Episode 268: Rediscovered Animals!

Posted on March 21, 2022 by strangeanimalspodcast

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My little cat Gracie got lost but she’s home! Let’s learn about some other rediscovered animals this week!

A very happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have the best birthday ever!

Further listening:

The Casual Birder Podcast (where you can hear me talk about birding in Belize!)

Further reading:

Bornean Rajah Scops Owl Rediscovered After 125 Years

Shock find brings extinct mouse back from the dead

Rediscovery of the ‘extinct’ Pinatubo volcano mouse

Gracie, home at last! She’s so SKINNY after a whole week being lost but she’s eating lots now:

The Bornean Rajah scops owl (photo from article linked above):

The djoongari is the same as the supposedly extinct Gould’s mouse (photo from article linked above):

The Pinatubo volcano mouse:

Show transcript:

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

While I was researching animals discovered in 2021, I came across some rediscoveries. I thought that would make a fun episode, so here are three animals that were thought to be extinct but were found again!

A couple of quick things before we get started, though.

First, happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have a brilliant birthday and that it involves family, friends, or at least your favorite kind of cake, but hopefully all three.

Next, a few weeks ago I appeared on the Casual Birder Podcast talking in depth about my trip to Belize and some of the birds I saw there. I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a great podcast that I really recommend if you’re interested in birding at all, and the host has such a lovely calming voice I also recommend it if you just like to have a pleasant voice in the background while you do other stuff.

Finally, thanks for the well wishes from last week, when I let our emergency episode run. I’m actually fine, but my little cat Gracie got frightened while I was bringing her into the house from a vet visit, and she ran away. That was on Friday, March 11 and I spent all night looking for her, but then we had a late-season snowstorm come through and dump six inches of snow on my town, which made me even more frantic. At dawn on Saturday I put on my boots and heavy coat and spent all day searching for Gracie, and on Sunday I was still searching for her. I didn’t have time to work on a new episode. In fact, I searched every day as much as possible all week long, until I was certain she was gone forever. I couldn’t bring myself to work on this episode because rediscovered animals just seemed like a cruel joke when my little cat was gone. I was almost done with a different episode when on Saturday night, March 19, 2022, eight full days after Gracie had disappeared, I got a phone call. Someone had seen a little gray cat under their shed, over half a mile from my house! I rushed over and THERE WAS GRACIE! I found her! She is home!

So I’ve been researching rediscovered animals with Gracie purring in my lap, in between her going to her bowl to eat. She’s lost a lot of weight but other than that she seems healthy, and she’s very happy to be home.

The person who found Gracie first noticed her around their birdfeeder, so we’ll start with a rediscovered bird.

There are two subspecies of Rajah scops owl that are only found on two islands in southeast Asia, Borneo and Sumatra. The subspecies that lives in Sumatra is fairly common throughout the mountains on that island, where it lives in the lower branches of trees in higher elevations. It’s a tiny owl that only weighs about 4 ounces, or 100 grams. As the article I link to in the show notes points out, that’s about the weight of four AA batteries.

The subspecies that lives on Borneo, though, was always much rarer and had a much smaller range. In fact, no one had seen one since 1892 and researchers thought it was probably extinct. There’s another owl that lives in the mountains of Borneo, the mountain scops owl, that’s fairly common.

In May of 2016, a team of scientists started a 10-year study of birds that lived on Mount Kinabalu in the country of Malaysia in northern Borneo. One team member, Keegan Tranquillo, was checking bird nests that very same month and noticed an owl that didn’t look like the mountain scops owl. It was larger and its plumage was different.

Tranquillo contacted ecologist and bird expert Andy Boyce, who came out to take a look. When he saw the owl, Boyce was excited at first but then filled with anxiety. He knew the owl must be incredibly rare and would be in great danger of going extinct if conservation efforts weren’t put into place. Many areas of Borneo are under pressure from logging, mining, and palm oil plantations, which is leading to habitat loss all over the island.

Not only that, the more Boyce looked at the owl, the more he noticed differences from the Sumatran subspecies of Rajah scops owl. He suspected it might not be a subspecies but a completely separate species. That made it even more important to protect the owl and study it.

The owl’s rediscovery was announced in May 2021. Studies of the owl are ongoing but hopefully will soon result in more information about it and its habitat.

Next, let’s talk about a rodent, since Gracie likes to play with toy mice. This rediscovery came from Australia, where a study of extinct Australian rodents and their living relations found something surprising. It’s the opposite of the owl we just talked about, that might end up being a separate species of its own.

The mouse in question was once called Gould’s mouse. It used to be common throughout Australia, where it’s a native mammal, but it was declared extinct in 1990 after no one had seen it since the 1840s. Researchers suspected it had gone extinct after colonizers brought cats to Australia, although diseases and competition from introduced species of mice and rats also had a big impact.

Meanwhile, another native mouse, called the djoongari or Shark Bay mouse, was driven nearly to extinction. Fortunately, the djoongari survived on a few islands off western Australia. Conservation efforts in 2003 introduced it to more islands, where it spread and did well. It’s a social mouse that lives in family groups in a burrow it digs under bushes. It lines the burrow with dry grass to make it warmer and more comfortable.

The djoongari is a large mouse, up to 4.5 inches long not counting the tail, or 11.5 centimeters. The tail is a little longer than the head and body combined. It has long, shaggy fur that’s a mixture of dark and light brown with a paler belly and feet, and it has a tuft of dark fur at the end of its tail like a tiny lion.

In early 2021, the researchers studying native rodent DNA realized that the living djoongari and the extinct Gould’s mouse had the exact same genetic profile! They were the same animal! That means Gould’s mouse didn’t go extinct, although technically it didn’t exist in the first place.

That doesn’t mean the djoongari is perfectly safe, of course. Its range is still extremely restricted and it’s vulnerable to the same factors that nearly drove it to extinction in the first place. But at least it’s still around and can be protected.

We’ll finish with another mouse. In 1991, a volcano in the Philippines erupted. The volcano was called Mount Pinatubo on the island of Luzon, and the eruption was enormous. It was ten times stronger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Lava and ash filled valleys up to 600 feet deep, or 183 meters. More than 800 people died from the eruption itself and the devastation afterwards, during landslides caused by all the ash every time it rained.

In addition to the awful situation for people, animals were affected too. Most of the forests near the volcano were completely destroyed. Scientists thought the Pinatubo volcano mouse had probably gone extinct since it only lived on that one volcanic mountain, which had just blown up. Surveys of the area a few years after the eruption didn’t turn up signs of any of the mice.

The Pinatubo volcano mouse was only described in 1962 from a single specimen collected in 1956. It was a large mouse, almost the size of a rat, with long hind legs for jumping and climbing and a tail much longer than the length of its head and body together. It mostly ate earthworms and other small animals, but not a lot was known about it.

More than 20 years after the eruption, a team of scientists surveyed the animals living on the mountain. The conditions were difficult for the team to navigate, since there was still a lot of ash and erosion in the area that made the steep slopes unstable. The lush forests were gone, replaced by grass and bamboo, shrubs, a few trees, and other plants. They didn’t expect to find a lot of animals, although they thought they’d find introduced species of rats and mice that had moved into the disturbed areas from other parts of the island.

But to their surprise, they found 17 species of mammal on the mountain. Eight were bats, there were wild pigs and deer, and the rest were rodents. And the rodents were mostly native species, not introduced ones—including the Pinatubo volcano mouse!

Researchers theorize that a mouse that lives on an active volcano as its only habitat must have evolved to weather occasional eruptions. The mice were actually most numerous in the places that had been the most destroyed. The term for a species that thrives in environments that have seen widespread natural destruction is “disturbance specialist,” and that’s just what these mice are.

It just goes to show that no matter how bad things may be, there is life. And where there’s life, there’s hope. And probably mice.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go make a chocolate cake to take to the person who found Gracie.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 263: Pair Bonds

Posted on February 14, 2022 by strangeanimalspodcast

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Thanks to Ella and Jack for this week’s topic suggestion, animals that mate for life or develop pair bonds! Happy Valentine’s Day!

Further reading:

Wisdom the albatross, now 70, hatches yet another chick

The prairie vole mates for life:

Swans mate for life:

The black vulture also mates for life:

The Laysan albatross:

Wisdom the Laysan albatross with her 2021 chick (pic from the link listed above). I hope I look that good at 70:

Dik-diks!

The dik-dik nose is somewhat prehensile:

The pileated gibbon (and other gibbons) forms pair bonds:

Show transcript:

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

Last February Ella and her son Jack suggested a Valentine’s Day topic. I already had the February episodes finished last year, but this year Valentine’s Day falls on a Monday and that just seems too perfect to pass up. So thanks to Ella and Jack, we’re going to learn about some animals that are monogamous.

Valentine’s Day falls on February 14th and in many European cultures is a day celebrating love and romance. It also falls at the very beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere, when many animals start finding mates.

Different species of animal have different relationships. Some animals are social, some are solitary. Every species is different because every species has slightly different requirements for reproducing due to different habitats, foods, how much care the babies need, and so forth.

There are different types of monogamy among animals and it can get complicated, just as it’s often complicated in people, so I’m going to simplify it for this episode into two categories: animals that mate for life and animals that form pair bonds. Animals that mate for life, meaning the male and female seek each other out every mating season to have babies together, don’t necessarily spend all their time together outside of mating season. Animals in pair bonds spend a lot of their time together, but they don’t always exclusively mate with each other. But some animals do both.

For instance, the prairie vole. This is a little rodent that lives in dry grasslands in central North America, in parts of the United States and Canada. It’s about the size of a mouse with a short tail although it’s more chonky than a mouse, like a small dark brown hamster. It spends most of its time either in a shallow burrow it digs among grass roots or out finding the plant material and insects it eats by traveling through aboveground tunnels it makes through densely packed plant stems. It lives in colonies and is a social animal most of the time, and the male in particular is devoted to his mate. He’s so devoted that once he’s found a mate, he will even drive away other females who approach him.

The only time the prairie vole isn’t social is during mating season, which is usually twice a year, in fall and in spring. At that time, mated pairs leave the colony and find a small territory to have their babies. The pair spends almost all their time together, grooming each other, finding and sharing food, and building a nest for the babies. When the babies are born, both parents help care for them.

The male prairie vole mates for life. Most of the time “mating for life” means that if one of a pair dies, the other will then find a new mate. But for the male prairie vole, if his mate dies, he stays single for the rest of his life. He also shows behaviors that are similar to grief in humans. The female prairie vole is a little more practical and although she also grieves if her mate dies, she’ll eventually find another mate. Researchers who study prairie voles have discovered that the hormones found in mated pairs are the same as those in humans who are in love.

That’s so sweet, and I wish I didn’t have to talk about the voles dying. I think the opposite of love isn’t hate; the opposite of love is grief. It’s okay to be sad even for a long time when someone you love dies or moves far away, or if your own pair bond doesn’t work out. It’s also okay to find happy moments even when you’re grieving. Life is complicated. Also, just going to point out, devoted as they are to each other, sometimes a prairie vole will mate with someone besides their own mate.

One bird that’s famous for being monogamous is the swan. It mates for life and also forms pair bonds. These pair bonds form while the swans are still young, and the young couples basically just hang out together long before they’re old enough to have babies. It’s no wonder pictures of swans appear on so many wedding invitations and Valentine’s day cards. It helps that they’re beautiful birds too. The black vulture also mates for life but no one puts vultures on a wedding invitation. Also, swans sometimes split up and find new mates. Things don’t always work out with a pair bond, even for swans.

Another large, beautiful bird that mates for life is the albatross, but it doesn’t form a pair bond. Most of the time the albatross is solitary, traveling thousands of miles a year as it soars above the open ocean, looking for squid, small fish, and other food near the surface of the water. But once a year in some species, and once every two years in other species, albatrosses return to their nesting grounds and seek out their mate.

Albatrosses live a very long time so are really picky about who they choose as a mate. Once a pair forms, they develop a complicated, elegant dance to perform together. Each couple’s dance is unique, which helps them find each other in a crowded nesting colony when they haven’t seen each other in a couple of years.

The oldest wild bird in the world that we know of is a Laysan albatross named Wisdom. She was tagged by scientists in 1956 when she was at least five years old already, and as of 2021 she was still healthy and producing healthy chicks with her mate. Her leg tag has had to be replaced six times because she’s outlasting the material used to make the tags.

The Laysan albatross is a smaller species of albatross, with a wingspan of not quite 7 feet, or over two meters. Its body is mostly white, although its back is gray, with black and gray wings and a dark smudge across the eyes that looks very dramatic. It spends most of the time in the northern Pacific between the west coast of North America and the east coast of Asia, but it only nests on 16 tiny islands. Most of these are part of the Hawaiian islands with a few near Japan, but recently new breeding colonies have been spotted on islands off the coast of Mexico.

Wisdom the albatross is estimated to be at least 70 years old as of 2021 and she’s raised 30 to 36 chicks successfully. Because of her age, which is old even for an albatross, she may have outlived her first mate and taken another. She’s been with her current mate since at least 2012.

Albatrosses only lay one egg during nesting season. Both parents help incubate the egg and feed the baby when it hatches. It takes two or three months for the egg to hatch, depending on the species. Once the egg hatches, it’s at least another 5 or 6 months before the chick is old enough to leave the nest and care for itself, and in some species this is as much as 9 months. This means a big time and energy investment for both parents.

Albatrosses don’t reach sexual maturity until they’re at least five years old. Birds younger than this still join the breeding colony and practice their dance moves for when they’re old enough to choose a mate.

Pair bonding and mating for life are common in birds, rare in amphibians, reptiles, and fish, and surprisingly rare in mammals. One mammal that both mates for life and forms a pair bond is a tiny antelope called a dik-dik.

The dik-dik lives in parts of eastern and southern Africa and is barely bigger than a rabbit, which it somewhat resembles in shape. It stands less than 16 inches tall at the shoulder, or 40 cm, although its back and rump are arched and rounded and so are actually higher than the shoulder. Females are usually larger than males, while only males have horns. The horns arch back from the head but because the male has a tuft of long hair on the top of his head, and because the horns are only about 3 inches long at most, or 7.5 cm, they can be hard to see.

The dik-dik has an elongated snout that’s somewhat prehensile. It lives in hot areas without much water, so it gets most of its moisture from the plants it eats. Most of the time hot weather doesn’t bother it, but on exceptionally hot days it can cool down by panting through its long nose. Its nose is lined with blood vessels close to the surface and it has special nose muscles that allow it to pant quickly. Air moving over the blood vessels helps cool the blood.

Because pretty much everything eats the dik-dik, traveling long distances to find a mate is dangerous. Once the dik-dik finds a mate, they stay together for life in a small territory and spend most of their time together. Females give birth to one fawn twice a year, and the fawn no longer needs its parents at about 7 months old. Parents drive away their grown offspring, who leave to find a mate and territory of their own.

Humans, of course, strongly pair bond because we’re such intensely social creatures, and many people choose a partner and stay with them for life. Then again, we don’t always. Surprisingly, our closest living cousins, the great apes, are also very social, but they don’t typically form pair bonds and females may mate with different males.

The gibbon, which is a lesser ape instead of a great ape, does often form long-lasting pair bonds. We’ve talked about various species of gibbon in previous episodes. Gibbons are the apes that sing elaborate duets with their mates, with their children sometimes joining in as a chorus.

Here’s a pair of pileated gibbons singing together. The female is named Molly and was in a rehabilitation center after being injured, but she found a wild mate while she was recovering:

[gibbons singing]

Thanks for listening!

Episode 262: Animals Discovered in 2021

Posted on February 7, 2022 by strangeanimalspodcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:49 — 17.2MB)

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It’s the second annual discoveries episode! Lots of animals new to science were described in 2021 so let’s find out about some of them.

Further reading:

First description of a new octopus species without using a scalpel

Marine Biologists Discover New Species of Octopus

Bleating or screaming? Two new, very loud, frog species described in eastern Australia

Meet the freaky fanged frog from the Philippines

New alpine moth solves a 180-year-old mystery

Meet the latest member of Hokie Nation, a newly discovered millipede that lives at Virginia Tech

Fourteen new species of shrew found on Indonesian island

New beautiful, dragon-like species of lizard discovered in the Tropical Andes

Newly discovered whale species—introducing Ramari’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon eueu)!

Scientists describe a new Himalayan snake species found via Instagram

The emperor dumbo octopus (deceased):

The star octopus:

New frog just dropped (that’s actually the robust bleating tree frog, already known):

The slender bleating tree frog:

The screaming tree frog:

The Mindoro fanged frog:

Some frogs do have lil bitty fangs:

The hidden Alpine moth, mystery solver:

The Hokie twisted-claw millipede:

One of 14 new species of shrew:

The snake picture that led to a discovery:

Show transcript:

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

This episode marks our 5th year anniversary! I also finally got the ebook download codes sent to everyone who backed the Kickstarter at that level. The paperback and hardback books will hopefully be ready for me to order by the end of February and I can get them mailed out to backers as soon as humanly possible. Then I’ll focus on the audiobook! A few Kickstarter backers still haven’t responded to the survey, either with their mailing address for a physical book or for names and birthdays for the birthday shout-outs, so if that’s you, please get that information to me!

Anyway, happy birthday to Strange Animals Podcast and let’s learn about some animals new to science in 2021!

It’s easy to think that with all the animals already known, and all the people in the world, surely there aren’t very many new animals that haven’t been discovered yet. But the world is a really big place and parts of it, especially the oceans, have hardly been explored by scientists.

It can be confusing to talk about when an animal was discovered because there are multiple parts to a scientific discovery. The first part is actually finding an animal that the field scientists think might be new to science. Then they have to study the animal and compare it to known animals to determine whether it can be considered a new species or subspecies. Then they ultimately need to publish an official scientific description and give the new animal a scientific name. This process often takes years.

That’s what happened with the emperor dumbo octopus, which was first discovered in 2016. Only one individual was captured by a deep-sea rover and unfortunately it didn’t survive being brought to the surface. Instead of dissecting the body to study the internal organs, because it’s so rare, the research team decided to make a detailed 3D scan of the octopus’s body instead and see if that gave them enough information.

They approached a German medical center that specializes in brain and neurological issues, who agreed to make a scan of the octopus. It turned out that the scan was so detailed and clear that it actually worked better than dissection, plus it was non-invasive so the preserved octopus body is still intact and can be studied by other scientists. Not only that, the scan is available online for other scientists to study without them having to travel to Germany.

The emperor dumbo octopus grows around a foot long, or 30 cm, and has large fins on the sides of its mantle that look like elephant ears. There are 45 species of dumbo octopus known and obviously, more are still being discovered. They’re all deep-sea octopuses. This one was found near the sea floor almost 2.5 miles below the surface, or 4,000 meters. It was described in April of 2021 as Grimpoteuthis imperator.

Oh, and here’s a small correction from the octopus episode from a few years ago. When I was talking about different ways of pluralizing the word octopus, I mispronounced the word octopodes. It’s oc-TOP-uh-deez, not oc-tuh-podes.

Another octopus discovered in 2021 is called the star octopus that has a mantle length up to 7 inches long, or 18 cm. It lives off the southwestern coast of Australia in shallow water and is very common. It’s even caught by a local sustainable fishery. The problem is that it looks very similar to another common octopus, the gloomy octopus. The main difference is that the gloomy octopus is mostly gray or brown with rusty-red on its arms, while the star octopus is more of a yellowy-brown in color. Since individual octopuses show a lot of variation in coloration and pattern, no one noticed the difference until a recent genetic study of gloomy octopuses. The star octopus was described in November 2021 as Octopus djinda, where “djinda” is the word for star in the Nyoongar language of the area.

A study of the bleating tree frog in eastern Australia also led to a new discovery. The bleating tree frog is an incredibly loud little frog, but an analysis of sound recordings revealed that not all the calls were from the same type of frog. In fact, in addition to the bleating tree frog, there are two other really loud frog species in the same area. They look very similar but genetically they’re separate species. The two new species were described in November 2021 as the screaming tree frog and the slender bleating tree frog.

This is what the slender bleating tree frog sounds like:

[frog call]

This is what the screaming tree frog sounds like:

[another frog call]

Another newly discovered frog hiding in plain sight is the Mindoro fanged frog, found on Mindoro Island in the Philippines. It looks identical to the Acanth’s fanged frog on another island but its mating call is slightly different. That prompted scientists to use both acoustic tests of its calls and genetic tests of both frogs to determine that they are indeed separate species.

Lots of insects were discovered last year too. One of those, the hidden alpine moth, ended up solving a 180-year-old scientific mystery that no one even realized was a mystery.

The moth was actually discovered in the 1990s by researchers who were pretty sure it was a new species. It’s a diurnal moth, meaning it’s active during the day, and it lives throughout parts of the Alps. Its wingspan is up to 16mm and it’s mostly brown and silver.

Before they could describe it as a new species and give it a scientific name, the scientists had to make absolutely sure it hadn’t already been named. There are around 5,000 species of moth known to science that live in the Alps, many of them rare. The researchers narrowed it down finally to six little-known species, any one of which might turn out to be the same moth as the one they’d found.

Then they had to find specimens of those six species collected by earlier scientists, which meant hunting through the collections of different museums throughout Europe. Museums never have all their items on display at any given time. There’s always a lot of stuff in storage waiting for further study, and the larger a museum, the more stuff in storage it has. Finding one specific little moth can be difficult.

Finally, though, the scientists got all six of the other moth species together. When they sat down to examine and compare them to their new moth, they got a real surprise.

All six moths were actually the same species of moth, Dichrorampha alpestrana, described in 1843. They’d all been misidentified as new species and given new names over the last century and a half. But the new moth was different and at long last, in July 2021, it was named Dichrorampha velata. And those other six species were stricken from the record! Denied!

You don’t necessarily need to travel to remote places to find an animal new to science. A professor of taxonomy at Virginia Tech, a college in the eastern United States, turned over a rock by the campus’s duck pond and discovered a new species of millipede. It’s about three quarters of an inch long, or 2 cm, and is mostly a dark maroon in color. It’s called the Hokie twisted-claw millipede.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world on the island of Sulawesi, a team of scientists discovered FOURTEEN different species of shrew, all described in one paper at the end of December 2021. Fourteen! It’s the largest number of new mammals described at the same time since 1931. The inventory of shrews living on Sulawesi took about a decade so it’s not like they found them all at once, but it was still confusing trying to figure out what animal belonged to a known species and what animal might belong to a new species. Sulawesi already had 7 known species of shrew and now it has 21 in all.

Shrews are small mammals that mostly eat insects and are most closely related to moles and hedgehogs. Once you add the 14 new species, there are 461 known species of shrew living in the world, and odds are good there are more just waiting to be discovered. Probably not on Sulawesi, though. I think they got them all this time.

In South America, researchers in central Peru found a new species of wood lizard that they were finally able to describe in September 2021 after extensive field studies. It’s called the Feiruz wood lizard and it lives in the tropical Andes in forested areas near the Huallaga River. It’s related to iguanas and has a spiny crest down its neck and the upper part of its back. The females are usually a soft brown or green but males are brighter and vary in color from green to orangey-brown to gray, and males also have spots on their sides.

The Feiruz wood lizard’s habitat is fragmented and increasingly threatened by development, although some of the lizards do live in a national park. Researchers have also found a lot of other animals and plants new to science in the area, so hopefully it can be protected soon.

So far, all the animals we’ve talked about have been small. What about big animals? Well, in October 2021 a new whale was described. Is that big enough for you? It’s not even the same new whale we talked about in last year’s discoveries episode.

The new whale is called Mesoplodon eueu, or Ramari’s beaked whale. It’s been known about for a while but scientists thought it was a population of True’s beaked whale that lives in the Indian Ocean instead of the Atlantic.

When a dead whale washed ashore on the South Island of New Zealand in 2011, it was initially identified as a True’s beaked whale. A Mātauranga Māori whale expert named Ramari Stewart wasn’t so sure, though. She thought it looked different than a True’s beaked whale. She got together with marine biologist Emma Carroll to study the whale and compare it to True’s beaked whale, which took a while since we don’t actually know very much about True’s beaked whale either.

The end result, though, is that the new whale is indeed a new species. It grows around 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and probably lives in the open ocean where it dives deeply to find food.

We could go on and on because so many animals were discovered last year, but let’s finish with a fun one from India. In June of 2020, a graduate student named Virender Bhardwaj was stuck at home during lockdowns. He was able to go on walks, so he took pictures of interesting things he saw and posted them online. One day he posted a picture of a common local snake called the kukri snake.

A herpetologist at India’s National Centre for Biological Sciences noticed the picture and immediately suspected it wasn’t a known species of kukri snake. He contacted Bhardwaj to see where he’d found the snake, and by the end of the month Bhardwaj had managed to catch two of them. Genetic analysis was delayed because of the lockdowns, but they described it in December of 2021 as the Churah Valley kukri snake.

The new snake is stripey and grows over a foot long, or 30 cm. It probably mostly eats eggs.

It just goes to show, no matter where you live, you might be the one to find a new species of animal. Learn all you can about your local animals so that if you see one that doesn’t quite match what you expect, you can take pictures and contact an expert. Maybe next year I’ll be talking about your discovery.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 260: Danger! Newts!

Posted on January 24, 2022 by strangeanimalspodcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:43 — 12.3MB)

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Thanks to Enzo for suggesting this week’s topic, newts from least dangerous to most dangerous!

Further reading:

One snake’s prey is another’s poison

The Corsican brook salamander is not toxic (photo by Paola Mazzei, from iNaturalist):

The smooth newt is a little bit toxic (photo by Fred Holmes and taken from this site) – this is a male during breeding season:

The Hong Kong warty newt has an orange-spotted belly and is toxic:

The chonky Spanish ribbed newt will stab you with its own toxin-covered bones (photo by Eduardo José Rodríguez Rodríguez, taken from this site):

Yeah maybe don’t touch the Japanese fire belly newt if you don’t need to:

Warning! Do not eat the California newt:

The safest newt to handle is this toy newt. I really want one:

Show transcript:

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

This week’s topic is a suggestion from Enzo, who wants to learn about newts “from least dangerous to most dangerous.” There are at least 60 species of newt known with more being discovered every year, but I’ll do my best to hit the highlights.

A newt is a type of salamander, specifically a semi-aquatic salamander in the subfamily Pleurodelinae. All newts are salamanders but not all salamanders are newts. Newts live throughout much of the northern hemisphere, including northern Africa and the Middle East, Eurasia, and North America.

Female newts lay their eggs in freshwater, usually attaching them to vegetation or in little crevices in rocks. A few weeks later, the eggs hatch into larvae with external gills. The larvae are called tadpoles like frog larvae, and they mostly eat algae and tiny insects. They metamorphose over several months just like frogs do when they develop from tadpoles, but where frogs develop their hind legs first, newt tadpoles develop front legs first. The newt tadpole finally absorbs its gills and grows lungs instead, at which point it emerges from the water as an immature newt called an eft. Efts are juvenile newts and live exclusively on land, although like other amphibians they have to keep their skin damp so you’ll usually find them in leaf litter and under rotting logs. Efts that live in North America return to the water when they become full adults, but most newts in other parts of the world stay on land the rest of their lives except during breeding season. Efts and adult newts eat worms, insects and insect larvae, slugs, frog tadpoles, and any other small animals they can catch.

The Corsican brook salamander is a type of newt that lives on the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea. It grows about five inches long at most, or 13 cm, and is brown or olive-green, sometimes with a mottled pattern of orange or red on its back. It’s an exception to the rule that newts outside of North America usually live their adult lives on land. Not only does the Corsican brook salamander live in freshwater most of the time as an adult, it doesn’t even have working lungs. It spends most of its time in fast-moving streams and rivers in higher elevations, where it absorbs oxygen from the water through its skin.

As Enzo undoubtedly knows, many newts produce toxins. This is why it’s not a good idea to handle a newt, or any other amphibian for that matter, unless you’re absolutely certain it’s a species that’s not toxic. In most cases, a newt’s toxin won’t hurt you if it just touches your skin, but if it gets in a cut or if you have some of the toxin on your finger and then rub your eye or put your finger in your mouth, the toxin can make you really sick. Some newts are even deadly.

The Corsican brook salamander we just talked about is not toxic, so we’ll call it the least dangerous newt. The smooth newt, on the other hand, produces a relatively mild toxin. You’d have to actually eat a bunch of smooth newts to get sick from its toxins, and why are you eating newts at all? Stop that immediately and have a banana instead.

The smooth newt lives throughout much of Europe and parts of Asia. It grows just over 4 inches long, or 11 cm, and most of the time it’s brown with darker spots. The male also has a bright orange stripe on his belly. During breeding season, though, the male develops a wavy crest down his spine and brighter colors. Both males and females move into the water during breeding season, so both males and females develop tail fins on the top and bottom of their tails to help them swim.

The males of many newt species develop brighter colors and crests during breeding season to attract females. In the case of the Hong Kong warty newt, in breeding season the male develops a white stripe on his tail. He attracts the attention of females by wagging his tail in the water, where the white stripe shows up well even in dim light. The Hong Kong warty newt lives in Hong Kong and grows up to 6 inches long, or 15 cm. It’s brown with orange patches on its belly and its skin appears bumpy like the skin of an orange. If it feels threatened, it sometimes rolls onto its back and pretends to be dead, which not only may deter some predators, it shows off the bright orange markings on its belly. This signals to a potential predator that this newt is toxic, and another thing it does when it plays dead is secrete toxins from its skin. In other words, don’t bite this newt or touch it. It’s also a protected species in Hong Kong so you shouldn’t be trying to eat it anyway. Its eggs are toxic too.

Some newts deliver their toxins to potential predators in a way you might not expect. If an animal tries to bite the Spanish ribbed newt, it secretes toxins from special glands on its sides and then pushes the sharp points of its own ribs out through the tubercles where the poison glands are located. The pointed ribs become coated with toxins as they emerge and are sharp enough to stab a predator right in the mouth. The toxin causes severe pain when injected and can even cause death in small animals. The newt itself isn’t injured by this process, which it can do repeatedly whenever it needs to. Newts, like all amphibians, heal extremely quickly.

The Spanish ribbed newt lives in the southern Iberian Peninsula in Europe and Morocco in northern Africa. It’s larger than the newts we’ve talked about so far, growing up to a foot long, or 30 cm. It’s dark gray with rusty-red or orange spots on its sides, one spot per poison gland. It actually spends most of its adult life in the water and especially likes deep, quiet ponds and wells.

Finally, we’ve reached the most dangerous newt in the world. I’m nominating two newts for this honor because they both secrete the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin, which we’ve talked about before. It’s the same kind of toxin found in pufferfish and some frogs. The toxin can irritate your skin even if you only touch it, and if a little of the toxin gets into a scratch or cut, it can cause numbness, shortness of breath, and dizziness. If you accidentally swallow any of the toxin, you can die within six hours. There’s no antidote.

Our two most dangerous newts are the Japanese fire belly newt and the California newt. The Japanese fire belly newt grows about 5.5 inches long, or 14 cm, and lives in parts of Japan in ponds, lakes, and ditches. It has pebbly skin and is brown or black with red speckles, but its belly is bright orange or red. The California newt has slightly bumpy gray or gray-brown skin on its back but a bright orange or yellow belly. It can grow up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm. It lives in parts of California, especially near the coast and in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The reason the California newt has such a potent toxin is that its main predator, the common garter snake, has a great resistance to the toxin. Only the most toxic newts are more likely to survive if a garter snake grabs it, and only the most resistant snakes are more likely to survive eating it. It’s a predator-prey arms race that’s been going on for at least 40 million years, resulting in a newt that is boss fight level toxic to most predators but just barely ahead of the game when it comes to garter snakes. It’s likely that something similar has occurred with the Japanese fire belly newt.

If you live in the areas where these toxic newts also live, be especially careful with your pets. Keep your dog on a leash so you can be sure it doesn’t try to bite or play with one of these newts. Some people actually keep the Japanese fire belly newt as a pet, but obviously if you do this you need to be extremely careful, especially if you have pets or small children. Maybe you should get a toy newt instead.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 259: Indestructible Animals

Posted on January 17, 2022 by strangeanimalspodcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:55 — 13.8MB)

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Thanks to Nicholas and Emma for their suggestions this week as we learn about some (nearly) indestructible animals!

Further listening:

Patreon episode about Metal Animals (unlocked, no login required)

Further reading:

Even a car can’t kill this beetle. Here’s why

The scaly-foot snail’s shell is made of actual iron – and it’s magnetic

The scaly-foot gastropod (pictures from article linked above):

The diabolical ironclad beetle is virtually unsquishable:

Limpet shells:

The business side of a limpet:

Highly magnified limpet teeth:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some indestructible animals, or at least animals that are incredibly tough. You may be surprised to learn that they’re all invertebrates. It’s a suggestion by Nicholas, and one of the animals Nicholas suggested was also suggested by Emma.

We’ll start with that one, the scaly-foot gastropod, a deep-sea snail. We actually covered this one a few years ago but only in a Patreon episode. I went ahead and unlocked that episode so that anyone can listen to it, since I haven’t done that in a while, so the first part of this episode will sound familiar if you just listened to that one.

The scaly-foot gastropod lives around three hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, about 1 ¾ miles below the surface, or about 2,800 meters. The water around these vents, referred to as black smokers, can be more than 350 degrees Celsius. That’s 660 degrees F, if you even need to know that that’s too hot to live.

The scaly-foot gastropod was discovered in 2001 but not formally described until 2015. The color of its shell varies from almost black to golden to white, depending on which population it’s from, and it grows to almost 2 inches long, or nearly 5 cm. It doesn’t have eyes, and while it does have a small mouth, it doesn’t use it for eating. Instead, the snail contains symbiotic bacteria in a gland in its esophagus. The bacteria convert toxic hydrogen sulfide from the water around the hydrothermal vents into energy the snail uses to live. It’s a process called chemosynthesis. In return, the bacteria get a safe place to live.

The snail’s shell contains an outer layer made of iron sulfides. Not only that, the bottom of the snail’s foot is covered with sclerites, or spiky scales, that are also mineralized with iron sulfides. While the snail can’t pull itself entirely into its shell, if something attacks it, the bottom of its foot is heavily armored and its shell is similarly tough.

Researchers are studying the scaly-foot gastropod’s shell to possibly make a similar composite material for protective gear and other items. The inner layer of the shell is made of a type of calcium carbonate, common in mollusk shells and some corals. The middle layer of the shell is regular snail shell material, organic periostracum, [perry-OSS-trickum] which helps dissipate heat as well as pressure from squeezing attacks, like from crab claws. And the outer layer, of course, is iron sulfides like pyrite and greigite. Oh, and since greigite is magnetic, the snails stick to magnets.

Unfortunately, the scaly-foot gastropod is endangered due to deep-sea mining around its small, fragile habitat. Hopefully conservationists can get laws passed to protect the thermal vents and all the animals that live around them.

The scaly-foot gastropod is the only animal known that incorporates iron sulfide into its skeleton or exoskeleton, although our next indestructible animal, the diabolical ironclad beetle, has iron in its name.

The diabolical ironclad beetle lives in western North America, especially in dry areas. It grows up to an inch long, or 25 mm, and is a dull black or dark gray in color with bumps and ridges that make it look like a piece of tree bark. Since it lives on trees, that’s not a coincidence. It spends most of its time eating fungus that grows on and under tree bark.

Like a lot of beetles, it’s flattened in shape. This helps it slide under tree bark and helps it keep a low profile to avoid predators like birds and lizards. But if a predator does grab it and try to crunch it up to eat, the diabolical ironclad beetle is un-crunchable. Its exoskeleton is so tough that it can withstand being run over by a car. When researchers want to mount a dead beetle to display, they can’t just stick a pin through the exoskeleton. It bends pins, even strong steel ones. They have to get a tiny drill to make a hole in the exoskeleton first.

The beetle’s exoskeleton is so strong because of the way it’s constructed. In a late 2020 article in Nature, a team studying the beetle discovered that the exoskeleton is made up of multiple layers that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Each layer contains twisted fibers made of proteins that help distribute weight evenly across the beetle’s body and stop potential cracking. At the same time, the arrangement of the exoskeleton’s sections allows for enough give to make it just flexible enough to keep from cracking under extreme pressure. Of course, this means the beetle can’t fly because its wing covers can’t move, but if it falls from a tree it doesn’t need to worry about hurting itself.

Engineers are studying the beetle to see if they can adapt the same type of structures to make airplanes and cars safer.

Nicholas also suggested the limpet, another mollusk. It’s a type of snail but it doesn’t look like the scaly-foot gastropod or like most other snails. Its shell is shaped like a little cone with ridges that run from the cone’s tip to the bottom, sort of like a tiny ice-cream cone that you don’t want to eat. There are lots of species and while a few live in fresh water, most live in the ocean. The limpets we’re talking about today are those in the family Patellidae.

If you think about a typical snail, whose body is mostly protected by a shell and who moves around on a wide flat part of its body called a foot, you’ll understand how the limpet is a snail even though it looks so different superficially. The conical shell protects the body, and the limpet does indeed move around on a so-called foot, gliding along very slowly on a thin layer of mucus.

The limpet lives on rocks in the intertidal zone and is famous for being able to stick to a rock incredibly tightly. It has to be able to do so because otherwise it would get washed off its rock by waves, plus it needs to be safe when the tide is out and its rock is above water. The limpet makes a little dimple in the rock that exactly matches its shell, called a home scar, and as the tide goes out the limpet returns to its home scar, seals the edges of its shell tight to the rock, and waits for the water to return. It traps water inside its shell so its gills won’t dry out while it waits. If the rock is too hard for it to grind down to match its shell, it grinds the edges of its shell to match the rock. It makes its home scar by rubbing its shell against one spot in the rock until both are perfectly matched.

The limpet mostly eats algae. It has a tiny mouth above its foot and in the mouth is a teensy tongue-like structure called a radula, which is studded with very hard teeth. It uses the radula to rasp algae off of the rocks. Other snails do this too, but the limpet has much harder teeth than other snails. Much, much harder teeth. In fact, the teeth of some limpet species may be the hardest natural material ever studied.

The teeth are mostly chitin, a hard material that’s common in invertebrates, but the surface is coated with goethite [GO-thite] nanofibers. Goethite is a type of of iron, so while the limpet does have iron teeth, it still doesn’t topple the scaly-foot gastropod as the only animal known with iron in its skeleton. Not only does the goethite help make the teeth incredibly strong, which is good for an animal that is scraping those teeth over rocks constantly, the dense chitin fibers in the teeth make them resistant to cracking.

The limpet replaces its teeth all the time. They grow on a sort of conveyer belt and move forward until the teeth in front, at the business end of the radula, are ready to use. It takes about two days for a new tooth to fully form and move to the end of the radula, where it’s quickly worn down and drops off.

Meanwhile, even though the limpet’s shell doesn’t contain any iron, its shape and the limpet’s strong foot muscles mean that once a limpet is stuck to its rock, it’s incredibly hard to remove it. It just sits there being more or less impervious to predation. Humans eat them, although they have to be cooked thoroughly because they’re tough otherwise, naturally.

Finally, one animal that Nicholas suggested is probably the royalty of indestructible animals, the water bear or tardigrade. Because we talked about it recently, in episode 234, I won’t go over it again. I’ll just leave you with an interesting note that I missed when researching that episode.

In April of 2019, an Israeli spacecraft was launched that had dormant tardigrades onboard as part of an experiment about tardigrades in space. There were no people onboard, fortunately, because the craft actually crashed on the moon instead of landing properly. The ship was destroyed but the case where the tardigrades were stored appears to be intact.

It’s not exactly easy to run up to the moon and check on the tardigrades, so we don’t know if they survived the crash landing. Studies since then suggest they probably didn’t, but until we can actually land on the moon and send a rover or an astronaut out to check, we don’t know for sure. Tardigrades can survive incredibly cold, dry conditions while dormant. It’s not exactly the experiment researchers intended, but it’s definitely an interesting one.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 258: Sable and Sable Antelope

Posted on January 10, 2022 by strangeanimalspodcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:41 — 13.5MB)

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A big birthday shout-out to Penelope this week! Thanks to Isaac for this week’s topic suggestion. We’re learning all about the sable and sable antelope!

Further reading (mostly for the pictures since there’s not much content otherwise):

Woman Rescues This Sable from Becoming Someone’s Coat

Further watching:

Kruger Park, Season 15 – this one is about some sable antelope bulls fighting

Fuzzy sable face:

Sable:

Sable antelopes:

A sable antelope growth chart. I find this really interesting. NERD:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’ve got an interesting theme, with both the theme and the animals suggested by Isaac. But first, we have a birthday shout-out!

Happy birthday this week to Penelope, whose birthday is on January 15th! I hope you have the best birthday ever!

Isaac suggested the sable, which is a type of mustelid, or weasel and ferret relation, and also suggested the sable antelope! It’s the sable episode.

The word sable means black or a rich dark brown, but most of the time it’s used to refer to the fur of an animal called the sable. The fur was so highly prized in Europe and Asia that the color of the animal’s fur was used as the name of the animal itself, and has been borrowed to refer to a specific coloration of other animals like cats and dogs.

The animal called the sable is common throughout parts of Asia, especially Siberia, China, and northern Mongolia. It lives in forests and mostly hunts by sound, and will eat just about anything it can find. This includes small animals like hares, rodents, birds, and even other species of mustelid, but it will also eat carrion, berries, fish, insects, snails and slugs, and occasionally it will even manage to kill a small bovid called a musk deer. The musk deer isn’t actually a deer but is more closely related to goats and antelopes. It can stand over two feet tall at the shoulder, or 70 cm, and the male has fang-like tusks instead of antlers or horns.

For an animal that sometimes kills and eats musk deer, the sable isn’t very big. It’s long and slender like other mustelids and measures nearly 2 feet long, or 56 cm, not counting its tail, which can add another 5 inches, or 12 cm. Females are a little smaller. It’s brown all over, usually dark brown but sometimes lighter depending on where it lives, with a pale patch on its throat. It has large fox-like ears and a somewhat fox-like or cat-like face but with smaller eyes. Its legs are short but that doesn’t stop it from covering long distances every day to find enough food, more than seven miles in some cases, or 12 km.

The sable is crepuscular, meaning it’s most active during dawn and dusk. When it’s not out hunting, it sleeps in a burrow it digs among tree roots, often lined with leaves and dry grass so it’s more comfortable and warmer. The exception is during mating season when the sable is more likely to be out during the daytime. Males fight each other during this time, and when a female is deciding whether she likes a male, she and the male will play-fight and chase each other.

One unusual thing about the sable is that even though mating season is usually in summertime, and even though it only takes about a month for the babies to develop inside the mother before they’re born, the babies are born in spring. Since the sable doesn’t have access to a time machine, something else is going on.

It’s called delayed implantation or embryonic diapause, where the mother’s egg is fertilized but then stays dormant for a time before it attaches to the uterine wall and starts developing into an embryo and ultimately a baby ready to be born. This allows babies to be born at a time of year when there’s plenty of food. In the sable’s case, the fertilized eggs don’t implant for 8 months.

Sables aren’t the only mammals that practice delayed implantation. A lot of mustelids do, as well as bears, seals, armadillos, and many others. A slightly different variety of delayed implantation only happens when the mother already has a baby that’s nursing, meaning she’s still producing milk. That’s hard on the body, so in some mammals, including some rodents and marsupials, the fertilized egg waits to implant until the mother is no longer producing milk. That way the mother has more resources available to nourish the growing embryo instead of having to divide her energy between her developing embryos and her already-born babies. In other mammals, including humans, a nursing mother doesn’t usually produce eggs to be fertilized until she’s stopped producing milk for her baby.

A female sable usually has two or three babies in a litter but sometimes more. The babies are born with a little bit of fuzzy hair to help keep them warm, but like puppies and kittens they’re born with their eyes sealed shut. It takes about a month for their eyes to open. The mother weans them when they’re about two months old but continues to take care of them, first by regurgitating food for them to eat, then by teaching them how to hunt and forage for themselves.

The sable’s fur is exceptionally soft and beautiful, and as a result it’s been killed for its fur for centuries and has always been expensive to buy. One Russian population is jet black with a white tip to each hair, which was even more highly prized than the rest. But the best way to experience the beautiful fur of a sable is by petting a live one, not the skin of a dead one. Some people have started keeping sables as pets, although they’re not actually domesticated and can be difficult or even dangerous to keep.

Next, another beautiful non-domesticated animal is the sable antelope. It lives in forested savannas in parts of eastern and southern Africa. There are four subspecies, the largest of which is the giant sable antelope. That makes it sound enormous but it’s only a little bigger than other subspecies, and is critically endangered. In fact, the giant sable antelope was suspected of having gone extinct during a terrible civil war in Angola, which is the only place in Africa where it lives. Fortunately a herd of them was caught on camera trap in 2004, and the giant sable antelope is now protected.

Sable antelope cows give birth to one baby during the rainy season, which varies depending on where they live. The calves are light brown or pale reddish-brown but as they grow older, their fur becomes darker. Mature females are usually dark brown but adult males are black. Adults and older calves also have white patches on the face, belly, and rump.

The sable antelope has a short tail with a little tuft at the end, and it also has a short mane that usually stands upright like a donkey’s mane. Males are bigger than females, standing some 4 and a half feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.4 meters.

Both males and females have horns, though. Antelopes are bovids, which means they have true horns like cattle and goats, not antlers like deer that are shed every year. The sable antelope’s horns are really impressive, too. They’re dark gray or black and arch up and back from the head like really big goat horns. A female can have horns up to 3 and a half feet long, or 102 cm, while a male can have horns 0ver 5 feet long, or 165 cm. That’s right, his horns can be longer than he is tall. Sable antelopes are so spectacular that when you think of an antelope, you probably think of an animal that has horns like this.

Unfortunately, those horns have caused the sable antelope to be a target for big game hunters who want the horns as a trophy. These days, though, the biggest threat is habitat loss as humans fence their grasslands to graze livestock.

During the rainy season, the sable antelope lives in small herds of up to 30 females and their young, who share a territory with a single bull. The herd is led by the oldest females who know where the best places are to graze and find water. When the herd moves, the male usually follows right behind to make sure everyone stays together.

The sable antelope eats tree leaves and some kinds of grass, and spends the hottest parts of the day lying down and chewing its cud because, like other bovids, it’s a ruminant. The calves are always in the middle of the resting herd and the adults lie facing outward so they can watch for danger and meet it with their horns. When the adults are moving around to graze, young calves stay in a group called a creche, watched over by a few adults.

During the dry season when there’s not as much to eat, herds will come together to graze in the best pastures with access to water. When young males mature, the older male drives them away from the herd to fend for themselves. Young bulls often form small bachelor herds or may be solitary.

When a bull challenges another bull in an attempt to take control of his territory, they fight with their horns, although they don’t usually injure each other. The sable antelope also uses its horns to fight off and sometimes even kill predators like lions and leopards.

This is the only reliable audio I could find of a sable antelope. There’s a link to the original video in the show notes. The sound is of a bull who’s stuck in the mud, although he later manages to get out.

[sable antelope sound]

Thanks for listening!

Episode 254: The Saola and the Striped Bunny

Posted on December 13, 2021 by strangeanimalspodcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:00 — 9.2MB)

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Thanks to Elaine for suggesting the saola this week!

Further reading:

The saola: rushing to save the most ‘spectacular zoological discovery’ of the 20th century

Striped rabbit revealed in Laos forest

Saola horns:

A saola from a 1999 camera trap (photo taken from link above):

A female saola (named Martha) who unfortunately only survived in captivity a few weeks (photo taken from link above):

A striped bunny!! The Annamite striped rabbit:

Show transcript:

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

This week’s topic is a remarkable hoofed animal suggested last year by Elaine, the saola, and another remarkable animal I learned about while researching the saola. Both animals are newly discovered by science.

The scientific story of the saola starts in May of 1992. The Southeast Asian country of Vietnam had established a new nature reserve a few years before and wanted to learn more about the kinds of animals and plants living there. A team of scientists surveyed the area and one of the things they found was a skull with horns they didn’t recognize. The horns were long and straight and very close together.

They knew the skull came from an animal new to science, so they tried to find one to see what it looked like alive. But they couldn’t find one. It wasn’t until 1998 that a scientist saw a live saola, a female captured by hunters and kept in captivity until it died a few weeks later.

The saola is an antelope-like bovid that looks a lot like an oryx. We talked about the Arabian oryx in episode 218 and there are other species of oryx that live in parts of Africa. Oryx have long, straight horns that grow side by side too. But genetic analysis of saola remains indicates that the saola is much more closely related to cattle than to oryxes. The saola was described formally in 1993 and placed in its own genus, Pseudoryx, meaning false oryx.

The saola stands about 3 feet tall at the shoulder, or 92 centimeters, and is mostly chocolate brown with white markings on the head and a black stripe down its spine. Both males and females have horns, although males grow longer horns. The horns grow side by side, usually only a few inches apart, or about 8 or 9 centimeters, and are dark brown or black. They grow up to about 20 inches long, or 50 centimeters, and are often about the same distance apart at their tips as they are at the base of the skull. People sometimes call the saola the Asian unicorn because it’s so rare and its horns look sort of like unicorn horns, although they grow back from the skull instead of forward and aren’t spiral shaped. So, not actually very much like unicorn horns.

The saola also has a short tail, slender legs, and a short muzzle, but its tongue is over 6 inches long, or 15 centimeters. It’s rough like a cat’s tongue and it uses it to groom itself, just like a cat, and to help it gather the plants it eats, unlike a cat. It lives in forested mountains and migrates to lower elevations in winter, although its fur is thick and soft to keep it warm in higher elevations. It also has special pores around its eyes that secrete a special fluid it uses to mark plants and rocks the way many antelopes do. Because the saola hasn’t been observed in the wild, we don’t know if it’s marking its territory or just letting other saola know where it is.

The saola is critically endangered, mostly due to poaching. A team of forest guards patrols the park looking for traps that hunters set. Poachers often hunt animals in the park not because the hunters are hungry but because they can make a lot of money selling exotic animals to other countries as so-called medicine. The saola isn’t considered to have any medicinal uses, though, so while a hunter will sometimes kill one to eat, mostly it just gets caught in traps set for other animals. Since it’s so rare to start with, every saola killed in this way could ultimately cause the entire species to go extinct.

Conservationists are working hard to help the saola and its habitat. Logging has been banned in the park and the forest guards are on the lookout for illegal logging activity too. The forestry service is working to educate the local people that the saola only lives in their mountains and nowhere else in the world, which is something for them to be proud of. The park is near the border of another country, Laos, which is also helping with conservation efforts since the saola probably lives there too. You won’t find a saola in any zoos, though, because it doesn’t do well in captivity.

Other animals new to science have been discovered in the park and nearby areas, specifically around the Annamite Mountains along the border of Vietnam and Laos. This includes a new species of rabbit.

In 1996 a biologist named Rob Timmins was looking through a market in Laos when he saw three dead rabbits for sale as food. But these rabbits didn’t resemble any rabbits known from the area. They had short ears, reddish rumps, and dark brown stripes. Stripy rabbits! There is a similar-looking species that lives a thousand miles away, or 1,600 kilometers, in the mountains of Sumatra and Indonesia. The Sumatran striped rabbit is brown with darker brown stripes and blotches, but it’s been known to science since 1880. Timmins was the first scientist to see the Laotian rabbits.

Timmins bought the rabbits, of course, so they could be studied. Genetic studies determined that the rabbits are a distinct species, although it’s closely related to the Sumatran striped rabbit. It was described as a new species in 2000 and camera traps have since taken pictures of it in Vietnam, but we still know very little about it and its cousin in Sumatra.

Both species of striped rabbit are threatened by hunting and habitat loss. Hopefully they can be protected, along with their mountain homes, and a captive breeding program started to ensure their survival. Also, I would like one as a pet.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 253: The Sand Striker

Posted on December 6, 2021 by strangeanimalspodcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:43 — 11.1MB)

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This week let’s learn about a weird marine worm and its extinct ancestor!

Further reading:

Eunice aphroditois is a rainbow, terrifying

The 20-million-year-old lair of an ambush-predatory worm preserved in northeast Taiwan

Here’s the money shot of the sand striker with its jaws open, waiting for an animal to get too close. The stripy things are antennae:

The fossilized burrow with notes:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going back in time 20 million years to learn about an animal that lived on the sea floor, although we’ll start with its modern relation. It’s called the sand striker and new discoveries about it were released in January 2021.

Ichnology is the study of a certain type of trace fossil. We talked about trace fossils in episode 103, but basically a trace fossil is something associated with an organism that isn’t actually a fossilized organism itself, like fossilized footprints and other tracks. Ichnology is specifically the study of trace fossils caused by animals that disturbed the ground in some way, or if you want to get more technical about it, sedimentary disruption. That includes tracks that were preserved but it also includes a lot of burrows. It’s a burrow we’re talking about today.

Because we often don’t know what animal made a burrow, different types of burrows are given their own scientific names. This helps scientists keep them organized and refer to a specific burrow in a way that other scientists can immediately understand. The sand striker’s fossilized burrow is named Pennichnus formosae, but in this case we knew about the animal itself before the burrow.

The sand striker is a type of polychaete worm, and polychaete worms are incredibly successful animals. They’re found in the fossil record since at least the Cambrian Period half a billion years ago and are still common today. They’re also called bristle worms because most species have little bristles made of chitin. Almost all known species live in the oceans but some species are extremophiles. This includes species that live near hydrothermal vents where the water is heated to extreme temperatures by volcanic activity and at least one species found in the deepest part of the ocean that’s ever been explored, Challenger Deep.

A polychaete worm doesn’t look like an earthworm. It has segments with a hard exoskeleton and bristles, and a distinct head with antennae. Some species don’t have eyes at all but some have sophisticated vision and up to eight eyes. Some can swim, some just float around, some crawl along the seafloor, and some burrow in sand and mud. Some eat small animals while others eat algae or plant material, and some have plume-like appendages they use to filter tiny pieces of food from the water. Basically, there are so many species known—over 10,000, with more being discovered almost every year, alive and extinct—that it’s hard to make generalizations about polychaete worms.

Most species of polychaete worm are small. The living species of sand striker generally grows around 4 inches long, or 10 centimeters, and longer. We’ll come back to its size in a minute. Its exoskeleton, or cuticle, is a beautifully iridescent purple. It doesn’t have eyes, instead sensing prey with five antennae. These aren’t like insect antennae but look more like tiny tentacles, packed with chemical receptors that help it find prey.

The sand striker lives in warm coastal waters and spends most of its time hidden in a burrow in the sand. It’s especially common around coral reefs. While it will eat plant material like seaweed, it’s mostly an ambush hunter.

At night the sand striker remains in its burrow but pokes its head out with its scissor-like mandibles open. When the chemical receptors in its antennae detect a fish or other animal approaching, it snaps its mandibles on it and pulls it back into its burrow. Its mandibles are so strong and sharp that sometimes it will cut its prey in half and then, of course, it pulls both halves into its burrow to eat. If the prey turns out to be large, the sand striker injects it with venom that not only stuns and kills it, it starts the digestive process so the sand striker can eat it more easily. It does all this so quickly that it can even catch fish and octopuses. The mandibles are at the end of a feeding apparatus called a pharynx, which it can retract into its body.

If a person tries to handle a sand striker, they can indeed get bitten. The sand striker’s mandibles are sharp enough to inflict a bad bite, and if it injects venom it can make the bite even more painful. Not only that, the sand striker’s body is covered with tiny bristles that can also inflict stings, with a venom strong enough that it can cause nerve damage in a human that results in permanent numbness where the person touched it. Don’t pet a sand striker.

Remember how I said the sand striker grows 4 inches or longer? That’s actually the low end of its size. The average sand striker is about 2 feet long, or 61 centimeters, but it can sometimes grow 3 feet long, or 92 centimeters, or even more. Sometimes a lot more.

In January 2009, someone noticed something in a float along the side of a mooring raft in Seto Fishing Harbor in Japan. The mooring raft had been in place for 13 years at that point and no one knew that a sand striker had moved into one of the floats. It had a nice safe home to use as a burrow. Sand strikers grow quickly and this one was living in a more or less ideal situation, so it just grew and grew until when it was found, it was just shy of 10 feet long, or 3 meters. Even so, it was still only about an inch thick, or 25 millimeters.

There are unverified reports of even longer sand strikers, some up to 50 feet long, or 15 meters. Look, seriously, do not pet it. Since sand strikers spend most of the time in burrows, it’s rare to get a good look at a full-length individual in the wild and we don’t know how long they can really get.

In case you’d forgotten, though, we started the episode talking about a fossilized burrow. In a fossil bed in northeast Taiwan, a team of paleontologists uncovered hundreds of strange burrows dating to about 20 million years ago. The burrows were L-shaped and as much as 6.5 feet long, or 2 meters, and about an inch across, or 2.5 centimeters. Even more confusingly, the fossilized sediment showed feather-like shapes in the upper section of the burrows.

The team of scientists studying the burrows had no idea what the feather-like structures were. The burrows were mysterious from start to finish anyway, since they were so much larger than most burrows in the seafloor.

They decided to do something unusual to solve some of the mysteries. They reached out not only to marine biologists but to marine photographers and aquarium keepers to get their insights. And, as you’ve probably guessed by now, the fossilized burrows most closely match those of the sand striker.

They even found out what the feather-shaped structures were. When a sand striker grabs a fish or other prey and drags it into its burrow, a lot of time it’s still alive, at least at first. Its struggles to get away can cause the sides of the burrow to shift. The sediment can’t collapse all the way because the worm lines it with mucus, so the partial collapsing and shifting results in feathery shapes.

These fossilized burrows are the first trace fossils known to be made by a marine ambush predator, which is pretty awesome. It’s even more awesome that some modern sand strikers are using the same type of burrows over 20 million years later.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 245: The Devil-Pig

Posted on October 11, 2021 by strangeanimalspodcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:11 — 13.9MB)

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Don’t forget the Kickstarter, as if I’d let you forget it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie

Our next monster for monster month is the devil-pig! It’s probably not a devil although it might be a pig.

The Asian tapir and its remarkable snoot:

The New Guinea carving:

The “gazeka” as imagined in the early 20th century:

Domestic and feral hogs are common in New Guinea:

Show transcript:

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

Don’t forget that our Kickstarter is still going on to fund the mystery animals book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie! There’s a link in the show notes so you can click through and look at the different tiers available. We’re doing really well so far, so thanks to those of you who have already backed the project or just shared it with your friends! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie

Our next monster month episode is about a mystery animal from New Guinea. We’ve learned a lot about New Guinea’s birds this year, and it comes up repeatedly in other episodes too because it’s such a huge island with varied ecosystems. It also has steep mountains that have hardly been explored by scientists or even locals. If you want to learn more about New Guinea itself, I recommend episode 206, which is the first of our episodes this year about strange birds of New Guinea. But this week, let’s learn about the devil-pig! It’s also sometimes called the gazeka, but we’ll come back to that later.

The story starts in 1875, when a man named Alfred O. Walker sent a letter to the journal Nature about a discovery on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. It wasn’t the discovery of an animal itself but a big pile of dung from an unknown animal. The dung pile was so big that the people who found it thought it must be from some kind of rhinoceros. The problem is that New Guinea doesn’t have any rhinos.

The dung pile was discovered by a British expedition led by Lt. Sidney Smith and Captain Moresby from the ship H.M.S. Basilisk. After the report was published in Nature, a German zoologist wrote to say he’d been to New Guinea too and that the people living there had told him about a big animal with a long snout, which they referred to as a giant pig. It supposedly stood 6 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters, and was very rare.

If you do a search for the devil-pig online, you’ll see it called the gazeka in a lot of places. Let’s discuss the word gazeka, because it doesn’t have anything to do with New Guinea. In fact, it comes from an adaptation of a French musical called The Little Michus. I bet you didn’t expect that. The musical is about two girls with the last name of Michu. One girl was given to the Michu family as a baby by her father, a general, who had to leave the country. The Michus had a baby daughter of the same age, and one day without thinking the father decided to give both babies a bath at the same time—and mixed them up. So no one knew which girl was which, but they grew up as sisters who think they’re twins and are devoted to each other. The play takes place when they’re both seventeen and the general suddenly shows up demanding his daughter back.

It’s a funny musical and was popular in the original French in 1897, but in 1905 an English translation was performed in London and was a huge hit. It ran for 400 performances and became part of the pop culture of the day. So where does the gazeka come in?

George Graves was a famous English comic actor, and he added an extra line or two to the play to get a laugh. He tells about a drunken explorer who thought he had seen a strange animal called the gazeka while under the influence of whiskey. The play was so popular, and the gazeka was considered so funny, that the idea just took off. The theater manager ran a competition for people to make drawings of the gazeka, and the winning drawing was made into a design that appeared on little charms, toys, and even in some advertisements for Perrier. The gazeka was even spun off into its own little song and dance in another play.

That was in 1905. In spring of 1906 an explorer called Captain Charles A.W. Monckton led an expedition to Papua New Guinea, and on May 10 two members of the team were sent to investigate some tracks the expedition had found the previous day. The team members included an army private named Ogi and a village constable called Oina who acted as Ogi’s guide. The two became separated at some point, and while he was looking for Oina, Ogi stumbled across two weird animals grazing in a grassy clearing. The devil-pigs!

The animals were only sort of piglike. Later Ogi reported that they were dark in color with a patterned coat, cloven hooves, horse-like tail, and a long snout. They stood about 3.5 feet tall, or 106 centimeters, and were 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters. He shot at one but missed, probably because he was so scared, but he claimed later that his hands were shaking because he was cold.

The tracks the two men were investigating were of a large cloven-footed animal. Captain Monckton thought the tracks must be made by the devil-pigs.

The story hit the newspapers while the gazeka craze was still popular. People started calling the devil-pigs Monckton’s Gazeka. Monckton didn’t appreciate this, because he didn’t like being compared to someone who saw imaginary animals while drunk.

So what could the devil-pig actually be?

One guess is that it was an unknown species of tapir. We talked about the tapir in episode 18, where I chose the only pronunciation of tapir that no one else in the world uses. The tapir looks kind of like a pig but it’s actually much more closely related to horses and rhinos. It has four toes on its front legs, three on its hind legs, and each toe has a large nail that looks like a little hoof. It also has a rounded body with a pronounced rump, a stubby little tail, and a long head with a short but prehensile trunk.

There are four known species of tapir alive today, three in Central and South America and one in Asia. It’s a shy, largely solitary, mostly nocturnal animal that prefers forests near rivers or streams. It spends a lot of time in water, eating water plants and cooling off when it’s hot. It swims well and can use its short trunk as a snorkel. Technically the trunk is called a proboscis, and the tapir mostly uses it to help gather plants.

As far as we know, there have never been any tapirs in New Guinea. The only tapir that lives in Asia today is the Asian tapir, which is mostly white or pale gray with black or dark gray forequarters and legs. It lives in lowland rainforests in Thailand, Sumatra, Myanmar, and a few other places, but not New Guinea. It’s the largest species of tapir alive today, up to 3 feet 7 inches tall, or 110 centimeters.

In 1962 some stone carvings were discovered in Papua New Guinea. The carvings are a few thousand years old and depict a strange animal. It looks a little like an anteater sitting up on its bottom with its front paws on its round belly, although there’s no tail. Its ears are small, its eyes are large, and it has a long nose with large nostrils at the end. It’s usually said to depict the long-beaked echidna, a small spiny monotreme mammal that lives in New Guinea, although it doesn’t look a lot like one.

In 1987 a mammologist named James Menzies looked at the carvings and made a suggestion. Instead of an echidna, he thought the carvings might depict a marsupial called a palorchestid diprotodont. The word diprotodont may make you perk your ears up, because we talked about it earlier this year in episode 224. Palorchestes is a genus of marsupials related to the diprotodont we talked about in that episode, but generally smaller, with the largest species being about the size of a horse. It had large claws on the front feet and a long tongue like a giraffe’s. Until recently, it was thought to have a short proboscis like a tapir, but a June 2020 study indicates it probably had prehensile lips instead. It used all these adaptations to strip leaves from branches.

Since Palorchestes probably didn’t have a trunk after all, and since its fossil remains have only been found in Australia, and since it went extinct around 13,000 years ago, the carvings probably don’t depict it. It probably also doesn’t depict a tapir. New Guinea is close to Australia and all of its native mammals are marsupials. The tapir is a placental mammal. That doesn’t mean a species of tapir didn’t once live on the island, but we have no fossil remains and the carvings don’t resemble a tapir all that much.

One animal that definitely lives in New Guinea is the pig, which was introduced to the island thousands of years ago by humans. Wild boars might be responsible for the huge cloven hoof prints found by explorers in New Guinea.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t an unknown hoofed animal hiding on the island, though. New Guinea is still not very well explored by scientists or even locals, so there are certainly animals living there that are completely unknown to science. Maybe one is a giant tapir or some other, more mysterious animal.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 243: Bats and Rats

Posted on September 27, 2021 by strangeanimalspodcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:33 — 12.2MB)

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Don’t forget the Kickstarter, as if I’d let you forget it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie

Let’s pre-game Halloween and monster month with an episode about some Halloween-y bats and rats! Thanks to Connor for the suggestion!

Further reading:

Meet Myotis nimaensis

Hyorhinomys stuempkei: New Genus, Species of Shrew Rat Discovered in Indonesia

Fish-eating Myotis

The orange-furred bat is Halloween colored!

The hog-nosed rat has a little piggy nose and VAMPIRE FANGS:

The fish-eating bat has humongous clawed feet:

The crested rat does not look poisonous but it is:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re getting ready for October by talking about a bat suggested by Connor, along with another type of bat and two rats. It’s the bats and rats episode ushering us into Monster Month with style!

Don’t forget that our Kickstarter for the Strange Animals Podcast book goes live in just over a week! I know, it hasn’t even started yet and I’m already shouting all about it, but I’m excited! There’s a link in the show notes if you want to click through and bookmark that page.

Also, I have a correction from our recent squirrel episode. Nicholas wrote to let me know that vitiligo isn’t actually a genetic condition, although some people are genetically slightly more likely to develop it. I think that’s what caused my confusion. Vitiligo can be caused by a number of things, but it’s still true that you can’t catch it from someone. I’ll include a more in-depth correction in next year’s updates episode.

Okay, let’s start this episode off with Connor’s suggestion. Connor told me about a newly discovered bat called Myotis nimbaensis, and it’s not just any old bat. It’s a Halloween bat! Its body is orange and its wing membranes are black. It’s called the orange-furred bat and it lives in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea in West Africa.

The orange-furred bat was only discovered in 2018, when a team of scientists was exploring abandoned mine shafts in the mountains, looking for the critically endangered Lamotte’s roundleaf bat. The team was surveying the bats in cooperation with a mining company and conservation groups, because they needed to know where the bats were so the old mine shafts could be repaired before they fell in and squished all the bats.

Then one of the team saw a bat no one recognized. It was orange and fluffy with big ears and tiny black dot eyes, and its wings were black. They sent a picture of the bat to an expert named Nancy Simmons, and Dr. Simmons knew immediately that it was something out of the ordinary. Sure enough, it’s a species unknown to science. The team described the bat in 2021.

Next, let’s talk about a rat. It was also discovered recently, in this case in 2013 and described in 2015. It’s usually called the hog-nosed rat. It lives in a single part of a single small island in South Asia, specifically in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. This is one of the same places where the babirusa lives, if you remember episode 218.

The hog-nosed rat is a rodent but it’s not actually that closely related to other rats and mice. It’s even been assigned to its own genus. It’s a soft brown-gray on its back and white underneath, with big ears, a very long tail, and a pink nose that does actually look a lot like a little piggy nose. Its eyes are small but its incisors are extremely long and sharp. In fact, they look like vampire fangs!

In 2013, a team of scientists was studying rodents living in the area. To do this they would put special traps out at night and check them in the morning. This isn’t a regular rat trap that kills rats, of course, but a box that keeps the rodent safe inside so it can be examined before being released again. One day they checked a trap and inside was a rodent no one recognized. Surprise rat!

So, what does the hog-nosed rat eat with those vicious fangs? Earthworms and beetle grubs! Terrifying, I know.

Next, let’s learn about another bat, Myotis vivesi. It’s called the fish-eating bat or the Mexican fishing bat. It lives around the Gulf of California on the west coast of North America, mostly on small islands. It’s brown on top, white or cream-colored underneath, and it has big ears because it’s a bat. Almost all bats have big ears.

Fish eating is unusual in bats, and marine fish eating is even more unusual. Only one other species of bat, the fisherman bat of Central and South America, catches marine fish regularly, but the two species belong to completely different families. The Mexican fishing bat’s closest relatives don’t eat fish at all.

Because it lives exclusively around the ocean and feeds mostly on fish and crustaceans, although it will occasionally eat insects and algae, the Mexican fishing bat has other unusual adaptations. It drinks seawater instead of fresh water, for one thing. During the day it hides in crevices in rocks, sometimes in cliffs but more often in the rocky ground. It actually wriggles its way about three feet underground, or a meter, where it’s dark and cool.

Why are we talking about this particular bat in our pre-October episode? Because it has humongous feet with long, pointy claws. The bat itself is only about 5 ½ inches long, or 14 cm, but its feet are almost an inch long, or 2.5 cm. It uses its big feet to snag tiny fish out of the water.

We’ll finish with another rodent, the maned rat, or African crested rat. It doesn’t actually look much like a rat, since its tail is furry and it has a short, blunt muzzle sort of like a porcupine’s face. It’s mostly gray and black with white-tipped hairs that make it look frosty, and it has a crest of longer hairs along its back. It also has white stripes along its sides. It grows about 14 inches long, or 36 cm, not counting its thick, furry tail.

The crested rat mostly eats plants, especially fruit and leaves, but will sometimes eat insects and meat too. Its stomach is divided into multiple chambers and is more like a ruminant’s stomach than a rodent’s, which allows it to use a form of foregut fermentation to digest plant material more efficiently.

Also, the African crested rat is POISONOUS.

The crested rat chews on the bark of the poison arrow tree, which contains toxins that can kill most animals. The crested rat isn’t affected by the toxins, though. After it chews the bark, it licks the long hairs of its crest, which are unusually absorbent. The hairs absorb the poison-filled spit so that any animal that tries to take a bite of African crested rat gets sick or even dies. It probably also tastes terrible but that’s just a guess.

The poison arrow tree is a type of milkweed, and most plants in this family contain toxins. North American milkweed plants are the ones that monarch butterfly caterpillars eat, and the caterpillars absorb toxins from the milkweed that keep birds and other animals from eating them. Researchers aren’t sure how the crested rat keeps from getting sick from the toxins, but one theory is that its stomach contains specialized bacteria that break down the toxins.

If an African crested rat feels threatened, it will raise its crest of long hairs. The crest actually parts down the middle of the back, exposing the white section of the hair and warning predators away.

In case you’re too scared by this poisonous fuzzy rodent, you can relax knowing that the African crested rat is a sociable animal that makes purring sounds while it grooms its family members. Just don’t lick it.

Thanks for listening!

Strange Animals Podcast

A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals!

Category Archives: Asia

Episode 268: Rediscovered Animals!

Episode 263: Pair Bonds

Episode 262: Animals Discovered in 2021

Episode 260: Danger! Newts!

Episode 259: Indestructible Animals

Episode 258: Sable and Sable Antelope

Episode 254: The Saola and the Striped Bunny

Episode 253: The Sand Striker

Episode 245: The Devil-Pig

Episode 243: Bats and Rats