Category Archives: insects

Episode 482: Smoky Mountain Mystery Animals

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I took this episode from an article I wrote for Flying Snake magazine, which was published in December 2020 (Vol. 6, #18).

Show transcript:

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

The Great Smoky Mountains is a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains, which stretches from the middle of Alabama in the United States north into southeastern Canada. The Appalachians formed when the world’s continents crunched together to form the supercontinent Pangaea. The southern Appalachians formed separately and later than the northern Appalachians, around 270 million years ago.

The Appalachians were once as high as the Rockies or Himalayas, but by the time the dinosaurs went extinct, they had eroded down to the mountain cores. Sediment weathered from the peaks and filled in valleys. But during the Pleistocene, when massive glaciers covered the northern parts of North America, the weight of the ice pushed the North American plate down, causing the southern part of the plate to rise. Eventually the ancient mountains’ roots were a thousand feet (300 m) above sea level again. Rivers that once flowed east into the Atlantic Ocean or west into the remains of the shallow Western Interior Seaway shifted their courses to flow northward. Streams that once meandered across the land now plunged down steep slopes and dug gorges into the rock. And over thousands of years, animals and plants retreating from the ice migrated southward along the mountain range.

When the climate warmed some 11,000 years ago and the ice age glaciers melted, many cold-adapted species were trapped in the peaks of the southern Appalachians. One of the highest peaks is Mount LeConte, with its highest point, High Top, measured at 6,593 ft, or 2,010 meters. I hiked Mount LeConte on 7 May, 2016 when the weather in nearby Knoxville, Tennessee was a warm 82 Fahrenheit, or 27.8 Celcius, but there was snow on the mountain that morning. I wrote my name in it. A spruce-fir forest grows on the upper slopes, a remnant of forest that grew throughout the mountains during the last ice age. The climate at the peak of Mount LeConte is more like that of southern Canada than the warm, humid southeastern United States.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in 1934 to protect the mountains along the Tennessee/North Carolina border. No one lives in the park’s 800 square miles (2,072 square km), which receives up to 90 inches [2.29 m] of rain a year, some of it from hurricanes that sweep up from the southern Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico. Large tracts of old-growth forest still remain in the park too.

So as you can see, the Smokies are a biodiversity hotspot. In 2018, the park announced its 1,000th species discovered that is new to science, which by July 2020 had grown to 1,025. Overall, 20,000 known species live in the park as of 2019 and scientists estimate that up to 100,000 more are yet to be discovered.

The Smokies are heavily forested, of course, but some mountain summits and crests have no trees. Instead, native grasses and shrubs grow. They’re called grassy balds and no one is sure why they exist. The prevailing theory is that Pleistocene megaherbivores opened the forests for grazing, and after their extinction, the balds remained open due to bison, elk (wapiti), and deer. When white settlers moved into the area, they used the balds to graze cattle and other livestock. Remains of mammoth and mastodon, musk ox, ground sloth, and other megaherbivores have been excavated from various balds throughout the park.

Amphibian enthusiasts call the Smokies the Salamander Capital of the World, with 30 known species. Largest of these is the hellbender, which we talked about in episode 14, a giant salamander that can grow nearly 2 ½ feet long, or 74 cm, and which lives in swift-moving mountain streams. It’s most closely related to the Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders, which can grow over twice as long as the hellbender. Twenty-seven of the salamanders found in the Smokies are lungless, in the family Plethodontidae. Instead of breathing with lungs or gills, the lungless salamanders absorb oxygen through their skin. Of these, the red-cheeked salamander is endemic to the Smokies—that is, it’s found nowhere else in the world.

The red-cheeked salamander lives in forests in high elevations. It can grow up to seven inches long, or 18 cm, and is gray or black with bright red patches on its face. It spends the day in a burrow, then comes out at night to find insects in the leaf litter. But it’s hard to tell apart from the imitator salamander, although the imitator only grows a little over four inches long, or 11 cm. The imitator has red cheeks but its body is patterned black and brown instead of solid gray or black. Sometimes its cheeks are yellow, too, while the red-cheeked salamander only ever has red cheeks.

Another animal found only in the Smoky Mountains, although it may also be present in mountains outside of the park, is a species of jeweled spider fly called Mary-Alice’s emerald (Eulonchus marialiciae). Mary-Alice’s emerald has a metallic-green body and yellow legs, and the adults eat nectar. But the larvae eat spiders. Specifically, they parasitize spiders. After hatching, the larva goes in search of a spider, especially trapdoor spiders that live in burrows. When it finds one, it works its way into the spider’s body and eats it from the inside out, eventually killing it. Then it pupates in the burrow and emerges as an adult spider fly. It prefers high elevations that are cool and moist.

A less horrific animal found in the Smokies is the Carolina northern flying squirrel. It was one of the species whose ancestors migrated south along the Appalachians during the Pleistocene. Then, after temperatures started to warm, the cold-adapted flying squirrel migrated north again. Some populations remained on mountaintops in the Smoky Mountains and have been isolated for thousands of years, evolving into a subspecies of flying squirrel found only in high elevations of the Smokies. It’s much rarer than the southern flying squirrel that lives throughout the southeastern United States, and prefers spruce forests instead of the hardwood forests that southern flying squirrels like. But the spruce forests are threatened by climate change, the introduced woolly adelgid insect that kills fir trees, and pollution in the form of acid rain and pesticides that travel to the mountains from other states and even other countries.

The Carolina northern flying squirrel has a patagium of furry skin that connects its front and back legs. When it jumps from a branch, it stretches its legs out and uses the patagia to glide to a new perch. It’s clumsy on the ground, though, and spends most of its time in trees. It mostly eats fungi, mushrooms, and lichens, but will also eat nuts, insects, bird eggs and even baby birds, and other plant material like tree sap and buds.

Bobcats still live in the Smokies, but the cougar, or mountain lion, was supposedly killed off in the area by the end of the 19th century. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the eastern cougar subspecies from the endangered species list in 2018, since it is supposed to be extinct. The last cougar in what is now the park was supposedly killed in 1920. But sightings continue in the Smokies, close to a dozen a year, and some sightings are compelling, like the 2002 report of a cougar crossing a road in the park, spotted by a veterinarian who treated captive cougars in his practice. Considering how seldom seen the bobcat is despite it being relatively abundant, it’s possible that a small number of cougars still live in the park—either animals that have moved back into the mountains from elsewhere, or a relict population.

The red wolf is native to the eastern United States and was once common in the Smoky Mountains, but was killed off by white settlers throughout most of its range. Where it remained in the wild, it interbred with closely related coyotes, until it was declared extinct in the wild in 1980. Fortunately, by then a captive breeding program was in place. Starting in 1991, 37 red wolves were released in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, following the release of 63 red wolves into the Alligator River Natural Area in North Carolina a few years earlier. But the release didn’t go well in the Smokies. Wolves are shy and need enormous territories with lots of game. Before long some wolves were leaving the park and attacking livestock. Others died of parvo virus, especially wolf pups.

Worse, this was about the same time that coyotes moved into the area from the west. The wolves started interbreeding with the coyotes, and the coyotes also competed with the wolves for food. In 1998, the Fish and Wildlife Service ended the program and recaptured all but one of the wolves originally released into the park.

The North Carolina release went better, with a population peak in 2006 estimated at nearly 130 wolves. But that program was suspended in 2015, and without management of the wild population, the number has dwindled. As of 2019, only 14 wolves remain in North Carolina—and that’s the entire population of red wolves in the wild.

But sightings of red wolves continue in the Smokies. The trouble is that the red wolf looks very similar to the coyote. It’s taller and larger, with a more pronounced reddish shade to its coat, but even experts can have trouble telling the two species apart if they can’t get a good look at the animal. Most likely people are seeing coyotes, possibly ones descended from red wolf/coyote hybrids born during the reintroduction program.

The biggest mystery in the park is the occasional sighting of a Bigfoot-type creature. Most sightings are probably bears, though. An estimated 1,500 American black bears live in the Smokies, and while some bears get used to hikers and tourists, most are shy and seldom seen. A black bear keeping an eye on hikers or cars will sometimes stand on its hind legs for a better view, and would naturally look like a hulking humanoid if glimpsed. But other sightings aren’t so easy to explain.

In February of 2009, a photographer named Deb Campbell was hiking the Middle Prong Trail in the snow. The Middle Prong Trail passes three major waterfalls and many smaller ones as it follows along a tributary of the Little River. She had the trail almost completely to herself—she says she only saw one person the whole time. Later she reported, “[A]t some point I am photographing along the stream and I start to smell a gawd awful stench. Not really like anything I had ever smelled before. I look around, see nothing, listen intently…nothing. So I finish up at that spot and go further up the trail.” The smell receded behind her but the snow increased, so finally she turned around to hike out. Around the area where she smelled the stink earlier, she started feeling watched. She stopped long enough to secure her camera gear for much faster hiking in slick conditions, when she heard a deep growl that she described as “very low, not like a cat, almost guttural.” Needless to say, she got off the mountain as quickly as possible.

The black bear doesn’t truly hibernate since its body temperature remains normal instead of dropping, but it does find a den in cold weather and will sleep for long stretches. It may emerge from its den occasionally during the winter during warm spells, but for the most part it’s asleep in its den from around November through March in the Smoky Mountains. But Campbell was hiking in February during a snowfall, with snow already on the ground. A bear would most likely not be out of its den in that weather unless it had been disturbed.

And bears don’t actually smell bad. During the winter hibernation most bears don’t defecate at all. Any feces left in a bear’s digestive tract harden to form a fecal plug. If it does feel the need to defecate near the end of the winter, it will do so just outside its den, but the fecal plug has very little odor. Even under ordinary conditions, unless a bear has been eating carrion, it will smell no worse than a dog that needs a bath.

Not only that, black bears don’t actually growl. They make grunty, huffing noises when warning people away or when males fight in the summer, and a frightened bear will moan, but they don’t growl like a dog.

It’s possible that Campbell hiked past a bear that had emerged from its den early and had found and eaten carrion, possibly roadkill, and that she was so close to the bear without seeing it that she smelled its breath. That’s almost more frightening than the thought of passing near a Bigfoot. The growl might have come from a different animal, a coyote or who knows, maybe even a red wolf. Or Campbell might have encountered a creature sometimes called a skunk ape due to its foul odor.

The skunk ape is most commonly reported in Florida swamps, but sightings—or smellings—have come from many other states. The smell is sometimes described as that of rotting food and roadkill on a hot day. A bear or other animal that has been rooting around in garbage bins can pick up this odor, especially in hot weather, but it’s hard to believe that a bear would be actively foraging so much in winter that it would smell like trash. January and February are the depths of winter in East Tennessee. The bears are hibernating, not foraging.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening! This is what a couple of fighting bears sound like:

[bear sounds]

Episode 471: Mystery Larvae

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Further reading:

I Can Has Mutant Larvae?

200-Year-Old ‘Monster Larva’ Mystery Solved

‘Snakeworm’ mystery yields species new to science

Hearkening back to the hazelworm

Show transcript:

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

A few weeks ago when I was researching big eels, I remembered the mystery eel larva we talked about back in episode 49, and that led me down a fun rabbit hole about other mystery larvae.

Let’s start with that eel larva. Eel larvae can be extremely hard to tell apart, so as a catchall term every eel larva is called a leptocephalus. They’re flattened side to side, which is properly referred to as laterally compressed, and transparent, shaped roughly like a slender leaf, with a tiny head at the front. Depending on the species, an eel may remain in its larval form for more than a year, much longer than most other fish, and when it does metamorphose into its next life stage, it usually grows much longer than its larval form. For instance, the larvae of conger eels are only about 4 inches long, or 10 cm, while an adult conger can grow up to 10 feet long, or 3 meters.

On January 31, 1930, a Danish research ship caught an eel larva 900 feet deep, or about 275 meters, off the coast of South Africa. But the larva was over 6 feet long, or 1.85 meters!

Scientists boggled at the thought that this larva might grow into an eel more than 50 feet long, or 15 meters, raising the possibility that this unknown eel might be the basis of many sea serpent sightings.

The larva was preserved and has been studied extensively. In 1958, a similar eel larva was caught off of New Zealand. It and the 1930 specimen were determined to belong to the same species, which was named Leptocephalus giganteus.

In 1966, two more of the larvae were discovered in the stomach of a western Atlantic lancet fish. They were much smaller than the others, though—only four inches and eleven inches long, or 10 cm and 28 cm respectively. Other than size, they were pretty much identical to Leptocephalus giganteus.

The ichthyologist who examined them determined that the larvae were probably not true eels at all, but larvae of a fish called the spiny eel. Deep-sea spiny eels look superficially like eels but aren’t closely related, and while they do have a larval form that resembles that of a true eel, they’re much different in one important way. Spiny eel larvae grow larger than the adults, then shrink a little when they develop into their mature form. The six-foot eel larva was actually a spiny eel larva that was close to metamorphosing into its adult form.

Not everyone agrees that Leptocephalus giganteus is a spiny eel. Some think it belongs to the genus Coloconger, also called worm eels, which are true eels but which have large larvae that only grow to the same size as adults. But worm eels don’t grow much bigger than about two feet long, or 61 cm. If the mystery larvae does belong to the genus Coloconger, it’s probably a new species. Until scientists identify an adult Leptocephalus giganteus, we can’t know for sure.

Another mystery larva is Planctosphaera pelagica, which sits all alone in its own class because the only thing it resembles are acorn worms, but scientists are pretty sure it isn’t the larva of an acorn worm. It’s not much to look at, since the larva is just a little barrel-shaped blob that grows about 25 mm across. This sounds small compared to the eel larva we just discussed, but it’s actually quite large compared to similar larvae. Acorn worm larvae are usually only about a millimeter long.

Planctosphaera has been classified as a hemichordate, which are related to echinoderms but which show bilateral symmetry instead of radial symmetry. Hemichordates are also closely related to chordates, which include all vertebrates. They’re marine animals that resemble worms but aren’t worms, so it’s likely that Planctosphaera is also wormlike as an adult.

Planctosphaera isn’t encountered very often by scientists. It has limited swimming abilities and mostly floats around near the surface of the open ocean, eating tiny food particles. One suggestion is that it might actually be the larva of a known species, but one where an occasional larva just never metamorphoses into an adult. It just grows and grows until something eats it. So far, attempts to sequence DNA from a Planctosphaera hasn’t succeeded and attempts to raise one to maturity in captivity hasn’t worked either.

Some people have estimated that an adult Planctosphaera might be a type of acorn worm that can grow nine feet long, or 2.75 meters, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility. The largest species of acorn worm known is Balanoglossus gigas, which can grow almost six feet long, or 1.8 meters, and not only is it bioluminescent, its body contains a lot of iodine, so it smells like medicine. It lives in mucus-lined burrows on the sea floor.

Another mystery larva is Facetotecta, which have been found in shallow areas in many oceans around the world. Unlike the other larvae we’ve talked about, they’re genuinely tiny, measured in micrometers, and eleven species have been described. They all have a cephalic shield, meaning a little dome over the head, and scientists have been able to observe several phases of their development but not the adult form. The juvenile form was observed and it looked kind of like a tiny slug with nonfunctioning eyes and weak muscles.

Scientists speculate that facetotecta may actually be the larva of an endoparasite that infests some marine animals. That would explain why no adult form has been identified. Genetic testing has confirmed that Facetotecta is related to a group of parasitic crustaceans.

DNA has solved some mysteries of what larvae belong to which adults. For instance, Cerataspis monstrosa, a larval crustacean that was first described in 1828. It’s over a cm long, pinkish-purple in color with stalked eyes, little swimming leg-like appendages, and neon blue horn-like structures on its head and back which act as armor. The armor doesn’t help too much against big animals like dolphins and tuna, which love to eat it, and in fact that’s where it was initially discovered, in the digestive tract of a dolphin. But scientists had no idea what the monstrous larva eventually grew up to be.

In 2012 the mystery was solved when a team of scientists compared the monster larva’s DNA to that of lots of various types of shrimp, since the larva had long been suspected to be a type of shrimp. It turns out that it’s the larval form of a rare deep-sea aristeid shrimp that can grow up to 9 inches long, or 23 cm.

Let’s finish with another solved mystery, this one from larvae found on land. In 2007, someone sent photos and a bag of little dead worms to Derek Sikes at the University of Alaska Museum. Usually when someone sends you a bag of dead worms, they’re giving you an obscure but distressing message, but Sikes was curator of the insect collection and he was happy to get a bag of mystery worms.

The worms had been collected from an entire column of the creatures that had been crawling over each other so that the group looked like a garden hose on the ground. Sikes thought they were probably fly larvae but he had never heard of larvae traveling in a column. If you’ve listened to the hazelworm episode from August 2018, you might have an idea. The hazelworm was supposed to be a snake or even a dragon that was only seen in times of unrest. It turns out that it the larvae of some species of fungus gnat travel together in long, narrow columns that really do look like a moving snake. But that’s in Europe, not Alaska.

Sikes examined the larvae, but since they were dead he couldn’t guess what type of insect they would grow up to be. Luckily, a few months later he got a call from a forester who had spotted a column of the same worms crossing a road. Sikes got there in time to witness the phenomenon himself.

The larvae were only a few millimeters long each, but there were so many of them that the column stretched right across the road into the forest. He collected some of them carefully and took them back to the museum, where he tended them in hopes that they would pupate successfully.

This they did, and the insects that emerged were a little larger than fruit flies and were black in color. Sikes identified them as fungus gnats, but when he consulted fungus gnat experts in Germany and Japan, they were excited to report that they didn’t recognize the Alaskan gnats. It was a new species, which Sikes described in late 2023. His summer students helped name the species, Sciara serpens, which are better known now as snakeworm gnats. He and his co-authors think the larvae form columns when they cross surfaces like roads and rocks, to help minimize contacting the dry ground. Fungus gnats live in moist areas with lots of organic matter, like forest leaf litter and the edges of ponds.

So the next time you see a huge long snake crossing the road, don’t panic. It might just be a whole lot of tiny, tiny larvae looking for a new home.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

BONUS: here’s the Hazelworm episode too!

The hazelworm today is a type of reptile, although called the slow worm, blind worm, or deaf adder. It lives in Eurasia, and while it looks like a snake, it’s actually a legless lizard. It can even drop and regrow its tail like a lizard if threatened. It spends most of its time underground in burrows or underneath leaf litter or under logs. It grows almost 2 feet long, or 50 cm, and is brown. Females sometimes have blue racing stripes while males may have blue spots. It eats slugs, worms, and other small animals, so is good for the garden.

But that kind of hazelworm isn’t what we’re talking about here. Back in the middle ages in central Europe, especially in parts of the Alps, there were stories of a big dragonlike serpent that lived in areas where hazel bushes were common. Like its slow-worm namesake, it lived most of its life underground, especially twined around the roots of the hazel. Instead of scales, it had a hairy skin and was frequently white in color. It was supposed to be the same type of snake that had tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

It had a lot of names besides hazelworm, including white worm for its color, paradise worm for its supposed history in the Garden of Eden, and even war worm. That one was because it was only supposed to show itself just before a war broke out.

People really believed it existed, although stories about it sound more like folklore. For instance, anyone who ate hazelworm flesh was supposed to become immortal. It was also supposed to suck milk from dairy cows and spread poison.

Some accounts said it was enormous, as big around as a man’s thigh and some 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters. Sometimes it was even supposed to have feet, or have various bright colors. Sometimes drawings showed wings.

There does seem to be some confusion about stories of the hazelworm and of the tatzelwurm, especially in older accounts. But unlike the tatzelwurm, the mystery of the hazelworm has been solved for a long time—long enough that knowledge of the animal has dropped out of folklore.

Back in the 1770s, a physician named August C. Kuehn pointed out that hazelworm sightings matched up with a real animal…but not a snake. Not even any kind of reptile. Not a fish or a bird or a mammal. Nope, he pointed at the fungus gnat.

The fungus gnat is about 8 mm long and eats decaying plant matter and fungus. You know, sort of exactly not like an 18-foot hairy white snake.

But the larvae of some species of fungus gnat are called army worms. The larvae have white, gray, or brown bodies and black heads, and travel in long, wide columns that do look like a moving snake, especially if seen in poor light or in the distance. I’ve watched videos online of these processions and they are horrifying! They’re also rare, so it’s certainly possible that even people who have lived in one rural area their whole life had never seen an armyworm procession. Naturally, they’d assume they were seeing a monstrous hairy snake of some kind, because that’s what it looks like.

Sightings of smaller hazelworms may be due to the caterpillar of the pine processionary moth, which also travels in a line nose to tail, which looks remarkably like a long, thin, hairy snake. Don’t touch those caterpillars, by the way. They look fuzzy and cute but their hairs can cause painful reactions when touched.

The adult moths lay their eggs in pine trees and when the eggs hatch the larvae eat pine needles and can cause considerable damage to the trees. They overwinter in silk tents, then leave the trees in spring and travel in a snaky conga line to eat pine needles. Eventually they burrow underground to pupate. They emerge from their cocoons as adult moths, mate, lay eggs, and die, all within one day.

Episode 470: Animals Discovered in 2025

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It’s the annual discoveries episode! Thanks to Stephen and Aryeh for their corrections and suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Salinella Salve: The Vanishing Creature That Defied Science for Over a Century

Three new species of the genus Scutiger

Baeticoniscus carmonaensis sp. nov. a new Isopod found in an underground aqueduct from the Roman period located in Southwest Spain (Crustacea, Isopoda, Trichoniscidae)

A new species of supergiant Bathynomus

Giant ‘Darth Vader’ sea bug discovered off the coast of Vietnam

A New Species of easter egg weevil

Bizarre ‘bone collector’ caterpillar discovered by UH scientists

Researchers Discover ‘Death Ball’ Sponge and Dozens of Other Bizarre Deep-Sea Creatures in the Southern Ocean

1,500th Bat Species Discovered in Africa’s Equatorial Guinea

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some animals discovered in 2025! We’ll also make this our corrections episode. This is the last new episode we’ll have until the end of August when we reach our 500th episode, but don’t worry, until then there will be rescheduled Patreon episodes every single week as usual.

We’ll start with some corrections. Shortly after episode 452 was published in September, where we talked about the swamp wallaby and some other animals, Stephen emailed to point out that I’d made a major mistake! In that episode I said that not all animals called wallabies were actually members of the family Macropodidae, but that’s actually not the case. All wallabies are macropodids, but they aren’t all members of the same genus in that family. I corrected the episode but I wanted to mention it here too so no one is confused.

Stephen also caught another mistake in episode 458, which is embarrassing. I mentioned that marsupials didn’t just live in Australia, they were found all over the world. That’s not actually the case! Marsupials are found in North and South America, Australia, New Guinea and nearby areas, and that’s it. They were once also found in what is now Asia, but that was millions of years ago. So I apologize to everyone in Africa, Asia, and Europe who were excited about finding out what their local marsupials are. You don’t have any, sorry.

One update that Aryeh asked about specifically is an animal we talked about in episode 445, salinella. Aryeh emailed asking for more information if I could find any, because it’s such a fascinating mystery! I looked for some more recent findings, unfortunately without luck. I do have an article linked in the show notes that goes into detail about everything we covered in that episode, though, dated to mid-January 2026, and it’s a nice clear account.

Now, let’s get into the 2025 discoveries! There are lots more animals that were discovered last year, but I just chose some that I thought were especially interesting. Mostly I chose ones that I thought had funny names.

Let’s start with three new species of frog in the genus Scutiger. Species in this genus are called lazy toads and I couldn’t find out why. Maybe they don’t like to move around too much. Lazy toads live in mountains in some parts of Asia, and we don’t know very much about most of the 31 species described so far. Probably the most common lazy toad is the Sikkim lazy toad that lives along high altitude streams in the Himalaya Mountains. It’s mottled greenish-brown and yellowish in color with lots of warts, and while its feet have webbed toes, it doesn’t have webbed fingers on its little froggy hands. This is your reminder that every toad is a frog but not every frog is a toad. The Sikkim lazy toad grows about two and a half inches long, or about 65 mm, from nose to butt. It seems to be pretty average for a lazy toad.

The three new species of lazy toad are found in Yunnan Province in China, in a mountainous region where several species of lazy toad were already known. Between 2021 and 2024, a team of scientists collected 27 lazy toads from various places, then carefully examined them to see if they were species already known to science. This included genetic analysis. The team compared their findings with other lazy toad species and discovered that not all of the specimens matched any known species. Further comparison with each other revealed that the team had discovered three new species, which they described in December of 2025.

Next, isopods are common crustaceans that live throughout the world. You have undoubtedly seen at least one species of isopod, because an animal with lots of common names, including woodlouse, pill bug, roly-poly, and sowbug, is a terrestrial isopod. That’s right, the roly-poly is not a bug or a centipede but a crustacean. The order Isopoda contains more than 10,000 species, and there are undoubtedly thousands more that haven’t been discovered by scientists yet. About half the species discovered so far live on land and the other half live in water, most in the ocean but some in fresh water. They don’t all look like roly-polies, of course. Many look like their distant crustacean cousins, shrimps and crayfish, while others look more like weird centipedes or fleas or worms. There’s a lot of variation in an animal that’s extremely common throughout the world, so it’s no surprise that more species are discovered almost every year.

In 2021 and 2022, a team of Spanish scientists took a biological survey of an ancient Roman tunnel system beneath Carmona, Spain. The tunnels were built around 2,000 years ago as a water source, since they capture groundwater, but it hasn’t been used in so long that it’s more or less a natural environment these days.

The scientists quickly discovered plenty of life in the tunnels, including an isopod living in cracks in some ancient timbers. It grows about two and a half millimeters long and actually does look a lot like a tiny roly-poly. It has long antennae and its body mostly lacks pigment, but it does have dark eyes. Most animals that live in total darkness eventually evolve to no longer have functioning eyes, since they don’t need them, but that isn’t the case for this new isopod. Scientists think it might take advantage of small amounts of light available near the tunnel entrances.

As far as the scientists can tell, the Carmona isopod only lives in this one tunnel system, so it’s vulnerable to pollutants and human activity that might disrupt its underground home.

Another new isopod species that’s vulnerable to human activity, in this case overfishing, lives off the coast of Vietnam. It’s another isopod that looks a lot like a roly-poly, which I swear is not what every isopod looks like. It’s a deep-sea animal that hunts for food on the ocean floor, and it’s a popular delicacy in Vietnam. Remember, it’s a crustacean, and people say it tastes like another crustacean, lobster. In fact, scientists discovered their specimens in a fish market.

Deep-sea animals sometimes feature what’s called deep-sea gigantism. Most isopods are quite small, no more than a few cm at most, but the new species grows almost 13 inches long, or over 32 cm. It’s almost the largest isopod known. Its head covering made the scientists think of Darth Vader’s helmet, so it’s been named Bathynomus vaderi.

Next we have a new species of Easter egg weevil, a flightless beetle found on many islands in Southeast Asia. Easter egg weevils are beautiful, with every species having a different pattern of spots and stripes. Many are brightly colored and iridescent. The new species shows a lot of variability, but it’s basically a black beetle with a diamond-shaped pattern that can be yellow, gold, or blue. Some individuals have pink spots in the middle of some of the diamonds. It’s really pretty and that is just about all I could find out about it.

Another new insect is a type of Hawaiian fancy case caterpillar, which metamorphose into moths. They’re only found on the Hawaiian islands, and there are over 350 species known. The new species has been named the bone collector, because of what the caterpillar does.

Fancy case caterpillars spin a sort of shell out of silk, which is called a case, and the caterpillar carries its case around with it as protection. Some of the cases are unadorned but resemble tree bark, while many species will decorate the case with lichens, sand, or other items that help it blend in with its background. Some fancy case caterpillars can live in water as well as on land, and while most caterpillars eat plant material, some fancy case caterpillars eat insects.

That’s the situation with the bone collector caterpillar. It lives in spider webs, which right there is astonishing, and decorates its case with bits and pieces of dead insect it finds in the web. This can include wings, heads, legs, and other body parts.

The bone collector caterpillar eats insects, and it will chew through strands of the spider’s web to get to a trapped insect before the spider does. Sometimes it will eat what’s left of a spider’s meal once the spider is finished.

The bone collector caterpillar has only been found in one tiny part of O’ahu, a 15-square-km area of forest, although researchers think it was probably much more widespread before invasive plants and animals were introduced to the island.

Next, the Antarctic Ocean is one of the least explored parts of the world, and a whole batch of new species was announced in 2025 after two recent expeditions. One of the expeditions explored ocean that was newly revealed after a huge iceberg split off the ice shelf off West Antarctica in early 2025. That’s not where the expedition had planned to go, but it happened to be nearby when the iceberg broke off, and of course the team immediately went to take a look.

Back in episode 199 we talked about some carnivorous sponges. Sponges have been around for more than half a billion years, and early on they evolved a simple but effective body plan that they mostly still retain. Most sponges have a skeleton made of calcium carbonate that forms a sort of dense net that’s covered with soft body tissues. The sponge has lots of open pores in the outside of its body, which generally just resembles a sack or sometimes a tube, with one end attached to something hard like a rock, or just the bottom of the ocean. Water flows into the sponge’s tissues through the pores, and special cells filter out particles of food from the water, much of it microscopic, and release any waste material. The sponge doesn’t have a stomach or any kind of digestive tract. The cells process the food individually and pass on any extra nutrients to adjoining cells.

In 1995, scientists discovered a tiny sponge that wasn’t a regular filter feeder. It had little hooks all over it, and it turns out that when a small animal gets caught on the hooks, the sponge grows a membrane that envelops the animal within a few hours. The cells of the membrane contain bacteria that help digest the animal so the cells can absorb the nutrients.

Since then, other carnivorous sponges have been discovered, or scientists have found that some sponges already known to science are actually carnivorous. That’s the case with the ping-pong tree sponge. It looks kind of like a bunch of grapes on a central stem that grows up from the bottom of the ocean, and it can be more than 20 inches tall, or 50 cm. The little balls are actually balloon-like structures that inflate with water and are covered with little hooks. It was discovered off the coast of South America near Easter Island, in deep water where the sea floor is mostly made of hardened lava. It was classified in the genus Chondrocladia, and so far there are more than 30 other species known.

The reason we’re talking about the ping-pong tree sponge is that a new species of Chondrocladia has been discovered in the Antarctic Ocean, and it looks a lot like the ping-pong tree sponge. It’s been dubbed the death-ball sponge, which is hilarious. It was found two and a quarter miles deep on the ocean floor, or 3.6 km, and while scientists have determined it’s a new species of sponge, it hasn’t been described yet. It’s one of 30 new species found so far, and the team says that there are many other specimens collected that haven’t been studied yet.

We haven’t talked about any new mammal discoveries yet, so let’s finish with one of my favorites, a new bat! It was discovered on Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea, which is part of Africa. During a 2024 biodiversity assessment on the island, a PhD student named Laura Torrent captured a bat that turned out to be not only a brand new species, it is the 1,500th species of bat known to science!

Pipistrellus etula gets its name from the local language, Bantu, since “etula” means both “island” and “god of the island” in that language. The bat was found in forests at elevations over 1,000 meters, on the slopes of a volcano. Back in 1989, a different researcher captured a few of the bats on another volcano, but never got a chance to examine them to determine if they were a new species. When Torrent’s team were studying their bats, one of the things they did was compare them to the preserved specimens from 1989, and they discovered the bats were indeed a match.

P. etula is a type of vesper bat, which is mostly active at dusk and eats insects. It’s brown with black wings and ears. Just like all the other species we’ve talked about today, now that we know it exists, it can be protected and studied in the wild.

That’s what science is really for, after all. It’s not just to satisfy our human curiosity and desire for knowledge, although that’s important too. It’s so we can make this world a better place for everyone to live—humans, animals, plants, isopods, weird caterpillars, and everything else on Earth and beyond.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. Thanks for listening! I’ll see you in August.

Episode 466: Lots of Invertebrates!

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Here’s the big invertebrate episode I’ve been promising people! Thanks to Sam, warbrlwatchr, Jayson, Richard from NC, Holly, Kabir, Stewie, Thaddeus, and Trech for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Does the Spiral Siphonophore Reign as the Longest Animal in the World?

The common nawab butterfly:

The common nawab caterpillar:

A velvet worm:

A giant siphonophore [photo by Catriona Munro, Stefan Siebert, Felipe Zapata, Mark Howison, Alejandro Damian-Serrano, Samuel H. Church, Freya E.Goetz, Philip R. Pugh, Steven H.D.Haddock, Casey W.Dunn – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1055790318300460#f0030]:

Show transcript:

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

Hello to 2026! This is usually where I announce that I’m going to do a series of themed episodes throughout the coming year, and usually I forget all about it after a few months. This year I have a different announcement. After our nine-year anniversary next month, which is episode 470, instead of new episodes I’m going to be switching to old Patreon episodes. I closed the Patreon permanently at the end of December but all the best episodes will now run in the main feed until our ten-year anniversary in February 2027. That’s episode 523, when we’ll have a big new episode that will also be the very last one ever.

I thought this was the best way to close out the podcast instead of just stopping one day. The only problem is the big list of suggestions. During January I’m going to cover as many suggestions as I possibly can. This week’s episode is about invertebrates, and in the next few weeks we’ll have an episode about mammals, one about reptiles and birds, and one about amphibians and fish, although I don’t know what order they’ll be in yet. Episode 470 will be about animals discovered in 2025, along with some corrections and updates.

I hope no one is sad about the podcast ending! You have a whole year to get used to it, and the old episodes will remain forever on the website so you can listen whenever you like.

All that out of the way, let’s start 2026 right with a whole lot of invertebrates! Thanks to Sam, warbrlwatchr, Jayson, Richard from NC, Holly, Kabir, Stewie, Thaddeus, and Trech for their suggestions this week!

Let’s start with Trech’s suggestion, a humble ant called the weaver ant. It’s also called the green ant even though not all species are green, because a species found in Australia is partially green. Most species are red, brown, or yellowish, and they’re found in parts of northern and western Australia, southern Asia, and on most islands in between the two areas, and in parts of central Africa. The weaver ant lives in trees in tropical areas, and gets the name weaver ant because of the way it makes its nest.

The nests are made out of leaves, but the leaves are still growing on the tree. Worker ants grab the edge of a leaf in their mandibles, then pull the leaf toward another leaf or sometimes double the leaf over. Sometimes ants have to make a chain to reach another leaf, with each ant grabbing the next ant around the middle until the ant at the end of the chain can grab the edge of a leaf. While the leaf is being pulled into place alongside the edge of another leaf, or the opposite edge of the same leaf, other workers bring larvae from an established part of the nest. The larvae secrete silk to make cocoons, but a worker ant holds a larva at the edge of the leaf, taps its little head, and the larva secretes silk that the workers use to bind the leaf edges together. A single colony has multiple nests, often in more than one tree, and are constantly constructing new ones as the old leaves are damaged by weather or just die off naturally.

The weaver ant mainly eats insects, which is good for the trees because many of the insects the ants kill and eat are ones that can damage trees. This is one reason why farmers in some places like seeing weaver ants, especially fruit farmers, and sometimes farmers will even buy a weaver ant colony starter pack to place in their trees deliberately. The farmer doesn’t have to use pesticides, and the weaver ants even cause some fruit- and leaf-eating animals to stay away, because the ants can give a painful bite. People in many areas also eat the weaver ant larvae, which is considered a delicacy.

Our next suggestion is by Holly, the zombie snail. I actually covered this in a Patreon episode, but I didn’t schedule it for next year because I thought I’d used the information already in a regular episode, but now I can’t find it. So let’s talk about it now!

In August of 2019, hikers in Taiwan came across a snail that looked like it was on its way to a rave. It had what looked like flashing neon decorations in its head, pulsing in green and orange. Strobing colors are just not something you’d expect to find on an animal, or if you did it would be a deep-sea animal. The situation is not good for the snail, let me tell you. It’s due to a parasitic flatworm called the green-banded broodsac.

The flatworm infects birds, but to get into the bird, first it has to get into a snail. To get into a snail, it has to be in a bird, though, because it lives in the cloaca of a bird and attaches its eggs to the bird’s droppings. When a snail eats a yummy bird dropping, it also eats the eggs. The eggs hatch in the snail’s body instead of being digested, where eventually they develop into sporocysts. That’s a branched structure that spreads throughout the snail’s body, including into its head and eyestalks.

The sporocyst branches that are in the snail’s eyestalks further develop into broodsacs, which look like little worms or caterpillars banded with green and orange or green and yellow, sometimes with black or brown bands too—it depends on the species. About the time the broodsacs are ready for the next stage of life, the parasite takes control of the snail’s brain. The snail goes out in daylight and sits somewhere conspicuous, and its body, or sometimes just its head or eyestalks, becomes semi-translucent so that the broodsacs show through it. Then the broodsacs swell up and start to pulse.

The colors and movement resemble a caterpillar enough that it attracts birds that eat caterpillars. A bird will fly up, grab what it thinks is a caterpillar, and eat it up. The broodsac develops into a mature flatworm in the bird’s digestive system, and sticks itself to the walls of the cloaca with two suckers, and the whole process starts again.

The snail gets the worst part of this bargain, naturally, but it doesn’t necessarily die. It can survive for a year or more even with the parasite living in it, and it can still use its eyes. When it’s bird time, the bird isn’t interested in the snail itself. It just wants what it thinks is a caterpillar, and a lot of times it just snips the broodsac out of the snail’s eyestalk without doing a lot of damage to the snail.

If a bird doesn’t show up right away, sometimes the broodsac will burst out of the eyestalk anyway. It can survive for up to an hour outside the snail and continues to pulsate, so it will sometimes still get eaten by a bird.

Okay, that was disgusting. Let’s move on quickly to the tiger beetle, suggested by both Sam and warblrwatchr.

There are thousands of tiger beetle species known and they live all over the world, except for Antarctica. Because there are so many different species in so many different habitats, they don’t all look the same, but many common species are reddish-orange with black stripes, which is where the name tiger beetle comes from. Others are plain black or gray, shiny blue, dark or pale brown, spotted, mottled, iridescent, bumpy, plain, bulky, or lightly built. They vary a lot, but one thing they all share are long legs.

That’s because the tiger beetle is famous for its running speed. Not all species can fly, but even in the ones that can, its wings are small and it can’t fly far. But it can run so fast that scientists have discovered that its simple eyes can’t gather enough photons for the brain to process an image of its surroundings while it runs. That’s why the beetle will run extremely fast, then stop for a moment before running again. Its brain needs a moment to catch up.

The tiger beetle eats insects and other small animals, which it runs after to catch. The fastest species known lives around the shores of Lake Eyre in South Australia, Rivacindela hudsoni. It grows around 20 mm long, and can run as much as 5.6 mph, or 9 km/hour, not that it’s going to be running for an entire hour at a time. Still, that’s incredibly fast for something with little teeny legs.

Another insect that is really fast is called the common nawab, suggested by Jayson. It’s a butterfly that lives in tropical forests and rainforests in South Asia and many islands. Its wings are mainly brown or black with a big yellow or greenish spot in the middle and some little white spots along the edges, and the hind wings have two little tails that look like spikes. It’s really pretty and has a wingspan more than three inches across, or about 8.5 cm.

The common nawab spends most of its time in the forest canopy, flying quickly from flower to flower. Females will travel long distances, but when a female is ready to lay her eggs, she returns to where she hatched. The male stays in his territory, and will chase away other common nawab males if they approach.

The common nawab caterpillar is green with pale yellow stripes, and it has four horn-like projections on its head, which is why it’s called the dragon-headed caterpillar. It’s really awesome-looking and I put it on the list to cover years ago, then forgot it until Jayson recommended it. But it turns out there’s not a lot known about the common nawab, so there’s not a lot to say about it.

Next, Richard from NC suggested the velvet worm. It’s not a worm and it’s not made of velvet, although its body is soft and velvety to the touch. It’s long and fairly thin, sort of like a caterpillar in shape but with lots of stubby little legs. There are hundreds of species known in two families. Most species of velvet worm are found in South America and Australia.

Some species of velvet worm can grow up to 8 and a half inches long, or 22 cm, but most are much smaller. The smallest lives in New Zealand on the South Island, and only grows up to 10 mm long, with 13 pairs of legs. The largest lives in Costa Rica in Central America and was only discovered in 2010. It has up to 41 pairs of legs, although males only have 34 pairs.

Various species of velvet worm are different colors, although a lot of them are reddish, brown, or orangey-brown. Most species have simple eyes, although some have no eyes at all. Its legs are stubby, hollow, and very simple, with a pair of tiny chitin claws at the ends. The claws are retractable and help it climb around. It likes humid, dark places like mossy rocks, leaf litter, fallen logs, caves, and similar habitats. Some species are solitary but others live in social groups of closely related individuals.

The velvet worm is an ambush predator, and it hunts in a really weird way. It’s nocturnal and its eyes are not only very simple, but the velvet worm can’t even see ahead of it because its eyes are behind a pair of fleshy antennae that it uses to feel its way delicately forward. It walks so softly on its little legs that the small insects and other invertebrates that it preys on often don’t even notice it. When it comes across an animal, it uses its antennae to very carefully touch it and decide whether it’s worth attacking.

When it decides to attack, it squirts slime that acts like glue. It has a gland on either side of its head that squirts slime quite accurately. Once the prey is immobilized, the velvet worm may give smaller squirts of slime at dangerous parts, like the fangs of spiders. Then it punctures the body of its prey with its jaws and injects saliva, which kills the animal and starts to liquefy its insides. While the velvet worm is waiting for this to happen, it eats up its slime to reuse it, then sucks the liquid out of the prey. This can take a long time depending on the size of the animal—more than an hour.

A huge number of invertebrates, including all insects and crustaceans, are arthropods, and velvet worms look like they should belong to the phylum Arthropoda. But arthropods always have jointed legs. Velvet worm legs don’t have joints.

Velvet worms aren’t arthropods, although they’re closely related. A modern-day velvet worm looks surprisingly like an animal that lived half a billion years ago, Antennacanthopodia, although it lived in the ocean and all velvet worms live on land. Scientists think that the velvet worm’s closest living relative is a very small invertebrate called the tardigrade, or water bear, which is Stewie’s suggestion.

The water bear isn’t a bear but a tiny eight-legged animal that barely ever grows larger than 1.5 millimeters. Some species are microscopic. There are about 1,300 known species of water bear and they all look pretty similar, like a plump eight-legged stuffed animal with a tubular mouth that looks a little like a pig’s snout. It uses six of its fat little legs for walking and the hind two to cling to the moss and other plant material where it lives. Each leg has four to eight long hooked claws. Like the velvet worm, the tardigrade’s legs don’t have joints. They can bend wherever they want.

Tardigrades have the reputation of being extremophiles, able to withstand incredible heat, cold, radiation, space, and anything else scientists can think of. In reality, it’s just a little guy that mostly lives in moss and eats tiny animals or plant material. It is tough, and some species can indeed withstand extreme heat, cold, and so forth, but only for short amounts of time.

The tardigrade’s success is mainly due to its ability to suspend its metabolism, during which time the water in its body is replaced with a type of protein that protects its cells from damage. It retracts its legs and rearranges its internal organs so it can curl up into a teeny barrel shape, at which point it’s called a tun. It needs a moist environment, and if its environment dries out too much, the water bear will automatically go into this suspended state, called cryptobiosis. When conditions improve, the tardigrade returns to normal.

Another animal has a similar ability, and it’s a suggestion by Thaddeus, the immortal jellyfish. It’s barely more than 4 mm across as an adult, and lives throughout much of the world’s oceans, especially where it’s warm. It eats tiny food, including plankton and fish eggs, which it grabs with its tiny tentacles. Small as it is, the immortal jellyfish has stinging cells in its tentacles. It’s mostly transparent, although its stomach is red and an adult jelly has up to 90 white tentacles.

The immortal jellyfish starts life as a larva called a planula, which can swim, but when it finds a place it likes, it sticks itself to a rock or shell, or just onto the sea floor. There it develops into a polyp colony, and this colony buds new polyps that are clones of the original. These polyps swim away and grow into jellyfish, which spawn and develop eggs, and those eggs hatch into new planulae.

Polyps can live for years, while adult jellies, called medusae, usually only live a few months. But if an adult immortal jellyfish is injured, starving, sick, or otherwise under stress, it can transform back into a polyp. It forms a new polyp colony and buds clones of itself that then grow into adult jellies.

It’s the only organism known that can revert to an earlier stage of life after reaching sexual maturity–but only an individual at the adult stage, called the medusa stage, can revert to an earlier stage of development, and an individual can only achieve the medusa stage once after it buds from the polyp colony. If it reverts to the polyp stage, it will remain a polyp until it eventually dies, so it’s not really immortal but it’s still very cool.

All the animals we’ve talked about today have been quite small. Let’s finish with a suggestion from Kabir, a deep-sea animal that’s really big! It’s the giant siphonophore, Praya dubia, which lives in cold ocean water around many parts of the world. It’s one of the longest creatures known to exist, but it’s not a single animal. Each siphonophore is a colony of tiny animals called zooids, all clones although they perform different functions so the whole colony can thrive. Some zooids help the colony swim, while others have tiny tentacles that grab prey, and others digest the food and disperse the nutrients to the zooids around it.

Some siphonophores are small but some can grow quite large. The Portuguese man o’ war, which looks like a floating jellyfish, is actually a type of siphonophore. Its stinging tentacles can be 100 feet long, or 30 m. Other siphonophores are long, transparent, gelatinous strings that float through the depths of the sea, and that’s the kind the giant siphonophore is.

The giant siphonophore can definitely grow longer than 160 feet, or 50 meters, and may grow considerably longer. Siphonophores are delicate, and if they get washed too close to shore or the surface, waves and currents can tear them into pieces. Other than that, and maybe the occasional whale or big fish swimming right through them and breaking them up, there’s really no reason why a siphonophore can’t just keep on growing and growing and growing…

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 462: Cryptic Coloration

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Thanks to Måns, Sam, Owen and Askel for this week’s suggestions!

Further reading:

Shingleback Lizard

What controls the colour of the common mānuka stick insect?

The mossy leaf-tailed gecko has skin flaps that hide its shadow. There’s a lizard in this photo, I swear! [photo by Charles J. Sharp – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92125100]:

A shingleback lizard, pretending it has two heads:

The beautiful wood nymph is a beautiful moth but also it looks like a bird poop:

The Indian stick insect (photo by Ryan K Perry, found on this page):

The buff tip moth mimics a broken-off stick. This person has a whole handful of them:

A cuttlefish can change colors quickly [photo by Σ64 – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77733806]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to talk about a few types of camouflage, a suggestion by Måns, and we’ll also talk about some camouflaged animals suggested by Sam, Owen and Aksel, Dylan, and Nina.

There are lots of types of camouflage, not all of it visual in nature. Back in episode 191 we talked about some toxic moths that generate high-pitched clicks that bats hear, recognize, and avoid. Naturally, some non-toxic moths also generate the same sounds to mimic the toxic moths.

Måns specifically suggested cryptic coloration, also called crypsis. It’s a type of camouflage that allows an animal to blend into their surroundings, which can involve multiple methods.

Some animals have cryptic coloration mainly along the edges of the body, to defeat a skill many predators use called edge detection. A lot of amphibians and reptiles have patches surrounded by an outline, with dark patches having a darker outline and light patches having a lighter outline. This acts as disruptive camouflage, hiding the outline of an animal’s body as it moves around. Some animals take this camouflage even further, with a way to hide their own shadow.

This is the case with the mossy leaf-tailed gecko, which is native to the forests of eastern Madagascar. It can grow up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm, not counting its tail, and it’s nocturnal. Its tail is flat and broad, sort of shaped like a leaf, but it doesn’t disguise itself as a leaf.

The mossy leaf-tailed gecko has a complicated gray and brown pattern that looks like tree bark, and it can change its coloration a little bit to help it blend in even more. At night it’s well hidden in tree branches as it climbs around looking for insects, but in the day it needs to hide really well to avoid becoming some other animal’s snack while it’s sleeping.

It does this by finding a comfortable branch and flattening its body and tail against it so that it just looks like another part of the branch. But to make it even more hidden, it has a flap of skin along its sides that wraps even farther around the branch. Not only do these skin flaps hide its edges, it hides its shadow, since the flaps are really flat and there’s no curved edge of a lizard belly pressed against a branch that a predator might notice.

The most common kind of cryptic coloration is called countershading, and it’s so common that you might not even have noticed it although you see it almost every time you see a fish, amphibian, reptile, and many birds and mammals. Countershading is an animal that’s darker on top and lighter underneath, like a brown mouse with a white belly. It’s even found in some insects and other invertebrates.

Countershading is another way to hide a shadow. If a dolphin, for instance, was gray all over, its underside would look darker because of shadows, since sunlight shines down from the sky and makes shadows underneath the body. That would make its body shape look rounder, meaning it stands out more and a predator would notice it more easily. But most dolphins are pale gray or even white underneath. There’s still a shadow, but it’s no longer darker than the rest of the body. The lighter colored underside makes the shadow paler, and as a result, from a distance the dolphin looks almost the same shade all over, which makes it appear flat and the edges of its body harder to see. We even know that some dinosaurs were countershaded, with lighter colored bellies.

Countershading is so common in animals that it’s almost impossible to pick one example. Dylan suggested we learn about the shingleback lizard, an amazing animal found in many parts of Australia. It’s also called the stumpy-tailed lizard, the bobtail lizard, or the two-headed lizard. All three of those names refer to the animal’s tail, which is short and fat and actually looks like a second head. This is an example of automimicry, similar to animals that have markings that look like eyes. The lizard is brown with darker and lighter speckles and it sometimes has yellow spots too. Its belly is pale with dark spots. Its scales are large and overlap each other, and its eyes are tiny, like little black beads. It grows about a foot long, or 30 cm.

The shingleback lives in arid and desert areas, and its tough skin and overlapping scales help reduce water loss. It eats snails, insects, flowers, and other small animals and plants. When threatened, it will open its mouth wide and stick out its large, dark blue tongue. It is an impressively blue, impressively big tongue, and the inside of the shingleback’s mouth is bright pink, so the lizard has a chance to escape while its predator is startled and wondering if the lizard is dangerous. The shingleback can give a painful bite, although it’s not venomous.

The shingleback mates for life, and the female gives birth to two or three live young every year instead of laying eggs. In many reptiles that give birth to live young, the eggs basically remain in the mother’s body until they hatch, and then she gives birth. But in the shingleback’s case, her babies develop in placentas in a process very similar in many ways to placental mammals. The babies eat the placenta after they’re born, giving them a quick first meal, and they’re born ready to take care of themselves.

Sam suggested we talk about animals that can be confused with inanimate objects, which is a type of camouflage referred to as mimicry. Mimicry of all kinds is a really common type of camouflage, like all those harmless insects that have yellow and black stripes to mimic bees and wasps that can sting.

My favorite inanimate object mimic is a moth we talked about in episode 191, the beautiful wood nymph of eastern North America. It has a wingspan of 1.8 inches, or 4.6 cm, and it is indeed a beautiful little moth. Its front wings are mostly white with brown along the edges and a few brown and yellow spots, while the rear wings are a soft yellow-brown with a narrow brown edge. It has furry legs that are white with black tips. But when the moth folds its wings to rest, suddenly those pretty markings make it look exactly like a bird dropping. It even stretches out its front legs so they resemble a little splatter on the edge of the poop.

If you think about it, it makes sense that a tiny animal like an insect would want to resemble something common in its environment that’s also not eaten by very many other animals. For instance, a stick.

Owen and Aksel wanted to learn more about the walking stick, since it’s been a long time since we talked about it, episode 93. Walking stick insects are also called stick insects or phasmids. When I was a kid I was terrified of the whole idea of a stick insect, although I don’t know why. I think I thought one day I’d climb a tree and discover that some of those sticks were not actually part of the tree. I guess I spent a lot of time climbing trees, but I never actually saw a walking stick insect. Maybe that’s because they were so well camouflaged that I thought they were sticks!

Walking sticks live in trees and bushes, naturally, especially in warm areas, but they’re found on every continent except Antarctica. They’re long, thin insects with long, thin legs and they really do look like sticks. Some are green, some are brown or gray, and many have little patterns, projections, and ridges that make them look even more like real sticks. They’re closely related to another type of phasmid called a leaf insect, which as you may have already guessed, mimics a leaf. All phasmids eat leaves and other plant material and most are nocturnal.

Some phasmids can even change colors to help blend in with their background. The Indian stick insect, which is indeed found in southern India although it’s been introduced in many other parts of the world and is considered invasive in some places, grows up to about 4 inches long, or 10 cm. It’s usually brown, but it can change its color in response to light levels by moving pigment granules in its cuticle that absorb and scatter light. The Indian stick insect has many other ways to hide in plain sight. If it feels threatened, it will stretch out with its rear legs folded flat against its body and its front pair of legs stretched forward to make it look even longer. It will stay perfectly stiff even if someone picks it up, but if it thinks it’s in danger, it will spread its front legs to show a patch of red at the base of the legs. This can startle or frighten a potential predator long enough to let the stick insect get away.

One interesting thing about the Indian stick insect is that almost all individuals are females. Females don’t need to mate with a male to reproduce. The female’s babies are little clones of herself, and she drops an egg every so often onto the ground. It looks like a tiny seed, and ants think it’s a seed and will collect it and take it back to the nest to be stored for later. The egg is then protected until it hatches, when the larval insect leaves the ant nest and finds a tree or bush to hide in.

The buff tip moth also looks like a twig or branch when its wings are folded, but not in the same way the walking stick insect does. It looks like a broken-off branch instead. It’s a fairly large moth with a wingspan more than 2 and a half inches across, or 7 cm, and its wings are mostly gray with a rounded buff patch at the end. The end of its abdomen is buff too, so that it looks like the inside part of a tree branch, that’s paler than the bark. It lives throughout much of Europe and Asia, and different populations look slightly different because they’ve evolved to resemble the branches of different species of tree.

Let’s finish with Nina’s suggestion, about an animal that can change colors really fast to blend in with its background. That’s the cuttlefish, and Nina wanted to know how it changes colors so fast, and while we’re at it, why octopuses are so flexible.

The cuttlefish is a cephalopod, closely related to octopuses and squid, but is quite small in comparison. It has eight arms and two feeding tentacles, just like the squid, but its arms are really small in comparison to its mantle. There are over 100 species known so far, most of which are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But unlike the squid or the octopus, the cuttlefish has an internal structure called the cuttlebone. It’s not a bone at all but a modified shell, which is your reminder that cephalopods are mollusks and are distantly related to clams, snails, and many other animals that have shells. The cuttlebone helps the cuttlefish stay buoyant without effort, and it also incidentally makes the body a little more structured than its squid and octopus cousins.

Octopuses are flexible because they have no bones. Basically the only hard structure in an octopus is its beak. A cephalopod’s mouth is in the middle of its arms, so it’s usually hidden from view. Way back in episode 142 we talked about how octopus muscles work, so let’s revisit that briefly. In animals with bones, muscles are attached to the bones. But octopuses don’t have bones.

The octopus’s muscles are structured differently than muscles in animals with bones. Our muscles are made up of fibers that contract in one direction. Let’s say you pick up something heavy. To do so, you contract the fibers in some muscles to shorten them, which makes the bone they’re attached to move. Then, when you push a heavy door closed, you contract other muscles and at the same time you relax the muscles you used to pick up something heavy. This pulls the arm bone in the other direction.

But in the octopus, the fibers in its muscles run in three directions. When one set of fibers contracts, the other two tighten against each other and form a hard surface for the contracted fibers to move. So they’re muscles that also sort of act like bones. It’s called a muscular hydrostat, and it actually can result in muscle movements much more precise than muscle movements where a bone is involved.

So, if you combine the octopus’s strong, precise muscle movements with its general lack of hard structures, you get a very flexible animal. Basically an octopus can squish itself through extremely small openings, as long as its beak will fit through. This can make it really hard to keep an octopus in captivity, because in addition to being flexible and squishy, the octopus is also really intelligent. It can survive for short periods of time out of the water, and it can figure out how to open its enclosure and get out to explore, or just escape.

But, back to the cuttlefish, which is small and needs to hide from predators. Like other cephalopods, the cuttlefish can change color and pattern in less than a second, and can even change the texture of its skin if it wants to look bumpy like the rocks around it.

Cephalopods have specialized cells called chromatophores in their skin. A chromatophore consists of a sac filled with pigment and a nerve, and each chromatophore is surrounded by tiny muscles. When a cuttlefish wants to change colors, its nervous system activates the tiny muscles around the correct chromatophores. That is, some chromatophores contain yellow pigment, some contain red or brown. Because the color change is controlled by the nervous system and muscles, it happens incredibly quickly, in just milliseconds.

But that’s not all, because the cuttlefish also has other cells called iridophores and leucophores. Iridophores are layers of extremely thin cells that can reflect light of certain wavelengths, which results in iridescent patches of color on the skin. While the cuttlefish can control these reflections, it takes a little longer, several seconds or sometimes several minutes.

Like other cephalopods, the cuttlefish uses its ability to change color and pattern in order to hide from predators. It also uses these abilities to communicate with other cuttlefish, because it’s a social animal. It will also sometimes frighten potential predators away with a bright, sudden display of color changing.

The most amazing thing of all is that cuttlefish can’t see colors. They have no color receptors in their eyes. But they accurately change color to match their background, even though they can’t see the color, and they can even do so if it’s almost completely dark. While scientists have some theories as to how the cuttlefish manages this, we don’t yet know how they do it for sure. So it is still a mystery!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 446: Termites

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

Further reading:

Replanted rainforests may benefit from termite transplants

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

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

Worker termites [photo from this site]:

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 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!