Category Archives: Australia

Episode 458: The Tasmanian Tiger and Friends

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Thanks to Viki, Erin, Weller, and Stella for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Tasmanian tiger pups found to be extraordinary similar to wolf pups

The thylacine could open its jaws really wide:

A sugar glider, gliding [photo from this page]:

A happy quokka and a happy person:

A swimming platypus:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some marsupial mammals suggested by Erin, Weller, and Stella, and a bonus non-marsupial from Australia suggested by Viki.

Marsupials are mammals that give birth to babies that aren’t fully formed yet, and the babies then finish developing in the mother’s pouch. Not all female marsupials actually have a pouch, although most do. Marsupials are extremely common in Australia, but they’re also found in other places around the world.

Let’s start with Weller’s suggestion, the Tasmanian tiger. We’ve talked about it before, but not recently. We talked about it in our very first episode, in fact! Despite its name, it isn’t related to the tiger at all. Tigers are placental mammals, and the Tasmanian tiger is a marsupial. It’s also called the thylacine to make things less confusing.

The thylacine was declared extinct after the last known individual died in captivity in 1936, but sightings have continued ever since. It’s not likely that a population is still around these days, but the thylacine is such a great animal that people hold out hope that it has survived and will one day be rediscovered.

It got the name Tasmanian tiger because when European colonizers arrived in Tasmania, they saw a striped animal the size of a big dog, about two feet high at the shoulder, or 61 cm, and over six feet long if you included the long tail, or 1.8 meters. It was yellowish-brown with black stripes on the back half of its body and down its tail, with a doglike head and rounded ears.

The thylacine was a nocturnal marsupial native to mainland Australia and the Australian island of Tasmania, but around 4,000 years ago, climate change caused more and longer droughts in eastern Australia and the thylacine population there went extinct. By 3,000 years ago, all the mainland thylacines had gone extinct, leaving just the Tasmanian population. The Tasmanian thylacines underwent a population crash around the same time that the mainland Australia populations went extinct—but the Tasmanian population had recovered and was actually increasing when Europeans showed up and started shooting them.

The thylacine mostly ate small animals like ducks, water rats, and bandicoots. Its skull was very similar in shape to the wolf, which it wasn’t related to at all, but its muzzle was longer and its jaws were comparatively much weaker. Its jaws could open incredibly wide, which usually indicates an animal that attacks prey much larger than it is, but studies of the thylacine’s jaws and teeth show that they weren’t strong enough for the stresses of attacking large animals.

Next, Stella wanted to learn about the sugar glider, and I was surprised that we haven’t talked about it before. It’s a nocturnal marsupial native to the forests of New Guinea and parts of Australia, with various subspecies kept as exotic pets in some parts of the world. It’s called a glider because of the animal’s ability to glide. It has a flap of skin between its front and back legs, called a patagium, and when it stretches its legs out, the patagia tighten and act as a parachute. This is similar to other gliding animals, like the flying squirrel.

The sugar glider resembles a rodent, but it isn’t. It’s actually a type of possum. It lives in trees and has a partially prehensile tail that helps it climb around more easily, and of course it can glide from tree to tree. It’s an omnivore that eats insects, spiders, and other small animals, along with plant material, mainly sap. It will gnaw little holes in a tree to get at the sap or gum that oozes out. It will also eat fruit, nectar, pollen, and seeds, but most of the time it prefers to hang around flowers and wait for insects to approach. Then it grabs and eats the insect without having to chase it.

The sugar glider is gray with black and white markings, big eyes that allow it to see well in darkness, rounded ears, and a really long, thick, furry tail. It’s a social animal that lives in family groups in small territories. Both males and females help take care of the joeys when they’re out of the mother’s pouch, mainly by helping them stay warm when it’s cold.

Our last marsupial of this episode is Erin’s suggestion, the quokka. It’s about the size of a domestic cat, related to wallabies and kangaroos. It’s shaped roughly like a chonky little wallaby but with a smaller tail and with rounded ears, and it’s grey-brown in color.

The quokka is considered incredibly cute because of the way its muzzle and mouth are shaped, which makes it look like it’s smiling. If you take a picture of a quokka’s face, it looks like it has a happy smile and that, of course, makes the people who look at it happy too.

This has caused some problems, unfortunately. People who want to take selfies with a quokka sometimes forget that they’re wild animals. While quokkas aren’t very aggressive and are curious animals who aren’t usually afraid of people, they can and will bite when frightened. Touching a quokka or giving it food or drink is strictly prohibited, since it’s a protected animal.

The quokka is most active at night. It sleeps during most of the day, usually hidden in a type of prickly plant that helps keep predators from bothering it. It gets most of its water needs from the plants it eats, and while it mostly hops around like a teensy kangaroo, it can also climb trees.

Let’s finish with our non-marsupial animal. Viki wanted to learn about the platypus, which we haven’t really talked about since way back in episode 45. It’s native to Australia and is very weird-looking, so it’s easy to think it’s another marsupial, but the platypus is even weirder than that. It’s not a marsupial and it’s not a placental mammal. Instead, it’s an extremely rare third type of mammal called a monotreme.

There are only two kinds of monotremes alive today, the echidna and the platypus. Monotremes retain a lot of traits that are considered primitive in mammals. Instead of giving birth to live babies, a monotreme mother lays eggs. The eggs have soft, leathery shells, but when they hatch, the babies look like marsupial newborns.

The platypus is sometimes called the duck-billed platypus, because its snout does kind of look like a duck’s bill, but instead of being hard, the snout is soft and rubbery, and it’s packed with electroreceptors that allow the platypus to sense the tiny electrical fields generated by muscle contractions in its prey. I bet that was not what you expected from what looks like a small beaver with a duck bill!

The platypus grows not quite two feet long, or 50 cm, and has short, dense, brown fur. It spends a lot of its time in the water, and has a flattened tail that acts as a rudder when it swims, along with its hind feet. It propels itself through the water with its front feet, which are large and have webbed toes. It lives in eastern Australia along rivers and streams, and digs a short burrow in the riverbank to sleep in. The female digs a deeper burrow before she lays her eggs, and she makes them a nest out of leaves.

Baby platypuses are called puggles, and while the mother doesn’t have a pouch, she keeps her babies warm by tucking them against her tummy with her tail. Monotremes don’t have teats, but they do produce milk from what are called milk patches. The puggles lick the milk up. Until scientists figured out that monotremes have these milk patches, in 1824, they thought monotremes weren’t mammals at all but something more closely related to reptiles.

Monotremes were much more common throughout the world until about 60 to 70 million years ago, when marsupials started outcompeting them. Marsupials don’t spend much time in water, though, because if they did their joeys would drown. The platypus and echidna both survived to the present day because they’re adapted for the water. The platypus mainly navigates in the water using its electrolocation abilities, and eats worms, fish, insects, crustaceans, and anything else it can catch.

It’s easy to think, “Oh, that mammal is so primitive, it must not have evolved much since the common ancestor of mammals, birds, and reptiles was alive 315 million years ago,” but of course that’s not the case. It’s just that the monotremes that survived did just fine with the basic structures they evolved a long time ago, and they’re still going strong today.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 457: Parrots!

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Thanks to Fleur, Yuzu, and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

World’s rarest parrot, extinct in wild, hatches at zoo

Kakapo recovery

This Parrot Stood 3 Feet Tall and Ruled the Roost in New Zealand Forests 19 Million Years Ago

The magnificent palm cockatoo:

The gigantic kakapo:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a bird episode, specifically some interesting parrots. Thanks to Fleur, Yuzu, and Richard from NC for their suggestions!

Parrots are intelligent, social birds that are mostly found in tropical and subtropical parts of the world, but not always. Most parrots eat plant material exclusively, especially seeds, nuts, and fruit, but some species will eat insects and other small animals when they get the chance. Most parrots are brightly colored, but again, not always. And, unfortunately, most parrot species are endangered to some degree due to habitat loss, hunting for their feathers and for the pet trade, and introduced predators like cats and rats.

All parrots have a curved beak that the bird uses to open nuts and seeds, but which also acts as a tool or even a third foot when it’s climbing around in trees. All parrots have strong clawed feet that they also use to climb around and perch in trees, and to handle food and tools.

Let’s start with Yuzu’s suggestions, the cockatoo and the parakeet. A parakeet is a small parrot, but it’s a term that refers to a lot of various types of small parrots. This includes an extinct bird called the Carolina parakeet.

It was small parrot that was common throughout a big part of the United States. It had a yellow and orange head and a green body with some yellow markings, and was about the size of a mourning dove or a passenger pigeon. Its story of extinction mirrors that of the passenger pigeon in many ways. The Carolina parakeet lived in forests and swamps in big, noisy flocks and ate fruit and seeds, but when European settlers moved in, turning forests into farmland and shooting birds that were considered pests, its numbers started to decline. In addition, the bird was frequently captured for sale in the pet trade and hunted for its feathers, which were used to decorate hats.

By 1860 the Carolina parakeet was rare anywhere except the swamps of central Florida, and by 1904 it was extinct in the wild. The last captive bird died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918, which was not only the same zoo where the last passenger pigeon died in 1914, it was the same cage. It was declared extinct in 1939.

The parakeet Yuzu is probably referencing is the budgie, or budgerigar. It’s the one that’s extremely common as a pet, and it’s native to Australia. In the wild it’s green and yellow with black markings, but the domestic version, which has been bred in captivity since the 1850s, can be all sorts of colors and patterns, including various shades of blue, yellow all over, white, and piebald, meaning the bird has patches of white on its body.

The budgie can learn to repeat words and various sounds, especially if it’s a young bird. I had two parakeets as a kid, named Dandelion and Sky so you can guess their colors, and neither learned to talk although I really tried to teach them. Some birds just aren’t interested in mimicry, while others won’t stop, especially if they get attention when they speak.

In the wild, budgies live in flocks that will travel long distances to find food and water. The birds mostly eat grass seeds, especially spinifex, but will sometimes eat wheat, especially in areas where farmland has destroyed much of their wild food. They’re social birds that are sometimes called lovebirds, although that’s the name of a different type of bird too, because they will preen and feed their mates.

Like many birds, the parakeet can see ultraviolet light, and their feathers glow in UV light. This makes them even more attractive to potential mates, as if the parakeet wasn’t beautiful enough to start with.

Yuzu also asked about the cockatoo. There are 21 species of cockatoo, also native to Australia and other nearby places, including Indonesia and New Guinea. It’s much larger than the budgie and most species have a crest of some kind. It lives in flocks and eats various types of plant material, including flowers and roots, but it will also eat insects. The cockatoo isn’t as brightly colored as many parrots, and is usually black, white, or gray, often with patches of color on the crest, cheeks, or tail.

The pink cockatoo is white with pale salmon pink markings on the body, and brighter pink and yellow on its crest. The sulphur-crested cockatoo is white with pale yellow on the undersides of the wings and tail, and a bright yellow crest. We talked about the palm cockatoo in episode 23 because not only does it look like it should be a drummer of the Muppet Animal variety, since it’s black with red cheeks and a big messy crest, it does actually use sticks and nuts to drum against tree branches, to attract a mate.

Richard from NC suggested we learn about Spix’s macaw, also called the blue macaw, because it’s considered one of the world’s rarest parrots. In fact, it was declared extinct in the wild in 2019. It only survives at all because of intensive conservation efforts, including a captive breeding program spread over multiple zoos.

The blue macaw is native to one small part of Brazil in South America, although it used to be much more common several hundred years ago. It’s blue with a gray-blue head. It’s such a beautiful parrot that it was driven to extinction by people trapping the birds to sell as pets, even though that had been outlawed by Brazil, although its numbers had been falling for centuries due to habitat loss. It relied on a particular species of tree called the tree of gold, because its flowers are bright yellow. The blue macaw nested in these trees, and its seedpods were one of its main foods. As groves made up of the tree of gold were chopped down to make way for farmland and towns, the bird became more and more rare.

Luckily, even though the blue macaw doesn’t breed very quickly in captivity, by 2022 there were enough healthy young birds to release twenty into the wild. Just a few weeks ago as this episode goes live, another egg has hatched in captivity in a bird conservation center in Belgium, after the previous hundred eggs were infertile and never hatched.

Next, Fleur wanted to learn more about the kakapo, a flightless, nocturnal parrot that lives only in New Zealand. We talked about it in episode 313, but it’s definitely time to revisit it.

The kakapo is the largest living parrot. It has green feathers with speckled markings, blue-gray feet, and discs of feathers around its eyes that make its face look a little like an owl’s face. That’s why it’s sometimes called the owl parrot. Males are almost twice the size of females on average. It can grow over two feet long, or 64 cm, and can weigh as much as 9 lbs, or about 4 kg. That’s way too heavy for it to fly, but its legs are short but strong and it will jog for long distances to find food. It can also climb really well, right up into the very tops of trees. It uses its strong legs and its large curved bill to climb. Then, to get down from the treetop more efficiently, the kakapo will spread its wings and parachute down, although its wings aren’t big enough or strong enough for it to actually fly. A big heavy male sort of falls in a controlled plummet while a small female will land more gracefully.

The kakapo evolved on New Zealand where it had almost no predators. A few types of eagle hunted it during the day, which is why it evolved to be mostly nocturnal. Its only real predator at night was one type of owl. As a result, the kakapo was one of the most common birds throughout New Zealand when humans arrived.

But by the end of the 19th century, the kakapo was becoming increasingly rare everywhere. By 1970, scientists worried that the kakapo was already extinct. Fortunately, a few of the birds survived in remote areas. Several islands were chosen as refuges, and all the kakapos scientists could find were relocated to the islands, 65 birds in total. While the kakapo is doing a lot better now than it has in decades, it’s still critically endangered. The current population is 237 individuals according to New Zealand’s Department of Conservation.

The kakapo may be the largest living parrot, but it’s not the largest parrot that ever lived. That would be the giant parrot. It’s known only from a few fossils dated to between 16 and 19 million years ago, but from those fossils scientists estimate that the giant parrot grew around 3 feet tall, or almost a meter, and possibly weighed almost twice what the kakapo weighs. It’s the largest parrot that ever lived as far as we know, and it was probably related to the kakapo.

We don’t know a lot about the giant parrot because only two fossils have been found, both of them leg bones and probably from the same individual. They bones are so big that scientists initially thought they belonged to an eagle. Hopefully soon more fossils will come to light so we can learn more about the giant parrot. For all we know, those leg bones belonged to a young parrot that wasn’t fully grown yet. Maybe the adults were even bigger than we think!

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 452: Rare Wallabies and Two Hoofed Beasts

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Thanks to Brody, Oz, and Sam for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Chasing gold

Two spectacled hare-wallabies hanging out under a spinifex bush [picture from this site]:

A regular swamp wallaby [photo by jjron – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4022233]:

The glorious golden swamp wallaby [photo by Jack Evershed, taken from the first article linked above]:

The takin can also be golden:

The gaur is so incredibly big! It’s so big, honestly, it’s just ridiculous:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have suggestions from Oz, Sam, and Brody, with some interesting mammals!

Let’s start with Brody’s suggestion, the wallaby! It’s been a while since we talked about the wallaby, which is an adorable marsupial closely related to the kangaroo. It’s native to Australia and New Guinea, part of the family Macropodidae.

One thing everyone knows about kangaroos, which is also true for wallabies, is that they hop instead of running. Their hind legs are extremely strong with big feet, and in fact the word Macropodidae means big feet. The animal hops by leaning forward and jumping, with its big hind feet leaving the ground at about the same time, and landing at the same time too before it bounces again. Its big tail helps it balance.

We talked about the wallaby last in episode 390, so let’s learn about some species of wallaby that we didn’t talk about then. For example, the spectacled hare-wallaby. It’s a small species that’s common in northern Australia and parts of Papua New Guinea. It’s active at night and is mostly solitary, so unless you’re wandering around at night you might not have seen one. It’s called the spectacled hare-wallaby because it has orange-colored fur around its eyes so that it looks sort of like it’s wearing glasses. The rest of its fur is brown, gray, and golden. Its ears are small and its tail and hind legs are very long, with short little front legs. It’s very cute.

The spectacled hare-wallaby prefers sandy or stony areas, like dunes and shrubland, where it can find lots of plants to eat but can easily hop away if it spots a predator. It’s smaller than a domestic cat, but it can travel incredibly fast when it wants to.

If you live along the eastern part of Australia, you might have seen the swamp wallaby, also called the black wallaby because it’s mostly dark gray or gray-brown in color, often with a white tip to the tail. It’s stocky and much larger than the spectacled hare-wallaby, almost three feet tall, or 85 cm, when it’s sitting up. It doesn’t just live in swamps but also likes forests and other areas with lots of places to hide. Unlike the spectacled hare-wallaby, it’s not that fast and can’t always outrun potential predators, but it’s good at hiding because its fur is so dark.

Most wallabies are grazers, meaning they mainly eat grass, but the swamp wallaby is a browser. Instead of having grinding teeth to break down grass, its teeth are sharper for cutting through plant material like bushes, shrubs, and ferns. The swamp wallaby will even use its front legs to pull branches into reach so it can eat the leaves.

Wallabies are marsupials, meaning the babies are born extremely early by our standards, crawl into the mother’s pouch and clamp onto a teat, and continue to develop in the pouch. Wallabies usually only have one baby at a time, but the mother swamp wallaby has two babies in its pouch almost all its adult life. The swamp wallaby has two uteruses, and a few days before the first baby is ready to be born, the female comes into estrus again, meaning she’s ready to mate. By the time her first baby is born, she’s already pregnant with her second baby. When the second baby is born, the first baby is old enough that’s it doesn’t spend all the time in the pouch—but by then, she’s already pregnant with her third baby. By the time the third baby is born, the first baby is grown up and on its own, the second baby is old enough that it isn’t in the pouch all the time, and—you guessed it—the mother is already pregnant with baby four. It sounds exhausting, but it works well for the swamp wallaby.

As I mentioned, the swamp wallaby is also called the black wallaby, but there’s a rare color variation that’s called a golden swamp wallaby. It’s still a swamp wallaby but its fur is golden yellow and it has a white face. The coloration is due to a mutation in coat color, but golden swamp wallabies seem to be perfectly safe in the few areas where they’re found, so it doesn’t seem to be a detriment. Some scientists suspect the color morph is helpful in open forests with sandier soil, which is exactly where the golden swamp wallabies are found.

Speaking of golden animals, let’s talk next about the takin, suggested by Sam. We talked about the golden takin back in episode 218, which is a subspecies of takin. The takin is closely related to sheep and mountain goats, but it looks more like a small musk ox.

The takin lives in the eastern Himalaya Mountains, and is a strong, stocky animal with a lot of adaptations to intense cold. It has a thick coat that grows even thicker in winter, with a soft, dense undercoat to trap heat next to the body. It also has large sinus cavities that warm the air it breathes before it reaches the lungs, which means it has a big snoot. Its skin is oily, which acts as a water repellent during rain and snowstorms. In spring it migrates to high elevations, but when winter starts it migrates back down to lower elevations where it’s not quite as cold.

It will eat just about any plant material it can reach, including tree bark, tough evergreen leaves, and bamboo. It sometimes shares the same bamboo forests where pandas live. It will even sometimes push over small trees so it can eat the leaves. It visits salt licks regularly, and some researchers think it needs the minerals available at salt licks to help neutralize the toxins found in many plants it eats.

Both male and female takins have horns, which grow sideways and back from the forehead in a crescent and can be almost three feet long, or 90 cm. It can stand over four feet tall at its humped shoulder, or around 1.4 m. Its fur is mainly golden-brown with gray and white patches.

A full-grown takin is big enough and strong enough that it doesn’t have many predators. If a bear or wolf threatens it, it can run fast if it needs to or hide in dense underbrush. But it’s just a little tiny baby compared to our last animal this week, suggested by Oz: the gaur. [pronounced gow-ur]

We’ve only mentioned the gaur once on the podcast, way back in episode 58, when I mispronounced it “gar.” It’s the largest living bovid, also called the Indian bison, although it doesn’t just live in India. It’s native to southeast Asia, but it’s increasingly rare due to habitat loss and poaching, even though it’s a protected animal.

The gaur looks kind of like a domestic cow, but much larger. It’s dark brown and its lower legs are white, as is its nose. It has a fairly short tail and long curving horns that are mostly pale but black at the tips, and its ears are large. Females are lighter in color than males and calves are a pale sandy-brown.

How big is the gaur? A big bull can grow over seven feet high at the shoulder, or 2.2 meters, and it’s even a bit taller if you measure it at the muscular hump just behind the shoulder. It’s an incredibly heavy animal too, with only elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes being heavier than a big bull. A bull can weigh over 3,300 lbs, or 1,500 kg. It’s so massive and muscular that bulls in particular look like they just got back from the gym and they’re flexing to show off.

The gaur is a bovid, but it doesn’t eat very much grass. Like the swamp wallaby, it’s a browser. It’s mainly found in forests, where it eats leaves, flowers, fruit, and even the bark of some trees, and it lives in herds of about a dozen animals each led by a wise old cow.

Almost the only predator that can kill a full-grown gaur is a tiger, and naturally the gaur does not like tigers at all as a result. If a herd spots a tiger, they form a ring around the calves to protect them, and if the tiger tries to approach, the adult gaurs attack and try to drive the tiger away. Sometimes the gaurs can even kill the tiger. At night the adult gaurs make a ring around the calves this same way, so that if a tiger or other predator approaches in the night, the adults are ready to defend their babies as soon as they wake up. Personally, if I were a tiger I think I wouldn’t bother trying to kill a gaur.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 447: So Many Legs!

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Thanks to Mila for suggesting one of our topics today!

Further reading:

The mystery of the ‘missing’ giant millipede

Never-before-seen head of prehistoric, car-size ‘millipede’ solves evolutionary mystery

A centipede compared to a millipede:

Show transcript:

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

Let’s finish invertebrate August this year with two arthropods. One is a suggestion from Mila and the other is a scientific mystery that was solved by a recent discovery, at least partially.

Mila suggested we learn about centipedes, and the last time we talked about those animals was in episode 100. That’s because centipedes are supposed to have 100 legs.

But do centipedes actually have 100 legs? They don’t. Different species of centipede have different numbers of legs, from only 30 to something like 300. Like other arthropods, the centipede has to molt its exoskeleton to grow larger. When it does, some species grow more segments and legs. Others hatch with all the segments and legs they’ll ever have.

A centipede’s body is flattened and made up of segments, a different number of segments depending on the centipede’s species, but at least 15. Each segment has a pair of legs except for the last two, which have no legs. The first segment’s legs project forward and end in sharp claws with venom glands. These legs are called forcipules, and they actually look like pincers. No other animal has forcipules, only centipedes. The centipede uses its forcipules to capture and hold prey, and to defend itself from potential predators. A centipede pinch can be painful but not dangerous unless you’re also allergic to bees, in which case you might have an allergic reaction to a big centipede’s venom. Small centipedes can’t pinch hard enough to break a human’s skin.

A centipede’s last pair of legs points backwards and sometimes look like tail stingers, but they’re just modified legs that act as sensory antennae. Each pair of a centipede’s legs is a little longer than the pair in front of it, which helps keep the legs from bumping into each other when the centipede walks.

The centipede lives throughout the world, even in the Arctic and in deserts, but it needs a moist environment so it won’t dry out. It likes rotten wood, leaf litter, soil, especially soil under stones, and basements. Some centipedes have no eyes at all, many have eyes that can only sense light and dark, and some have relatively sophisticated compound eyes. Most centipedes are nocturnal.

The largest centipedes alive today belong to the genus Scolopendra. This genus includes the Amazonian giant centipede, which can grow over a foot long, or 30 cm. It’s reddish or black with yellow bands on the legs, and lives in parts of South America and the Caribbean. It eats insects, spiders–including tarantulas, frogs and other amphibians, small snakes and lizards, birds, and small mammals like mice. It’s even been known to catch bats in midair by hanging down from cave ceilings and grabbing the bat as it flies by.

Some people think that the Amazonian giant centipede is the longest in the world, but this isn’t actually the case. Its close relation, the Galapagos centipede, can grow 17 inches long, or 43 cm, and is black with red legs.

But if you think that’s big, wait until you hear about the other animal we’re discussing today. It’s called Arthropleura and it lived in what is now Europe and North America between about 344 and 292 million years ago.

Before we talk about it, though, we need to learn a little about the millipede. Millipedes are related to centipedes and share a lot of physical characteristics, like a segmented body and a lot of legs. The word millipede means one thousand feet, but millipedes can have anywhere from 36 to 1,306 legs. That is a lot of legs. It’s probably too many legs. The millipede with 1,306 legs is Eumillipes persephone, found in western Australia and only described in 2021. It lives deep underground in forested areas, where it probably eats fungus that grows on tree roots. It’s long and thin with short legs and no eyes. It’s only about 1 mm in diameter, but can grow nearly 4 inches long, or almost 10 cm.

Millipedes mostly eat decaying plant material and are generally chunkier-looking than centipedes. They have two pairs of legs per segment instead of just one, with the legs attached on the underside of the segment instead of on the sides. A millipede usually has short, strong antennae that it uses to poke around in soil and decaying leaves. It can’t pinch, sting, or bite, although some species can secrete a toxic liquid that also smells terrible. Mostly if it feels threatened, a millipede will curl up and hope the potential predator will leave it alone.

The biggest millipede alive today is probably the giant African millipede, which can grow over 13 inches long, or almost 34 cm, but because millipedes are common throughout the world and are often hard for scientists to find, there may very well be much larger millipedes out there that we just don’t know about.

As an example, in 1897 scientists discovered a new species of giant millipede in Madagascar and named it Spirostreptus sculptus. One specimen found was almost 11 inches long, or over 27 cm. But after that, no scientist saw the millipede again—until 2023, when a scientific expedition looking for lost species rediscovered it, along with 20 other species of animal. It turns out that the millipede isn’t even uncommon in the area, so the local people probably knew all about it.

But Arthropleura was way bigger than any millipede or centipede alive today. It could grow at least 8 ½ feet long, or 2.6 meters, and possibly longer. It probably weighed over 100 lbs, or 45 kg. We have plenty of fossilized specimens, but not one of them has an intact head. Then scientists discovered two beautifully preserved juvenile specimens in France, and CT scans in 2024 revealed that both specimens had nearly complete heads.

The big question about Arthropleura was whether it was more closely related to millipedes or centipedes, or if it was something very different. Without a head to study, no one could answer that question with any confidence, although a lot of scientists had definite opinions one way or another. Studies of the head scans determined that Arthropleura was indeed more closely related to modern millipedes—but naturally, since it lived so long ago, it also had a lot of traits more common in centipedes today. It also had something not found in either animal, eyes on little stalks.

There are still lots of mysteries surrounding Arthropleura. For instance, what did it eat? Because of its size, scientists initially thought it might be a predator. Now that we know it was more closely related to the millipede than the centipede, scientists think it might have eaten like a millipede too. That would mean it mostly ate decaying vegetation, but we don’t know for sure. We also don’t know if it could swim or not. We have a lot of Arthropleura tracks that seem to be made along the water’s edge, so some scientists hypothesize that it could swim or at least spent part of its time in the water. Other scientists point out that Arthropleura didn’t have gills or any other way to absorb oxygen while in the water, so it was more likely to be fully terrestrial. The first set of scientists sometimes comes back and argues that we don’t actually know how Arthropleura breathed or even why it was able to grow so large, and maybe it really did have gills. A third group of scientists then has to come in and say, hey, everyone calm down, maybe the next specimen we find will show evidence of both lungs and gills, and it spent part of its time on land and part in shallow water, so there’s no need to argue. And then they all go for pizza and remember that they really love arthropods, and isn’t Arthropleura the coolest arthropod of all?

At least, I think that’s how it works among scientists. And Arthropleura is really cool.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 446: Termites

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Thanks to Yonatan and Eilee for this week’s suggestion!

Further reading:

Replanted rainforests may benefit from termite transplants

A vast 4,000-year-old spatial pattern of termite mounds

A family of termites has been traversing the world’s oceans for millions of years

Worker termites [photo from this site]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a topic I’ve been wanting to cover for a while, suggested by both Yonatan and Eilee. It’s the termite episode!

We talk a lot about animals that eat termites, and in many cases termite-eating animals also eat ants. I’ve always assumed that termites and ants are closely related, but they’re not. Termites are actually closely related to cockroaches, which are both in the order Blattodea, but it’s been 150 million years since they shared a common ancestor. They share another trait too, in that no one wants either insect infesting their house.

Like most cockroach species, though, most termite species don’t want anything to do with humans. They live in the wild, not in your house, and they’re incredibly common throughout most of the world. That’s why so many animals eat termites almost exclusively. There are just so many termites to eat!

There are around 3,000 species of termite and about a third of them live in Africa, with another 400 or so in South America, 400 or so in Asia, and 400 or so in Australia. The rest live in other parts of the world, but they need warm weather to survive so they’re not very common in cold areas like northern Europe.

A termite colony consists of a queen, soldiers, and workers, which sounds very similar to ants, but there are some major differences. Worker termites take care of the nest and babies, find and process food so the other termites can eat it, and store the processed food. They also take care of the queen. Unlike ants and bees, worker termites aren’t only female and aren’t always sterile. Soldiers are bigger and stronger than workers, with much bigger heads and jaws so they can fight off potential predators. In some species, the soldiers have such big jaws that they can’t actually eat without help. Worker termites feed them. Finally, the queen is the largest individual in the colony, usually considerably larger than workers, but unlike queen bees and ants, she has a mate who stays with her throughout her life, called a king. Some termite queens can live to be as much as 50 years old, and she and the king spend almost their entire lives underground in a nesting chamber.

The larger the colony, the more likely it is that the colony has more than one queen. The main queen is usually the one that started the colony along with her king, and when it was new they did all the work—taking care of the eggs and babies, foraging for food, and building the nest itself. As the first workers grew up, they took on more of those tasks, including expanding the nest.

Workers are small and their bodies have little to no pigment, so that they appear white. Some people call them white ants, but of course they’re not ants. Workers have to stay in a humid environment like the nest or their bodies dry out. Workers and soldiers don’t have eyes, although they can probably sense light and dark, and instead they navigate using their antennae, which can sense humidity and vibrations, and chemoreceptors that sense pheromones released by other termites.

Termites have another caste that’s not as common, usually referred to as reproductives. These are future kings and queens, and they’re larger and stronger than workers. They also have eyes and wings. When outside conditions are right, usually when the weather is warm and humid, the reproductive termites leave the nest and fly away. Males and females pair off and search for a new nesting site to start their own colony.

Termites mainly eat dead plant material, including plant material that most other animals can’t digest. A termite’s gut contains microbes that are found nowhere else in the world, which allow the termite to digest cellulose found in plants, especially wood. Baby termites aren’t born with these microbes, but they gain them from worker termites when the babies are fed or groomed.

In some areas termites will eat the wood used to build houses, which is why people don’t like them, but termites are actually important to the ecosystems where they live, recycling nutrients and helping break down fallen trees so other plants can grow. They also host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which are important to plant life.

A recent study in Australia determined that termites are really important for rainforest health. In some parts of Australia, conservation groups have started planting rainforest trees to restore deforested areas. Decomposers like termites are slower to populate these areas, with one site that was studied 12 years after planting showing limited termite activity. That means it takes longer for fallen branches, logs, and stumps to decay, which means it takes longer for the nutrients in those items and others to be available for other plants to use.

The problem seems to be that the new forests don’t have very many dead trees yet, so the termites don’t have a lot to eat. The team is considering bringing in fallen logs from more established forests so the termites have food and can establish colonies more easily.

Some species of termite in Africa, Australia, and South America build mounds, and those mounds can be huge. A mound is built above ground out of soil and termite dung, held together with termite saliva. It’s full of tunnels and shafts that allow the termites to move around inside and which bring air into the main part of the nest, which is mostly below ground. Different species build differently-shaped mounds, including some that are completely round.

Some termite mounds can be twice the height of a tall person, and extremely big around. The biggest measured had a diameter of almost 100 feet around, or 30 meters. But in at least one place on earth, in northeastern Brazil, there’s a network of interconnected termite mounds that is as big as Great Britain.

The complex consists of about 200 million mounds, each of them about 8 feet tall, or 2.5 meters, and about 30 feet across, or 9 meters. They’re just huge piles of soil excavated from underground, and tests have determined that the mounds range in age from 690 years old to at least 3,820 years old and are connected by tunnels–but the nests under the mounds are still in use!

Not all termite species build mounds or even live underground. A group called drywood termites live in wood and usually have much smaller colonies than other termites. They probably split off from other termites about 100 million years ago, and a 2022 genetic study determined that they probably originated in South America. But drywood termites have spread to many other parts of the world, and scientists think it’s because their homes float. They estimate that over the last 50 million years, drywood termites have actually floated across entire oceans at least 40 times. When their floating log homes washed ashore, the termites colonized the new land and adapted to local conditions.

A lot of people worry that termites will damage their homes, but in many parts of the world, people eat termites. The termites are fried or roasted until they’re nicely crunchy, and they’re supposed to have a nut-like flavor. They’re also high in protein and important fats. So the next time you worry about your house, you can shout at any potential termites that if they’re around, you might just eat them as a snack.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 442: Trees and Megafauna

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Further reading:

The Trees That Miss the Mammoths

The disappearance of mastodons still threatens the native forests of South America

Study reveals ancient link between mammoth dung and pumpkin pie

A mammoth, probably about to eat something:

The Osage orange fruit looks like a little green brain:

Show transcript:

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

Way back at the end of 2017, I found an article called “The Trees That Miss the Mammoths,” and made a Patreon episode about it. In episode 320, about elephants, which released in March of 2023, I cited a similar article connecting mammoths and other plants. Now there’s even more evidence that extinct megafauna and living plants are connected, so let’s have a full episode all about it.

Let’s start with the Kentucky coffeetree, which currently only survives in cultivation and in wetlands in parts of North America. It grows up to 70 feet high, or 21 meters, and produces leathery seed pods so tough that most animals literally can’t chew through them to get to the seeds. Its seed coating is so thick that water can’t penetrate it unless it’s been abraded considerably. Researchers are pretty sure the seed pods were eaten by mastodons and mammoths. Once the seeds traveled through a mammoth’s digestive system, they were nicely abraded and ready to sprout in a pile of dung.

There are five species of coffeetree, and the Kentucky coffeetree is the only one found in North America. The others are native to Asia, but a close relation grows in parts of Africa. It has similar tough seeds, which are eaten and spread by elephants.

The African forest elephant is incredibly important as a seed disperser. At least 14 species of tree need the elephant to eat their fruit in order for the seeds to sprout at all. If the forest elephant goes extinct, the trees will too.

When the North American mammoths went extinct, something similar happened. Mammoths and other megafauna co-evolved with many plants and trees to disperse their seeds, and in return the animals got to eat some yummy fruit. But when the mammoths went extinct, many plant seeds couldn’t germinate since there were no mammoths to eat the fruit and poop out the seeds. Some of these plants survive but have declined severely, like the Osage orange.

The Osage orange grows about 50 or 60 feet tall, or 15 to 18 meters, and produces big yellowish-green fruits that look like round greenish brains. Although it’s related to the mulberry, you wouldn’t be able to guess that from the fruit. The fruit drops from the tree and usually just sits there and rots. Some animals will eat it, especially cattle, but it’s not highly sought after by anything. Not anymore. In 1804, when the tree was first described by Europeans, it only grew in a few small areas in and near Texas. The tree mostly survives today because the plant can clone itself by sending up fresh sprouts from old roots.

But 10,000 years ago, the tree grew throughout North America, as far north as Ontario, Canada, and there were seven different species instead of just the one we have today. 10,000 years ago is about the time that much of the megafauna of North and South America went extinct, including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, elephant-like animals called gomphotheres, camels, and many, many others.

The osage orange tree’s thorns are too widely spaced to deter deer, but would have made a mammoth think twice before grabbing at the branches with its trunk. The thorns also grow much higher than deer can browse. Trees that bear thorns generally don’t grow them in the upper branches. There’s no point in wasting energy growing thorns where nothing is going to eat the leaves anyway. If there are thorns beyond reach of existing browsers, the tree must have evolved when something with a taller reach liked to eat its leaves.

The term “evolutionary anachronism” is used to describe aspects of a plant, like the Osage orange’s thorns and fruit, that evolved due to pressures of animals that are now extinct. Scientists have observed evolutionary anachronism plants throughout the world. For instance, the lady apple tree, which grows in northern Australia and parts of New Guinea. It can grow up to 66 feet tall, or 20 meters, and produces an edible red fruit with a single large seed. It’s a common tree these days, probably because the Aboriginal people ate the fruit, but before that, a bird called genyornis was probably the main seed disperser of the lady apple.

In episode 217 we talked about the genyornis, a flightless Australian bird that went extinct around 50,000 years ago but possibly more recently. It grew around 7 feet tall, or over 2 meters, and recent studies suggest it ate a lot of water plants. It would have probably eaten the lady apple fruit whenever it could, most likely swallowing the fruits whole and pooping the big seeds out later.

Way back in episode 19 we talked about a tree on the island of Mauritius that relied on the dodo’s digestive system to abrade its seeds so they could sprout. It turns out that study was flawed and the seeds don’t need to be abraded to sprout. They just need an animal to eat the flesh off the seed, either by just eating the fruit and leaving the seed behind, or by swallowing the entire fruit and pooping the seed out later, and that could have been done by any number of animals. The dodo probably did eat the fruits, but so did a lot of other animals that have also gone extinct on Mauritius.

In June of 2025, a study was published showing that the gomphothere Notiomastodon, which lived in South America until about 10,000 years ago, definitely ate fruit. Notiomastodon was an elephant relation that could probably grow almost ten feet tall, or 3 meters. It probably lived in family groups like modern elephants and probably looked a lot like a modern elephant, at least if you’re not an elephant expert or an elephant yourself. The 2025 study examined a lot of notiomastodon teeth, and it discovered evidence that the animals ate a lot of fruit. This means it would have been an important seed disperser, just like the African forest elephant that we talked about earlier.

Another plant that nearly went extinct after the mammoth did is a surprising one. Wild ancestors of modern North American squash plants relied on mammoths to disperse their seeds and create the type of habitat where the plants thrived. Mammoths probably behaved a lot like modern elephants, pulling down tree limbs to eat and sometimes pushing entire trees over. This disturbed land is what wild squash plants loved, and if you’ve ever prepared a pumpkin or squash you’ll know that it’s full of seeds. The wild ancestors of these modern cultivated plants didn’t have delicious fruits, though, at least not to human taste buds. The fruit contained toxins that made them bitter, which kept small animals from eating them. Small animals would chew up the seeds instead of swallowing them whole, which is not what the plants needed. But mammoths weren’t bothered by the toxins and in fact probably couldn’t even taste the bitterness. They thought these wild squash were delicious and they ate a lot of them.

After the mammoth went extinct, the wild squash lost its main seed disperser. As forests grew thicker after mammoths weren’t around to keep the trees open, the squash also lost a lot of its preferred habitat. The main reason why we have pumpkins and summer squash is because of our ancient ancestors. They bred for squash that weren’t bitter, and they planted them and cared for the plants. So even though the main cause of the mammoth’s extinction was probably overhunting by ancient humans, at least we got pumpkin pies out of the whole situation. However, I personally would prefer to have both pumpkin pie and mammoths.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 439: The Missing Echidna

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Thanks to Cara for suggesting we talk about the long-beaked echidna this week!

Further reading:

Found at last: bizarre, egg-laying mammal finally rediscovered after 60 years

A short-beaked echidna:

The rediscovered Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about an animal suggested by Cara, the echidna, also called the spiny anteater. It’s a type of mammal, but it’s very different from almost all the mammals alive today. We talked about the echidna briefly in episode 45, but this week we’re going to learn more about it, especially one that was thought to be extinct but was recently rediscovered.

Cara specifically suggested we learn about the long-beaked echidna, which lives only in New Guinea. The short-beaked echidna lives in New Guinea and Australia. The names short and long beaked make it sound like the echidna is a bird, but the beak is actually just a snout. It just looks beak-like from a distance and is covered with tough skin, sort of like the platypus’s snout is sometimes called a duck-bill.

In June and July of 2023, an expedition made up of scientists and local experts from various parts of Indonesia, as well as from the University of Oxford in England, discovered and rediscovered a lot of small animals in the Cyclops Mountains. They even discovered an entire cave system that no one but some local people had known about, and they discovered it when one of the expedition members stepped on a mossy spot in the forest and fell straight through down into the cave. But one animal they were really hoping to see hadn’t made an appearance and they worried it was actually extinct. That one was Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, a type of mammal known as a monotreme.

There are three big groups of mammals. The biggest is the placental mammal group, which includes humans, dogs, cats, mice, bats, horses, whales, giraffes, and so on. A female placental mammal grows her babies inside her body in the uterus, each baby wrapped in a fluid-filled sac called a placenta. Placental mammals are pretty well developed when they’re born.

The second type is the marsupial mammal group, which includes possums, kangaroos, koalas, wombats, sugar gliders, and so on. A female marsupial has two uteruses, and while her babies initially grow inside her, they’re born very early. A baby marsupial, called a joey, is just a little pink squidge about the size of a bean that’s not anywhere near done growing, but it’s not completely helpless. It has relatively well developed front legs so it can crawl up its mother’s fur and find a teat. Some species of marsupial have a pouch around its teats, like possums and kangaroos, but other species don’t. Once the baby finds a teat, it clamps on and stays there for weeks or months while it continues to grow.

The third and rarest type of mammal these days is the monotreme group, and monotremes lay eggs. But their eggs aren’t like bird eggs, they’re more like reptile eggs, with a soft, leathery shell. The female monotreme keeps her eggs inside her body until it’s almost time for them to hatch. The babies are small squidge beans like marsupial newborns, and I’m delighted to report that they’re called puggles. There are only two monotremes left alive in the world today, the platypus and the echidna. The echidna has a pouch and after a mother echidna lays her single egg, she tucks it in the pouch.

Monotremes show a number of physical traits that are considered primitive. Some of the traits, like the bones that make up their shoulders and the placement of their legs, are shared with reptiles but not found in most modern mammals. Other traits are shared with birds. The word monotreme means “one opening,” and that opening, called a cloaca, is used for reproductive and excretory systems instead of those systems using separate openings.

It wasn’t until 1824 that scientists figured out that monotreme moms produce milk. They don’t have teats, so the puggles lick the milk up from what are known as milk patches. Before then a lot of scientists argued that monotremes weren’t mammals at all and should either be classified with the reptiles or as their own class, the prototheria.

It’s easy to think, “Oh, that mammal is so primitive, it must not have evolved much since the common ancestor of mammals, birds, and reptiles was alive 315 million years ago,” but of course that’s not the case. It’s just that the monotremes that survived did just fine with the basic structures they evolved a long time ago. There were no evolutionary pressures to develop different shoulder bones or stop laying eggs. Other structures have evolved considerably.

Monotremes aren’t closely related to any of the other mammals alive today, either marsupial or placental mammals. The last shared ancestor lived at least 163 million years ago and possibly much earlier, maybe even 220 million years ago. The first dinosaurs lived around 230 million years ago, so we are talking a very long time ago.

The echidna is relatively closely related to the platypus and its ancestors probably looked and acted a lot like a platypus, including being largely aquatic. The echidna is adapted to life on land, even though it can swim quite well. It looks superficially like a big hedgehog since it’s covered in spines as well as hair, and if it feels threatened it will curl up into a ball like a hedgehog with its spines sticking out. It’s also a strong digger and will often dig a shallow hole very quickly when threatened, so that a potential predator encounters basically a bunch of spines sticking up out of the dirt. But unlike a hedgehog, which is usually small enough to fit in an adult human’s hand, the echidna can grow over 20 inches long, or 52 cm, and a big male can weigh as much as 13 lbs, or 6 kg.

The echidna has a long, skinny snout with a pair of nostrils at the end. The snout is bare of fur and the echidna pokes it into the ground and leaf litter to find the worms and other small invertebrates it eats. Not only does it have a good sense of smell to locate food, its snout also contains electroreceptors that allow it to sense the tiny muscle movements of its prey. The short-beaked echidna mostly eats termites and ants, while the long-beaked echidna mostly eats earthworms. The echidna doesn’t have teeth and its mouth is tiny, but it has a long sticky tongue to lick up the animals it eats. The long-beaked echidna’s tongue has tiny spines on it, sort of like a cat’s tongue has tiny spines that help it groom its fur, but the spines on the echidna’s tongue help it stab worms and insect larvae and drag them into its mouth.

Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna is a subspecies that was only discovered by scientists in 1961. It’s only known from a single specimen, and it hadn’t been seen since. In 2007 a scientific expedition found signs that an echidna was still living in the Cyclops Mountains, namely nose-pokes in the dirt where an echidna had been looking for food, but despite lots of searching for the animal, no one had seen it. Since the echidna is nocturnal and spends most of the day sleeping in its burrow, it’s hard to spot even under the best conditions.

The 2023 expedition used over 80 trail cameras to try and find the echidna. The trail cams were set up for four weeks and not a single one recorded a single echidna—until the very last day, and even then it was almost the very last video on the memory card. It’s just a short little video of an echidna just walking along on its way to do echidna stuff, but it made a big difference for the scientists.

Now that we know that Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna isn’t extinct, scientists can work with local people to help protect it and its habitat.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 429: Foxes!

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

Further reading:

Meet the Endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox

Long snouts protect foxes when diving headfirst in snow

Black bears may play important role in protecting gray fox

The red fox:

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

The extremely fluffy Arctic fox:

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

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 428: The Most Venomous Snake!

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Thanks to Nora and BlueTheChicken for suggesting the inland taipan this week!

The inland taipan in its summer colors [picture by AllenMcC. – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4442037]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a suggestion by Nora and BluetheChicken, who both wanted to learn about the inland taipan. Is it really the most venomous snake in the world? Let’s find out, from a safe distance.

The inland taipan is native to some parts of Australia, specifically in dry areas around the border of Queensland and South Australia. In the summer it’s lighter in color, tan or yellowy-brown, and in winter it’s dark brown or black with a lighter belly. Its head is usually darker in color than the rest of its body, and even in summer it usually has darker scales that make a zig-zaggy pattern on its back and sides. It can grow more than eight feet long, or 2.5 meters. It eats small animals, especially Dasyurids, which are members of the family Dasyuridae.

Dasyurids are marsupials and include larger animals like the Tasmanian devil and the quoll, but those particular species don’t live where the inland taipan does. The inland taipan mainly eats species that are often referred to as marsupial mice and marsupial rats, although they’re not related to rodents at all. It also eats introduced placental mammals like actual rats and house mice.

The inland taipan was described in 1879 from two specimens captured in northwestern Victoria. Then it wasn’t seen again by scientists until 1972, when someone in Queensland sent a snake head to the herpetologist Jeanette Covacevich. Most people would consider that a threat, but she was delighted to get a mystery snake head in the mail. She grabbed a colleague and they hurried to Queensland to look for the snake. They found 13 of them, and to their utter delight, they turned out to be the long-lost inland taipan! Part of the reason it wasn’t rediscovered sooner is that everyone thought it lived in Victoria, when it’s actually still not been seen in that state since 1879.

The inland taipan is often called the fierce snake because if it feels threatened, it will strike repeatedly and very fast. Its venom is incredibly toxic and takes effect incredibly quickly. It’s a neurotoxin that can cause convulsions, paralysis, kidney failure, cerebral hemorrhage, heart failure, and lots more horrible symptoms. People have died from the venom, but unless you keep an inland taipan in captivity and handle it a lot, you don’t have to worry about one biting you. It’s very shy in the wild and will hide in rock crevices or cracks in dry soil rather than attack, plus it lives in remote areas of Australia that most people never visit. Even in captivity it’s usually calm and not aggressive, which leads to reptile keepers and scientists not always taking the correct precautions for handling it. Luckily, with quick treatment and antivenin, most people recover from an inland taipan bite.

So is it the most venomous snake in the world? The inland taipan’s venom hasn’t been fully studied yet, and scientists haven’t fully studied the venom of many other snakes either, but as far as we know right now, yes. The inland taipan is the most venomous snake known, even compared to sea snakes.

You may be wondering if anything would dare eat the inland taipan since it’s so venomous. A big perentie monitor lizard, which we talked about in episode 384, will eat lots of different snakes, including the inland taipan. A snake called the mulga, also referred to as the king brown snake, will eat the inland taipan. The mulga usually only eats small snakes, but it’s immune to the venom of most Australian snakes and can grow up to 11 feet long, or 3.3 meters. The mulga lives throughout most of Australia and is venomous itself. Even though its venom isn’t all that toxic, it will bite repeatedly and even chew to inject even more venom. Honestly, I would much rather run into an inland taipan, if you ask me.

Because it’s so venomous, and so hard to find in the wild anyway, the best place to see an inland taipan is at a public zoo, where you can admire it in an environment that’s safe for you and safe for the snake.

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

Thanks for listening!