowering the frequencies of the sounds produced by the feathers so that it’s below the prey’s hearing spectrum, while the owl can hear itself and other owls flying just fine. Researchers are studying owl feathers to help design quieter airplane wings, wind turbines, and other machines.

Most bird feathers are somewhat waterproof because when a bird preens, it spreads oil over the feathers. Owls don’t do this, which means owls can’t hunt in wet weather.

An owl swallows its prey whole. Teeth, claws, some bones, hair, and feathers can’t be digested, so instead of passing through the digestive system, these indigestible pieces are compacted into pellets in the gizzard and regurgitated by the owl before it eats its next meal. Researchers study owl pellets to determine what an owl is eating. Some other birds of prey make pellets too, including hawks and eagles.

There are a lot of superstitions about owls, just as there are about bats. Some cultures believe that an owl calling around a home means someone who lives there is going to die, but some cultures consider owls lucky. Owls are also known for their wisdom, and I do not know where this comes from because they’re no smarter or dumber than any other bird. Actually, I do know where this comes from. The owl was associated with the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena.

If you wonder why anyone would think an owl’s call is a bad omen, you may not have heard an owl call. Sure, some owls make jolly little hoot-hoot sounds. But some sound like this:

[screech owl call]

That’s an eastern screech owl, and I recorded it myself in my own driveway a few weeks ago. It sounds like a ghost. A lot of owls sound like ghosts. I mean, I’ve never actually heard a ghost. I’m just making an assumption that they sound scary. Maybe people who hear scary owl calls didn’t know what was making the sound, and assumed they were made by ghosts.

Some people even call barn owls ghost owls. Some farmers in Florida and other areas have started putting up nest boxes to attract barn owls, because owls hunt rats that damage sugar cane and other crops. Putting up owl nest boxes is a lot less expensive and better for the environment than rat poison. The common barn owl lives throughout much of the world. It’s brown or gray on its back, white underneath, and with a white face and dark eyes. It’s a medium-sized owl with a wingspan of about three feet, or 95 cm. This is what it sounds like:

[barn owl call]

Let’s finish with a creepy little story I found in a book called The Telltale Lilac Bush by Ruth Ann Musick. It’s a collection of ghost tales from West Virginia, and Musick was a folklorist who collected the tales with the help of her students. I reread the book this week hoping to find mention of an owl to close out this episode. Instead, I found this. Listen and decide what you think really landed on this poor man’s back during his ride through the night. It’s a story called “A Ride with the Devil,” collected in 1955 and related to the student by his mother, as told to her by her mother.

“One dark evening, about one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather had a strange experience. He was riding his horse back from a small country store somewhere in Randolph County in the vicinity of Mill Creek. He heard something that sounded like a log chain falling from a tree, and then he felt the presence of something on the horse behind him.

“He was frightened half out of his wits, but he turned his head around to see what the thing was. First he saw long claws that were digging into the flesh on his shoulder. He thought that a bear had jumped behind him on his horse, but, turning his head farther around, he found himself staring straight into two fire-red eyes. The creature had hardly any nose, but there were two protruding objects on his head that looked like horns. He was face to face with Satan himself! He tried many times to shake him off his back. He pushed. He tried racing his horse to get rid of him. But all this did no good. Satan clung to his back with those razorlike claws through it all.

“As he came within sight of his home, a strange thing happened. To his utter surprise, the thing disappeared.

“Upon arriving home, he slowly walked into the house. His wife noticed his torn shirt and bleeding shoulder and was terrified.

“He told her the whole story, but asked her never to say anything about it to anyone. Then he said something else. He said, ‘I have just seen the devil, and it won’t be long now before he gets me.’

“Exactly three weeks from that chance meeting with the devil, Grandfather fell while repairing his tobacco shed and was killed almost instantly. His last word before he died was ‘Water!'”

On a possibly related note, this is what a great horned owl sounds like:

[great horned owl hoot]

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 090: Spiders! NO COME BACK, IT’S SAFE TO LISTEN

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As we get closer and closer to Halloween, the monsters get scarier and scarier! Okay, spiders are not technically monsters, but some people think they are. Don’t worry, I keep descriptions to a minimum so arachnophobes should be okay! This week we learn about some spider friends and some spider mysteries.

I stole the above cartoon from here. I am sorry, Science World.

A cape made from golden silk orbweaver silk:

Further reading and listening:

Blue spiders

Varmints! Podcast scorpions episode

Show transcript:

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

It’s almost Halloween! I’m on the third bag of gummi spiders, although they’ve changed the flavor from last year so I only eat the orange and yellow ones. The purple and green ones are in the bucket to give out to unsuspecting children.

Speaking of spiders…yes, I’m going there. I realize a lot of people are scared of spiders, but they’re beautiful, fascinating animals that are associated with Halloween. Don’t worry, I will try hard not to say anything that will set off anyone’s arachnophobia. Besides, there are some mysterious spiders out there that I think you’ll find really interesting.

First off, you don’t have to worry about gigantic spiders like in the movies. Spiders have an exoskeleton like other arthropods, and if a spider got too big, some researchers think its exoskeleton would weigh so much the spider wouldn’t be able to move. Not only that, spiders have a respiratory system that isn’t nearly as efficient as that of most vertebrates, so giant spiders couldn’t exist because they wouldn’t be able to get enough oxygen to function.

Specifically, some spiders have a tracheal system of breathing, like most insects and other arthropods also have. These are breathing tubes that allow air to pass through the exoskeleton and into the body, but it’s a passive process and spiders don’t actually breathe in and out. Other spiders have what are called book lungs. The book lung is made up of a stack of soft plates sort of like the pages of a book. Oxygen passes through the plates and is absorbed into the blood, which by the way is pale blue. This is also a passive process.

In other words, that picture that’s forever popping up on facebook of the enormous spider on the side of someone’s house, it’s photoshopped. In fact, pretty much any photo you see of a gigantic spider or insect or other arthropod is either photoshopped or made to look bigger by forced perspective. Also, spiders with wings are photoshopped, because no spider has ever had wings, even fossil spiders all the way back to the dawn of spider history, over 300 million years ago. So that’s one less thing to worry about.

Spiders live all over the world, everywhere except in the ocean and in Antarctica. The smallest spider known is .37 mm, so basically microscopic. It lives in Colombia and basically lives out its whole life not knowing most things about the world, like what whales are and how to operate a smart phone. On the other hand, the largest spider in the world is a tarantula called the goliath birdeater, and it probably also doesn’t know what whales are and how to use a smartphone. The goliath birdeater is the heaviest spider at a bit over 6 ounces, or 175 g, and has a legspan of 11inches, or 28 cm. Despite its name, it mostly eats insects but it will occasionally eat frogs, small rodents, small snakes, and worms. It lives in swampy areas in the rainforests of northeastern South America.

The spider with the biggest legspan—yes, I know, some of you are freaking out but I can’t do an episode about spiders and not talk about the biggest spiders. The spider with the biggest legspan is the giant huntsman, which lives around cave entrances in Laos, a country in southeast Asia. And it’s not much bigger than the goliath birdeater, with a legspan of one foot, or 30 cm.

All spiders produce silk but not all of them make webs. I won’t go into the process of how a spider generates silk, because it’s complicated and I just read about it and have already forgotten all the details, but spiders use silk to wrap up their eggs safely, line the walls of burrows to make a comfortable home, wrap up prey so it can’t escape, and of course make webs and get around without falling off tall things.

Most spider silk appears white, but the golden silk orb-weaver produces golden silk. The spider itself is gorgeous, with striped legs and a body that can be yellow, red, greenish, or brown, often with white spots and delicate patterns. It lives all over the world in warm climates, especially Australia. It builds webs that can be several feet across, or over a meter, and it occasionally catches and eats small birds as well as insects. One was even spotted eating a small snake that had been caught in its web. Its silk has occasionally been used to make cloth, but spider silk is difficult to collect in the quantities needed for textiles.

Most spiders eat insects, although one spider eats plants. Just one. It lives in Central America. Some baby spiders eat nectar until they get big enough to catch prey. Some spiders will scavenge on dead insects, some will eat fruit as well as insects, many eat pollen that gets caught on their webs, and some eat each other. Some spiders are adapted to swim in freshwater, and while they mostly eat aquatic insects, they will catch and eat small fish. Some spiders also catch and eat small birds and bats.

Basically, there are too many spiders to cover everything about them in one episode. Besides, what we all really want to know about are the mystery spiders. Because it’s almost Halloween!

Our first mystery spider is from Africa, specifically the jungles of central Africa. In 1938, an English couple, Reginald and Margurite Lloyd, were driving through the jungle when what looked like a monkey or cat stepped onto the dirt road. They stopped the car so it could cross the road, at which point they saw it was a spider. It looked like a tarantula but was huge, with a legspan of up to three feet, or almost a meter. Before Reginald Lloyd could grab his camera, the spider disappeared into the undergrowth.

Supposedly, the same giant spider was reported in the 1890s by a British missionary named Arthur John Simes. Some of his men got tangled in a huge web and a pair of spiders came out and attacked them. The larger of the spiders, presumably the female, was four feet across, or 1.2 meters. Simes was bitten but shot one of the spiders and was able to escape. He ultimately died of the bite.

This seems less than believable, to put it gently. The largest spider that catches prey with a web is our friend the golden silk orbweaver, but its legspan is only five inches across, or 12 cm. The biggest spiders in the world are tarantulas and other spiders that hunt actively, none of which build webs.

A more believable giant-spider mystery is called the up-island spider, which is supposed to be an extra-large variety of wolf spider from parts of Maine in the United States. Its legspan is supposed to be as much as 8 inches across, or 20 cm. Wolf spiders are common throughout the world, and while they look scary, they bite people very rarely and their venom is weak, no worse than a bee sting. The wolf spider with the biggest legspan is Hogna ingens, with a legspan less than 5 inches, or 12 cm. Hogna ingens lives on one island in the Maderia archipelago, and is a beautiful soft grey with white stripes on the legs. It’s critically endangered, but Bristol Zoo in England has a successful captive breeding program underway so it won’t go extinct. The species of wolf spider most commonly found in Maine is probably Tigrosa helluo, but it’s not very big, only a couple of inches across at most, or maybe five cm. It’s likely that the up-island spider is actually the Carolina wolf spider, which can have a legspan of four inches, or 10 cm, but I can tell you from personal experience that they look a whole lot bigger if you see one in your garage or basement when you flip on the light. The Carolina wolf spider does live in Maine, but it’s not very common in the area.

Zoologist Karl Shuker has a blog post from 2010, with some later updates, about spiders that are normal sized except for being blue, in species that aren’t normally blue. It’s an interesting post and I’ll link to it in the show notes if you want to read it and look at the pictures he posts. He discusses a number of blue spiders readers have reported to him, and while one seems to have been spraypainted blue, the rest appear naturally colored blue.

As it happens, there are lots of reports of blue spiders out there—and other blue invertebrates like woodlice. According Shuker’s post, some of these have been studied and found to be suffering from a virus called invertebrate iridovirus, or IIV. This infects invertebrates and sometimes is so highly concentrated in the animal’s tissues that it forms crystalline aggregations that emit blue iridescence and make the animal look blue. I should stress that you can’t catch IIV if you are a mammal, bird, reptile, fish, or anything else with a backbone, which I am assuming is most of my listeners.

The ancestors of spiders evolved around 380 million years ago, although those animals probably couldn’t generate silk. They did have eight legs, though. True spiders date to around 300 million years ago. Those spiders had silk spinnerets in the middle of the abdomen instead of at the end, and modern spiders appeared around 250 million years ago. We have fossil spiders and we also have spiders preserved in amber, the resin of certain trees that later fossilizes but remains at least partly transparent. We even have a spider web preserved in amber and dated to 110 million years ago, along with several insects that had been trapped in the web.

Spiders are closely related to whip scorpions, also called whip spiders because they look superficially similar to spiders in some ways except that they are HORRIFYING and I cannot look at pictures of them right now, I just can’t. While whip scorpions have eight legs, they only walk on six of them. The front pair are more like feelers and are elongated. Other whip scorpions have long, thin tails and are sometimes called vinegaroons, because if they’re disturbed they squirt a liquid that smells like vinegar. Some whip scorpions look a lot like scorpions. I don’t want to talk about scorpions. In fact, I’m just going to stop talking entirely, because while spiders don’t bother me, scorpions do and I cannot look at these pictures anymore, okay? If you want to learn about scorpions, Varmints! Podcast just released a scorpions episode. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Eventually I’ll manage to listen to it myself.

Happy Halloween?

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 088: Megabats and the Ahool

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Our next Halloween monster is the ahool, a mystery bat from Indonesia and Java, but along the way we’ll learn about megabats in general–especially the hammerhead bat! Thanks to Grace, Grace’s sons, and Tania for the hammerhead bat suggestion!

I’ve unlocked a Patreon bonus episode about burrowing bats, which you can listen to here.

A hammerhead bat (male) from side and front. DAT SNOOT. (Photos by Sarah Olson and swiped off the web, because I have no shame.)

The Egyptian fruit bat (Photo by Amram Zabari and swiped etc etc):

Great flying foxes, sleepin (photo by Lars Petersson and swiped etc etc):

Golden-crowned flying fox, flyin (photo by Dave Irving and swiped etc etc):

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about bats—some real, some mysterious, and all of them awesome, because bats are awesome! Listeners Grace and Grace’s sons requested an episode about hammerhead bats recently, which made me realize two things. One, I had never actually done a bats episode even though bats are one of my favorite animals, and two, back when listener Tania suggested hammerhead worms and other hammerhead animals, I totally forgot hammerhead bats were a thing!

As a special Halloween treat, I’ve unlocked a Patreon episode about burrowing bats that anyone can now listen to. I’ll put a link in the show notes, which you can click to listen on your browser. You don’t need a Patreon login or anything.

Bats are grouped into two basic types, microbats and megabats. Microbats are typical bats, usually small, flat-faced with big ears, that use echolocation to catch insects at night. Megabats are typically larger, with limited echolocation abilities and longer muzzles, and they often eat fruit. They’re sometimes called fruit bats collectively. We’re going to focus on megabats in this episode.

Let’s start with the hammerhead bat. It lives in parts of Africa near the equator, in forests and swamps, and mostly eats fruit. It especially likes figs. So do I, big flappy bat friend. It’s a big bat, with a wingspan over three feet wide, or 97 cm. Males are larger than females, and males tend to fly farther to find fruit while females generally stick to areas they know.

During the day the hammerhead bat roosts high up in trees. Researchers think it’s nocturnal mostly because it tends to overheat while flying. Naturally it prefers to nap when it’s hottest out and is only active at night when it’s cooler.

The hammerhead bat’s body is furry, with leathery wings and a mostly bare nose, although it also has long whiskers. Its fur is mostly brown or gray-brown, but its shoulders are white and it has a tuft of white fur at the base of its ears. Its tail is short and its eyes are large.

Most of what a hammerhead bat does is typical for other fruit bats. But it differs from other fruit bats in a big way. The hammerhead bat gets its name from the male’s face, which looks sort of mooselike with a big snoot, big lips, cheek pouches, a split lower lip, and a larynx that’s really big for the size of the throat. All these features allow the male hammerhead bat to make really loud honking noises to attract females. Females have smaller faces that resemble a fox or dog rather than a moose.

Often, males gather at night to honk and flap their massive wings, showing off for the females. Females fly around, checking the males out and probably giggling with each other about which ones they like best and who’s got the best voice.

This is what the hammerhead bat sounds like, although it’s not a great audio clip. At least it gives you an idea of what these bats sound like:

[hammerhead bats honking]

There are reports of the hammerhead bat attacking chickens and other birds to eat them. Fruit isn’t all that high in protein, so it could be that a bat occasionally needs nutrients it can’t get from its usual diet. This is not that uncommon in herbivorous animals, as it happens. Cows will occasionally eat chickens, deer and sheep will eat baby birds when they find them, and so forth.

Fruit bats of all kinds also visit mineral licks, especially pregnant females. But researchers have found that fruit bats don’t actually need those trace minerals. Fruit is rich in minerals. Researchers think the mineral-rich clay actually acts as a detoxifier for the bats, helping reduce the toxic effects of secondary plant compounds—leaves and unripe sections of the fruit, and so forth—that the bats eat every night that could otherwise make them sick.

Not a whole lot is known about the hammerhead bat or other megabats, for that matter. A recent discovery about how fruit bats navigate in the darkness suggests they actually use a rudimentary form of echolocation, but it’s very different from the echolocation used by microbats. For one thing, the clicking sounds they make aren’t vocalizations, they’re produced by the wings as the bat flies. For another, while the echolocation does help bats navigate, it’s not very accurate. Bats still sometimes crash into things. Researchers think echolocation has evolved separately in bats and that the megabat echolocation is not related to microbat echolocation.

The Egyptian fruit bat uses a more sophisticated version of echolocation, clicking its tongue to produce the signals it uses. It’s a relatively small megabat, with a wingspan of about two feet, or 60 cm, and it eats fruit, especially wild dates. Its echolocation is more like dolphin and whale sonar than microbat echolocation. It also has good eyesight and can easily switch between visual navigation and echolocating depending on how much light it has available.

Fruit bats are amazing flyers. Their wings are modified arms, with the fingers enormously elongated. The fingers are connected with tough but flexible skin called a membrane. Researchers have found that the membrane contains tiny muscles barely thicker than a hair that help the bat fine-tune the stiffness and shape of the membranes. This allows it to fly efficiently and quickly.

Many farmers think megabats destroy fruit crops, so they try to kill or drive off the bats. But while fruit bats do sometimes visit fruit farms, they are most likely to eat overripe fruit that was missed by pickers. This helps keep fungus and insect pests to a minimum, so it’s actually beneficial to fruit farmers. Unfortunately, many people just don’t like bats and blame them for damage to crops that’s actually done by other animals and by birds.

For instance, in Australia the flying fox is blamed for fruit crop destruction and the spreading of the Hendra virus and other diseases. But the flying fox mostly eats blossoms, especially of gum trees, along with insects, leaves, nectar, and some fruit. Birds are much more damaging to orchards. And while all bats can carry diseases, just as all mammals can, it’s not proven that the Hendra virus is spread by flying foxes at all. Domestic cats, on the other hand, do spread the virus. Keep your cats indoors. But the flying fox has been systematically persecuted in Australia for the last century, with several species having gone extinct as a result. This is a shame for many reasons, but especially because fruit bats of all kinds are important to the environment as seed dispersers and pollinators.

The biggest bat alive today is probably the great flying fox, which lives in New Guinea, Indonesia, and other nearby areas. Its wingspan can be nearly six feet across, or 1.8 meters. The golden-crowned flying fox, which lives in the Philippines, is very nearly as large, with a wingspan of over five and a half feet across, or 1.7 meters.

But there are reports of bats much larger than these. And that brings us to the ahool, a monstrous batlike creature reported from Java, Indonesia, and other areas.

The first official report of an animal called the ahool comes from western Java in 1927. Naturalist Dr. Ernst Bartels was in bed but still awake when he heard a loud call that sounded something like “a-hool!” Bartels rushed outside with a flashlight in hopes of seeing what animal had made the call, but he heard it again farther away, then again almost out of earshot.

As it happens, Bartels had grown up in western Java and knew about the legend of the ahool. It was supposed to be a monstrous bat, its wingspan some 12 feet across, or 3.6 meters. Its face was monkey-like with large eyes, and it was supposed to have feet that pointed backwards. During the day it was supposed to live in caves hidden behind waterfalls, but at night it flew out and scooped fish from the river.

Bartels did more research into the ahool legend, and eventually Ivan Sanderson, a cryptozoologist who had his hand in everything back in the day, contacted him with his own account. In 1932 Sanderson said he had seen a gigantic black bat in western Africa one night. He and his companion, naturalist Gerald Russell, had been searching for tortoises in a river when the bat flew over them. They both estimated its wingspan as 12 feet, and Sanderson said he could even see the sharp teeth in its open mouth.

Now, I can’t help but be skeptical of Sanderson’s sighting just because Sanderson was always having remarkable cryptozoological sightings with no proof but his own say-so. No one’s that lucky and unlucky at the same time. Dude should have carried a camera with him at all times, you know? Also, Bartels’ story was documented by Sanderson and is therefore a little bit suspect too.

But the ahool is an interesting cryptid because its description sounds so plausible. Even the backwards feet make sense, as bat feet have evolved to allow bats to hang upside down easily, which means when they’re right side up, their feet do appear to be backwards.

There are some discrepancies, though. Megabats all have long muzzles compared to microbats. The ahool is specifically described as having a flat face like a human or a monkey. While megabats aren’t all 100% frugivorous—that is, they don’t all eat nothing but fruit—none of them are known to eat fish. Some microbats do specialize in catching fish, though, and those bats all have longer snouts than typical insectivorous bats, although not as long as megabat snouts. And the ahool is said to stand or sit upright on the ground occasionally. While microbats sometimes do stand upright, megabats never do.

Sanderson proposed that the ahool may actually be an enormous microbat. Some microbats are actually pretty big, including the carnivorous ghost bat, also called the false vampire bat, which lives in parts of northern Australia. Its wingspan is almost 20 inches, or 50 cm. This is much larger than the smallest megabat, the spotted-winged fruit bat, which has a wingspan of only 11 inches, or 28 cm.

But microbats don’t make a lot of noise. It’s megabats who honk and call to each other rather than just squeaking. The ahool is supposedly named for its loud cry, the one Bartels heard. And remember that Bartels never saw the animal he heard.

So we have a few possibilities here.

Possibility one: the ahool is a real animal, exactly or mostly as described, with aspects of both megabats and microbats. It’s either incredibly rare or extinct these days, which would explain why there aren’t more sightings. If this is the case, it’s undoubtedly an animal completely new to science.

Possibility two: the ahool is a real animal, but it’s not well known because it’s so seldom seen. It seems to be a mixture of microbat and megabat because people who saw it made assumptions of its appearance based on what they know about bats. But some of those details are from microbats and some from megabats, and the actual animal may not look anything like its description in folklore. In this case, it’s probably a megabat.

Possibility three: the ahool is an animal entirely of folklore and myth, described as similar to various bats familiar to locals but enormously large. In this case, the myth may have grown up around the call, if the ahool’s call is that of a rare or migratory bird, seldom heard and therefore mysterious.

I can’t even make a guess as to which possibility might be the most likely, and that’s pretty awesome.

Let’s go back to the hammerhead bat for another mystery. A few years ago people started pointing out that the hammerhead bat looked a lot like drawings of the Jersey Devil, a cryptid supposedly seen in the southern New Jersey pine barrens. Newspaper accounts of the Jersey devil started circulating in the early years of the 20th century, although it may have been an established folktale before then. It’s usually described as having the head of a goat, bat wings, cloven hooves, and a forked tail, although its description varies from story to story. It’s more of an urban legend than a real cryptozoological mystery, to be honest. In 1909 a couple of guys bought a circus kangaroo, glued fake bat wings on it, and claimed they’d captured the Jersey devil.

So could someone have brought a male hammerhead bat to New Jersey and released it, where it subsequently inspired reports of the Jersey devil? I’m going to say no. The hammerhead bat can’t survive in cold weather, and if temperatures drop below 55 degrees F, or about 13 degrees C, it can’t even fly. Even if someone had captured one and somehow managed to keep it alive during the journey from equatorial Africa, how and why did it end up in the pine barrens of New Jersey? A bat that big would have excited comment even if only glimpsed in a cage on the docks, and would probably have been a big draw in traveling menageries. But there are no records of any giant bats in the area, and the theory that the Jersey devil was inspired by a hammerhead bat is a modern one. It’s still pretty cool, though.

Because bats are nocturnal and look scary, a lot of superstitions have grown up around them. Some cultures consider bats lucky, some unlucky. Some say you have to kill a bat to cancel out its bad luck, some say harming a bat will bring bad luck. But bats would avoid people completely if they could, and you don’t have anything to fear from them, not even bad luck.

I mean, except for the kind that can turn into actual vampires. Those are scary. Fortunately they only exist in horror movies.

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Thanks for listening!