Category Archives: insects

Episode 446: Termites

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

Further reading:

Replanted rainforests may benefit from termite transplants

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

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

Worker termites [photo from this site]:

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 443: Ant Lions and the Horrible Seal Problem

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Thanks to Jayson and warblrwatchr for suggesting this week’s invertebrates!

Further reading:

Parasite of the Day: Orthohalarachne attenuata

Trap-jaw ants jump with their jaws to escape the antlion’s den

Get out of my noooooose:

An ant lion pit:

An ant lion larva:

A lovely adult antlion, Nannoleon, which lives in parts of Africa [photo by Alandmanson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58068259]:

Show transcript:

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

It’s almost August, and of course we’re doing invertebrate August again this year. Let’s get ready by talking about a few extra invertebrates this week, with suggestions from Jayson and warblrwatchr.

Before we get started, I have some quick housekeeping. First, a big shout-out to Nora who emailed me recently. I just wanted to say hi and I hope you’re having a good day. Next, I’m moving in just a few weeks to Atlanta, Georgia! I know I was talking forever about moving to Bloomington, Indiana, but I changed my mind. The next few episodes are already scheduled so I can concentrate on moving.

I’m about 75% packed at this point and have given away or sold a lot of stuff, including a lot of books. But I have a collection that a listener might be interested in. I offered it to the patrons last month but no one grabbed it, so I’ll offer it here.

I have every issue of the little magazine Flying Snake ever published, 30 in all. They’re a fun hodgepodge of articles, reprinted newspaper clippings, old photos, and other stuff more or less associated with cryptozoology and weirdness in general. I’ve decided they take up too much space on my shelves to take with me to Atlanta. If you’re interested in giving them a home, let me know and I’ll box them up and send them to you for free. The first person who says they’ll take them will get them, but the catch is that you have to take them all. I won’t just send you a few. I’ll also throw in all four volumes of the Journal of Cryptozoology. This offer stands until mid-August when I move, because if I have to move them to my new apartment, I’m just going to keep them.

Okay, now let’s learn about some invertebrates! First, Jayson wanted to learn about a tiny invertebrate called Orthohalarachne attenuata. It doesn’t have a common name because most people will never ever encounter it, or think about it, and I kind of wish I didn’t have to think about it because it’s gross. Thanks a lot, Jayson. It’s a mite that lives in the nasal passages of seals, sea lions, and walruses. It’s incredibly common and usually doesn’t bother the seal very much, although sometimes it can cause the seal to have difficulty breathing if the infestation is heavy.

The adult mite spends its whole life anchored in the seal’s nasal passages with sharp little claws, although it can move around if it wants to. Its larvae are more active. The mite is mainly spread by seals sneezing on each other, which spreads the larvae onto another seal, and the larvae crawl into the new seal’s nose and mouth.

Unless you’re a seal or other pinniped, this might sound gross but probably doesn’t bother you too much. But consider that in 1984, a man went to the doctor when one of his eyes started hurting. The doctor found a mite attached to his eyeball, and yes, it was Orthohalarachne attenuata. The man had visited Sea World two days before he started feeling pain in his eye, and happened to be close to some walruses that were sneezing.

Luckily for pinnipeds kept in captivity in zoos that give their animals proper care, mite infestations can be treated successfully by veterinarians.

Let’s move on quickly to an invertebrate that isn’t a parasite that can get in your eyes, the ant lion! It was suggested by warblrwatchr and I’ve been wanting to cover it for a while. When I was a kid, there was a strip of soft powdery dirt under the eaves of the school gym that always had ant lions in it, and I would squat down during recess and watch to see if any ants would fall in and get caught. Sometimes this did actually happen and the resulting battle between ant and ant lion was exciting and kind of horrible to witness.

The ant lion is actually the larva of antlion lacewing, which look like a small damselfly that is mainly active at dusk. Ant lions live throughout the world, with more than 2,000 species known. Some wait for prey while hidden in leaf litter, while some hide in rock crevices and become camouflaged by lichens growing on them. Many others dig little pits in sand or soft dirt. They’re also called the doodlebug in some places, because when they’re looking for a place to dig a little pit, they make a loopy pattern in the dirt as they’re walking around.

The ant lion’s body is robust and has little backwards-pointing bristles that help it dig itself into the dirt and stay there without moving until it needs to. It waits at the bottom of the pit, hidden underground with just its long, sharp jaws showing through the dirt, until an ant or other insect falls in. The ant can’t climb out because the sides of the pit are so sharply angled that they start to cave in, sending the ant down to the bottom of the pit. If that doesn’t work, the ant lion kicks dirt at the ant so that it falls. Then the ant lion grabs the ant in its fearsome jaws and injects venom and digestive enzymes into it, and that is the end of the ant. The jaws actually have little projections that are hollow and act like horrible little straws, so that the ant lion sucks the liquefied ant insides into its digestive system.

One species of ant, the trap-jaw ant, can sometimes escape the ant lion’s pit by using its own fearsome jaws as a spring to bounce itself to safety. There are many species of trap-jaw ant that live in tropical and subtropical areas throughout much of the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, and much of the Americas. Its long jaws can snap closed extremely quickly and with a lot of force, allowing it to kill prey, bite pieces off of food, and lots of other activities. They can also jump with their jaws, and this improves their ability to bounce right out of the ant lion pit.

The ant lion can remain in its larval stage for years, maturing slowly. It has no anus but it doesn’t expel the waste products that it can’t digest, it just stores them in its body. When it does finally pupate, it uses a lot of the waste to produce silk for its cocoon. Whatever is left over it leaves behind when it emerges from its cocoon.

The cocoons are naturally hidden underground, and when the adult antlion lacewing emerges, it digs its way to the surface and rests while its wings open. Compared to the tough little larva, the adult is delicate and not very robust. It doesn’t live very long, usually no more than a few weeks, and most species eat pollen or nectar, or maybe tiny insects. It mainly just seeks out a mate, and the female lays her eggs in soft soil. When they hatch, they build their first tiny pits and the cycle starts again. And nobody gets into anybody’s eyeballs.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 437: Updates 8 and the Nutria

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Thanks to Nicholas, Måns, Warblrwatchr, Llewelly, and Emerson this week, in our yearly updates episode!

Further reading:

An Early Cretaceous Tribosphenic Mammal and Metatherian Evolution

Guam’s invasive tree snakes loop themselves into lassos to reach their feathered prey

Rhythmically trained sea lion returns for an encore — and performs as well as humans

Scientists Solve Mystery of Brown Giant Pandas

Elephant turns a hose into a sophisticated showering tool

New name for one of the world’s rarest rhinoceroses

Antarctica’s only native insect’s unique survival mechanism

Komodo dragons have iron-coated teeth to rip apart their prey

The nutria has really orange teeth:

Show transcript:

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

This week is our annual updates episode, and we’ll also learn about an animal suggested by Emerson. But first, we have some corrections!

Nicholas shared a paper with me that indicates that marsupials actually evolved in what is now Asia, with marsupial ancestors discovered in China. They spread into North America later. So I’ve been getting that wrong over many episodes, over several years.

Måns shared a correction from an older episode where I mentioned that humans can’t get pregnant while breastfeeding a baby. I’ve heard this all my life but it turns out it’s not true. It is true that a woman’s fertility cycle is suppressed after giving birth, but it’s not related to breastfeeding. Some women can become pregnant again only a few months after giving birth, while others can’t get pregnant again for a few years. It depends on the individual. That’s important, since the myth is so widespread that many women get pregnant by accident thinking they can’t since they’re still feeding a baby.

Warblrwatchr commented on the ultraviolet episode and mentioned that cats can see ultraviolet, which is useful to them because mouse urine glows in UV light.

Finally, Llewelly pointed out that in episode 416, I didn’t mention that fire ant venom isn’t delivered when the ant bites someone. The ant bites with its mandibles to hold on, then uses the stinger on its back end to sting repeatedly.

Now, let’s dive into some updates about animals we’ve talked about in past episodes. As usual, I don’t try to give an update on every single animal, because we’d be here all week if I did. I just chose interesting studies that caught my eye.

In episode 402, we talked about snakes that travel in unusual ways, like sidewinders. Even though I had a note to myself to talk about the brown tree snake in that episode, I completely forgot. The brown tree snake is native to parts of coastal Australia and many islands around Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. It’s not native to Guam, which is an island in the western Pacific, way far away from the brown tree snake’s home. But in the late 1940s, some brown tree snakes made their way to Guam in cargo ships and have become invasive since then.

The brown tree snake can grow up to six and a half feet long, or 2 meters, and is nocturnal, aggressive, and venomous. It’s not typically a danger to adults, but its venom can be dangerous to children and pets. The government employs trained dogs to find the snakes so they can be removed, and this has worked so well that brown tree snake population is declining rapidly on the island. But that hasn’t stopped the snake from driving many native animals to extinction in the last 75 years, especially birds.

One of the things scientists did in Guam to try and protect the native birds was to place smooth poles around the island so birds could nest on top but snakes couldn’t climb up to eat the eggs and chicks. But before long, the snakes had figured out a way to climb the poles, a method never before documented in any snake.

To climb a pole, the snake wraps its body around it, with the head overlapping the tail. Then it sort of scoots itself up the pole with tiny motions of its spine, a slow, difficult process that takes a lot of energy. Tests of captured brown tree snakes afterwards showed that not all snakes are willing or able to climb poles this way. Scientists think the brown tree snake evolved this method of movement to climb smooth-trunked trees in its native habitat. They also suspect some other species of snake can do the same.

Way back in episode 23 we talked about musical animals, including how some species can recognize and react to a rhythmic beat while most can’t. Sea lions are really good at it, especially a sea lion named Ronan.

Ronan was rescued in 2009 when she was a young sea lion suffering from malnutrition, wandering down a highway in California. She was determined to be non-releasable after she recovered, so she’s been a member of the Pinniped Lab in the University of California – Santa Cruz ever since, where she participates in activities that help scientists study sea lions. The rhythm studies are only one of the things she does, and only occasionally. The scientists put on a metronome and she bobs her head to the beat while they film her in ultra-slow motion.

The latest study was published in May of 2025. Ronan is 16 years old now and in her prime, so it’s not surprising that she performed even better than her last tests when she was still quite young. The study determined that not only does Ronan hit the beat right on time, she’s actually better at it than a human a lot of the time. She hits the beat within 15 milliseconds. When you blink your eye, it takes 150 milliseconds. If only she had hands, she’d be the best drummer ever!

The greatest thing about this process is that Ronan enjoys it. She’s rewarded with fish after a training session, and if she doesn’t feel like doing an activity, she doesn’t have to.

Back in episode 220, we talked about the giant panda, especially the mysterious Qinling panda that’s brown and tan instead of black and white. A study published in March of 2024 looked into the genetics of this unusual coat color and determined that it was a natural genetic mutation that doesn’t make the animals unhealthy, meaning it probably isn’t a result of inbreeding.

We talk occasionally about tool use in animals, especially in birds like crows and parrots, and in primates like chimpanzees. But a study published in November of 2024 detailed an elephant in the Berlin Zoo that uses a water hose to shower.

You may not think that’s a big deal, but the elephant in question, named Mary, uses the hose the way a human would to shower off. She holds the hose with her trunk just behind the nozzle, then moves it around and shifts her body to make sure she gets water everywhere she wants. She has to sling the hose backwards to clean her back, and when researchers gave her a heavier hose that she couldn’t move around as easily, she didn’t bother with it but just used her own trunk to spray water on herself.

Even more interesting, another elephant, named Anchali, who doesn’t get along with Mary, will interfere with the hose while Mary is using it. She lifts part of the hose to kink it and stop the water from flowing. Sometimes she even steps on the hose to stop the water, something the elephants have been trained not to do since zookeepers use hoses to clean out the enclosures. Anchali only steps on a hose if Mary is using it.

This is the first time researchers have studied a water hose as tool use, but it makes sense for elephants to understand how to use a hose, since they have a built-in hose on their faces.

We talked about the rhinoceros in episode 346, and more recently in the narwhals and unicorns episode. A study published in March of 2025 suggested that the Javan rhino should be classified as a new species of rhino in its own genus. The Javan rhino is incredibly rare, with only about 60 individuals alive in the world, all of them living in the wild in one part of Java. The Javan rhino is also called the Sundaic rhinoceros, and it’s been considered a close relation of the Indian rhinoceros. It’s smaller than the Indian rhino and most Javan rhino females either don’t have a horn at all or only have a big bump on the nose instead of a real horn.

The Javan rhino is so rare that we don’t really know much about it. The new study determined that there are big enough differences between the Javan rhino and the Indian rhino, in their skeletons, skin, diet, behavior, and fossil remains, that they should be placed in separate genera. The proposed new name for the Javan rhino is Eurhinoceros sondaicus instead of Rhinoceros sondaicus.

The only insect native to Antarctica is the Antarctic midge, which we mentioned in episode 221 but haven’t really talked about. It’s a flightless insect that can grow up to 6 mm long, and it’s the only insect that lives year-round in Antarctica. It’s only been found on the peninsula on the northwestern side of the continent.

Every animal that lives in Antarctica is considered an extremophile, and this little midge has some remarkable adaptations to its harsh environment. Its body contains compounds that minimize the amount of ice that forms in its body when the temperature plunges. It’s so well adapted to cold weather that it actually can’t survive if the temperature gets much above freezing. It eats decaying vegetation, algae, microorganisms, and other tiny food in its larval stages, but doesn’t eat at all as an adult.

The midge spends most of its life as a larva, only metamorphosing into its adult form after two winters. During its first winter it enters a dormant phase called quiescence, but as soon as the weather warms, it can resume development. It enters another dormant phase called obligate diapause for its second winter, where it pupates as soon as the weather gets cold. When summer arrives, all the midges emerge as adults at the same time, which allows them to find mates and lay eggs before dying a few days later.

The female midge lays her eggs and deposits a jelly-like protein on top of them. The jelly acts as antifreeze and keeps the eggs from drying out, and when the eggs hatch, the babies can eat the jelly.

In episode 384, we talked about the Komodo dragon, and only a month or so after that, and right after the 2024 updates episode, a new study was released about Komodo dragon teeth. It turns out that the Komodo dragon has teeth that are tipped with iron, which helps keep them incredibly sharp but also strong. As if Komodo dragons weren’t already scary enough, now we know they have metal teeth!

Many animals incorporate iron in their teeth, especially rodents, which causes some animals to have orange or partially orange teeth. In the Komodo dragon, the iron is incorporated into the tooth’s enamel coating, but only on the tips of the teeth. Since Komodo dragons have serrated teeth, that’s a lot of very sharp points.

There’s no way currently to test fossilized teeth to see if they once contained iron, especially since the iron would most likely be deposited in the tooth coating, the way it is for animals living today, not in the tooth itself. But because the Komodo dragon has teeth that are very similar in many ways to the teeth of meat-eating dinosaurs, scientists think some dinosaurs may have had iron in their teeth too.

And that brings us to the nutria, an animal suggested by Emerson. Emerson likes the nutria because of its orange teeth, and hopefully you can guess why its teeth are orange.

The nutria is also called the coypu, and it’s a rodent native to South America. In Spanish the word nutria means otter, so in South America it’s almost exclusively called the coypu, and the name coypu is becoming more popular in other languages too. It’s been introduced to other parts of the world as a fur animal, and it has become invasive in parts of Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States.

The nutria is a semi-aquatic rodent that looks like a muskrat but is much bigger, up to two feet long, or 64 cm, not counting its tail. It also kind of looks like a beaver but is smaller. If you’re not sure which of these three animals you’re looking at, since they’re so similar, the easiest way to tell them apart is to look at their tails. The beaver has a famously flattened paddle-like tail, the muskrat’s tail is flattened side to side to act as a rudder, and the nutria’s tail is just plain old round. The nutria also has a white muzzle and chin, and magnificent white whiskers.

The nutria mostly eats water plants and is mostly active in the twilight. While it usually lives around slow-moving streams and shallow lakes, it will also tolerate saltwater wetlands. Wild nutrias are generally dark brown, but ones bred for their fur are often blond or even white.

The nutria digs large dens with the entrance usually underwater, but the nesting chamber inside is dry. It also digs for roots. This can cause a lot of damage to levees and riverbanks, which is why the nutria is so destructive as an invasive animal. It will also eat people’s gardens and commercial crops like rice and alfalfa.

One interesting thing about the nutria is that the female has teats that are high up on her sides, which allows her babies to nurse even when they’re all in the water.

The nutria’s big incisor teeth are bright orange, as we mentioned before. This is indeed because of the iron in the enamel that strengthens the teeth. Like other rodents, the nutria’s incisors grow throughout its life and are continually worn down as it chews tough plants. A nutria eats about 25% of its weight in plants every single day. That’s almost as much as me and pizza.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 416: The heaviest tarantula and the bitey-est ant

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Thanks to Siya, Sutton, Owen, and Aksel for suggesting this week’s topic, the Goliath birdeater tarantula and the fire ant!

Further listening:

The TEETH Podcast

Further reading:

Tropical fire ants traveled the world on 16th century ships

The Goliath birdeater tarantula, bigger than some kittens:

Fire ants:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to talk about two invertebrates, a spider and an insect. Thanks to Siya, Sutton, Owen, and Aksel for suggesting them!

We’ll start with the spider, which Siya and Sutton both suggested. It’s the goliath tarantula, also called the goliath birdeater. You know it has to be a big spider if it’s called a birdeater. We’ve talked about it before, but not in a long time.

The goliath birdeater is the heaviest spider in the world. If you think of the usual spider, even a big one, it’s still pretty lightweight. Let’s use a wolf spider as an example, which is found just about everywhere in the world. It’s a hunting spider that doesn’t spin a web, and while different species vary in size, the biggest is the Carolina wolf spider found in many parts of North America. A big female can have a legspan of four inches across, or 10 cm, with a body up to an inch and a half long, or 35 mm—but it weighs less than an ounce. That’s barely 28 grams, or just a little heavier than five sheets of printer paper.

In comparison, the goliath birdeater tarantula can weigh over 6 ounces, or 175 grams. That’s heavier than a baseball, or two packs of cards. Its legspan can be as much as 12 inches across, or 30 cm with a body length of about 5 inches, or 13 cm. It’s brown or golden in color and lives in South America, especially in swampy parts of the Amazon rainforest. It’s nocturnal and mostly eats worms, large insects, other spiders, amphibians like frogs and toads, and occasionally other small animals like lizards or even snakes. And yes, every so often it will catch and eat a bird, but that’s rare. Birds are a lot harder to catch than worms, especially since the Goliath birdeater lives on the ground, not in trees.

Because it’s so large, the goliath looks like it would be incredibly dangerous to humans. It does have fangs and can inflict a venomous bite, but it’s not very strong venom. The danger comes from a very different source, because the goliath birdeater is famous for its urticating spines.

Many species of tarantula have special setae, hairlike structures called urticating spines, that can be dislodged from the body easily. If a tarantula feels threatened, it will rub a leg against its abdomen, dislodging the urticating spines. The spines are fine and light so they float upward away from the spider on the tiny air currents made by the tarantula’s legs, and right into the face of whatever animal is threatening it. The spines are covered with microscopic barbs that latch onto whatever they touch. If that’s your face or hands, they are going to make your skin itch painfully, and if it happens to be your eyeball you might end up having to go to the eye doctor for an injured cornea. Scientists who study tarantulas usually wear eye protection.

The goliath birdeater tarantula is considered a delicacy in northeastern South America. People eat it roasted. Apparently it tastes kind of like shrimp.

Next, Owen and Aksel wanted to learn about fire ants. I couldn’t believe that we’ve never talked about fire ants before!

Fire ant is the name for any of the more than 200 species in the genus Solenopsis, but it’s typically used to refer to the species Solenopsis invicta. It’s native to tropical South America but has been introduced to parts of North America, Australia, China, Taiwan, India, Africa, and many other places where the climate is tropical or sub-tropical.

The fire ant initially became so invasive due to Spanish galleons in the 16th century, which carried trade goods around the world. A ship that’s meant to carry a lot of cargo is built so that it needs to be weighted down to a certain degree to sail safely. A lot of times if a Spanish ship didn’t have enough goods in its hold to make it weigh enough, the captain would bring a few tons of soil onboard to make up the difference. Then, when the ship got to its next port where it was supposed to pick up new cargo, it would just dump the dirt wherever it was. It didn’t matter to the fire ant if the dirt was dumped into the water, because fire ants are prepared for their nests getting flooding. They cling together and form huge rafts that the wind pushes to shore. But more often, the dirt would get dumped on land for other ships to re-use.

A team of scientists figured out where the invasive fire ant populations came from by comparing the genetic signatures of 192 different populations. They hypothesized that the ants with the highest genetic diversity were the original population, and that as the ants were moved around the world by ship, genetic diversity would get lower and lower, since all the ants were descendants of the original colony or colonies transported accidentally in the dirt. They mapped out the genetics, then compared the results to Spanish trade routes in the mid-1600s, and it all matched up.

The fire ant made it to the United States in the late 1930s or early 1940s, the West Indies around 1980, and Australia around 2001. These days a lot of fire ants end up transported to new areas in golf course sod imported from Florida.

A fire ant colony consists of a queen, thousands of worker ants, and larger soldier ants that protect the workers and especially the queen. Some colonies have more than one queen. The ants eat anything, including seeds and insects, and even small animals, but also including dead animals they find. The colony can have as many as a quarter million ants. The nest is underground and entrances can be far from the nest itself, and nests can be so large that they can cause structures built over them to collapse.

Invasive animals of any kind aren’t good for the native animals, and the same is true for the fire ant. The fire ant specializes in colonizing areas where humans have disturbed the ground, whereas native ants often have trouble surviving in disturbed areas. The fire ants crowd out native ants and can destroy some native plants.

But the main reason why people don’t like fire ants is that they bite and they’re venomous. The bites cause a burning sensation and painful swelling, but some people are allergic to the venom and can actually die from ant bites. Luckily, that’s rare, but the bites are still painful.

Some countries have spent millions of dollars trying to eradicate the fire ant, including Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand seems to have succeeded, but Australia is still struggling to get the invasion under control. Fortunately, a lot of animals eat fire ants, which helps. One of the animals that especially loves to eat fire ants is the wolf spider, so now we’ve come full circle in this episode.

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

Thanks for listening!

If you are wishing that I’d gone into more detail about fire ant attacks, you might like the TEETH podcast. It’s the only podcast where you’ll hear wild animal attack stories directly from the survivors, hosted by a wilderness guide and attack survivor himself. I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can go listen. It’s appropriate for all ages. I don’t think they’ve actually covered a fire ant attack, but they’ve got lots of other fascinating accounts.

Episode 396: Moths!

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Thanks to Joel and an anonymous listener for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Dieback and recovery in poplar and attack by hornet clearwing moth

The enormous and beautiful Atlas moth:

A male hairy tentacle moth without and with coremata extended [photos from this site]:

The hornet moth looks like a hornet but can’t sting:

Show transcript:

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

Welcome to September, where we’re mere weeks away from Monster Month! Invertebrate August is over for another year, but what’s this? An episode about moths?! Hurrah for one extra invertebrate episode, because they don’t get enough attention on this podcast! Thanks to Joel and an anonymous listener for their suggestions.

First, a listener who wants to remain anonymous suggested that we talk about moths in general, and the Atlas moth in particular. I like the Atlas moth because you can catch it in Animal Crossing. It’s also beautiful and one of the largest moths in the entire world. Its wingspan can be well over 10 inches across, or about 27 cm, which is bigger than a lot of bird wingspans.

The Atlas moth’s wings are mostly cinnamon brown with darker and lighter spots. The upper wings have a curved sort of hook at the top that’s lighter in color and has an eyespot. It looks remarkably like a snake head, and in fact if a predator approaches, the moth will move its wings so that it looks like a snake is rearing its head back to strike.

Despite having such huge wings, atlas moths don’t fly very well. That’s okay because they only need to be able to fly for a few days, which they mostly do at night. They’re only looking for a mate, not food, because they don’t even have fully formed mouthparts. They don’t eat as adults. Like many moths, they mate, lay eggs, and die.

A few weeks later, the eggs hatch and the baby caterpillars emerge. The caterpillar is pale green with little spikes all over, and it eats plants until it grows to around 4 and a half inches long, or about 11 and a half cm. At that point it spins a cocoon attached to a twig, hidden from potential predators by dead leaves that the caterpillar incorporates into the cocoon’s outside.

The Atlas moth lives in forests in southern Asia, including China, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia, with a subspecies native to Japan. Its cocoons are sometimes collected to use for silk. The silk isn’t as high a quality as the domesticated silk moth’s, but it’s very strong and since the cocoons are so big, they produce lots of silk. Sometimes people will collect a cocoon after the moth has emerged and use it as a little purse.

Next, Joel suggested two interesting moths. The first is often called the hairy tentacle moth, which sounds absolutely horrifying. Its scientific name is Creatonotos gangis, and it lives in parts of Australia and southeast Asia.

The hairy tentacle moth is also called the Australian horror moth and other names that inspire fear and disgust. But why? The moth is really pretty. Its wings are pale brown and white with dark gray stripes in the middle, and it has a black spot on its head. The abdomen is usually red with black spots in a row. The wingspan is about 40 mm.

The issue comes with the way the male attracts a female. Inside his abdomen the male has four coremata, which are glands that emit pheromones. Pheromones are chemicals that other moths can detect, much like smells. When a male is ready to advertise for a mate, he perches on the edge of a leaf or somewhere similar and inflates the coremata so that they unfurl from inside the abdomen, like blowing up a balloon. Sometimes he only extends two of the coremata, sometimes all of them. Either way, the coremata are surprisingly large, sometimes longer than the entire abdomen. They’re dark gray with feathery hairs and they do actually look like hairy tentacles. They’re sometimes called hair pencils, but the term coremata is actually Greek for feather dusters.

If you don’t know what they are, the coremata really do look weird and unpleasant. But the moth is just doing his best to get his pheromones picked up on the breeze so a female will find him. The pheromone also repels other males.

The hairy tentacle moth can only develop his coremata and the pheromones he needs if he eats enough of plants that contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids. These are intensely bitter compounds that are also toxic to many animals. When he’s a caterpillar, the male eats plants that contain these alkaloids and retains them in his body, chemically modifying them later into pheromones, but if he doesn’t eat enough of them, he’s not able to grow coremata either.

Finally, Joel also suggested the hornet moth, which lives in Europe and the Middle East. It’s a moth, but it genuinely looks exactly like a yellow and black striped hornet. It even has clear wings like a hornet or wasp and flies like one too, and it’s about the size of a hornet. Even though it’s harmless, it looks like it would give you a bad sting, which protects it from potential predators who know better than to mess with a hornet. It’s a great example of what’s called Batesian mimicry, but it has one big drawback. The moth lives in some areas where there aren’t any hornets, and in those areas birds and other animals soon learn that those brightly striped insects are yummy and easy to catch.

The female hornet moth lays her eggs in the plants around the base of a tree or on its bark, especially the poplar tree. When the eggs hatch, the larvae spend the next two or three years in and around the tree, mostly around its roots. It eats the wood of the roots, and when it’s ready to pupate it burrows into the tree trunk and spins its cocoon in the burrow. The problem is that it needs the cocoon to be protected inside the tree, not near the entrance of the burrow, but when it emerges from the cocoon it needs to be near the entrance or its newly metamorphosed body will be too large for it to crawl out. To solve the problem, when it’s getting close to emerging, the moth will wriggle around in its cocoon so energetically that it manages to push the pupa up the burrow to the entrance. You can imitate this action by zipping yourself into a sleeping bag and trying to crawl across a room.

For a long time people thought the hornet moth was damaging poplar trees by this behavior, causing them to die. It turns out that the moths aren’t hurting the trees, they’re just more noticeable when poplars are already injured by drought.

There’s also an American hornet moth that lives in some parts of the Midwest and western areas of North America. It’s closely related to the hornet moth of Europe and adults look an awful lot like hornets, but they don’t sting. So the next time you’re about to run from a hornet, take a moment to determine if the hornet is actually a harmless moth. Or at least don’t run, just walk away quickly and safely. Just in case.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 392: Moon Jellyfish, Kung Fu Mantis, and Octocorals

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Thanks to Kari and Joel for their suggestions this week! You can find Kari Lavelle’s excellent book Butt or Face? Volume 2: Revenge of the Butts at any bookstore.

Our Kickstarter for some enamel pins goes live in just over a week if you’re interested!

Further reading:

Jellyfish size might influence their nutritional value

History of Taiji Mantis

Glowing octocorals have been around for at least 540 million years

The moon jellyfish [photo by Alexander Vasenin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32753304]:

A Chinese mantis [photo by Ashley Bradford, taken from this site]:

Also a Chinese mantis:

A type of octocoral:

Show transcript:

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

It’s finally Invertebrate August! We have some great episodes coming up this month, so let’s get started. Thanks to Kari and Joel for their suggestions this week!

First, we’ll start with an invertebrate from Kari Lavelle’s latest book, Butt or Face? Volume 2: Revenge of the Butts! It’s a sequel to the hilarious and really interesting book we talked about last summer. Kari kindly sent me a copy of the book and it’s just as good as the first one. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil the answer of whether the picture in the book is of an animal’s butt or face, but let’s talk about the moon jellyfish.

We’ve talked about jellyfish in several previous episodes, most recently in episode 343. Moon jellyfish is the term for jellies in the genus Aurelia, all of which look so identical that it takes close study by an expert, or a genetic test, to determine which species is which. We’re going to talk about a specific species in this episode, Aurelia aurita, but most of what we’ll learn about it also applies to the other moon jelly species.

Aurelia aurita lives in temperate, shallow water and is often found in harbors and close to shore. It’s mostly transparent and can grow up to 16 inches across, or 40 cm, although most are smaller. It’s sometimes called the saucer jelly because when its bell is open, it’s shaped sort of like a saucer or shallow bowl, if the bowl was upside down in the water with pinkish-white internal organs inside and short stinging tentacles. That’s most bowls, I think.

Unlike a lot of jellyfish, the moon jelly doesn’t have long tentacles that hang down from the middle of the bell. Instead, its tentacles are short and thin and line the edges of the bell. There are hundreds of them, but while the tentacles do have stinging cells, they’re not very strong. If you were to pet a moon jelly, you probably wouldn’t even feel the stings but you’d probably get sticky digestive mucus on your hands from the tentacles. The mucus is sticky to trap tiny pieces of food, which can include everything from fish eggs and various types of larvae to microscopic animals called diatoms and rotifers.

The moon jellyfish can survive in water with low oxygen, and in fact it prefers low oxygen water. Since most larger marine animals that live near the surface need a lot of oxygen to survive, the moon jelly can safely find its tiny food in low-oxygen areas without worrying too much about predators. Actually the moon jellyfish doesn’t worry about much of anything, because like other jellies, technically it doesn’t have a brain, just a nerve net.

Speaking of predators, for a long time scientists have wondered why anything bothers to eat jellies. They’re mostly water, which makes them easy for other animals to digest, but they contain almost no nutritional value. A study published in March 2023 determined that the bigger the jellyfish is, the more fatty acids its body contains, and fatty acids are an important nutrient. The main difference between a little jelly and a big jelly (besides size) is what they eat, so scientists think the bigger jellies are eating prey that contain more fatty acids, which slowly accumulate in the jelly’s body too.

Next, Joel sent a bunch of excellent suggestions for invertebrates, so many good ones I had trouble choosing which one to put in this episode. I chose the kung fu mantis because I love the Kung Fu Panda movies and think Mantis is an awesome character who is not appreciated enough.

Everyone loves praying mantises and we’ve talked about various species in different episodes, most recently episode 375. The one we’re talking about today is specifically called the Chinese mantis, Tenodera sinensis, which is native to Asia but which is invasive in parts of North America. It grows over 4 inches long, or about 11 cm, and is brown and green in color. It has a yellow spot between its raptorial arms, which as you can guess from the “raptor” part of that word are the arms with the big spikes that help it catch and kill its prey.

The reason this mantis is also called the kung fu mantis is because its ferocity and grace when hunting inspired a style of martial arts in China hundreds of years ago. The story goes that a great hero called Wang Lang was defeated in a duel, and afterwards set himself to study and train harder. One day he noticed a bird trying to catch a praying mantis, but the mantis was so skilled in defending itself against a much larger opponent that the bird eventually gave up and flew away. Wang Lang was inspired to incorporate the mantis’s movements into kung fu, and afterwards he never lost a duel.

Like other mantises, the Chinese mantis will eat pretty much anything it can catch. That’s mostly insects and spiders, but occasionally it will eat frogs and other amphibians, lizards and other reptiles, and occasionally even small birds. It’s a good insect to have around the garden because it eats so many garden pests, but it also eats bees and butterflies, which isn’t so good for the gardener. The Chinese mantis also eats other mantises, which is a problem in North America where it will kill and eat the native mantis species. But because the Chinese mantis is easy to keep in captivity, if you order mantises to release in your garden in the United States, as a natural pest control, there’s a good chance that the species is actually the Chinese mantis. The native Carolina mantis looks very similar but is smaller, only about 2.5 inches long, or 6 cm.

The Chinese mantis also eats other Chinese mantises. You may have heard about how the praying mantis female will bite the male’s head right off after or even while they’re in the process of mating, and then she’ll just eat him up for a nice big meal to help her develop her eggs. This is actually something that happens, although not always. In the case of the Chinese mantis, scientific observations have found that the female eats the male about half the time.

Let’s finish with a type of coral you may not have heard of, octocoral, also called soft coral. We’ve mentioned corals lots of times in various episodes but we haven’t really discussed them in detail. When most people think of coral they think of stony corals that make up coral reefs. Most corals are colonial animals, meaning each individual polyp grows together in a group, and stony coral polyps form a type of exoskeleton or shell made of calcium carbonate to protect its soft body. The polyps have small tentacles that they extend into the water to catch plankton and other particles of food, although some species are larger and can even grab little fish. The tentacles contain stinging cells called nematocysts that can stun or even kill small animals. As the colony grows, with old polyps dying and young polyps attaching to the hard skeletons left behind, the reef gets larger and larger as the years pass.

Not all stony corals live in shallow warm water and build reefs. Some live in cold water and deeper water, and there are even deep-sea corals, and these types of coral don’t build reefs. Octocorals don’t build reefs and are found in both shallow and deep water, and they don’t form hard skeletons.

Instead, the polyps of octocoral form a soft tissue full of tiny channels that allow water through. Octocorals are colonial, so the tissue of each polyp blurps together with those of all the other polyps around it. Some species of octocoral secrete little pieces of harder material to help the tissue keep its shape, but most species are still overall quite soft. It’s strong, though, and the tiny channels through it allow water to carry nutrients to all the polyps.

The octocoral gets its name because it has exactly eight tentacles, although the tentacles are feathery in appearance with lots of little branches growing off the main tentacle. This allows it to catch more tiny food. Some octocorals have long, elaborate tentacles, which has earned them the names sea fans and sea pens, from the old-timey days when pens were made from big feathers.

Corals in general appear in the fossil record for about half a billion years, with stony corals more likely to preserve for obvious reasons. Many species of octocoral exhibit bioluminescence, and that leads us to a recent study, published in April 2024.

Until this new study, scientists estimated that the first bioluminescent creatures lived around 250 million years ago. Bioluminescence has evolved separately over 100 times, though, and is found today in animals as different as fungus and fish. For the new study, scientists analyzed the genetics of 185 octocoral species to see how they were related, and then compared their findings with fossil corals to learn more about when the species split from their common ancestors. That gave them a good idea of when octocorals might have evolved originally and hinted at which ancestors were bioluminescent. They estimated that the first octocoral evolved around 540 million years ago and was already bioluminescent!

The scientists who worked on the study suggest that bioluminescence may have developed originally as a byproduct of other chemical reactions, but it was useful to the animal by possibly attracting food or other octocorals. Bioluminescence is common in marine animals these days, especially in deep-sea animals, so it’s possible that the ocean half a billion years ago was filled with lights from octocorals and many other organisms.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 389: Updates 7 and the Lava Bear

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It’s our annual updates episode! Thanks to Kelsey and Torin for the extra information about ultraviolet light, and thanks to Caleb for suggesting we learn more about the dingo!

Further reading:

At Least 125 Species of Mammals Glow under Ultraviolet Light, New Study Reveals

DNA has revealed the origin of this giant ‘mystery’ gecko

Bootlace Worm: Earth’s Longest Animal Produces Powerful Toxin

Non-stop flight: 4,200 km transatlantic flight of the Painted Lady butterfly mapped

Gigantopithecus Went Extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 Years Ago, New Study Says

First-Ever Terror Bird Footprints Discovered

Last surviving woolly mammoths were inbred but not doomed to extinction

Australian Dingoes Are Early Offshoot of Modern Breed Dogs, Study Shows

A (badly) stuffed lava bear:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have our annual updates episode, and we’ll also learn about a mystery animal called the lava bear! As usual, a reminder that I don’t try to update everything we’ve ever talked about. That would be impossible. I just pick new information that is especially interesting.

After our episode about animals and ultraviolet light, I got a great email from Kelsey and Torin with some information I didn’t know. I got permission to quote the email, which I think you’ll find really interesting too:

“You said humans can’t see UV light, which is true, however humans can detect UV light via neuropsin (a non-visual photoreceptor in the retina). These detectors allow the body to be signaled that it’s time to do things like make sex-steroid hormones, neurotransmitters, etc. (Spending too much time indoors results in non-optimal hormone levels, lowered neurotransmitter production, etc.)

“Humans also have melanopsin detectors in the retina and skin. Melanopsin detectors respond to blue light. Artificial light (LEDs, flourescents, etc) after dark entering the eye or shining on the skin is sensed by these proteins as mid-day daylight. This results in an immediate drop in melatonin production when it should be increasing getting closer to bedtime.”

And that’s why you shouldn’t look at your phone at night, which I am super bad about doing.

Our first update is related to ultraviolet light. A study published in October of 2023 examined hundreds of mammals to see if any part of their bodies glowed in ultraviolet light, called fluorescence. More than 125 of them did! It was more common in nocturnal animals that lived on land or in trees, and light-colored fur and skin was more likely to fluoresce than darker fur or skin. The white stripes of a mountain zebra, for example, fluoresce while the black stripes don’t.

The study was only carried out on animals that were already dead, many of them taxidermied. To rule out that the fluorescence had something to do with chemicals used in taxidermy, they also tested specimens that had been flash-frozen after dying, and the results were the same. The study concluded that ultraviolet fluorescence is actually really common in mammals, we just didn’t know because we can’t see it. The glow is typically faint and may appear pink, green, or blue. Some other animals that fluoresce include bats, cats, flying squirrels, wombats, koalas, Tasmanian devils, polar bears, armadillos, red foxes, and even the dwarf spinner dolphin.

In episode 20 we talked about Delcourt’s giant gecko, which is only known from a single museum specimen donated in the 19th century. In 1979 a herpetologist named Alain Delcourt, working in the Marseilles Natural History Museum in France, noticed a big taxidermied lizard in storage and wondered what it was. It wasn’t labeled and he didn’t recognize it, surprising since it was the biggest gecko he’d ever seen—two feet long, or about 60 cm. He sent photos to several reptile experts and they didn’t know what it was either. Finally the specimen was examined and in 1986 it was described as a new species.

No one knew anything about the stuffed specimen, including where it was caught. At first researchers thought it might be from New Caledonia since a lot of the museum’s other specimens were collected from the Pacific Islands. None of the specimens donated between 1833 and 1869 had any documentation, so it seemed probable the giant gecko was donated during that time and probably collected not long before. More recently there was speculation that it was actually from New Zealand, since it matched Maori lore about a big lizard called the kawekaweau.

In June of 2023, Delcourt’s gecko was finally genetically tested and determined to belong to a group of geckos from New Caledonia, an archipelago of islands east of Australia. Many of its close relations are large, although not as large as it is. It’s now been placed into its own genus.

Of course, this means that Delcourt’s gecko isn’t the identity of the kawekaweau, since it isn’t very closely related to the geckos of New Zealand, but it might mean the gecko still survives in remote parts of New Caledonia. It was probably nocturnal and lived in trees, hunting birds, lizards, and other small animals.

We talked about some really big worms in episode 289, but somehow I missed the longest worm of all. It’s called the bootlace worm and is a type of ribbon worm that lives off the coast of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Britain, and it’s one of the longest animals alive. The longest worm we talked about in episode 289 was an African giant earthworm, and one was measured in 1967 as 21 feet long, or 6.7 meters. The bootlace worm is only 5 to 10 mm wide, but it routinely grows between 15 and 50 feet long, or 5 to 15 meters, with one dead specimen that washed ashore in Scotland in 1864 measured as over 180 feet long, or 55 meters.

When it feels threatened, the bootlace worm releases thick mucus. The mucus smells bad to humans but it’s not toxic to us or other mammals, but a recent study revealed that it contains toxins that can kill crustaceans and even some insects.

We talked about the painted lady butterfly in episode 203, which was about insect migrations. The painted lady is a small, pretty butterfly that lives throughout much of the world, even the Arctic, but not South America for some reason. Some populations stay put year-round, but some migrate long distances. One population winters in tropical Africa and travels as far as the Arctic Circle during summer, a distance of 4,500 miles, or 7,200 km, which takes six generations. The butterflies who travel back to Africa fly at high altitude, unlike monarch butterflies that fly quite low to the ground most of the time. Unlike the monarch, painted ladies don’t always migrate every year.

In October of 2013, a researcher in a small country in South America called French Guiana found some painted lady butterflies on the beach. Gerard Talavera was visiting from Spain when he noticed the butterflies, and while he recognized them immediately, he knew they weren’t found in South America. But here they were! There were maybe a few dozen of them and he noticed that they all looked pretty raggedy, as though they’d flown a long way. He captured several to examine more closely.

A genetic study determined that the butterflies weren’t from North America but belonged to the groups found in Africa and Europe. The question was how did they get to South America? Talavera teamed up with scientists from lots of different disciplines to figure out the mystery. Their findings were only published last month, in June 2024.

The butterflies most likely rode a well-known wind current called the Saharan air layer, which blows enough dust from the Sahara to South America that it has an impact on the Amazon River basin. The trip from Africa to South America would have taken the butterflies 5 to 8 days, and they would have been able to glide most of the time, thus conserving energy. Until this study, no one realized the Saharan air layer could transport insects.

We talked about the giant great ape relation Gigantopithecus in episode 348, and only a few months later a new study found that it went extinct 100,000 years earlier than scientists had thought. The study tested the age of the cave soils where Gigantopithecus teeth have been discovered, to see how old it was, and tested the teeth again too. As we talked about in episode 348, Gigantopithecus ate fruit and other plant material, and because it was so big it would have needed a lot of it. It lived in thick forests, but as the overall climate changed around 700,000 years ago, the forest environment changed too. Other great apes living in Asia at the time were able to adapt to these changes, but Gigantopithecus couldn’t find enough food to sustain its population. It went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago according to the new study, which is actually later than I had in episode 348, where I wrote that it went extinct 350,000 years ago. Where did I get my information? I do not know.

The first footprints of a terror bird were discovered recently in Argentina, dating to 8 million years ago. We talked about terror birds in episode 202. The footprints were made by a medium-sized bird that was walking across a mudflat, and the track is beautifully preserved, which allows scientists to determine lots of new information, such as how fast the bird could run, how its toes would have helped it run or catch prey, and how heavy the bird was. We don’t know what species of terror bird made the tracks, but we know it was a terror bird.

We talked about the extinction of the mammoth in episode 256, especially the last population of mammoths to survive. They lived on Wrangel Island, a mountainous island in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of western Siberia, which was cut off from the mainland about 10,000 years ago when ocean levels rose. Mammoths survived on the island until about 4,000 years ago, which is several hundred years after the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. It’s kind of weird to imagine ancient Egyptians building pyramids, and at the same time, mammoths were quietly living on Wrangel Island, and the Egyptians had no idea what mammoths were. And vice versa.

A 2017 genetic study stated that the last surviving mammoths were highly inbred and prone to multiple genetic issues as a result. But a study released in June of 2024 reevaluated the population’s genetic diversity and made a much different determination. The population did show inbreeding and low genetic diversity, but not to an extent that it would have affected the individuals’ health. The population was stable and healthy right to the end.

In that case, why did the last mammoths go extinct? Humans arrived on the island for the first time around 1700 BCE, but we don’t know if they encountered mammoths or, if they did, if they killed any. There’s no evidence either way. All we know is that whatever happened, it must have been widespread and cataclysmic to kill all several hundred of the mammoths on Wrangel Island.

We talked about the dingo in episode 232, about animals that are only semi-domesticated. That episode came out in 2021, and last year Caleb suggested we learn more about the dingo. I found a really interesting 2022 study that re-evaluated the dingo’s genome and made some interesting discoveries.

The dingo was probably brought to Australia by humans somewhere between 3,500 and 8,500 years ago, and after the thylacine was driven to extinction in the early 20th century, it became the continent’s apex predator. Genetic studies in the past have shown that it’s most closely related to the New Guinea singing dog, but the 2022 study compared the dingo’s genome to that of five modern dog breeds, the oldest known dog breed, the basenji, and the Greenland wolf.

The results show that the dingo is genetically in between wolves and dogs, an intermediary that shows us what the dog’s journey to domestication may have looked like. The study also discovered something else interesting. Domestic dogs have multiple copies of a gene that controls digestion, which allows them to eat a wide variety of foods. The dingo only has one copy of that gene, which means it can’t digest a lot of foods that other dogs can. Remember, the dingo has spent thousands of years adapting to eat the native animals of Australia. When white settlers arrived, they would kill dingoes because they thought their livestock was in danger from them. The study shows that the dingo has little to no interest in livestock because it would have trouble digesting, for instance, a lamb or calf. The animals most likely to be hurting livestock are domestic dogs that are allowed to run wild.

We’ll finish with a mystery animal called the lava bear. In the early 20th century, starting in 1917, a strange type of bear kept being seen in Oregon in the United States. Its fur was light brown like a grizzly bear’s, but otherwise it looked like a black bear—except for its size, which was very small. The largest was only about 18 inches tall at the back, or 46 cm, and it only weighed about 35 pounds, or 16 kg. That’s the size of an ordinary dog, not even a big dog. Ordinarily, a black bear can stand 3 feet tall at the back, or about 91 cm, and weighs around 175 pounds, or 79 kg, and a big male can be twice that weight and much taller.

The small bear was seen in desert, especially around old lava beds, which is where it gets its name. A shepherd shot one in 1917, thinking it was a bear cub, and when he retrieved the body he was surprised to find it was an adult. He had it taxidermied and photographs of it were published in the newspapers and a hunting magazine, which brought more hunters to the area.

People speculated that the animal might be an unknown species of bear, possibly related to the grizzly or black bear, and maybe even a new species of sun bear, a small bear native to Asia.

Over the next 17 years, many lava bears were killed by hunters and several were captured for exhibition. When scientists finally got a chance to examine one, they discovered that it was just a black bear. Its small size was due to malnutrition, since it lived in a harsh environment without a lot of food, and its light-colored fur was well within the range of fur color for an American black bear. Lava bears are still occasionally sited in the area around Fossil Lake.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 375: The Praying Mantis Re-Revisited

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Thanks to Elijah and an anonymous listener for suggesting that we talk about some more species of praying mantis!

Further reading:

The luring mantid: Protrusible pheromone glands in Stenophylla lobivertex (Mantodea: Acanthopidae)

Dragons and unicorns (mantises) spotted in Atlantic forest

Citizen scientists help discover new mantis species

The dragon mantis [photo from first article linked above]:

The possibly new species of unicorn mantis [picture from second article linked above]:

Inimia nat, or I. nat, discovered after a citizen scientist posted its photo to iNat [photo from third article linked above]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to revisit a popular topic that we’ve covered before, especially in episode 187, but which has been suggested by a couple of listeners who want to know more. It’s the praying mantis. Thanks to Elijah and an anonymous listener who suggested it. Elijah even keeps mantises as pets and sent me some pictures of them, which was awesome.

The praying mantis gets its name because it holds its spiny front legs forward and together, which sort of resembles someone holding their hands together while praying. That’s the type of praying spelled p r a y ing, not p r e y ing, which refers to killing and eating other organisms, but the praying mantis does that too. It’s a predator that will eat anything it can catch, including birds, fish, mice, lizards, frogs, and of course lots of insects.

There are thousands of mantises, also called mantids, with most species preferring tropical and subtropical climates. In general, a mantis has a triangular head with large eyes, an elongated body, and enlarged front legs that it uses to catch prey. Most species have wings and can fly, some don’t. Most are ambush predators.

We talked about several species of mantis in episode 187, and some more in episode 201. You can go back to those episodes to find out general information about mantises, such as how their eyes work and whether they have ears and whether they actually eat their mates (they do, sometimes). This week we’re going to focus on some findings about mantises that are new since those episodes came out.

The dragon mantis, Stenophylla lobivertex, was only discovered in the year 2000. Its body is covered with gray-green or green-brown lobes that help it blend in with the leaves in its forest home, but that also kind of make it look like a tiny dragon covered with scaly armor. Even its eyes are spiky. It lives in the tropics of South and Central America where it’s quite rare, and it usually only grows about an inch and a half long, or 4 cm. It spends most of the time in treetops, where it hunts insects, spiders, and other small animals.

Unlike many mantis species, the dragon mantis is mostly nocturnal. That’s one of the reasons why we don’t know a lot about it. In late 2017 through mid-2018, one member of a team of scientists studying animals in Peru noticed something weird in a captive female dragon mantis. Frank Glaw isn’t an expert in insects but in reptiles and amphibians, but he happened to observe what looked like two tiny maggots emerge from the mantis’s back, roughly above her last pair of legs, but then disappear again into her back. He thought he was seeing the results of parasitism, but a mantis expert suspected it was something very different.

Some praying mantis females release pheromones from a gland in about the same place on the back. Pheromones are chemicals that can be sensed by other insects, usually ones in the same species. They’re most often used to attract a mate. It turns out that the female dragon mantis has a Y-shaped organ that’s up to 6 mm long that can release pheromones in a particular direction. The mantis can even move the prongs of the Y around if she wants to. Because she only does this at night when she’s sure she’s safe, and only when she hasn’t found a mate yet, and because this species of mantis is really rare, no one knew that any mantis had this specific organ. It’s possible that other mantis species have the organ too, but that scientists just haven’t seen it yet.

As we learned in our previous mantis episodes, not only are there well over 2,000 known species of mantis alive today, there are more being discovered all the time. In 2019, Project Mantis went to Brazil to look for mantises, and not only did they find two of the extremely rare dragon mantises, they discovered what may be a species new to science. It hasn’t been described yet as far as I can find, but it appears to be a member of a group called unicorn mantises because it has a spike sticking up from the top of the head. Scientists have no idea what the spike is for, but it’s funny that they found unicorn mantises and dragon mantises in the same forest.

Late in 2023, two new species of Australian mantis were described, one of which is so different from other known species that it was placed in its own genus. They’re small mantises that live on tree trunks and are camouflaged to look like pieces of bark, so they’re hard to spot. Luckily, a citizen scientist named Glenda Walter noticed them and posted pictures to iNaturalist. A lot of scientists watch iNaturalist posts, and it’s a good thing because Glenda’s mantises turned out to be completely new to science. One of them has been named Inimia nat, which is abbreviated I. nat, which is also the abbreviation for iNaturalist. A citizen scientist is anyone who is interested in science and works to help improve scientific knowledge in general, for instance by taking pictures of interesting bugs and posting them to iNat.

The praying mantis has been around since at least the early Cretaceous, around 120 million years ago. The oldest remains found don’t look that much like modern mantises, though. They look more like cockroaches, which isn’t too surprising since mantises are closely related to cockroaches. By about 110 million years ago mantises had started to evolve the deadly front legs that they have now. Most fossilized mantis remains are actually impressions of wings, but experts can learn a lot from just the wings. Baby praying mantises have even been found preserved in amber from up to 87 million years ago.

A lot of people are scared of praying mantises because they look dangerous. They’re not dangerous to humans or pets at all, though. If you get pinched or nipped by a mantis, just wash your hands to clean out the wound and you’ll be fine. Mantises are extremely beneficial insects, especially in the garden, because they eat other insects that eat plants that humans don’t want eaten, like flowers and vegetables. Some people release mantises in the garden as a natural way to control insect pests. And, as Elijah can tell you, mantises actually make really interesting pets.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 336: The Turtle Ant and the Alien Butt Spider

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Thanks to Kari for suggesting this week’s topics! Definitely check out her book Butt or Face?, which is funny and has lots of animal information!

Further reading:

Butt or Face? by Kari Lavelle

GBIF: Araneus praesignis [the spider pictures below come from this site]

The turtle ant’s body is flattened and the soldier caste ants have specialized head shapes to block the nest entrances:

The alien butt spider has a butt that looks like an alien’s face!

The alien butt spider hides during the day in its leaf fort:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about two really weird invertebrates suggested by Kari. One of these two animals is her favorite and the other is a weird ant from a book she wrote. Kari’s full name is Kari Lavelle and her book is for kids, called Butt or Face? It actually releases tomorrow as this episode goes live, so if you’re listening to this episode on Monday, July 10, 2023, you still have time to preorder the book, or you can just wait a day and run out to your local bookstore or library to get a copy.

Kari was nice enough to send me a copy of the book and it’s really funny and interesting. It’s partly a game where you look at a picture and decide whether it shows an animal’s butt or its face. It’s a lot harder than you’d think! You make your guess and turn the page to find out if you’re right and learn about the animal. It’s very fun and I actually guessed wrong on one animal, but I’m not telling you which one. There’s a link in the show notes if you want to learn more about the book and maybe order a copy for yourself.

Anyway, let’s talk about the ant first, because it’s actually one I’ve had on the list to talk about for a while. I was really excited to see it in Kari’s book. It’s called the turtle ant, sometimes called the “door head” ant. That gives you a clue as to whether its picture in the book features its butt or its face.

The turtle ant is any of the well over 100 species of ant in the genus Cephalotes, which are native to the Americas. Most live in Central and South America, especially in tropical and subtropical areas. Almost all species live in trees, nesting in cavities originally made by beetle larvae.

For the most part, turtle ants are pretty typical compared to other ant species. They have a generalized diet, eating pretty much anything they find. This includes plant material, dead insects and other animals they find, bird poop, nectar, and even pollen in some species. Each colony has a single queen that mates with multiple males and lays all the eggs for the colony. Worker ants tend the eggs and larvae, gather food, and keep the colony clean. But as in some other ants, many species of turtle ant have a soldier caste. These are worker ants who are specialized to defend the nest. We talked about army ants recently, in episode 328, and also back in episode 185, and army ant soldiers have massive sharp mandibles that can inflict painful bites. But the turtle ant soldiers don’t have sharp mandibles and aren’t aggressive. They have one job, and that job is to stand at the nest’s entrances and stop them up with their heads, only moving when another ant needs to get through.

As a result, turtle ant soldiers have weird-shaped heads. The head shape varies from species to species, with some looking more normal and some being heavily armored and strangely shaped. Well, they’re not strangely shaped except in comparison to an ordinary ant head. They’re shaped exactly right to do the job they’ve evolved to do, be a door. In some species, the top of the soldier’s head is completely round and flattened, just the right size and shape to block the entrance.

Turtle ants have another ability that they share with some other ants. If an ant falls from the twig or branch it’s climbing on, instead of just falling to the ground, it can glide back to the tree trunk. Turtle ants have flattened bodies, which helps catch the air like a tiny ant-shaped parachute. Unlike other ants that do this, which glide head-first, the turtle ant glides abdomen-first. It uses its legs and head to adjust which way it’s gliding, and most of the time it lands safely on the tree trunk.

There are undoubtedly more turtle ant species than we know about so far, and we actually don’t know very much about most of the species we have discovered. Most turtle ants live in trees, and that makes them hard to study.

There’s actually a spider called the ant-mimicking crab spider that eats turtle ants. It looks so much like a turtle ant worker that it can get close to the actual ants before it’s recognized as a predator, at which point it has a good chance of grabbing an ant to eat before the ant can run away. But that’s not actually the type of spider we’re talking about next.

The other animal we’re talking about today isn’t one from the book, it just happens to be one of Kari’s favorite animals *cough*sequel*cough*. It’s called the alien butt spider and it is completely awesome, as you can tell from the name.

The alien butt spider lives in Queensland, Australia, and it gets its name because—maybe you should just guess. I’ll wait.

Yes, you’re right! The abdomen of the spider has black or dark blue-green markings that look for all the world like the face of a tiny space alien from a movie. The spider itself is mostly green and very small, with a big female only growing about 8 mm long, although its legspan can be 20 mm across. Males are smaller, mostly because the male has a much smaller abdomen.

Its scientific name is Bijoaraneus praesignis, changed in December 2021 from Araneus praesignis. It’s also called the outstanding orbweaver or green orbweaver. Like many spiders, especially orbweavers, it’s mostly active at night. It spins a big round web that looks like the kind you see on Halloween decorations, because that’s the kind of web most orbweavers make, and at night it waits on or near the web for an insect to get stuck in it. During the day, though, the alien butt spider needs to hide. It makes what’s called a retreat in a leaf that’s partially closed or curled. The spider spins a thick layer of silk across the edges of the leaf that turns it into basically a little leaf fort, then crawls inside. The underside of the spider is plain greenish-yellow with no markings, so it’s hard to see against the leaf, especially through the layer of silk.

The spider’s abdomen is green with a yellow or white pattern on top, with black eye spots visible from the rear. The eye spots show up really well against the yellow or white pattern. But the spider also has black markings at the front of its abdomen, which also look like eyespots from some angles. The rest of its body is green, greeny-yellow, and brown, which helps it blend into leafy backgrounds.

Naturally, the alien butt spider is not actually trying to look like an alien. That’s something humans have decided it looks like because it’s green and the eyespots are so large. The spider just wants potential predators to see the eyespots and think, “Darn, that animal already saw me so I can’t sneak up on it. I won’t waste my energy trying to grab it.” Or maybe, “Uh oh, look at the size of that animal’s eyes! I must be looking at the head of a very large animal that might eat me, plus it’s looking right at me. I’d better run.”

Even though it looks kind of spooky, the alien butt spider is completely harmless to humans. We also don’t know much about it, so while it seems to be a common spider within its range, we don’t know for sure if it’s potentially endangered. It’s best to leave this little alien alone no matter how cute it is (and it is very cute).

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 294: Updates 5 and a New Zealand Parrot!

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It’s our fifth updates and corrections episode, with some fun information about a New Zealand parrot, suggested by Pranav! Thanks also to Llewelly, Zachary, Nicholas, and Simon who sent in corrections.

Further reading:

Vitiligo

Tyrannosaurus remains hint at three possible distinct species

Study refutes claim that T. rex was three separate species

The reign of the dinosaurs ended in spring

Impact crater may be dinosaur killer’s baby cousin

California mice eat monarch butterflies

‘Hobbit’ human story gets a twist, thanks to thousands of rat bones

Playground aims to distract mischievous kea

The kea showing off the bright colors under its wings:

A kea jungle gym set up to stop the birds from moving traffic cones around for fun:

Show transcript:

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

This is our fifth annual updates episode, where I catch us up on new studies published about various animals we’ve talked about before. This is mostly just whatever happens to catch my eye and isn’t comprehensive by any means. Also, because things have been so busy for me the last few weeks, I decided to just go with what I’d already finished and not try to add more.

We’ll start as usual with corrections, then do some updates, then learn about a parrot from New Zealand, which was a suggestion from Pranav. This part of the episode started as a Patreon episode from 2019, so patrons, I promise your October bonus episode will be brand new and interesting and in-depth!

First, both Llewelly and Zachary pointed out that there are lions living in Asia, not just Africa. It’s called the Asiatic lion and these days, it only lives in a few small areas in India. It’s a protected animal but even though their numbers are increasing, there are probably still no more than 700 Asiatic lions living in the wild.

Next, Nicholas points out that vitiligo isn’t a genetic condition, it’s an autoimmune disorder that can be caused by a number of different diseases and conditions. You still can’t catch it from other people, though. We talked about vitiligo briefly in episode 241, about squirrels. Nicholas included a link, which I’ll put in the show notes for anyone who’s interested in learning more.

For our final correction, Simon questioned whether there really are only six living species of macaw known. This was polite of him, since I was completely wrong about this. In fact, there are six genera of macaws and lots of species, although how many species there are exactly depends on who you ask. Since this mistake made it into the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book, I am very irritated at myself, but thank you to Simon for helping me clear this up.

Let’s start our updates with the animal who gets an update every single time, Tyrannosaurus rex. A study published in February 2022 examined the fossilized remains of 37 T. rexes and suggested that there may actually be three distinct species of T. rex instead of just one. The study focused specifically on differences in teeth and leg bones that don’t seem to have anything to do with the individual’s age when it died or whether it was male or female.

However, in July 2022, another study found that all the T. rexes found so far do indeed belong to the same species. This is how science works, because new information is always being discovered and that means we have to reassess the things we thought we knew.

In other dinosaur news, in episode 240 we talked about the last day of the dinosaurs. Results of a study released in February 2022 suggest that the asteroid struck in early spring in the northern hemisphere. The asteroid hit the earth so hard that it rocked the entire continental plate that it struck, which caused massive waves unlike any other waves, since all the water above the continental plate was pushed upwards at once. This pushed all the sediment lying quietly on the bottom of the ocean up into the water, so much of it at once that it actually buried a lot of fish alive. The same thing happened in lakes and every other body of water. The fossil site we talked about in episode 240 is still being studied, the one that appears to date to literally the day of the asteroid impact, and preserved soft tissues in some of the fish have been discovered. Careful analysis of the fish show evidence that they all died in early spring. Researchers suggest that the time of year may have been especially bad for many dinosaurs, who were probably just starting to lay eggs and have babies.

In even more recent last-day-of-the-dinosaurs news, in August 2022 a study was released about a newly discovered crater off the coast of West Africa. Researchers are pretty sure it was from an asteroid impact, although much smaller than the big one that hit what is now Mexico and led to the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. They’re also not completely certain when it formed, since it’s deep under the sea floor these days and was only discovered when scientists were examining seismic survey data of the sea floor. But it does seem to have formed about 66 million years ago, and another crater found in Ukraine is also about the same age. In other words, there may have been more than one asteroid that hit earth at the same time, either because a bigger asteroid broke into pieces as it entered earth’s atmosphere, or because smaller asteroids were orbiting the bigger one.

We’ve talked about the monarch butterfly several times, especially in episode 203. The monarch is a beautiful orange and black butterfly that migrates from the United States and Canada into central Mexico for the winter, where it gathers in huge groups. The monarch butterfly caterpillar primarily eats the milkweed plant, which contains toxins that the caterpillar stores in its body. Those toxins remain in the body even after the caterpillar has transformed into a butterfly, meaning the butterflies are toxic too. Birds and other animals learn to recognize the bright orange and black pattern of the butterfly and avoid eating it, because it tastes bad and makes them sick.

But a study from December 2021 determined that one animal does eat monarch butterflies, and a whole lot of them. Many species of mouse that live where monarch butterflies spend the winter, in a few spots in Mexico and California, will eat the butterflies, especially ones that fall to the ground either by accident or because they’re unhealthy and weak. The mice show resistance to the butterfly’s toxins.

Research into the small hominin remains on the island of Flores is ongoing, and the most recent findings shed some light on what might have happened about 60,000 years ago. The so-called Hobbit fossils have all been found at Liang Bua, a giant cave, but lots of other fossils have been found at the same site. A whole lot of those are from various species of rodent, especially rats, ranging in size from mouse-sized to ordinary rat-sized to giant rat sized, over two feet long including the tail, or about 75 cm.

Because we know a lot about the rats that lived on Flores, and in some cases still live there, we can infer a lot about what the area around Liang Bua was like over the centuries. Until about 60,000 years ago, most of the rat remains found were of medium-sized species that like open habitats. That means the area around Liang Bua was probably pretty open. But after about 60,000 years ago, there’s a big shift in what kind of rodents appear in the fossil record. More rats of smaller size moved in, ones that were adapted for life in forests, while the medium-sized rats moved out. That corresponds with other animals disappearing from the fossil record in and around the cave, including a species of Komodo dragon and a subspecies of Stegodon, an elephant relation that exhibited island dwarfism and was about the size of a cow. The Flores little people remains also vanish from the cave during this time, until by 50,000 years ago there are no signs of them.

But that doesn’t mean that H. floresiensis went extinct at that time. Researchers now think that as the land around the cave became more heavily forested, the Flores little people moved to other parts of the island that were more open. We don’t know where yet, and as a result we don’t know when exactly they went extinct. They might even have left the island completely. One neighboring island is Sulawesi, and researchers have found small stone tools on that island that are very similar to those made by H. floresiensis.

Modern humans probably arrived on the island of Flores about 46,000 years ago, and it’s possible that when they did, their small-statured cousins were still around.

We’ll finish with Pranav’s suggestion, a New Zealand parrot called the kea!

The kea is a type of parrot, but it doesn’t look much like a parrot at first glance. Parrots usually have brightly colored feathers but the kea appears more drab initially. It’s olive green with black-laced feathers, but it has bright orange feathers under its wings that show when it flies and the tips of its wings are blue. It’s a big, heavy bird with a wingspan more than three feet across, or one meter, and it has a big hooked beak like other parrots. It lives in the mountains of New Zealand’s South Island, the only parrot that lives in such a cold environment.

The kea is an omnivore but it mostly eats plants and insects. It will eat roadkill, small animals like rabbits, chicks of other species of bird, and trash. For over a century there were rumors that the kea would attack sheep, which led to the New Zealand government paying a bounty for dead keas that wasn’t lifted until 1970. By the time the bounty ended, there were only around 5,000 keas left, and even then the bird wasn’t fully protected until 1986.

So does the kea kill sheep or was that just an excuse to kill birds? Actually, the kea does attack sheep, or at least some keas do. Most of the attacks aren’t fatal, but we definitely know it happens because someone got it on video in 1992.

The keas land on the sheep’s back and pull out hunks of wool, which exposes and injures the skin underneath. Then they use their sharp beaks to dig into the wound and eat the fat from the living sheep. This can result in the sheep dying from infection and shock, naturally, so it’s no wonder sheep farmers disliked the kea. But the sheep is not an animal native to New Zealand while the kea is, plus the kea primarily eats plants—and sheep destroy the plants the kea eats, especially the ones high in vegetable lipids that provide the same high energy food that sheep fat does.

Besides, there’s some tantalizing evidence that the kea used to do the same thing to the moa, a huge flightless bird that lived in New Zealand until it went extinct after humans arrived. Moa bones dating to 4,000 years ago and found in a swamp along with lots of other well-preserved bones show markings on the pelvis that may be from kea beaks.

Like other parrots, the kea is remarkably intelligent and known for its tool use. It’s also infamous for its curiosity and willingness to disassemble things, including cars. I found an article about the kea in New Zealand Geographic that has some awesome stories about the bird, like this one that I’ll quote.

“In September 1983, the Old Pompolona Hut on the Milford Track was destroyed by flood when the pent-up Clinton River broke through its winter avalanche dam. The walking track season was only six weeks away. Planners, builders and helicopter crews worked night and day to complete a new hut complex before the first walkers arrived.

“The local clan of kea took a keen interest in all this frantic activity after a cold and quiet winter. Just what were these people up to? One bird, for whom building materials seemed to hold a particular attraction, began stealing nails. So persistent was the bird’s thievery that an exasperated carpenter chased it (in vain) over the roof of the new main hut. While his back was turned, another kea stole his packet of roll-your-owns, shredding tobacco and papers to the raucous approval of spectator kea perched in nearby trees.

“Weeks later, after the new hut had been completed, the purloined nails were discovered. They had been neatly laid in the gutters of an outbuilding’s iron roof, sorted according to size.”

The kea’s intelligence, tool use, and problem-solving abilities line up with those in corvids like crows and ravens. Studies show that corvids are more successful figuring out tasks that require them to make pecking motions in one way or another while parrots, including the kea, are more successful when the tasks require pulling motions. This makes sense, since parrots have a hooked beak that they use to pull things apart, like rotting logs to get at grubs, while corvids have straight beaks that they use to stab through things to find food.

The kea is also really sociable. Young keas play together, often using items as toys. For instance, from the same article, witnesses at a ski resort watched a kea steal a plastic mug, fly off with it, and start up a game of catch with it with a group of other keas.

The kea even has a particular call it makes to encourage other keas to play. In a recent study, when the call was broadcast to some captive keas over a loudspeaker, the keas immediately started a game of chase. Researchers think the call isn’t so much an invitation to play but is more like laughter which makes other keas want to laugh along, or in this case play.

This is what the play call sounds like:

[kea call]

The kea builds its nests in burrows it digs in the ground, with some burrows 20 feet long, or 6 meters. The nesting chamber is lined with soft plant material. Females lay two to five eggs, which hatch in about three weeks. Despite the parents’ care, more than half of babies don’t survive their first year, mostly due to introduced predators like rats, stoats, and possums. But if a kea survives to grow up, it can live up to 50 years or possibly more.

Young keas, like young adult humans, can cause a lot of mischief that sometimes leads to tragedy. A lot of keas are killed by cars because they find cars and roads interesting. They especially like to move road cones, which of course is also dangerous to humans. One community set up a kea jungle gym well off the road to give keas a safe place to play, and it succeeded so well that other communities have built kea jungle gyms too.

Kea numbers are improving slowly, with an estimated 7,000 individuals alive today. Part of the problem is that keas find humans interesting. They like our things, which they want to steal or destroy, and they like our junk food, which they want to eat. In other words, they’re suspiciously like us. Only they can fly.

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

Thanks for listening!