Category Archives: cryptozoology

Episode 129: The blurry line between animals and plants

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This week we’re looking at some really strange animals…or are they plants? Or both? We’ll start with the sea anemone, then learn about a sea slug that photosynthesizes like a plant (sort of), then learn a little about whether algae is a plant or an animal…and then we’re off and running through the wild world of carnivorous plants–including some carnivorous plants of mystery!

Thanks to Joshua Hobbs of A Degree in Nonsense for the suggestion, and to Simon for the article link I’ve already managed to lose!

A sea anemone and some actual anemones. Usually pretty easy to tell apart:

The sea onion looks so much like an onion I can’t even stand it. This is an ANIMAL, y’all!

Venus flytrap sea anemone and actual Venus flytrap. It’s usually pretty easy to tell these two apart too.

 

The eastern emerald elysia, a sea slug that looks and acts like a leaf:

Giant kelp. Not a plant. Actually gigantic algae. Algae is neither a plant nor an animal:

The corpse flower (left) and the corpse lily (right). Both smell like UGH and both are extremely BIG:

The pitcher plant can grow very big:

Maybe don’t go near trees with a lot of skulls around them:

Puya chilensis (the clumps in the foreground are its leaves; the spikes in the background are its flower spikes):

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to explore the sometimes blurry line between animals and plants. Joshua Hobbs of a great new podcast A Degree in Nonsense suggested a type of carrion flower that smells like rotting flesh to attract insects, and friend of the pod Simon sent me an article about carnivorous plants. Our very first Patreon bonus episode was actually about carnivorous plants, so I’ve expanded on that episode and added lots of interesting new content. Buckle up, folks, because we’re going to cover a whole lot of ground today!

Oh, and Joshua also says, quote, “I never had a pet growing up, but recently gained an interest in animals. Now after getting into your podcast and animal YouTube channels, I’ve got my first pet, a little corn snake named Arnold!” So welcome to podcasting, Joshua and Arnold!

Let’s start by looking at an animal that resembles a plant. The sea anemone looks so much like a plant that it was named after an actual flower, the anemone, but the sea anemone is related to jellyfish. Most sea anemones attach to a rock or other hard surface most of their lives and don’t move much, although they can creep along very slowly—so slowly that snails are racecar drivers in comparison. Many species have a body shaped like a plant stem and colorful tentacles that resemble flower petals. But those tentacles aren’t just to look pretty. The sea anemone uses them to catch prey. The tentacles are lined with stinging cells that contain venom, just like many jellyfish have. The venom contains neurotoxins that paralyzes a fish or other small animal so that the sea anemone can eat it.

So how does something that looks like a plant eat a fish?

The sea anemone has an interesting body plan. What looks like the stem of a plant is called the column, and in some species it’s thin and delicate while in other species it’s thick like a tree trunk. It sticks to its rock or whatever with an adhesive foot called a basal disc, and on the other end of the column is what’s called the oral disc. Oral means mouth. The actual mouth is in the middle of the oral disc, surrounded by tentacles. The mouth is usually shaped like a slit, which if you think about it is sort of how people’s mouths are too. The digestive system is inside the column. But there is no other opening into the body. The mouth is it. So like jellyfish, the mouth takes in food but it also expels waste, so, you know, not precisely a mouth like ours. When the sea anemone wants to eat, it uses its tentacles to push the food into its mouth.

You know the movie Finding Nemo? Nemo and his dad are clownfish, which aren’t affected by sea anemone venom. Clownfish hide among sea anemone tentacles so predators won’t bother them. In return, the sea anemone eats the clownfish’s poops. I wish I were making that up.

If a sea anemone feels threatened, many species can not only suck its tentacles into its mouth, it can retract the whole mouth inside its body. Basically, it can swallow its own mouth. A sea anemone called the sea onion retracts its tentacles and inflates its column so that it looks like an actual onion. The sea onion lives in a burrow it digs very slowly into the sediment at the bottom of the ocean, with just its tentacles sticking out.

Most sea anemones live in relatively shallow water, but there are some deep-sea species. The Venus flytrap sea anemone has been found at 5,000 feet deep, or over 1,500 meters. At first glance looks like a Venus flytrap plant, thus the name. Its body is a long, usually slender column that widens into a big oral disc on top that’s fringed with short tentacles. It mostly eats detritus that drifts down from above, which it filters from the water with its tentacles, although if a living creature strays into its tentacles it’ll eat it too.

That brings us to the actual Venus flytrap. It’s a plant that eats insects and spiders, especially crawling insects like ants and beetles. The ends of its leaves are modified into lobes that look a little like flowers because the insides of the lobes are a cheerful red while the edges and the hair-like cilia are yellow. When a bug touches the receptors inside the lobes it closes tightly. If the insect continues to move around inside, stimulating the receptors even more, the lobes seal and form a sort of stomach. Digestive enzymes are secreted and about ten days later the lobes reopen and there’s nothing left of the insect but its empty exoskeleton.

If bugs made movies, this would be the subject of every single bug horror film.

The Venus flyptrap is only found in one small part of the world, the boggy areas surrounding Wilmington, North Carolina in the United States. They’re so in demand that the plant is almost extinct in the wild due to idiots digging them up to sell. But Venus flytraps really aren’t that difficult to grow, you just have to make sure the soil you use is deficient in nitrogen and phosphorus. So you can buy Venus flytraps that were grown ethically instead of dug up from the wild. As of 2014 digging up a Venus flytrap is a felony in North Carolina.

Before we go on to talk about some other carnivorous plants, let’s discuss an animal that acts like a plant. It’s a sea slug called the eastern emerald elysia and it lives along the east coast of North America in shallow water. Even though it’s a sea slug, it will also live in fresh water. It grows to about an inch long, or 3 cm, and is green. It’s green because it photosynthesizes like a plant…sort of.

The sea slug eats algae, but it doesn’t fully digest the algae it eats. Its digestive system retains the algae’s chloroplasts, which are the parts of a plant cell that convert sunlight into energy, which is what photosynthesis is. The sea slug keeps the chloroplasts in its digestive system and keeps them alive for months, living off the energy the chloroplasts produce. Researchers aren’t sure how the sea slugs keep the chloroplasts alive.

This is pretty amazing, but it’s not the only sea slug that photosynthesizes in this way. The blue dragon sea slug, that lives along coasts around the Indo-Pacific Ocean, doesn’t just keep chloroplasts alive to produce chlorophyll energy. It gets even more complicated about it. The blue dragon eats tiny animals called hydrozoa, which are related to jellyfish and include the freshwater hydra, although since the blue dragon only lives in the ocean it doesn’t actually eat the hydra. The blue dragon eats hydrozoa that themselves contain a type of microscopic algae that live in a lot of animals, like giant clams, some jellyfish, even some sea anemones, and exchange energy from photosynthesis for protection from predators by living in or on its host. So when the blue dragon eats the hydrozoa containing these algae, it retains the algae and keep them alive. So basically it gets to eat its prey and steals its prey’s symbiotic algae.

Speaking of algae, most algae photosynthesize, and in fact many seaweeds, like kelp, aren’t plants but are giant plant-like algae. But algae, technically, aren’t plants. They’re not animals either. Researchers and taxonomists are still working out the ways various algae are related to each other and to other organisms, but most algae are considered more closely related to plants than to animals without actually being plants. They’re usually grouped with plants above the kingdom level of taxonomy, but since at that level animals like humans and fish and worms and mosquitoes are grouped with fungi, this is a really broad category.

And that brings us, in a roundabout way, to the rotten meat smelling plant suggested by Joshua. There are several plants that attract flies and other insects to pollinate their flowers by smelling of rotten meat. Some of these have freakishly large flowers, like the corpse flower. It lives in rainforests in parts of Sumatra and Java and is actually related to the calla lily. It’s a weird-shaped plant and hard to describe. You know how a calla lily has a pretty white petal that wraps around a yellow spike thing? The corpse flower is like that, only it can be ten feet high, or 3 meters. The thing that looks like a petal is actually a specialized leaf and the yellow spike is called the spadix. The yellow part is made up of tiny flowers, so a calla lily isn’t a single flower, it’s lots of flowers that look like one. Well, the corpse flower is like that, although its flowers are actually only at the bottom of the spadix. The petal-like leaf is dark red inside. The top of the spadix is where the rotten smell comes from, and it’s incredibly stinky—something like rotting meat and rotting fish with some extra smell like dung on top of it. It releases this stink mostly in the evenings and the top of the spadix actually grows hot to better disperse the smell.

The largest single flower in the world is sometimes called the corpse lily and it can grow over three feet across, or about a meter. It’s dark reddish-brown with white speckles and five fleshy petals, which look like meat. It smells like rotting meat too. Flies are attracted to the flower, which pollinate it. The flower can take an entire year to develop but only blooms for a few days. If it’s successfully pollinated, the flower produces a round fruit full of seeds that are eaten by tree shrews, which later poop the seeds out and spread them.

But the corpse lily isn’t any ordinary plant. It doesn’t even have roots or a stem or leaves. All it has is the flower, which grows directly from the roots of the corpse lily’s host plant. That’s right, the corpse lily is a parasitic plant, but it’s no ordinary parasite. It grows not on or around its host plant, but inside it. The host plant is a type of vine called Tetrastigma, related to the grape vine. When a tree shrew poops out a seed, the seed germinates and if it happens to germinate on a Tetrastigma vine, it develops tiny threadlike filaments that penetrate the vine and grow inside it.

The corpse lily lives only in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, and it’s rare and getting rarer since so much of the rainforests in those areas are being destroyed. Fortunately, the corpse lily is actually a tourist attraction since it’s so rare, so spectacular, and so stinky. People who have corpse lilies growing in their yard sometimes protect the flower buds from harm and charge tourists to come look at them, which helps the people of the area and the plants.

There are literally hundreds of carnivorous plant species, with carnivorous habits evolving probably nine different times among plants that aren’t related. Different species use different methods to catch insects. For instance, the pitcher plant has modified leaf that forms a slippery-sided pitcher filled with nectar-like liquid. When an insect crawls down to drink the liquid, it falls in. The insect drowns and is dissolved and digested.

Some carnivorous plants have leaves lined with sticky mucilage, which traps small insects. The sundew has tentacles lined with hair-like structures beaded with mucilage. When an insect becomes trapped in the mucilage, the tentacles bend toward the insect and stick onto it, sometimes quite quickly—in seconds, or in at least one species, a fraction of a second. Generally you don’t think of plants as moving that fast.

Almost all known carnivorous plants are pretty small. The largest are pitcher plants. Two species of big pitcher plants grow in the mountains of the Philippines. Attenborough’s pitcher plant was discovered in 2007 and described in 2009, and is a shrub with pitchers that can hold nearly two liters of fluid. An even bigger pitcher plant was discovered in 2010. But the biggest pitcher plant known is from a couple of mountains in Malaysian Borneo called Nepenthes rajah. It’s been known to science since 1858 and its pitchers can hold over 2 ½ liters of digestive fluid. The biggest pitcher ever measured was over 16 inches tall, or about 41 cm, and the plant itself is a messy sort of vine that can grow nearly 20 feet long, or 6 meters. Mostly pitcher plants just attract insects, but these giant ones also trap frogs, lizards, rats and other small mammals, and even birds.

There’s always the chance that even bigger pitcher plants have yet to be discovered by science, although probably not much bigger than the ones we do know about. The larger an animal, the more likely it is to damage the pitcher while trying to escape. Insects and the occasional small animal are fine, anything bigger than that could just bust through the leaf.

But there have long been rumors about plants that eat much larger animals, even humans. In the 1870s, a German explorer named Karl Liche claimed he’d witnessed a tribe in Madagascar sacrifice a woman to a carnivorous tree. His account is not very believable. He describes the tree as about eight feet high with a thick trunk. A coat of leaves hang down from the top of the tree, leaves about twelve feet long with thorns. At their base is a flower-like receptacle with sweet liquid inside, with six ever-moving tendrils stretching up from it. When the sacrificial woman was made to drink the liquid, the tendrils wrapped around her and the tree’s long leaves folded up and over her. After ten days, the leaves relaxed, leaving nothing but a bleached skull at the base of the tree.

Later expeditions to Madagascar never found any plant that resembled Liche’s. In fact, everyone who’s researched Liche, the tribe he mentioned, and the tree in question haven’t found any evidence that any of them ever existed. It turns out that the account was a hoax from start to finish, written by a reporter named Edmund Spencer for a newspaper called the New York World in 1874.

A 1924 book called Madagascar: Land of the Man-Eating Tree describes a more realistic-sounding carnivorous plant that was supposed to be from India. Its blossoms have a pungent smell that attracts mice and sometimes large insects, which crawl into a hole in the blossom that turns out to be a bristly trap. This sounds a little like the corkscrew plant that lives in wet areas of Africa and Central and South America. It has ordinary leaves aboveground but modified leaves that grow underground. The modified leaves are traps with a stalk lined with hairs pointing in one direction. Tiny water animals, especially single-celled protozoans, stray into the leaves but can’t get out because of the hairs. They’re digested and absorbed by the leaves. But there are no known corkscrew plants or anything like them that trap larger animals or animals that live aboveground.

An 1892 article describes a friend of a friend of a friend’s encounter with a tangle of thin, willow-branch-like vines covered with an incredibly sticky gum. This was supposed to have happened in Nicaragua in Central America. A Mr. Dunstan’s dog was ensnared by the plant but was rescued by Dunstan, who managed to cut the vines with his knife. In the process, both man and dog suffered blistered injuries from the plant, as though it had been trying to suck their blood. The article also says that natives of the area say the plant will reduce a lump of meat to a dried husk in only five minutes.

From these sorts of factual-seeming accounts, it’s a short step to plants of folklore like the Japanese Jubokko tree that grows on battlefields and drinks human blood. It captures people who pass too close to it, sticks its branches into them, and sucks out their blood. If someone cuts into the tree’s bark, blood comes out instead of sap.

Another carnivorous plant was supposedly encountered by a French explorer in 1933 in the jungles of southern Mexico. He doesn’t describe the plant in his 1934 magazine article, just says it’s enormous, but he does say that when a bird alighted on one of its leaves, the leaf closed and pierced the bird with long thorns. The expedition’s guide called it a vampire plant.

A similar story supposedly of a plant found in South America and Central Africa is of a short tree with barbed leaves that grow along the ground, and if an animal or bird steps on the leaves they twine around it and stab it to death, then squeeze the blood out to absorb.

There may actually be a real plant that these stories are based on. It’s called the Puya chilensis and it lives in Chile in South America, on dry hillsides of the Andes Mountains near the ocean. It’s an evergreen plant that only flowers after it’s some 20 years old, with a flower spike that can grow over 6 ½ feet high, or up to 2 meters. The flowers are pollinated by birds. But its leaves are long, edged with hooked spines, and grow in clumps that can be up to six feet wide, or nearly two meters.

Those hooks along the leaves give the plant its other name, the sheep-killer. Sheep and other animals can become entangled in the leaves, which are so tough that locals use the leaf’s fibers to make rope. If the animal can’t escape, it dies and its body decomposes, adding nutrients to the soil around the plant. Yum.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 128: Weird Pigs

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If you think pigs are just cute little pink animals that go oink, you definitely need to listen to this week’s episode!

Further listening (two unlocked Patreon episodes):

Weird teeth featuring the babirusa

Peccaries

Further reading:

More about the swamp pig of Hungary

An adorable pygmy hog:

A Javan warty pig, looking magnificent:

An actual warthog, not a cartoon warthog, just sayin:

A giant forest hog, looking kind of similar to the warthog but bigger:

A wild boar looking surprisingly fluffy:

A wild boar piglet, awwww:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to look at an animal all of us know as the thing that goes oink-oink. Some people eat them, some people will absolutely not eat them, some people keep them as pets, but everybody knows what a pig is. But you might not know about these weird and sometimes mysterious pigs!

I’ve unlocked two Patreon bonus episodes about pigs so that anyone can listen to them. I recently posted a bonus episode about peccaries, and there’s an older bonus episode about some animals with weird teeth that features the babirusa. Check the show notes for links to those episodes. You don’t need a Patreon login, just click on the link and use your browser to listen.

There are two groups of piglike animals, known as the New World pigs found throughout the Americas, and the Old World pigs from Africa and Eurasia. Domestic pigs are Old World pigs, although escaped domestic pigs live as feral animals in many parts of the world. New World and Old World pigs are related, but not closely. They used to be classified together in the pig family, Suidae, but the New World pigs now have their own family, Tayassuidae.

All these pigs have one thing in common: a snout that ends in a disc with nostrils at the end. You know, a pig snout. The disc is made of cartilage and is usually extremely tough, with leathery skin, but it’s also full of nerve endings so the pig can tell exactly what it’s touching with its snout. Pigs use their snouts to root in the ground, digging up plant material and small animals like grubs and worms. You know why pigs sometimes have a ring in their nose, through the nostrils? This stops a pig from rooting, because the ring gets caught on rocks and things and pulls at the sensitive nostrils.

Male pigs of all kinds also have tusks, or teeth that grow long enough that they extend out of the mouth. Plus pigs have small, thin tails, bulky bodies with relatively slender legs, cloven hooves with two dew claws on each foot, and small eyes. The babies of wild pig species are usually furry with stripes the length of their body.

Pigs are surprisingly intelligent and can learn all kinds of tricks, just like dogs. And while a domestic pig that’s been handled often since it was a piglet will make a good pet, wild pigs and pigs that aren’t used to people can be dangerous. Pigs will eat people, which seems only fair since people eat so many pigs. Pigs will eat anything, in fact. They’re omnivores, just like humans are. Pigs also carry a lot of parasites and diseases that humans can catch too.

Let’s look at some of the more unusual wild pigs out there, starting with the pygmy hog. The pygmy hog isn’t actually very closely related to most pigs. It’s much smaller than most pig species, only about a foot high, or 30 cm. It’s brown in color with short hair and rounded ears, and it lives in India although it used to be much more widespread.

The pygmy hog lives in small family groups, usually females and their young. Males are more solitary. In cold weather the pygmy hog digs a nest to sleep in, rooting out a small trough in the dirt with its snout and lining it with grass. This is adorable.

The pygmy hog was first described in 1847 but by the 1960s it was supposedly extinct. But a population was rediscovered in 1971 living in a wildlife sanctuary. By the time a conservation program was set up in 1995, only a few hundred pygmy hogs were still alive in the wild due to habitat loss and hunting. The pygmy hog likes wet grasslands, which are often overgrazed by livestock. Fortunately it’s now a protected species in India, and over a hundred captive-bred pygmy hogs have been reintroduced into the wild and are repopulating areas where they were once common.

Another endangered pig is the Javan warty pig, which lives on several islands in Indonesia. It’s black with some reddish areas on its head and belly. Males can grow up to three feet tall, or about a meter, although females are smaller. It’s mostly active at night, with females and young living in small groups, while adult males are mostly solitary. When something scares it, it gives a shrill whistle to warn other pigs.

The male Javan warty pig has three pairs of so-called warts on its head, one pair under the eyes, one pair under the ears, and one pair on the jaw. These aren’t warts at all, of course, but thickened skin that protect the eyes, the ears, and the neck from the tusks of other male pigs, since males fight with their tusks during mating season.

The most famous wart-bearing pig, of course, is the warthog. The warthog lives in Africa and is well-adapted to the savanna and hot weather. It has very little hair except for a mane down the spine, and very little fat, which helps keep it cool, and it often sleeps in abandoned aardvark burrows or digs its own burrow for shade. It usually backs into its burrow so if anything tries to come in after it, it will meet its tusks.

Warthogs have two pairs of massive tusks that rub against each other, sharpening them. The upper tusks can grow up to two feet long, or 61 cm, with the lower tusks up to 6 inches long, or 15 cm. Males fight each other with the tusks, but both males and females have them since they make good weapons against predators like lions. But the warthog can run so fast that it doesn’t usually need to defend itself. It can run up to 34 mph, or 55 km/hour.

The warthog mostly eats grass and other plants, including roots that it digs up with its snout. It can go without water for months at a time, getting the moisture it requires from the plants it eats. But when water is available, it likes to sit in the water to cool down. It will also wallow in mud just like domestic pigs do. It often kneels while it eats but no one’s sure why. I guess it just finds that comfortable.

One of the biggest species of wild pig alive today is the giant forest hog, which lives in forests in a few parts of Africa. There are three subspecies, but only the one that lives in East Africa is really big. It can grow more than 3 ½ feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.1 meters, and a big male can weigh over 600 lbs, or 275 kg. It looks sort of like a hairier, bigger warthog with a broader head.

The giant forest hog is black, gray, and dark brown. It likes forests and mostly eats plants, especially grass, although like other pigs it will eat anything it can find when its favorite foods aren’t available. This includes insects, carrion, and elephant dung. It lives in small family groups, usually one male, a few females, and their piglets. Younger males without a mate will hang out together in bachelor herds, but adult males will fight if they encounter each other, mostly by ramming their heads together or pushing snout to snout in a test of strength.

The other biggest species of wild pig is the wild boar, native to Eurasia and north Africa, and the ancestor of the domestic pig. It’s been introduced to other parts of the world as a game animal, including Australia and the United States. There are 16 subspecies of wild boar, including the Ussuri wild boar, which grows the largest. It lives in parts of China and Russia. A big male Ussuri can weigh 660 pounds, or 300 kg.

According to Hungarian folklore, there used to be a type of large wild pig called the fisher pig or swamp pig that lived in marshy areas near certain rivers. Hungary is a country in central Europe, roughly between Austria and Romania. The swamp pig is supposed to be extinct now, dying out around the end of the 19th century, but it was once well known in parts of Hungary. It mostly ate crabs and fish and lived in herds. That’s pretty much all I could find out about it. It may have been a population of feral pigs or it might have been a subspecies of wild boar that’s gone extinct now.

So what’s the biggest domestic pig ever measured? Pigs are usually assessed by weight, naturally, and a pig named Big Bill holds the world record. He weighed 2,552 pounds, or 1,157 kg, in 1933. This is really unusual, though. Most pigs that weigh anywhere near that much end up dying of heart failure or other health issues brought on by their unusual size after being overfed by their owners.

Wild boars can and do crossbreed with domestic pigs. The offspring usually resembles the wild parent more than the domestic parent, often with a mane of bristly hair that gives it the name razorback. It can be hard to tell whether a particular animal is a wild boar or a hybrid or just a feral domestic pig.

Sometimes unusually large pigs are shot and killed. You may have heard of Hogzilla, Hog Kong, and the Monster Pig, among others. Where wild boars have been introduced as game animals, they’re incredibly destructive to the environment and can be dangerous. It’s common for people to hunt them and sometimes they kill humongous pigs. Or at least they claim they did.

In 2004 a man shot a pig on a hunting reserve in Georgia, in the United States, that he claimed weighed over a thousand pounds, or 450 kg. It actually turned out to be much smaller, only about 800 pounds, or 360 kg. That’s still a big pig, so I don’t know why the hunter had to lie about its size.

Similarly, in 2007, some hunters in Alabama in the United States reported that an 11yo boy with them, the son of one of the hunters, had shot and killed a pig that weighed over a thousand pounds, or more than 475 kg. They sent photos of the boy and the dead pig to local media, but pretty soon the story fell apart. It turned out that the photos used forced perspective to make the pig look bigger than it really was, and that the pig wasn’t even wild. It was a domestic pig named Fred who was quite friendly and had been raised as a pet. Fred’s owners had sold him to a hunting preserve and recognized their former pet in the pictures. The 11yo boy had “hunted” Fred in a relatively small enclosure. Whatever your views on hunting, this wasn’t a fair hunt and it turned out that the whole thing was a publicity stunt to drum up business at the preserve.

I don’t know, maybe don’t sell your pet pig to a canned hunt business in the first place.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. You can email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 123: Linnaeus’s mystery animals

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Carolus Linnaeus was a botanist who worked out modern taxonomy and binomial nomenclature, but there are two mystery animals associated with his work. Let’s find out about them!

Rembrandt sketched this elephant whose skeleton is now the type specimen of the Asian elephant:

Linnaeus’s original entry about Furia infernalis:

Further reading:

Ewen Callaway, “Linnaeus’s Asian elephant was wrong species”

Karl Shuker, “Linnaeus’s Hellish Fury Worm – The History (and Mystery) of a Non-Existent Micro-Assassin”

Show transcript:

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

This week let’s learn a little something about binomial nomenclature, which is the system for giving organisms scientific names. Then we’ll learn about a couple of mystery animals associated with the guy who invented binomial nomenclature.

That guy was Carlolus Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who lived in the 18th century. Botany is the study of plants. If you’ve ever tried to figure out what a particular plant is called, you can understand how frustrating it must have been for botanists back then. The same plant can have dozens of common names depending on who you ask.

When I was a kid, the local name for a common plant with edible leaves that tasted deliciously tart was rabbit grass. I’ve never heard anyone anywhere else call it rabbit grass. Maybe you know it as sourgrass or false shamrock or wood sorrel.

There are over a hundred species of that plant throughout the world in the genus Oxalis, so it’s also sometimes just called oxalis. The species that’s most common in East Tennessee where I grew up is Oxalis dellenii, but all species look pretty much the same unless you get down on your stomach and really study the leaves and the flower petals and the stems. So if you were a botanist wanting to talk to another botanist about Oxalis dellenii back in the early 18th century, you couldn’t call it Oxalis dellennii. Not yet. You’d have to say, hey, do you know what rabbit grass is? And the other botanist would say, why no, I have never heard of this no doubt rare and astounding plant; and you’d produce a pot full of this pretty little weed that will grow just about anywhere, and the other botanist would look at it and say, “Oh. You mean sourgrass.” But imagine if you weren’t right by the other botanist and didn’t have the plant to show them. You’d have to draw it and label the drawing and write a paragraph describing it, just so the other botanist would have a clue about which plant you were discussing. Nowadays, all you have to do is say, “Hey, are you familiar with Oxalis dellenii?” and the other botanist will say, “Ah yes, although I myself believe it is the same as Oxalis stricta and that the differences some botanists insist on are not significant.” And then you’d fight. But at least you’d know what plant you were both fighting about.

Before Linnaeus worked out his system, botanists and other scientists tried various different ways of describing plants and animals so that other scientists knew what was being discussed. They gave each plant or animal a name, usually in Latin, that described it as closely as possible. But because the descriptions sometimes had to be really elaborate to indicate differences between closely related species, the names got unwieldy—sometimes nine or ten words long.

Carl Linnaeus sorted this out first by sorting out taxonomy, or how living creatures are related to each other. It seems pretty obvious to us now that a cat and a lion are related in some way, but back in the olden days no one was certain if that was the case and if so, how closely related they were. It’s taken hundreds of years of intensive study by thousands upon thousands of scientists and dedicated amateurs to get where we are today, not to mention lots of technological advances. But Linnaeus was the first to really attempt to codify different types of animals and other organisms depending on how closely they appeared to be related, a practice called taxonomy.

Linnaeus’s system is beautifully simple. Each organism receives a generic name, which indicates what genus it’s in, and a specific name, which indicates the species. This conveys a whole lot of information in just two words. A zoologist who hears the name Stenella longirostris will know that it belongs to the genus Stenella, which means it’s a type of dolphin, which means it’s in the family delphinidae. If they’re familiar with dolphins they’ll also know they’re talking about the spinner dolphin, and in this case they can even get an idea of what it looks like, since the specific name longirostris means ‘long beak.’ To make things even clearer, a subspecies name can be tagged on the end, so Stenella longirostris centroamericana is a subspecies of spinner dolphin that—you guessed it—lives in the ocean around Central America.

Carl Linnaeus was a young man when he started working out his classification system. He was only 25 when he traveled to Lapland on a scientific expedition to find new plants and describe them for science. This was in 1732 so travel was quite difficult. Linnaeus traveled on horseback and on foot, which as you can imagine took a long time and gave him lots of time to think. Within three years he had worked out the system we still use today.

You know what else Linnaeus invented? The index card. He needed index cards to keep track of all the animals and plants he and other scientists named using his binomial nomenclature system.

Linnaeus named a whole lot of plants and animals himself—something like ten thousand of them during his lifetime. And naturally enough, some mistakes crept in that have since been corrected. But a couple of his mistakes have led to mysteries, and those are the ones we’re going to look at today.

In 1753 Linnaeus got to examine a fetal elephant preserved in a jar of alcohol. Back then hardly anyone outside of Asia and Africa had seen an elephant, so Linnaeus was enormously excited about it and wrote to a friend that the specimen was as rare as a diamond.

Linnaeus described the species and named it Elephas maximus, also known as the Asian elephant today. But from records that still survive, the specimen was marked as having come from Africa. A Dutch pharmacist and collector had acquired the specimen around 1736, and after he died it was sold to King Adolf Frederick of Sweden, who let Linnaeus examine it. The auction catalog where it was listed for sale indicates that it was from Africa, but in his official description of the elephant Linnaeus wrote that it was from Ceylon, which is now called Sri Lanka, which is in Asia.

So ever since there’s been a mystery as to whether the elephant specimen was actually an Asian elephant or an African elephant, and if Linnaeus even knew that there were elephants in Africa. Because the specimen is of a fetal elephant—that is, a baby that died before it was fully developed, probably when its mother was killed while she was pregnant—it’s hard to tell just by looking if the specimen is an African or Asian elephant. We do still have the specimen, fortunately, which is held in the Swedish Natural History Museum’s collection.

A mammal expert at the London Natural History Museum, named Anthea Gentry, got curious about the specimen in 1999, when she saw it on a trip to Sweden. Gentry’s husband was a paleontologist who specialized in mammals, and later she showed him a photograph of the specimen and asked what he thought. He said he was pretty sure it was an African elephant, not an Asian elephant. Gentry got permission to do DNA testing on the specimen, but since it had been in alcohol for so long, not even the most advanced technology and the world’s most experienced expert in ancient DNA could get a usable genetic sequence from the tissue.

The world’s most experienced expert in ancient DNA was Tom Gilbert of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He did his best and failed, but he couldn’t forget about the little mystery elephant. In 2009 he got an idea for extracting genetic material from the specimen in a new way that might yield results. It took years, but he and his team got it to work. In 2012 the mystery was finally solved. Linnaeus’s little elephant was actually an African elephant.

But that’s not the end of the story. When a scientist describes a new species and gives it its scientific name, the first specimen described is known as the type specimen. Linnaeus’s elephant was the type specimen of the Asian elephant—but since it was proven to be an African elephant, it couldn’t continue to be the type specimen of the Asian elephant. But that meant that there was no official type specimen of the Asian elephant. They needed a specimen that was still available and that had been described by someone who had examined it scientifically.

When an animal is described officially, it’s a formal process. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature decides whether a suggested name is acceptable and makes decisions on type specimens and taxonomy. So researchers connected with the Commission started digging around for a new type specimen, preferably one from Linnaeus’s time or earlier.

A type specimen isn’t always a whole animal. A lot of times it’s just a little piece of a skeleton or a partial fossil, although the more complete a specimen is, the better. Linnaeus had described a partial elephant tooth at some point which was still available in a Swedish museum, and taxonomists were considering using that as a type specimen when they got an email from a paleontologist who specialized in elephants. He sent a copy of a travel journal from an amateur naturalist named John Ray, who had visited Florence in 1664 and wrote his observations of an elephant skeleton and skin on display in the duke’s palace.

And, it turned out, the elephant skeleton John Ray had described was in the collection of a museum in Florence. And it was definitely the skeleton of an Asian elephant—in fact, we even have what amounts to a photograph of the elephant when it was alive, because none other than the artist Rembrandt sketched it. So that skeleton was designated as the type specimen of the Asian elephant and all is well.

That brings us to the other mystery associated with Linnaeus, and this one is a lot less cute than a misidentified baby elephant. But before I tell you what the mystery animal is, let me tell you something that happened to Linnaeus before he’d even come up with his system of nomenclature. This happened in 1728, when Linnaeus was a broke college student staying with a professor and spending all his free time collecting botanical specimens in the marshes.

One day Linnaeus was searching for plants he didn’t already have specimens of when something stung him on the neck. Since he was wading around in a marsh, this was not really that unusual. But this wasn’t the usual insect sting or midge bite. Before long Linnaeus’s neck was painfully swollen, and soon one of his arms had swollen up too.

These days we’d recognize this as an allergic reaction, but back in 1728 they didn’t know what allergies were. By the time Linnaeus got home, he was in such bad shape that the doctor they called worried he wouldn’t survive.

Fortunately for Linnaeus and for science and humanity in general, he survived and went on to invent his naming system only eight years later. Some thirty years after he almost died, he published the tenth edition of his book, Systema Naturae, and included a formal description of the animal that had almost killed him. He named it the fury worm, Furia infernalis.

But there was no type specimen of a fury worm. Linnaeus hadn’t seen the one he believed had bitten him, and the only one anyone had shown him was a tiny worm so dried up and old that he couldn’t see any details. But he knew the fury worm existed because it had bitten him, and anyway everyone knew it was a real animal.

The fury worm was supposed to be tiny and slender, so small that it could be picked up by the wind and blown to other places. If it landed on a person or an animal it would immediately bite them with its sharp mouthparts, breaking the skin, then burrow into the flesh through the wound. It would dig in so quickly and so deeply that it was impossible to find, and even if you did find it, it was impossible to get out because of the backward-pointing bristles on its tail that kept it anchored in place. A person or animal bitten by the worm was likely to die within a day, sometimes within half an hour, unless a poultice of cheese or curds was applied to the bite.

Fortunately for most of the world, this horrible worm only lived in swampy areas in northern Sweden and Finland, Russia, and a few other nearby areas. In one year, 1823, some 5,000 reindeer died from fury worm attacks, and the export of reindeer furs was banned so the worm wouldn’t spread.

But. Where. Are. The. Worms??? And why would a parasitic worm kill its host so quickly? A parasite depends on its host staying alive for enough time that the parasite can benefit from whatever it’s getting from the host, whether that’s nutrients or a protected place to develop into its next life stage. This isn’t going to happen in half an hour.

So we have all this anecdotal evidence of the fury worm’s existence, even from such noted a scientist as Linnaeus himself, but no worms. And the symptoms reported from fury worm attacks varied quite a lot from patient to patient.

Doubts about the fury worm’s existence were already common in the 19th century, and even back in the late 18th century Linnaeus started to have doubts. And as technology and scientific knowledge improved, the fury worm started to look less and less like a real animal and more and more like an explanation for things people had once not understood—like allergies, infection, and bacteria. The death of 5,000 reindeer in 1823 was finally traced to a disease called neurocysticercosis [neuro-cyst-iser-kosis], which is actually caused by a parasite, but not a fury worm. It’s caused by tapeworm larvae that only kill its host after the larvae have matured and are ready to infect a new animal, which happens when something eats the meat of the animal that has died.

So was the fury worm ever a real animal? Almost certainly not. I tried to find out if people are still reporting fury worm bites in northern Sweden and Finland, but I didn’t come up with anything. On the other hand, I did check and it doesn’t look like there’s a band named Furia infernalis, so if you were trying to think of a really cool name for your band, I got you.

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

Thanks for listening!

 

Episode 115: Giant Rabbits and King Hares

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This week let’s learn about some giant-sized rabbits and hares! Also some regular-sized ones.

Further listening:

Life, Death & Taxonomy podcast episode about the Collared Pika

Further reading:

Dr Karl Shuker’s post about giant rabbits and hares

The National Cryptid Society’s post about giant rabbits and hares

An eastern cottontail rabbit:

The Flemish giant looks Photoshopped. It’s a big bunny:

A European hare (also called the brown hare):

The Belgian hare is a domestic rabbit bred to look like a hare:

Show transcript:

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

A few weeks ago we had an episode about some animal hoaxes that were based on true animal facts, including the horned hare. While I was researching that topic, I kept running across interesting facts about rabbits and hares, specifically mysterious reports about giant rabbits. So this week, let’s have a whole episode about gigantic rabbits and hares.

We’ll start with some general information. Collectively rabbits and hares are called leporids after their family, Leporidae, or lagomorphs after their order, Lagomorpha. Lagomorphs include pikas, which are really cute and look sort of like oversized hamsters. The podcasts Species and Life, Death and Taxonomy both did really good episodes about the pika recently, so we’re just going to talk about rabbits and hares today.

Leporids are famous for hopping instead of walking, and they’re able to do so because their hind legs are longer than their front legs and have specialized ankle joints. Ancestors of leporids developed this ankle as much as 53 million years ago, but their legs were much shorter so they probably ran instead of hopped. Hares have longer legs than rabbits and can run faster as a result, but both rabbits and hares are known for their ability to bound at high speeds. When a rabbit or hare runs, it pushes off from the ground with the tips of its long hind toes, and its toes are connected with webbed skin so they can’t spread apart. If the toes did spread apart, they would be more likely to get injured. Rabbits and hares also don’t have paw pads like dogs and cats do. The bottom of a leporid’s foot is covered with dense, coarse fur that protects the toes from injury. Its long claws help it get a good purchase on the ground so its feet won’t slip.

Baby rabbits are called bunnies, kits, or kittens, and like baby dogs and cats, they’re born helpless, without fur and with their eyes still sealed closed. Baby hares are called leverets and are born fully developed, with fur and with their eyes open.

Leporids eat plants, including grass, weeds, twigs, and bark. Animals that eat grass and other tough plants have specialized digestive systems so they can extract as many nutrients from the plants as possible. Many animals swallow the plants, digest them for a while, then bring up cuds of plants and water to chew more thoroughly. Rabbits and hares don’t chew their cud in that way, but they do have a system that allows them to digest the plants they eat twice.

After a leporid eats some plants, the plants go into the stomach, naturally, and then travel into the first part of the large intestine, called the cecum. The cecum separates the softer parts of the plants from the harder, less digestible parts. The hard parts are compressed into hard pellets that the rabbit poops out. But the soft parts of the plants, which are most nutritious, develop into softer pellets. These are called cecotropes, and as soon as the rabbit poops out the cecotropes, it immediately eats them again. This allows the digestive system to get a second round to extract more nutrients from the plants.

Most rabbit species are native to North America, but there are also rabbits native to parts of South America, parts of Europe and Asia, parts of Africa, and a few Japanese islands. They’ve also been introduced to other areas of the world, especially Australia, where they’re a real pest since rabbits eat a lot and reproduce rapidly.

Most hare species are native to Eurasia, with some species also living in parts of Africa, North America, and some Japanese islands. Despite its name, the jackrabbit of North America is a hare.

Hares live above ground and are generally solitary. Almost all rabbits are sociable and sleep underground in warrens and burrows. The exceptions are the rare hispid hare of South Asia, which is actually a rabbit, and the cottontail rabbit of North America. These rabbits make nests in long grass like hares do to raise their babies. Eastern cottontails are the rabbits I’m familiar with, and the cottontail gets its name because its short tail is white all over instead of only white underneath. It looks like a powder puff.

Hares aren’t domesticated, but rabbits have been and there are a lot of breeds of domestic rabbit. I had a pet red satin when I was a kid. Her name was June and she was beautiful. Domestic rabbits can be trained to use a litter box just like a cat, but unlike most cats, rabbits will chew on everything. I say most cats because I had a cat once who liked to chew through phone cords, back when I had a landline phone. But a rabbit will chew on all cords, on furniture, on wallpaper, and things like that if the rabbit isn’t trained and isn’t given appropriate things to chew on. A pet rabbit can be spayed or neutered just like a pet dog or cat to make it healthier, less likely to spray urine to mark its territory, and less aggressive.

So now we have a good idea of what rabbits and hares are like. Now let’s find out about some gigantic and mysterious leporids.

I’ll start with an account by a witness named Evelyn who saw something unusual while waiting for the school bus one morning. This happened in New Jersey, which is in the northeastern United States. I’ll quote the account I found in the National Cryptid Society archives.

“In 1954, I had just turned 14. I was waiting for the school bus at 6:45 AM by our house in the country, which was across the road from a holly farm. At that time before they planted hollies it was mostly weeds along the road but sweet potatoes in the rest of the field.

“I glanced over at the 10+ acre field in front of me and there sat what appeared to be a huge ‘rabbit.’ It was brown and I was roughly ten to fifteen feet from it. I had seen hares before but this was not a hare; besides, hares hadn’t been seen in that part of New Jersey in forty years.

“This creature was sitting on its haunches and stood nearly four and a half feet tall. It just watched me for several minutes, and then it just disappeared! It did not hop away.

“I wasn’t frightened. I had a strange feeling of peace. I had such a calm, peaceful feeling. It was almost as if it was reassuring me it was not unreal; that is the only way I can explain it.

“No one else ever saw it and my family lived there for over 25 years. To this day I wonder what it really was and where it came from.”

Wow, wait, what?? How does an animal that big just disappear? Like, actually vanish into thin air?

Let’s take a closer look at the details here and see what we can figure out.

We’ll start with the detail about the sweet potatoes in hopes of figuring out what time of year it was. In New Jersey, sweet potatoes are planted around the end of spring and harvested in late summer into early autumn. In other words, if there were sweet potatoes in the field, the days would be long and it would have been fully light at 6:45 am. So Evelyn probably did get a good look at the animal for at least a minute.

She also states she was only ten to fifteen feet away from it, which would be about 3 to 4 and a half meters away. That’s really close. But from the way she describes the scene, it sounds like she was across the road from the field where she saw the animal. She says she was waiting by her house, which was across from the farm. I actually measured the road in front of my house when I was researching episode 17 about the Thunderbird. My road is a typical two-lane road in a small town and I believe it measured 18 ½ feet, or just over 5.6 meters. Of course, I don’t know how wide roads were back in 1953, but it’s likely Evelyn was a little farther away from the animal than she remembers.

It sounds like the animal was close to the road, probably in the weeds along the edge of the road rather than in the cultivated field full of sweet potatoes. Deer are considered sweet potato pests but rabbits aren’t, so if it was a giant rabbit of some kind, it was probably eating weeds instead of sweet potato leaves.

Next, what kind of rabbits and hares live in New Jersey? The eastern cottontail and the New England cottontail are both small rabbits that Evelyn would have recognized easily. The European hare, black-tailed jackrabbit, and white-tailed jackrabbit, which are all hares, have been introduced into parts of New Jersey for hunting at different times. But Evelyn states specifically that this was not a hare.

The snowshoe hare is sometimes seen in northern New Jersey and might occasionally stray farther south. I don’t know what part of New Jersey Evelyn was from, but sweet potato farming is more common in the southern parts of the state. The snowshoe hare is more rabbit-like in appearance than other hares, since its ears are smaller and its body more rounded. Its fur usually turns white in winter to camouflage it against the snow, but in summer it would be brown. And it’s also fairly large, certainly bigger than a cottontail rabbit. Not counting the tail, a snowshoe hare can grow up to a foot and a half long, or 48 cm. If it was sitting up on its hind legs, especially if it was sitting up high on its hind legs to watch Evelyn in case it needed to run, it might appear to be even bigger, say two feet or more, or over 61 cm. But even accounting for the animal’s size being exaggerated in Evelyn’s memory, that’s still a lot smaller than the almost four and a half foot tall animal she describes. Four and a half feet is 137 cm. That’s really tall.

If you’ve listened to episode 73, about phantom kangaroos, you know that wallabies and kangaroos are sometimes kept as pets in the United States and often escape. Wallabies and kangaroos have long ears, long hind legs, and sit up like rabbits and hares. If Evelyn saw a wallaby but didn’t see its long tail, she might have thought she was looking at an enormous rabbit.

But…it disappeared. Hares are considered masters of hiding and are said to be able to seem to disappear from view even in short grass, but how in the heck can an animal more than four feet tall just vanish?

I don’t have an answer, so all I can offer is that either Evelyn misjudged the animal’s size and thought it was much larger than it was, and it was able to drop down quickly and appear to vanish in tall weeds, or Evelyn actually saw a ghostly giant rabbit of some kind that actually vanished. Now this sounds like a Halloween episode. At least her ghost rabbit wasn’t scary. She even points out that she felt peaceful after seeing it.

Evelyn isn’t the only person who’s reported seeing a giant rabbit or hare. In 1976 in Dorset, England, a woman named Louise Hodgson and two men out walking their dogs in the evening saw a group of about a dozen hares in a field. This was in September so it was unusual to find that many hares together just to start with, since hares are usually solitary except during mating season in spring. But there was a bigger animal with the hares. The dog-walkers at first thought it was a roe deer due to its size, but then they realized it was another hare, but huge. A roe deer stands no more than two and a half feet at the shoulder, or 75 cm, which is the same measurement of the length of a large European hare’s body. So a European hare could appear as tall as a roe deer when sitting up, but then why did it appear so much larger than the other hares?

In April of 2006, not long after the awesome movie Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit was released, reports of a giant rabbit eating up gardens in Northumberland, England hit the news. People thought it was an April Fool’s joke, but the gardeners were furious and had proof: giant-sized rabbit footprints, and of course their destroyed produce. They reported that the rabbit was the size of a dog and was black and brown in color. The first witness saw it in February of that year. But before anyone could get a good photo of the rabbit or capture it, a local woman reported that she’d been driving one night in early April when a massive rabbit bounded in front of her car. She wasn’t able to stop and collided with the rabbit, which was so big that the front bumper of her car was damaged. The rabbit died, unfortunately, and the woman said she got out and looked at it. She estimated it was at least two feet long, or 61 cm, with long legs. Rabbit fur was found stuck in the damaged bumper of her car, but the dead rabbit was long gone, probably eaten by a fox. After that the giant rabbit wasn’t seen again and the gardeners were left in peace.

And in 2017 a man reported that when he was a kid in the late 1960s, in Placer County, California, he and his mother both saw some jackrabbits that were almost four feet tall when they sat up, or 1.2 meters. The best part of this story is that they saw more than one giant jackrabbit.

So what could these giant hares and rabbits be? Do leporids ever really get that big?

Actually, yes. There are two breeds of domestic rabbit that are enormous. One is called the Flemish giant and the other is a British breed called the Continental giant. Both were originally bred for fur and meat, but are good-natured rabbits that are often kept as pets these days. A typical domestic rabbit is roughly the size and weight of a small to medium-sized cat, but a Flemish or continental giant rabbit can be as large as a medium-sized dog. The biggest is a rabbit named Darius, who is officially four feet four inches long, or 134 cm. Pictures of him and other domestic breed giants look photoshopped, because how can a rabbit be so big? But they are.

It’s probable that the Northumberland giant rabbit was a Flemish or continental giant that had escaped its home. But what about the giant hares reported in other places? Hares look much more slender and angular than rabbits and usually have longer ears.

Some cryptozoologists suggest that an extinct leporid might be the culprit, if it isn’t really extinct. Nuralagus rex, also called the Minorcan giant lagomorph, and sometimes referred to as a giant jackrabbit, was only described in 2011 and went extinct 3 to 5 million years ago. But Nuralagus wasn’t a jackrabbit and it only lived on one island, Menorca in the Mediterranean Sea. While it was related to modern rabbits and hares, it was definitely very different and not really all that big. It probably stood about a foot and a half high at the highest part of the back, or around half a meter, and was big and heavy. But it had small eyes and ears, and it probably couldn’t hop or even run very fast. If it was alive today, no one would think it was even related to a rabbit or hare.

The king hares seen in parts of England might be unusually large hares whose size has been exaggerated, since it’s hard to estimate size of an animal seen in the distance or seen only briefly. The king hare seen by Louise Hodgson in Dorset amid a bunch of smaller hares might actually have been a large hare in a field of rabbits, which Hodgson and her companions might have interpreted as being one giant hare and a lot of normal-sized hares. Hares and rabbits don’t typically interact where their ranges overlap, but they also don’t apparently dislike each other. A solitary hare might feed in a field where rabbits are also feeding.

Of course it’s also possible that there are anomalously large hares born sometimes. But there is another possibility.

In the mid-1980s, a man named Andrew Munro was walking through his mother’s garden in County Cork, Ireland when he saw a huge hare. He stopped and stared at it, and it stopped and stared at him, standing on its hind legs with its ears perked up. Munro estimated it was over four feet tall, or 1.2 meters. Munro’s dog saw it and gave chase, but the hare bounded away and was gone in moments.

This is an interesting sighting, because Munro pointed out that the hare was only four feet tall because it was standing up tall on its hind legs with its long ears up. A large hare can have ears more than half a foot long, or 15 cm. If you add the ear length to the body and head length, a big hare sitting up can measure three feet, or over 91 cm, and if it’s also standing on its hind legs instead of sitting on its bottom, that adds more height. So maybe we’re talking about big hares, but not ENORMOUS hares.

Not only that, there’s a breed of domestic rabbit called the Belgian hare that was bred to look like a hare. It’s slender, strong, and energetic, with long ears and legs. It was first bred in the early 18th century and was considered a meat rabbit, and while it’s not as heavy or bulky as a Flemish giant or continental giant rabbit, it’s big, much bigger than a wild hare. In fact, the Flemish giant was developed from the Belgian hare breed.

The Belgian hare became incredibly popular at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th as a meat rabbit and as a show rabbit. Some prize Belgian hares sold for as much as a thousand dollars, which is expensive now and was ridiculously expensive back in the olden days. By 1917 its popularity had fallen, mostly because there were just so many Belgian hares that the price dropped to almost nothing, which made fewer people want to bother keeping them to sell.

According to zoologist Karl Shuker’s blog, during the 1940s, Belgian hares may have been released into the wild in Ireland with the expectation that people could shoot them for meat. But before long Ireland was overrun with rabbits to such an extent that they were eradicated. I can’t find anything else about this online so this might not be the case, or the rabbits might only have been released in one small area, but it is interesting to consider that the big hare Andrew Munro saw in the 1980s might actually have been a descendant of one of these hare-like rabbits.

We’ll finish with another interesting rabbit, but not a big one. It’s the marsh rabbit, and it’s a type of cottontail that lives in swamps and along the coast of the southeastern United States. It’s smaller than other cottontail species with small ears and shorter legs, and it always lives around water. There are three subspecies, including the endangered Lower Keys marsh rabbit that lives in the Florida Keys.

The marsh rabbit can hop just fine like other rabbits, but because its legs are so much shorter than other rabbit species, it can also walk. Its walking gait resembles a cat’s. This helps it navigate dense vegetation more easily. Not only that, its toes are much more widely spread than in other rabbit species.

But the really extraordinary thing about the marsh rabbit is that it likes to swim. It spends a lot of time in the water—and I mean, actually in the water. It mostly eats aquatic plants. It will submerge itself in muddy water to hide with just its nose and eyes above water and its ears laid flat to hide them. If a predator approaches, the rabbit will swim away. This is not behavior I think of when I think of rabbits but you have to admit, it’s adorable.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 113: Horned Hares and Winged Cats

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It’s April Fool’s Day, but while these two mystery animals may mostly be associated with hoaxes and tall tales, there’s a really interesting nugget of truth in both.

Unlocked Patreon episode about mammals with nose horns

Further reading: Dr Karl P N Shuker’s blog post about winged cats and his blog post about horned hares

Traditional drawings of horned hares:

You can take classes in taxidermy that specialize in making jackalopes!

A genuine horned hare (with an extreme case of SPV):

A winged cat:

Mitzi/Thomas the winged cat:

Show transcript:

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

This episode releases on April Fool’s Day, April 1. I’m not a fan of April fool jokes, so we’re going to discuss two interesting strange animals that turned out to be hoaxes—but hoaxes with a nugget of truth that’s actually more interesting than the hoax.

The first hoax is akin to the jackalope and it’s pretty obvious to us nowadays. The horned hare was a tradition in European folklore and drawings of it look like a jackalope. There are even stuffed horned hares, just as there are stuffed jackalopes.

Some of you may be wondering what the heck a jackalope is, so I’ll explain that first.

The jackalope legend may have started as a tall tale, but was probably just a taxidermy joke. When someone prepares a dead animal for taxidermy, it’s not a simple process. The taxidermist has to remove the skin from the body, clean it and add preservatives, make a careful armature or mannequin of the body out of wood or other materials, and put the skin on the armature and sew it up. The taxidermist then adds details like glass eyes and artificial tongues. It can take months of painstaking work to finish a specimen, and it requires a lot of artistry and training. Taxidermists who are learning the trade will often mount small, common animals like rabbits and rats as practice. And sometimes they’ll get creative with the process, just to make it more interesting. For instance, a taxidermist may add pronghorn antelope horns to a jackrabbit. Voila, there’s a jackalope!

You can see stuffed jackalopes today in a lot of places, since they’re fun conversation pieces. Some restaurants will have one stuck up on a wall somewhere, for instance. Horned hares are similar, but instead of a jackrabbit with pronghorn horns or white-tailed deer antlers, which are animals from North America, the European horned hare is usually a European hare with horns [I should have said antlers] from a roe deer.

The horned hare was such a common taxidermied animal that people actually believed it was real. Eventually, around the 19th century, as knowledge of the natural world grew more sophisticated, scientists realized rabbits and hares don’t have horns and those stuffed specimens were just hoaxes. The tip-off was probably when taxidermists started getting really fancy and adding bird wings and saber teeth to their mounted hares.

But…

The horned hare goes way back in history. It appeared in medieval bestiaries, sometimes called the unicorn hare. The unicorn hare was supposed to have a single black horn on its head. The hare would act normal, but when someone approached, it would spring at them and stab them with its horn. Then it would eat them. The legend of the horned hare is so widespread and long-lived, in fact, and was believed for so long, that it’s easy to think maybe it was based on something real. I mean, we just talked about rodents with nose horns a few weeks ago, so nothing’s impossible.

Wait, I think that’s a Patreon episode. If it is, I’ll unlock it. I’ll put a link in the show notes.

There is a strange truth behind all the jackalopes and horned hares. A disease called the Shope papilloma virus, or SPV, affects hares and rabbits. There are a lot of papilloma viruses in various animals, even humans, but in most animals, including humans, it only results in tumors in the body. In rabbits and hares, it causes keratinized tumors to grow from the skin, often on the head. Usually these are small and don’t show through the fur, but sometimes an animal has an extreme case of SPV and it genuinely looks like it has horns. The horns are hard and usually dark in color. As if that wasn’t bad enough, rabbits and hares in Europe can also get a disease called Leporipoxvirus that again causes facial horns to grow from the skin.

If you’re feeling totally creeped out right now, don’t worry, humans can’t catch these diseases from rabbits and hares.

Remember how I mentioned taxidermied hares with wings? What about cats with wings—but not taxidermied, real live domestic cats with fur-covered wings. That totally can’t be real, right? It’s not real?

It’s real…but only if you are really generous with what you mean by wings.

Winged cats are a real phenomenon, but the wings in question are furry, not feathered, and winged cats can’t fly. That doesn’t stop people from claiming they’ve seen these winged cats flying around causing mischief. For instance, in Ontario, Canada in 1966 a so-called vampire cat was supposedly flying around attacking other animals. It was a black tomcat with furry wings 7 inches long, or 18 cm. Eventually someone shot the cat, which was examined by veterinarians and found to be rabid. Its wings were nothing but thickly matted fur, so the stories of it flying around weren’t true, although sadly, it was definitely attacking other animals due to having rabies.

In 1959, a case went to court in West Virginia over a winged cat. A 15 year old boy named Douglas Shelton said he’d rescued the cat from a tree and adopted her. But a woman named Mrs. Hicks said that the cat was hers, named Mitzi, but that Mitzi had run away and she wanted her back. This makes sense. I mean, I would want my cat back too. At first the judge awarded the cat to Mrs. Hicks, but when Douglas brought her into the courtroom, she had no wings. Douglas said she’d shed them during the summer but he’d kept the wings, which he showed to the judge. At that point, Mrs. Hicks suddenly decided she didn’t want the cat after all. Frankly, I’m sure Mitzi was better off with Douglas, who didn’t care if she had wings or not, although he did change Mitzi’s name to Thomas.

Stories like these didn’t just happen back in the olden days. There are lots of winged cat reports today, including photos and videos. What’s going on? Why do some cats develop these furry appendages that people call wings?

Sometimes the cats in question just have long fur that has become unusually matted and appears to form winglike flaps along the sides. But in many cases, the wings are due to a rare skin condition called feline cutaneous asthenia, or FCA.

Cats with FCA have unusually elastic skin. All skin stretches at least a little bit but almost immediately snaps back into place. You can try this yourself by gently tugging up the skin on the back of your hand and releasing it. But in cats with FCA, the skin doesn’t snap back properly, especially the skin along the shoulders and back. Since in the ordinary course of living its life, a cat’s skin stretches quite a bit along the back, eventually an FCA cat ends up with long flaps of furry skin that stretched and didn’t snap back repeatedly. The wings aren’t really wings, of course, and can’t allow the cat to fly.

Cats with FCA do usually need special care, especially if the case is severe. The skin is elastic, but it’s also prone to damage because it’s actually very delicate. The so-called wings sometimes tear off naturally, leaving wounds that bleed very little but still need to be treated by a veterinarian. They then reform. The wings tend to be on the sides near the hind legs but are sometimes closer to the shoulders.

Mitzi, AKA Thomas, was definitely a cat with FCA. Her wings were six inches long, or 15 cm, and her tail was described as squirrel-like. She was a white cat described as a Persian, although she may have just had long hair like a Persian cat. A reporter who examined Thomas described her wings as fluffy at the ends but with a gristly feel at the base, as though they contained tendons or other structure. This was probably the extended skin due to FCA.

It sounds like Douglas was a really nice kid who rescued the cat from the tree and took her home, and when his friends made fun of the unusual-looking cat, he was really upset. Once word of the winged cat got around, people started showing up at the family’s house to look at it. At first Douglas charged 10cents to see the cat, and he was even invited to New York where he and Thomas appeared on the Today Show.

But after that, things started to go kind of nuts. Thousands of people kept trying to see the cat, so many that Douglas’s mom spread the story that the cat had died, just so people would leave the family alone. She also took the cat to a friend’s house for a while until the fuss died down, swearing the friend to secrecy that the cat was still alive. Then Mrs. Hicks sued.

I tried to find out what happened to Douglas Shelton and Thomas after all the excitement died down. Douglas and his family were awarded custody of Thomas by the judge, with Mrs. Hicks rewarded a single dollar in damages, but whatever happened after that has vanished into the pre-internet vacuum. I’m sure Thomas lived a good life with the Sheltons, and Douglas is probably still alive today. He would be about the right age to be a granddad by now, so I bet he tells his grandkids stories about the time he had a cat with wings. I bet they don’t even believe him.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 110: Three mystery animals from India

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

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

A pink-headed duck, deceased:

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 102: Three Mystery Apes

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It’s mystery ape time! Learn about de Loys’ ape and two other mystery apes this week!

The only photograph we have of de Loys’ ape:

A white-fronted spider monkey:

Oliver the so-called “ape man”:

A better picture of Oliver late in his life:

A Bili ape:

A regular gorilla (top) and a regular chimp (bottom, hearing no evil) for comparison with the Bili ape and Oliver:

Show transcript:

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

I don’t know about you, but I’m in the mood for a mystery animal this week. So let’s really dig in to a topic I haven’t covered much before, mystery apes!

A lot of people get apes and monkeys confused, but it’s actually easy to tell them apart. For one thing, there aren’t very many apes. Gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos are called great apes, and gibbons and siamangs are called the lesser apes, mostly because they’re smaller.

Apes never have tails and are closely related to humans. Humans, in fact, are considered great apes, but it’s rude to say so. We like to think we’re special because we can make podcasts and bulldozers and delicious cakes. Monkeys usually have tails, although not always, and a monkey, unlike an ape, can’t stand fully upright and can’t straighten its elbow out so that its arm is flat.

Now that we have a pretty good idea of what an ape is, let’s look at three mystery apes.

We’ll start with a big mystery from 1920, an ape supposedly killed in South America and subsequently dubbed de Loys’ ape. It’s not just one mystery, it’s several mysteries wrapped up together. And while the ape’s body has been lost, we still have a photograph.

In 1917, geologist François de Loys led an expedition to Venezuela and Colombia to search for oil. It was a disaster of an expedition, since not only did they not find oil, almost everyone in the expedition died. According to de Loys, in 1920 what was left of the group was camped along the Tarra River on the border between Colombia and Venezuela when two large animals appeared. De Loys said he thought they were bears at first, then realized they were apes of some kind. They were large, had reddish hair and no tails, and walked upright. The apes became aggressive toward the humans and, fearing for their lives, the geologists shot at the apes. They killed one and wounded the other, which fled.

The dead ape looked like a spider monkey, which was fairly common in the area, but it was much larger and had no tail. There was no way for the expedition to keep the body, so they propped it up on a crate with a stick under its chin to keep it upright, then took pictures. Only one of those pictures survived, since de Loys said the others were lost when a boat capsized later in the expedition.

But after de Loys got home to Europe, he didn’t tell anyone about the ape. He said he forgot all about it until 1929 when the anthropologist George Montandon noticed the surviving photograph in de Loys’s papers. After that, De Loys wrote an article about the ape which was published in the Illustrated London News.

It was a sensational article, not meant to be scientific. Here’s an excerpt:

“The jungle swished open, and a huge, dark, hairy body appeared out of the undergrowth, standing up clumsily, shaking with rage, grunting and roaring and panting as he came out onto us at the edge of the clearing. The sight was terrifying…

“The beast jumped about in a frenzy, shrieking loudly and beating frantically his hairy chest with his own fists; then he wrenched off at one snap a limb of a tree and, wielding it as a man would a bludgeon, murderously made for me. I had to shoot.”

Montandon was enthusiastic about the ape. He wrote three articles for scientific journals and proposed the name Ameranthropoides loysi for it. But scientists were skeptical. Who was this de Loys guy and did he have any proof that the ape wasn’t just a spider monkey? Did he even have proof that the photograph was taken in South America?

Because that’s one of the mysteries. Quite apart from what kind of primate de Loys’ ape might be, if it really is an ape, is it an ape native to South America? There are no apes native to the Americas at all, only monkeys. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos live in Africa, while orangutans, gibbons, and siamangs live in Asia. If de Loys really did find an ape new to science in South America, it radically changes what we know about ape evolution.

De Loys said he measured the animal as 157 cm high, which works out to about 4.5 feet. This is much larger than a spider monkey, which tops out at about 3.5 feet high, or 110 cm. But we have only de Loys’s word to go by, and as it happens, de Loys was a known practical joker. He also didn’t talk about the ape very often and seems to have only written his article at the urging of Montandon, his friend the anthropologist. We’ll come back to Montandon in a minute.

In 1962, a medical doctor, Enrique Tejera, read an article about de Loys’ ape in a magazine called The Universal. Tejera had worked with de Loys during part of his expedition as a camp doctor, and he had firsthand knowledge about de Loys’ ape. The letter was published, and published again in 1999 in the Venezuelan scientific magazine Interciencia. I’ll read an excerpt of the translated letter:

“This monkey is a myth. I will tell you his story. Mister Montandon said that the monkey had no tail. That is for sure, but he forgot to mention something: it has no tail because it was cut off. I can assure you, gentlemen, because I saw the amputation. In 1917 I was working in a camp for oil exploration in the region of Perijá. The geologist was François de Loys and the engineer Dr. Martín Tovar Lange. De Loys was a prankster and often we laughed at his jokes. One day they gave him a monkey with an infected tail, so it was amputated. After that de Loys called him ‘el hombre mono,’ the monkey man.

“Some time later de Loys and I entered another region of Venezuela, an area called Mene Grande. He always took his monkey along, who died some time later [in 1919]. De Loys decided to take a photo and I believe that Mr. Montandon will not deny it is the same photograph that he presented in 1929.”

The monkey Dr. Tejera said de Loys had been given was a white-fronted spider monkey. And that’s exactly what the photo de Loys took looks like.

I’ll put the photo of de Loys’ ape in the show notes if you want to look at it. There are no people in the photo, nothing except the crate it’s sitting on to use as a size reference. You can’t even see whether the animal has a tail or not.

The white-fronted spider monkey is endangered these days due to habitat loss and hunting, but in the early 20th century it was still common in Colombia, Venezuela, and other parts of northwestern South America. It’s mostly black with a white belly, a long tail, and long arms and legs. That’s why they’re called spider monkeys, incidentally. Long arms and legs like a spider. The white-fronted spider monkey mostly eats fruit, but it also eats leaves, flowers, and other plant parts, and occasionally eats insects. Like many monkeys, its tail is somewhat prehensile and has a bare patch near the end that helps it grip branches like an extra finger. Since the spider monkey doesn’t have actual thumbs on its hands like most primates, it needs that tail to help it get around in trees.

If you look closely at the photograph of de Loys’ ape, you can see that the poor dead monkey does not have thumbs on its hands the way an ape would. It also looks like it has a penis, but that’s actually not a penis. Female spider monkeys have an organ that retains droplets of urine and drips them out as the monkey travels around, leaving a scent trail, and which looks superficially like a penis. It’s actually called a pseudo-penis and it makes it difficult for researchers to determine whether a spider monkey in the wild is male or female at first glance. It’s also an organ only found in spider monkeys and a few other types of monkey, never apes.

So we can be pretty sure de Loys’ ape was actually a spider monkey. But there’s more going on here than a simple hoax. Here’s another excerpt from de Loys’s 1929 article. He writes,

“Until my discovery of the American anthropoid, we could only imagine that man migrated to these shores. But now, in the light of this discovery, it is obvious that the failure of the otherwise well established principle of evolution when it was applied to America was due only to imperfect knowledge. The gap observed in America between monkey and man has been eliminated; the discovery of the Ameranthropoid has filled it.”

What? WHAT? What is that mess of a paragraph trying to say?

Well, basically, it’s promoting Montandon’s theory that humans of different races evolved from different apes. We know these days that that’s nonsense. All humans are genetically the same species, despite superficial physical differences like skin and hair color. Montandon thought that, for instance, people from Africa had evolved from gorillas, Asians evolved from orangutans, while people from Europe—you know, white people—were the only ones actually descended from early Homo sapiens.

In other words, Montandon wasn’t just a terrible scientist, he was a terrible human being, because his theory was pure racism. He was delighted to learn about de Loys’ ape because he decided that was the ape that native Americans must have evolved from. Again, nonsense science, awful person, I’m glad he’s dead. The French Resistance killed him during WWII.

It’s possible that de Loys wasn’t even trying to hoax anyone initially. He just had a pet monkey that died, took a photo as a creepy joke, and stuck the photo in his papers. It was Montandon who came across the photo and urged de Loys to write about it. It’s very likely that Montandon decided to claim the animal was an ape to further his racist theory, and de Loys went along with it, possibly reluctantly given how little he talked about it.

Ugh. Let’s move on to something less infuriating.

Oliver was a strange-looking chimpanzee sometimes referred to as an ape-man back in the 1970s. Oliver had been part of a traveling animal act, but he never fit in with the other chimps in the act and preferred to spend his time with humans, helping with chores. He walked fully upright at all times.

In 1976 an attorney called Michael Miller bought Oliver, mostly because Oliver just looked weird. His head was oddly shaped compared to other chimps and his jaw was smaller and more human-like in appearance. His ears were slightly pointed. The popular press found Oliver interesting and for a short while he was famous, or infamous. Some claims about Oliver were that he had 47 chromosomes instead of a chimp’s normal 48, that he was a mutant, that he was a hybrid between a chimp and some other primate, like a bonobo, or even an ape-man somewhere between a human and a chimp.

Oliver had a rough life, honestly. Michael Miller sold him to a theme park in 1977, and after that Oliver was passed from theme park to theme park. Interest in Oliver died down after a while, and in 1989, he was bought by a laboratory that leased out animals for testing. Oliver was never used as an experimental animal, but he lived for seven years in a cage so small he could barely move, so that his muscles atrophied.

Fortunately, in 1996 Oliver finally got a break and moved to an animal sanctuary in Texas. He had a spacious territory of his own, a chimp mate called Raisin, and lived out the rest of his days in peace. He died in 2012 at the age of about 55.

When the sanctuary acquired Oliver, they had him genetically tested to see if he really was a hybrid animal. It turned out that Oliver’s chromosome count was normal for a chimpanzee, and that he was genetically dead normal in every respect. So why did he look so weird?

Mainly, it was because his teeth had all been pulled at an early age so he couldn’t bite. This barbaric practice resulted in his jaw muscles being underdeveloped and his jaw bones becoming shortened. His head and ear shape were well within normal range for chimps, but only looked strange when combined with his poorly developed jaw. And the reason he walked upright all the time was because he’d been trained to do so.

After Oliver died, the sanctuary cremated his body and spread his ashes on the grounds where he had lived peacefully for the first time in his life.

Our last mystery ape this week is called the Bili ape. In 1898, a Belgian army officer donated some skulls to a museum in Belgium, skulls which he said were from gorillas killed in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Specifically, he said the gorillas lived in a forest near the village of Bili in an area referred to as Bondo. So after a museum curator examined the skulls and realized they weren’t the same as other gorilla skulls and not from an area where gorillas were known to live, the mystery ape was dubbed the Bili ape or the Bondo ape. The curator thought the Bili ape was a subspecies of gorilla.

In 1970 a mammalogist examined the skulls and determined that they were just regular old western lowland gorilla skulls. Nothing exciting. But a conservationist and photographer named Karl Ammann wasn’t convinced. He decided to go out and see if he could find the Bili ape for himself, take pictures, and see what the ape really was. In 1996, he took his cameras and went looking for gorillas.

He didn’t find any, but he did find a skull. It looked sort of like a gorilla skull, which has what’s called a sagittal crest that runs along the top of the skull and which allows the attachment of a gorilla’s powerful jaw muscles. But the rest of the skull looked more like a chimpanzee’s. Ammann also bought a photograph taken from a poacher’s trail cam that showed what looked like huge chimps. He also found great big poops and great big footprints, larger even than a gorilla’s footprint.

He had enough evidence to interest researchers, so in 2001 he and a team of scientists returned to find the Bili ape. They had no luck, partly because there was a civil war going on in the area at the time and getting around without getting killed was difficult. But they did find evidence that the apes were there, and the evidence was confusing. Gorillas build nests on the ground to sleep in, and the team did find big nests on the ground. But gorillas don’t like swampy ground and they move around a lot and build a new nest every night. These nests were often in swampy areas and showed evidence that they were reused. Chimps prefer to sleep in trees. But while the feces the researchers collected from around the nests were big enough to be gorilla poops, they indicated the apes’ diet was high in fruit, which is typical of chimps.

The team returned to the area in 2003 after the civil war ended, and this time they found the Bili ape.

The first scientist to see a Bili ape was a primate behavior specialist named Shelly Williams. The whole group heard the apes in the trees around them, very close to them, and then four apes rushed at the group. Williams knew they weren’t trying to intimidate the humans, they were going to kill them—I mean, that’s what it means to be a primate behavior specialist. It apparently means you know when you’re about to die at the hands of an enraged mystery ape. But the apes caught sight of her, stopped short, and returned into the brush.

If that happened to me, for one thing I would wet myself, and for another I would wonder for the rest of my life if I was an extra pretty human, or if I was extra pretty for a chimp or gorilla. But as it happens, Williams knew that the apes weren’t after the humans specifically but had responded to a call made by the team’s tracker, who had imitated the noise a wounded antelope makes. Imagine the scene from the apes’ point of view. You’re out hunting with your buddies, you hear some loud noises of animals walking through the forest. Then you hear an antelope. You and your buddies rush out, already thinking about how good that antelope is going to taste—and instead of antelopes, you see a bunch of humans. Of course you’re going to beat feet, because those humans might be hunting you.

Williams was the only scientist in the group to get a look at the apes that day, and they confused her. They mostly looked like chimps, but they were huge. A male common chimpanzee is about five feet tall when standing, or 1.5 meters, with females usually about a foot shorter, or 30 cm shorter. The Bili ape was way bigger, closer to six feet tall, or 1.8 meters. This is the height of a gorilla. Williams wasn’t sure if she’d seen giant chimps or weird gorillas or something else entirely.

After that first sighting, the team was able to get video and photos of the Bili apes. They resemble large chimps with gorilla-like heads, and Williams thinks the females and young mostly sleep in trees, while adult males sleep on the ground. They seem to live and travel in small groups, compared to chimps that usually live in troupes of up to 50 members.

The locals in the area say there are two different kinds of Bili ape. The smaller ones prefer to live in trees and are known as tree-beaters. The larger ones live on the ground and are called lion-killers. The lion-killers are supposed to be immune to the poison-dart frog secretions that locals use to poison their arrow tips.

DNA samples from dung and hair finally cleared up the mystery. Results indicate that the apes are chimpanzees, specifically a known subspecies of the common chimpanzee. Researchers think the Bili ape may look and act different since it’s so isolated from other chimps and may be somewhat inbred. Bili apes encountered far from villages show very little fear or aggression toward humans, only curiosity. Unfortunately, the chimps are under increased threat from poaching, since gold mining began in the area in 2007 and the population of humans has increased. Hopefully protections can be put into place soon so these rare chimpanzees can remain safely in their homes and can continue to be studied by researchers.

One exciting thing to remember is that the area where the Bili ape lives is still quite remote. There could very well be other animals unknown to science hidden in the forests. That’s yet another reason to protect the forest and everything that lives in it. You never know what might be out there ready to be discovered.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 096: Strangest Big Fish

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Because there are so many weird fish out there, I’ve narrowed this week’s episode down to weird BIG fish! We’ll cover the smaller ones another time. Thanks to Damian and Sam for suggestions this week!

A manta ray being interviewed by a diver:

A manta ray with white markings:

A mola mola, pancake of the sea, with a diver:

The flathead catfish head. So many teeth:

A Wels catfish with Jeremy Wade:

A couple of red cornetfish:

Howick Falls in South Africa. Put that on my endless list of places I want to visit:

Further reading:

Karl Shuker’s blog post about the black and white manta rays

Show transcript:

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

It’s another listener suggestion week! Recently, Damian sent a list of excellent topic suggestions, one of which was weirdest fish, and I am ALL OVER that! But because there are so many weird fish, I’m going to only look at weird humongous fish this time, including a mystery fish.

We’ll start with a fish that doesn’t actually look very fishlike. Rays are closely related to sharks but if you didn’t know what they were and saw one, you’d probably start to freak out and think you were seeing some kind of water alien or a sea monster. The ray has a broad, flattened body that extends on both sides into wings that it uses to fly through the water, so to speak. The wings are actually fins, although they don’t look like most fish fins. Like sharks, rays have no bones, only cartilage. Rays are so weird that I’m probably going to give them their own episode one day, but for now let’s just look at one, the manta ray.

There are two species of manta ray alive today. The reef manta can grow 18 feet from wingtip to wingtip, or 5.5 meters. Manta birostris is even bigger, up to 29 feet across, or 8.8 meters, which is why it’s called the giant manta ray. This is just colossally huge. I didn’t realize how big manta rays were until just now. Both species live in warm oceans throughout the world and both eat plankton, krill, and tiny fish. Sometimes the manta ray is called the devil fish because of its horns, which aren’t horns at all, of course. The two protuberances that stick forward at the manta ray’s front are actually fins that grow on either side of the rectangular mouth. These fins help direct plankton into the mouth. When the manta ray isn’t feeding, it can roll up these fins into points and close its mouth. Its eyes are on the sides of its head.

Manta rays are white underneath and black or dark brown on top. But there is a mystery associated with the giant manta ray, with reports of black and white striped rays dating back to at least 1923. In April of that year, naturalist William Beebe spotted a manta ray near the Galapagos Islands that had white wingtips and a pair of broad white stripes extending from the sides of the head halfway down the back. Beebe thought it might be a new species of manta ray. There are other reports of manta rays with white or grayish V-shaped markings on the back.

Better than that, in the last few decades divers and boaters started to get photographs and even video of these manta rays with white markings. These days, manta rays with white markings are known to be common, although for decades scientists thought all manta rays were unmarked dorsally, or on the back. Since the markings are unique to individuals, it makes it easy for researchers to track individuals they recognize. The manta ray also sometimes has black speckles or blotches on its belly.

But wait, there’s more! According to zoologist Karl Shuker, in 2014, researchers in Florida published a paper discussing the ability of manta rays to actually CHANGE COLOR in minutes when they want to. The color in question that it changes? Its white markings. The markings can be barely visible against its background color, and then will brighten considerably when other manta rays are around or when it’s feeding. I’ll put a link to Shuker’s blog post in the show notes, which contains an excerpt from the article, if you want to read it.

The reef manta mostly lives along coasts, especially around coral reefs, while the giant manta ray sometimes crosses open ocean. Researchers used to think it migrated, but new studies suggest most don’t travel all that far. It does dive deeply, though, sometimes as deep as 3,300 feet, or 1,000 meters.

Another fish with a mostly cartilaginous skeleton instead of bone are the various species of ocean sunfish. The largest is the mola mola, although the southern sunfish is about the same size. Both grow to about 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters, and they are really, really weird.

The ocean sunfish doesn’t look like a regular fish. It looks like the head of a fish that had something humongous bite off its tail end. It has one tall dorsal fin and one long anal fin, and a little short rounded tail fin that’s not much more than a fringe along its back end. The sunfish uses the tail fin as a rudder and progresses through the water by waving its dorsal and anal fins the same way manta rays swim with their pectoral fins. Pectoral fins are the ones on the sides, while the dorsal fin is the fin on a fish’s back and an anal fin is a fin right in front of a fish’s tail. Usually dorsal and anal fins are only used for stability in the water, not propulsion.

Because it’s almost round in shape and its body is flattened, it actually kind of looks like a pancake with fins. I would not want to eat it but a lot of people do, with the fish considered a delicacy in some cuisines. These days it’s a protected species in many areas, but it often gets caught in nets set for other fish. It also ends up eating plastic bags and other trash that float like jellyfish.

The mola mola lives mostly in warm oceans around the world, and it eats jellies, small fish, squid, crustaceans, plankton, and even some plants. It has a small round mouth that it can’t close and four teeth that are fused to form a sort of beak. It also has teeth in its throat, called pharyngeal teeth. Its skin is thick and rough like sandpaper. It likes to sun itself at the water’s surface, and it will float on its side like a massive fish pancake and let sea birds stand on it and pick parasites from its skin. Occasionally it will jump completely out of the water, called breaching, as far as ten feet high, or 3 meters. Since the mola mola is one of the world’s heaviest fish that isn’t actually a shark or ray, sometimes weighing over two tons, or 2,000 kg, you really don’t want to be in a boat near a breaching mola mola. If it lands in your boat, it could sink you, or just squash you as flat as a finch under a giant tortoise.

Some researchers think the mola mola’s internal organs contain a neurotoxin—not a surprise since it’s related to the pufferfish—but we don’t know a whole lot about it yet and other researchers say it’s not toxic at all. Until recently researchers thought it only ate jellyfish, but more recent studies show that jellies only make up a small part of its diet. It feeds near the surface at night, but during the day it dives deeply, warming up between dives by sunning itself at the surface. Instead of a swim bladder, it has a layer of a jelly-like substance under its skin that helps make it neutrally buoyant.

The mola mola looks like it has no tail because it actually has no tail. Its little tail fin is called a pseudotail, or false tail. At some point during its evolution it lost its real tail. As a result, it has fewer vertebrae than any other fish, only 16. It’s a slow and clumsy swimmer but its size means it doesn’t have many natural predators beyond orcas and large sharks. It can grind its teeth together to make a croaking sound when it’s in distress. It can also blink, unlike most fish, and can retract its eyes deeper into their sockets to protect them.

In 2017, a new species of sunfish was named, the hoodwinker sunfish, Mola tecta. It grows up to ten feet long, or 3 meters, and is smooth and silvery with speckles. It’s really pretty. It lives in the southern hemisphere and that is pretty much all we know about it so far.

From the gentle giants of the sea, the manta ray and the mola mola, let’s move on to a weird freshwater fish that’s a lot scarier-looking. A few years ago, the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, which is an awesome place that is well worth a visit if you’re in the area, was contacted by a man whose dog had found and was chewing on a hideous fish head. It had a wide grinning mouth full of rows and rows of short sharp teeth. He wanted to know what it was, naturally, because while it looked like a catfish, he’d never seen one with teeth.

It turns out that the flathead catfish does have teeth, and that’s what his dog had found. It’s native to parts of the southeastern United States into northern Mexico, but has been introduced in other places as game fish and can become an invasive species. It can grow really big, with the longest specimen ever caught measuring almost six feet long, or 1.75 meters, and weighing just shy of 140 lbs, or 63.45 kg. It eats fish, insects, crustaceans, and pretty much anything else it can catch. It’s yellowish or even purplish in color. The weird thing is that all the descriptions I read of the flathead catfish mentioned how big it is and how people like to fish for it, and how it is supposed to be the best-tasting catfish, but they don’t mention its horrifying teeth! I was going by the picture posted by the Tennessee Aquarium, sent in by the guy whose dog found the ultimate chew toy. That picture made the teeth look vicious. But I found a description of the teeth finally that said they’re more like sandpaper to human hands if you hold the fish correctly, possibly because the teeth are packed so tightly. I don’t want to put my fingers in a fish’s mouth for any reason, teeth or no teeth.

Big as it is, the flathead isn’t the biggest catfish in the world. That would be the Wels catfish, a topic suggestion by Sam. Thank you, Sam! The first time I heard about the Wels catfish was from the show River Monsters, where the fisherman Jeremy Wade caught several. I hope everyone listening finds a special someone one day who looks at them the way Jeremy Wade looks at gigantic fish. I love that show. The Wels catfish is native to parts of Europe but like the flathead catfish, it’s been introduced as a game fish in other areas and has become an invasive species.

Like other catfish, the Wels has a skin with no scales, but instead is protected by a layer of slime that has antibacterial properties. This is true for the manta ray and the sunfish too, in fact. It also has barbels that give catfish the name catfish, since the barbels look a little like whiskers. The barbels act as feelers and contain chemical receptors that help the fish taste potential prey in the water.

The Wels catfish likes warm, slow-moving water and can grow up to 16 feet long, or 5 meters, although most are much smaller. It has lots and lots of small teeth but it generally swallows its prey whole, sucking it into its big mouth. It eats fish, crustaceans, insects, worms, and anything else it can catch, but bigger ones will eat frogs, rats, even ducks and other birds. On occasion a Wels will come out of the water to catch a bird on land, but this behavior seems to be from fish that have been introduced to rivers and lakes that aren’t in its native range. The wels is also rumored to drown people and even eat them. There are reports of Wels catfish grabbing anglers by the leg or arm and dragging them into the water.

The red cornetfish lives throughout the world in tropical oceans, although young fish may live in the mouths of rivers that connect with the sea. It’s a long, skinny fish that can grow up to six and a half feet long, or 2 meters, but barely weighs more than ten pounds, or 4.7 kilograms. It can be red, orange, brownish, or even yellowish, sometimes with white or dark stripes or blotches. There’s some evidence that it can actually change its color to match its background. It also has a row of bony plates along its back.

The red cornetfish eats small squid, shrimp, and fish, which it’s able to sneak up on because it’s so incredibly thin. Basically, if it’s swimming straight toward you, all you see is a dot with two bulges for eyes. It also sneaks up on prey by hiding behind harmless fish that are fatter than it is, which is every fish.

The red cornetfish is related to pipefish and seahorses, and like those fish it has a long, pipe-like snout with a tiny mouth at the end that gives it its other common name, flutemouth. Its teeth are also tiny. At the end of its tail, a whip-like filament grows past the tail fin that extends the lateral line, which is a row of sensory cells that helps a fish detect the movements of other fish in the water.

Finally, let’s finish up with a mystery fish from South Africa. It’s called the inkanyamba and is supposed to be some twenty feet long, or six meters. It lives in lakes and near waterfalls and is generally supposed to look like a snake or eel with a horselike head.

The inkanyamba seems to be associated with storms and other severe weather, an association that goes back untold centuries to cave paintings of what are known as rain animals. So it could be that the inkanyamba is like the thunderbird, a creature of spiritual belief rather than a physical one. Groups such as the Xhosa and the Zulu believe that Inkanyamba is a giant winged snake that appears as a tornado as he flies around looking for his mate, who lives in a lake. Houses with metal roofs that aren’t painted are in danger from Inkanyamba since he might mistake the roof for water.

Then again, there are sightings. In 1962 a park ranger saw an eel-like or snake-like creature on a sand bank along the Umgeni River, which slithered into the water as he approached. Another witness sighted the monster twice near Howick Falls in 1971 and 1981. He said it was thirty feet long with a crest along its neck. The waterfall known in English as Howick Falls in South Africa is sacred to the Zulu, who believe it’s the home of Inkanyamba. It’s 310 feet high, or 95 meters, and is situated on the Umgeni River. The only people who are traditionally allowed to approach the pool at the base of the falls, or who can safely approach it, are sangomas, or traditional healers.

One suggestion is that the inkanyamba is a giant mottled eel, which has fins that run all around the tail like a crest. But it only grows to about six and a half feet long at most, or 2 meters. This is pretty big, but not anywhere near twenty or thirty feet. It eats fish, frogs, crustaceans, and other small animals, and isn’t dangerous to humans. It’s nocturnal, spends most of its time at the bottom of the lakebed or riverbed, and migrates from fresh water into the ocean to spawn and lay eggs. You may remember this from episode 49, which goes into the complicated details about eel migration.

I’m not convinced that Inkanyamba is an eel, even a big one. I think it’s more a creature of legend. If you’re lucky enough to visit Howick Falls, don’t get too close to the water, out of respect for a sacred place and just in case there’s something there that could eat you up.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 091: The Spookiest Owls

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

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

The Hazelworm

VAMPIRE BIRDS

See-through animals

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

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

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

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

A great horned owl:

Further reading:

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

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[screech owl call]

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

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

[barn owl call]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[great horned owl hoot]

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

Thanks for listening!

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

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

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

A cape made from golden silk orbweaver silk:

Further reading and listening:

Blue spiders

Varmints! Podcast scorpions episode

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Halloween?

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

Thanks for listening!