Category Archives: South America

Episode 036: Patagonian giants, Yowie, and Bunyip (Bigfoot part 2)

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Part two of the Bigfoot episode sort of got away from me. We start with giants of Patagonia and end up, inexplicably, with seals in Australia. But it’s a fun ride along the way, where we learn about real giants in Patagonia, folkloric giants in Patagonia, the Yowie of Australia, and the Bunyip of Australia. And Southern elephant seals.

Some map giants:

Yowie candy, because it’s getting close to Halloween:

A drawing of the bunyip geoglyph:

A map showing where the geoglyph was located. Old maps are neat:

The southern elephant seal. Look at that magnificent snoot!

Further reading:

Monsters of Patagonia by Austin Whittall

“What to make of the Yowie?” By Darren Naish

“Buckley’s Bunyip” by Paul Michael Donovan, in The Journal of Cryptozoology, Vol. 4 (Dec 2016)

Further listening:

The Folklore Podcast December 15 2016 episode “Bunyip: Devil of the Riverbed”

Show transcript:

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

We’re one week closer to Halloween and deep in monster lore. Last week we learned about the Yeti. This week we’re going to learn about bigfoot-type legends from other parts of the world—specifically, Patagonia and Australia.

Patagonia isn’t a country but a region at the southern tip of South America. Part of it is in Chile, part in Argentina. It includes the Andes Mountains, and the southern end is only 600 miles from Antarctica. People have lived in the area for at least 13,000 years and there are many different indigenous cultures still living there today.

Much of South America was originally populated by the little-known Clovis People, who migrated into the Americas from Asia once the glaciers retreated from Alaska. The Clovis People are supposed to have arrived around 13,000 years ago, but archaeologists have dated some non-Clovis sites in both North and South America to much earlier than that. One theory is that an earlier human migration reached South America by sea from the South Pacific, although this is controversial. DNA studies of First Nations people suggest that there may have been an earlier migration from Asia into North America, possibly 20,000 years ago, before the Clovis People arrived.

The first Europeans to visit Patagonia were Magellan and his crew on their voyage around the world. They spent the winter in Patagonia in 1520, and Magellan is the one who named the area. Specifically, he named its people Patagons, and reported that they were giants.

Antonio Pigafetta was one of only 18 survivors of the expedition. When he got home, he wrote about his adventures. He described the Patagons as nine to twelve feet tall, or 2 and three-quarters to over 3 and a half meters tall.

Soon everyone in Europe knew Patagonia was the land of giants. Maps of the region included illustrations of bearded men nearly twice as tall as the explorers greeting them. It would be easy to dismiss the accounts of giants as inventions to sell a few books, except that other explorers were reporting the same thing.

A priest from a Spanish expedition reported that in 1525 he saw native men who were 13 spans tall, or 9 feet, or 2.75 meters. In 1577 Sir Francis Drake visited Patagonia, and later his chaplain reported seeing giants 5 cubits tall, or 7 ½ feet, or 2.3 meters. In 1579 another Spanish expedition started a short-lived settlement in the Strait of Magellan, which ended up being renamed Port Famine, and maybe they wouldn’t have starved if they hadn’t started off by killing one of the giant locals. According to the expedition leader, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, it took ten men to capture the native. Only one settler survived the bitter winters and lack of provisions. He was rescued by an Englishman, Sir Thomas Cavendish, who didn’t see any giants but did see footprints he reported as 18” long, or almost 46 centimeters.

The reports of giants continued, in 1591, 1599, 1614, 1641, and so on well into the 18th century. In 1615 two men dug up some stone cairns and underneath found human skeletons they said were ten or eleven feet long, or a bit over 3 meters. In 1642 Dutch admiral Henry Brewer reported more 18” footsteps in Tierra del Fuego.

All this sounds definitive. But other expeditions didn’t report seeing giants, including those from 1535, 1540, a land exploration from 1557 to 1559, 1618, another land expedition from 1623 to 1624, 1670, and so on. Tellingly, after a 1741 shipwreck on the southern Chilean coast, a survivor, John Bulkeley, claimed he encountered gigantic men in the area—but Thomas Pascoe, a member of the same fleet, disagreed. He said the people in the area were average-sized—and, incidentally, not wild cannibals as Bulkeley claimed. Pascoe called them “harmless, civil, and inoffensive.”

So what’s going on? Are all these people, hundreds of sailors, soldiers, priests, and even naturalists, from different eras and nations, all liars?

In 1767, Captain Samuel Wallis, apparently fed up with the conflicting reports about giants, sailed to Patagonia with a measuring rod. There he measured some very tall people, for sure, but not giants. The tallest man he measured was 6 feet 7 inches, or 2.01 meters, with several others only an inch or two shorter. But, he reported, most were between 5 feet 10 inches and six feet tall, or 1.78 to 1.83 meters. And their feet, he mentioned, were quite small.

Several subsequent European measuring expeditions revealed the same proportions among the Tehuelche, a large and varied group of nomadic people who lived throughout Patagonia. The Tehuelche were among the tallest people in the world. Since the average height of a northern European in the 16th century was 5’ 6” or 1.67 meters, and the average height of a southern European was only 5 feet or 1.5 meters, a group of people whose average height was 6’1” or 1.86 meters would seem like giants. The rest was likely due to exaggeration.

The Tehuelche were almost completely destroyed in the late 19th century, and those who survived warfare and introduced diseases were mostly absorbed into other groups. Only about 6,000 Tehuelche remain scattered across South America.

But were the Tehuelche the only so-called giants in Patagonia? Various Europeans reported another group called the Tiremenen or the Caucauhue, who were not just tall, but stout and muscular mountain people last seen around the 1700s. They were supposedly bigger than the Tehuelche, warlike and dangerous. According to various stories, the Tehuelche finally killed the last of them after a fierce battle. Survivors of the battle took refuge in a cave, where the Tehuelche lit fires and asphyxiated them with thick smoke.

So far, all these giants are people, not furry Bigfoots. But there are plenty of stories from various indigenous groups of wild men and monsters in Patagonia, especially in the forests and mountains. According to the Alakuf, the Mwono was a snow man that lived among the glaciers and high mountains and left tracks in the snow. Over a thousand miles north, or 2,000 km, the Mapuche told a similar story. The Carcancho were hairy solitary men who lived in the mountains. They could stand almost 7 feet tall, or over 2 meters, and left large footprints in the snow. The Mapuche also believed that a giant with fiery red hair and beard, called a Trauko, lived along the Collón Curá River.

While the Mapuche people have lived in what is now Chile and Argentina for some 2500 years, they differ genetically from other indigenous peoples of Patagonia. When they moved into Patagonia, they conquered and absorbed many other tribes, and it’s possible many of their stories of the olden days come from those tribes. They say that giant animals once lived in the area but that their ancestors killed most of them, along with the evil giants that once lived there too. It’s hard not to speculate that the giant animals were megafauna like giant ground sloths. But all the people who migrated to the Americas were humans—no Neandertals or other of our relations made it there as far as we know—and until humans arrived, there were no members of the ape family in the Americas.

So what about other primates? Researchers aren’t sure how monkeys made it to South America, but they’ve been there for some 37 million years. They lived first in the Amazon basin and spread slowly throughout South and Central America. But there are no species of monkey in Patagonia and there hasn’t been for millions of years. The few species of monkey that had spread into Patagonia had already gone extinct long before our first human ancestor started walking upright, so it’s not likely that the first human settlers of Patagonia encountered monkeys. Of course, you never know what fossils might come to light in the future, and there are scattered stories about tribes of men with tails in Patagonia.

In his marvelous book The Monsters of Patagonia, author Austin Whittall suggests that the Patagonian wild man legends, as well as other story elements, may be connected to Australian Aboriginal legends. If the original settlers of Patagonia did arrive by sea from Austronesia, which is by no means established, they would have adapted their stories to their new home. Whittall also suggests that one story in particular may be related to Homo erectus, our direct human ancestor who probably went extinct when humans began competing with them for resources. The ancestors of the Australian Aborigines probably did encounter Homo erectus. Maybe that was the source of the Yowie legend.

I probably don’t need to point out that this is fringey, fringey stuff. But it’s fun to think about.

The Yowie in Australian Aboriginal lore is a man-like monster that’s seven or even as much as 12 feet tall, or around 2 to 3 and a half meters. It has big feet, although some stories say its feet are backwards so people tracking it are actually going the wrong way. Sometimes the Yowie is said to have long white hair. Modern interpretations of the Yowie are a lot like the Sasquatch, with brown or reddish hair all over and arms that hang to its knees.

Many older accounts by European settlers refer to this creature by various other names, including wood devil, Australian gorilla, and Yahoo. I don’t know if Yahoo was an attempt at pronouncing an unfamiliar Aboriginal word or if 19th century pop culture was still drawing on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In Swift’s story, yahoos are brutish but human-like creatures much despised by the narrator, who prefers the company of the intelligent horses that treat the yahoos as servants. Oh, the satire was subtle back in 1726.

These days, the Yowie is as firmly entrenched in Australian culture as Sasquatch is in North American culture. Yowies sell chocolates and toys, appear in cartoons, and like Sasquatch hunters, Yowie hunters run around in the Australian bush and make plaster casts of big footprints.

Let me tell you something important about plaster. It’s a terrible way to make casts of footprints or anything else. Not only does it produce tiny ridges along its edges as it dries, which have been interpreted as dermal ridges of bigfoot feet, it also generates heat as it dries, which has the potential to alter the prints it’s supposed to be faithfully representing. These days, field scientists use dental stone or latex to take casts. Plaster is cheap and readily available, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best.

Anyway, the earliest colonial reports of the Yowie are from around the early 19th century. European settlers sometimes treated the Yowie as a real animal that had yet to be discovered, sometimes as an amusing Aboriginal superstition. Reported Yowie sightings were relatively uncommon until the 1970s. At that point, cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy, whom I disparaged in episode 32 for being secretive about his findings and data, started showing up in the Australian media with big plaster casts of what he claimed were Yowie tracks.

The problem with the Yowie is that Australia, even less so than Patagonia, has never been home to any animal that stands upright the way humans do. Most of Australia’s large mammals are marsupials so they aren’t even remotely related to apes.

It’s possible that the Aboriginal tales of the Yowie are old, old memories of Homo erectus or other human relatives, as I suggested about the Patagonian wild men. But it’s also possible that the Yowie is a monster of human imagination. Cultures from around the world have stories of big people and little people who sometimes help, sometimes cause mischief, or are sometimes just plain menacing. It seems to be a human trait to people the landscape with giants and dwarves.

The more research I do about any cryptid, as opposed to animals we know exist or used to exist, the more I realize cryptozoology is actually about people. It’s the study not so much of unknown animals, it’s the study of how humans interact with the unknown. Sometimes I’m disappointed when I trace a fascinating story back to its primary source and discover it’s not as mysterious as later versions of the event make it out to be. But sometimes I come across something so purely human that I don’t even care that the mystery has evaporated.

So let me tell you about the Bunyip. This is another Australian monster, one that sometimes gets confused with the Yowie in popular culture, or sometimes gets lumped in with lake monsters. I learned about this from an article by Paul Michael Donovan in the 2016 Journal of Cryptozoology, called “Buckley’s Bunyip.” Shortly after I read the article, I happened to listen to the “Bunyip: Devil of the Riverbed” episode of the Folklore Podcast. That episode was an interview with none other than Paul Michael Donovan about the same material his article covered, so if you want more information, check the show notes for a link to that episode.

The bunyip is supposed to be a monster that attacks and eats people who come too near the waterholes or lagoons where it lives. Descriptions vary, but it’s sometimes said to be gray and covered with feathers, with a peculiar two-tone bellow that it uses to warn people away. By about the 1850s the word bunyip had been adopted into Australian English as a term meaning something like humbug or poser.

There was an Aboriginal sacred site near Ararat, Victoria where the outline of a bunyip was carved into the ground and the turf removed from within the figure. Every year the local indigenous people would gather to re-carve the figure so it wouldn’t become overgrown, because it symbolized an important event. At that spot, two brothers had been attacked by a bunyip. It killed one of the men and the other speared the bunyip and killed it. When he brought his family and others back to retrieve his brother’s body, they traced around the bunyip.

The bunyip carving is long gone, since eventually the last Aborigine who was part of the ritual died sometime in the 1850s and the site was fenced off for cattle grazing. But we have a drawing of the geoglyph from 1867. A copy of it is in the show notes. It’s generally taken to be a two-legged sea serpent type monster with a small head and a relatively short, thick tail. Some people think it represents a bird like an emu.

But if you turn it around, with the small head being the end of a tail, and the blunt tail being a head, suddenly it makes sense. It’s the shape of a seal.

The Southern elephant seal lives around the Antarctic, but it is a rare visitor to Australia. It’s also enormous, twice the size of a walrus, six or seven times heavier than a Polar bear. The males can grow over 20 feet long, or over six meters, while females are typically about half that length. The male also has an inflatable proboscis with which it makes horrible roaring sounds. This is a clip of what it sounds like, although these calls are from Northern elephant seals, which are much smaller than Southern elephant seals. Still pretty darn big, though.

[seals honking]

The elephant seal is also an aggressive carnivore. If an elephant seal strayed inland up a river or stream, which does sometimes happen, the Aboriginal people of the area would definitely take notice of the monster.

So the bunyip is, in the end, a true monster. And the bunyip’s story is a deeply human one. A man’s brother died. His family mourned, and commemorated the event with a carving that withstood who knows how many years. Oh, and the carving’s size? It was about eight meters long. That’s 26 feet.

I’m not entirely sure how I ended up talking about seals when we started out talking about giants of Patagonia. But hey, the southern elephant seal lives in Patagonia too.

I could easily do two or three more episodes about bigfoots around the world, but I’m ready for something else. Next week we’ll learn about a four-footed monster from Ireland, a Halloween story if I ever heard one since it starts with a gravestone.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 022: Megatherium

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Episode 22 is all about megatherium, the giant extinct ground sloth–and a little bit about glyptodon, the giant extinct…thing.

Megatherium vs trees was basically no contest. Giant ground sloth FTW!

Giant sloth big, yeah yeah yeah, it’s not small, no no no

Glyptodon. Like a giant armadillo that can’t roll up and doesn’t need to.

Show transcript:

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

For this week’s episode, let’s learn about some Ice Age megafauna! But first, a quick note about my schedule. I’ll talk more about this in a few weeks, but in August I’m going to be in Helsinki, Finland for WorldCon 75. I don’t have the final schedule yet, but I am going to be on a panel about podcasting. If you’re going to WorldCon too, or if you’ll be in Helsinki the week of the convention or the week after, let me know so we can meet up! I’ll also be in Oslo, Norway for part of the day on August 7. I got a cheap flight to Helsinki because it has an 11-hour layover in Oslo, but to me that’s a bonus. Oslo has birds! Birds I’ve never seen before! So if you’re going to be in Oslo on August 7 and you’d like to meet me for a birding trip and/or lunch, definitely let me know! And don’t worry, I’ll schedule episodes ahead of time so you can continue to learn about strange animals even while I’m gone.

Now, on to the megafauna. Until about five million years ago, South America was a big island continent the way Australia is today. As a result, many of the animals that evolved there at the time don’t look anything like animals in other parts of the world.

The various species of giant ground sloth, such as Megatherium and Eremotherium, were South American mammals that lived from around 30 million years ago until only about 10,000 years ago—but we’ll come back to that in a minute. Those two species were huge—as big as African elephants. It was 20 feet long and stood more than 12 feet high on its hind legs. They liked woodlands and grasslands and ate plants.

Megatherium had huge curved claws on its forefeet just like modern sloths, four claws that were a foot long each, and we know it walked on the sides of its paws as a result because we have some fossilized tracks. A ground sloth could walk on its hind legs, at least for short distances, and when feeding it spent a lot of its time reared up on its hind legs, helped to balance by its thick tail. It could reach branches some 20 feet off the ground that way. It hooked the branches down with its claws to eat the leaves.

Around 5 million years ago, South America became connected to North America by the Central American Isthmus, which is volcanic in origin. Over the millennia, peaking around 3 million years ago, North American animals migrated south, and South American animals migrated north, called the Great American interchange. A lot of South American megafauna went extinct with the increased competition for resources, but nothing bothered the giant ground sloths. One medium-sized species, named Megalonyx by Thomas Jefferson, spread throughout North America as far north as Alaska. It was “only” about 10 feet long and weighed some 800 pounds, with three claws on its forefeet.

The North American sloths died out first, around 11,000 years ago. It didn’t take long for most of the South American sloths to go extinct too, a little over 10,000 years ago. And yes, that was the same time that humans were spreading deeper into the Americas. It’s not a coincidence, although climate change after the last big ice age probably played a part too. Ground sloths had thick skin reinforced with osteoderms, knobs of bone tissue that grow in the skin like armor, so killing one would have been a lot of work for our ancestors, and was undoubtedly dangerous too.

But a whole lot of islands make up the Carribean, and giant sloths lived on some of those islands. Many had developed in isolation long enough that they’re now considered separate species from the mainland sloths. And many of the island sloths persisted for thousands of years after their gigantic mainland cousins were long dead.

The island sloths were much smaller than Megatherium. Megalocnus only weighed about 200 pounds—a big sloth, but nothing like the five tons that Megatherium could weigh. But Megalocnus survived until some 6,000 years ago in Cuba and maybe much more recently. Another Cuban sloth lived another thousand years after that. A small ground sloth called Neocnus survived on Hispanolia until only about 4,500 years ago.

You may have heard recently about a lot of huge tunnels in Brazil. Until recently, people assumed they were natural caves. It wasn’t until the 2000s that geologists started investigating the tunnels and immediately saw that they weren’t natural at all. They were burrows, many with claw marks on the walls as though just dug, thousands of them scattered across Brazil and a few other parts of South America. Some are tall enough to stand up inside comfortably. One paleoburrow in the Amazon is a network that adds up to around 2,000 feet of tunnels, six feet tall and almost that wide. It was probably used by generations of animals, enlarged and extended as new adults dug their own burrows.

The burrows were probably dug by giant sloths. No one is sure why. Giant sloths had no predators until humans moved into the area. But it’s also possible that some or most of the burrows were dug by the extinct ancestors of armadillos, glyptodon.

The glyptodonts are related to both the giant ground sloths and modern-day armadillos. Glyptodon and its two related species, Panochthus and Doedicurus, lived in the same areas where the giant burrows have been discovered. And modern armadillos are good burrowers. But Glyptodon had even less reason to need burrows than giant ground sloths did. It was an enormous animal, 11 feet long and five feet high, weighing over two tons, with a massive domed carapace like a tortoise shell, made of rows of osteoderms. It also had osteoderms that protected its head like a cap, and rings of bony plates on the end of its thick tail that made it into a club-like weapon. Even its jaws contained osteoderm ridges, which helped grind up the plants it ate, although it also had huge grooved teeth.

In other words, glyptodon was a walking tank. Nothing much ate them until humans showed up. A full-grown glyptodon was a bonanza for humans if they could kill it. Not only did it provide a whole lot of meat, its shell could be used as shelter. Clean it out good first. At least one human burial has been found in a glyptodon shell.

Considering how amazing glyptodonts are, you’d think they’d be more well known and better studied. There’s still a whole lot we don’t know about them, including how many species there actually were and how recently they died out. There aren’t even very many reported sightings of living ones, which tends to happen with just about any extinct animal.

Giant ground sloths, on the other hand, do get reported every so often, and there are hints that giant ground sloths might have lived until much more recently than ten or eleven thousand years ago. Megatherium remains found in caves sometimes seem suspiciously fresh, although so far radiocarbon dating hasn’t given us any surprises. In 1740 the Portuguese historian Lozano mentioned an animal that sounds a little like a ground sloth, which was supposedly called the su by locals.

Some cryptozoologists believe that a legendary South American monster, the mapinguari, may have been inspired by megatherium. The mapinguari is supposed to be nine feet tall and smelly, with feet that face backwards, an extra mouth in its belly, skin that deflects arrows, and sometimes it’s said to have only one eye in the middle of its forehead. It also eats meat. That sounds a little on the far-fetched side to me, and a lot of cryptozoologists group the mapinguari with bigfoot type monsters.

There is another monster story from Patagonia that sounds a lot more sloth-like on the surface. The yemisch is supposed to be a cow-sized animal that sleeps in burrows it digs with its huge claws. It can’t be killed because arrows bounce off its hide. In fact, yemisch is supposed to mean “the one covered in little stones.”

That sounds promising, but the story comes exclusively from a man called Florentino Ameghino, who was convinced that a smaller giant ground sloth named mylodon still lived in Patagonia. The first mention anywhere of the Yemisch comes from Ameghino’s 1898 paper about mylodon, where he said the Tehuelche of Patagonia referred to it as the water tiger. It was semi-aquatic, spending much of its time in the river. It was said to drag horses into the water with its huge claws. Its feet were flat, its ears tiny, it had huge claws and fangs, and its toes were webbed for swimming. It was bigger than a puma but with shorter legs.

This doesn’t sound like a ground sloth, which were not carnivores despite their big claws. In 1900 a French naturalist, Andrew Tournouer, spotted an animal in a stream that looked a lot like Ameghino’s description of the Yemisch. Tournouer said it was definitely not a ground sloth; his guide said it was called a Hymche.

The water tiger Ameghino describes is well known in Patagonian native lore, but not under the name Yemisch. It’s possible Ameghino mangled the word Hymche. Whatever the water tiger is, though, it’s definitely not a giant ground sloth and I’m going to save it for a future episode if I can dig up more about it.

There was an aquatic giant ground sloth once, though, Thalassocnus. It grew to around five or six feet long and lived off the Pacific coast of South America, where it ate seaweed and other marine plants. Fossils document how it adapted to marine life over the generations. The earliest Thalassocnus fossils are of semi-aquatic animals that grazed in shallow water. Fossils from more recent species show increasing adaptations to deeper water, including increased weight of the skeleton to help it stay underwater instead of bobbing up to the surface. It died out around two and a half million years ago, after the Isthmus of Panama formed, probably because the new land mass caused the water temperature to cool and many of the ocean plants in its habitat went extinct.

Whether or not any giant ground sloths are still alive in the remote parts of South America, I think we can all agree that they’re not going to eat anyone. So if you see one, don’t shoot it unless it’s with a camera.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 018: Some mystery elephants and the tapir

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This week’s episode is about a couple of mystery elephants and a non-mysterious animal, the tapir…but there might be some mystery associated with that little-trunked cutie too.

The tapir and its weird snoot:

The Moeritherium probably looked something like this:

Some super cute Borneo elephants with super long tails:

A baby tapir omgimgoingtodieofcuteomg

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re looking at some animals with snoots. Specifically, a couple of mysterious elephants, and the tapir, which looks like what you might get if a pig and an elephant had a baby.

Usually I start episodes with the facts about a known animal and finish up with a mystery, but this week we’re starting with a strange and mysterious animal called a water elephant.

There’s only been one reported sighting of a water elephant and it’s not a recent one. In 1912, an article appeared in the Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society. It was written by R.J. Cuninghame but concerned a Mr. Le Petit.

Now, before I go on to discuss the water elephant, let me just say that I have a great big problem with someone named M. Le Petit. No pun intended. Going by the name, and the secondhand nature of the account, and the fact that a lot of stories about strange African animals from this era are hoaxes of one variety or another, I’m taking this whole thing with a grain of salt. But it’s an interesting story, and if there really was a guy saddled with the name of little mister man, I can see why he spent a lot of time exploring the Congo instead of becoming a Shakespearian actor or something.

Anyway, I was able to find the original article, which has been digitized. It’s quite short, so instead of paraphrasing it I’ll just read the whole thing. It’s from the July 1912 issue of the journal, volume two number four, pages 97 through 98.

[read article]

There is no known animal that precisely fits Le Petit’s description. The closest is possibly the tapir. You can pronounce it taper if you want. It’s spelled T-A-P-I-R and no one seems to know how it’s supposed to be pronounced. Anyway, there are five species of tapir still around, four in Central and South America and one in Asia.

While the different species vary in size and coloring, generally a tapir is about 3 feet high at the shoulder and up to 8 feet long with short fur. The ears are oval-shaped with white tips. Its body is rounded with a pronounced rump, a stubby little tail, and a long head with a short but prehensile trunk. Superficially the tapir looks kind of like a piggy but it’s actually much more closely related to horses and rhinos. It has four toes on its front legs, three on its hind legs, and each toe has a little hoof. Depending on the species, the tapir may be gray, reddish-brown, black and white, or if it’s a baby, stripey. Females have a single pair of teats and males have a remarkably long, somewhat prehensile penis with flaps on the end that helps make a seal so it can mate underwater. You won’t get this information on National Geographic Kids, no sirree.

The tapir is a shy, largely solitary, mostly nocturnal animal that prefers forests near rivers or streams. It can bite like heck if it needs to, but it much prefers to run away from danger. Its favorite method of hiding is to submerge in water. It spends a lot of time in water, in fact, eating water plants and cooling off when it’s hot. It swims well and can use its snoot as a snorkel.

Technically its snoot is called a proboscis. It’s like a short elephant trunk although tapirs and elephants aren’t closely related. When it’s not snorkeling, the tapir uses its snoot to help gather plants. I just like saying snoot.

Tapir fossils have been discovered in Europe, China, and North America, but not Africa. So whatever M. Le Peti saw, assuming the account wasn’t a hoax or a mistaken identity, it probably wasn’t a tapir. So what else might fit the water elephant’s description?

There is an extinct animal that fits the description pretty well as far as we know. The Moeritherium lived about 35 million years ago and its fossils have been found in many parts of Africa. It was related to modern elephants although it wasn’t a direct ancestor, just an offshoot that as far as we know died out without descendants.

It wasn’t a very big animal—like the tapir, it looked more like a pig than an elephant. It stood between 2 and 3 feet high at the shoulder but was long-bodied, almost 10 feet long. Its legs were short, it may have had a tapir-like trunk, and it had small tusks more like those of a hippo, nothing like elephant tusks. Studies of its teeth indicate it ate a lot of aquatic plants, so it probably lived a lot like a hippo.

So could the water elephant be a descendant of Moeritherium? It sure sounds like a possibility, but there are two important facts to keep in mind.

First of all, the hippo evolved about 16 million years ago. If the Moeritherium had lived and continued to evolve, it’s possible it would have ended up looking a lot like the modern hippo. But the hippo is most closely related to whales—I’m not even kidding, and somehow I always manage to bring up whales no matter what animal I’m researching, huh?—and the hippo wouldn’t have become so wide-spread if the Moeritherium had a lock on the big aquatic freshwater herbivore niche.

Second, the date of the article is suspicious if you look at the discoveries of Moeritherium fossils. The Moeritherium was first described in 1901 from fossils found in Egypt. More fossils were discovered in 1902 and 1904. In 1911 the fossils were examined more closely and divided into two species. During this time, discoveries in palaeontology were popular subjects in magazines and newspapers. Dinosaurs and other extinct animals were even more a part of popular culture as they are now. Arthur Conan Doyle’s book The Lost World was published in 1912, continuing a tradition already well established by Jules Verne of science fiction stories where people discover supposedly extinct animals in remote areas. Scientists and explorers were still hopeful that living dinosaurs or ice age megafauna would be found alive and well. So it’s not a bit outlandish to suggest that the author of the water elephant story made it up with the best possible intentions—perhaps he expected to find the Moeritherium living in the Congo and wanted to excite interest in more expeditions. Or perhaps he was hoaxed by someone who’d read about the Moeritherium and thought it would make a plausible subject of a tall tale.

Clearly, I’m skeptical about the water elephant being a real animal, although I’d love to be proven wrong. But there is another definitely real elephant that might be a mystery that’s been hiding in plain sight for hundreds of years.

In 1750 or thereabouts, according to locals, a pair of elephants was given to the Sultan of Sulu who brought them to Borneo. At some point the elephants were released into the wild and their descendants now live throughout the western and northern parts of the island. This story sounds straightforward and interesting, but there are a lot of confusing details that make it less certain. Supposedly, the Raja of Java gave a pair of elephants to Raja Baginda of Sulu, but that was around 1395. We do know that in 1521, tame elephants were part of the palace’s wonders, but by the 1770s there were no tame elephants, only feral ones. Supposedly, the elephants were released into the wild at some point to keep them from being captured for use in war in the event of an invasion.

Whenever and however it happened, it sounds plausible that the elephants still living in Borneo are descendants of elephants gifted to a local ruler. Elephants have long been considered appropriate royal gifts. The story is given more weight by the fact that no elephant fossils have ever been found in Borneo, which suggests the elephants were introduced recently. The Bornean elephants have a very low genetic diversity, which would be the case if they were descendants of a single pair.

But here’s why these smallish, rather tame elephants in Borneo are such a big deal. Locals, and some researchers, think they’re the only surviving members of an otherwise extinct subspecies of Asian elephant, called the Java elephant. And they are different in appearance and behavior from other Asian elephant subspecies. They’re slightly smaller, although they’re not actually pygmy elephants as they’re sometimes called. A big male Borneo elephant may stand about eight feet tall at the shoulder while a big male Asian elephant may reach close to 10 feet. The Borneo elephant’s tusks are straighter than other Asian elephants—some males don’t have tusks at all—and their tails are so long that in some individuals, they actually touch the ground. Roughly 2,000 Borneo elephants remain on the island, although their habitat is increasingly being lost to palm oil plantations. Poaching is also a problem.

Borneo and Java are both part of the Malay Archipelago in southeast Asia, which is full of islands and nations I’ve mostly only ever heard about in songs and stories, like Singapore and Sumatra, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. I bet it’s beautiful out there, wow. Java is over 800 miles south of Borneo, so it’s not like the elephants could get there without human help. And the Java elephant was extinct by the 1800s.

In 2003, DNA testing on the Borneo elephants indicated they were not related to other Asian subspecies of elephant and were either from Java or native to Borneo. Since Borneo was cut off from the Asian mainland and the rest of the Malay Archipelago around 18,000 years ago, when sea levels rose due to melting glaciers, that means the elephants must have been on the island for at least 18,000 years if they truly are a native subspecies. But if that’s the case, where are the fossil and subfossil remains? Why do the locals insist that the elephants were introduced only hundreds of years ago?

I tried very hard to find information about DNA testing supposedly underway in 2015, but without luck. It could be that the results haven’t yet been analyzed or that the analysis hasn’t yet been published. But my bet is that the locals are right and these are Java elephants, once owned by kings.

To bring things back around to where we started, more or less, in November of 1975 a young tapir was supposedly captured in Borneo. Unfortunately, no one knew what they’d caught—the papers were described as a mixture of various types of animals, such as a tiger’s body, an elephant’s trunk, a goat’s legs but claws like a chicken’s, and so forth. Put that way it sounds absurd and made up. The papers dubbed it a tigelboat. But as zoologist Karl Shuker points out in his blog, everything about the tigelboat fits the characteristics of a young Malayan tapir. Tapir babies are stripey, and while tapirs have hooves, they do have a claw-like appearance since the toes are widely spread and the hooves pointed.

Unfortunately, no one in the scientific community followed up on the animal’s capture and it’s not known what happened to it. It was kept at a prison but wasn’t cared for and eventually disappeared. Someone probably ate it, that’s my guess. But it’s possible that tapirs still live in the swamps and rainforests of Borneo. We know they lived on the island during the Pleistocene.

Finally, one last mystery tapir was supposedly seen in New Guinea in 1906, when two New Guinea natives were employed as scouts for an expedition. The two were sent ahead to check on a trail but had to be rescued after a terrifying encounter with what they called devil-pigs. There were two of the animals, and the description sounds exactly like dark gray or black tapirs. But tapirs don’t live in New Guinea—as far as we know.

Papua and Papua New Guinea make up an island about 1,900 miles away from Borneo, so it’s not a close neighbor by any means, but it is part of the same archipelago. During the ice ages of the Pleistocene, when so much of the world’s water was locked up in glacial sheets and the sea levels were therefore much lower, the 25,000 or so islands that make up the Malay Archipelago were connected to each other and to the Asian mainland. When the oceans rose again some 18,000 years ago animals were stranded on the islands and have since either died out or adapted to their smaller territories. Who knows what secrets these little pockets of the ancient world may still hide?

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, give us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a PAYtreon if you’d like to support us that way. Rewards include exclusive twice-monthly episodes and stickers.

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Episode 011: The Vampire Squid and the Vampire Bat

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This week we’re going all goth in April for the vampire squid and the vampire bat. They’re so awesome I want to die.

The vampire squid looking all menacing even though it’s barely a foot long.

“I love you, vampire bat!!” “I love you too, Kate.”

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Show transcript:

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

I thought about waiting to run this episode in October, but that’s a really long way away. So we’ll have Halloween in April and talk about the vampire squid and the vampire bat.

The vampire squid has one of the coolest Latin names going, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which means “vampire squid from hell.” It’s a deep-sea squid and until recently, not a lot was known about it. It was discovered in 1903 and originally classified as an octopus. Its body is about six inches long [15 cm], with another six inches or so of tentacles, which are connected with webbing called a cloak. Actually I’m not sure if scientists refer to this as a cloak, but if you’ve called your animal the vampire squid from hell, you can’t complain if podcasters, for instance, refer to web-connected octopus legs as a cloak.

So is it an octopus or a squid? It’s both, in a way. The vampire squid is the last surviving member of its own order, Vampyromorphida, which shares similarities with both.

The vampire squid’s color varies from deep red to velvety black. The inside of its cloak is black and the parts of its legs inside the cloak are studded with spines. Its beak is white. Basically the only thing this little guy needs to be the world’s ultimate goth is a collection of Morrissey albums.

It lives in the lightless depths of the ocean below 3,000 feet [914 meters]. There’s not a lot of oxygen down there so there aren’t very many predators. The vampire squid doesn’t need oxygen because it’s a vampire—or at least it can live and breathe just fine with oxygen saturations as little as 3%. Its metabolic rate is the lowest of any cephalopod.

The vampire squid doesn’t move a lot. It drifts gently, aided in buoyance because its gelatinous tissues are roughly the same density as seawater. Adults have two small fins sticking out from their mantle, which they flap to propel them through the water.

If something threatens a vampire squid, it brings its legs up to expose the spiny insides of its cloak and hide its body. If something really threatens a vampire squid, even though it doesn’t have ink sacs, it can eject a cloud of bioluminescent mucus, and can flash its photophores in a dazzling display of lights. These photophores are concentrated on the outside tips of its arms. If the end of an arm is bitten off, the vampire squid can regenerate it.

So we have a creepy-looking, if small, cephalopod that lives in the deep, deep sea called a vampire squid. WHAT. DOES. IT. EAT?

I hate to disappoint you, but the vampire squid eats crap. In fact, it eats the crap of animals that eat crap. There’s not a lot of food in the ocean depths. Mostly there’s just a constant rain of fish poop, algae, bits of scales and jellyfish, and other waste. Lots of little creatures live on this stuff and their poop joins the rain of barely-food that makes it down to the abyssal depths where the vampire squid waits.

The squid had two retractable filaments—not the same thing as the two feeding tentacles true squids have, but used for feeding. The filaments are extremely long, much longer than the vampire squid itself. It extends the filaments, organic detritus falls from above and sticks to them, and the vampire squid rolls the detritus up with mucus from its arm tentacles into little sticky balls and pops the balls into its mouth.

That’s not very goth. Or it might be incredibly goth, actually.

Most cephalopods only spawn once before they die. A 2015 paper in Current Biology reports that the vampire squid appears to go through multiple spawning phases throughout its life. It may live for a long time too, but we don’t know for sure. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the vampire squid.

Because squids and octopuses are soft bodied, we rarely find them in the fossil record. In 1982, though, a beautifully preserved octopus body impression was found in France in rocks dating to 165 million years ago. And guess what kind of octopus it turned out to be! Yes, it’s related to the vampire squid.

If the vampire squid is the kind of pensive goth who listens to The Smiths and reads Poe in cemeteries, the vampire bat is out clubbing with its friends, blasting Combichrist, and spending its allowance in thrift shops. There are three species of vampire bat, but they’re different enough from each other that each belongs to its own genus. They’re native to the Americas, especially tropical and subtropical environments, although they haven’t been found any further north than Mexico. And yes, vampire bats do actually feed on blood. It’s all they eat.

Vampire bats are small, active, and lightweight. They’re only about 3 ½ inches long [9cm] with a 7-inch wingspan [18 cm], and weigh less than two ounces [57 grams]. They live in colonies that consist of big family groups: a small number of males and many more females and their babies. Males without a colony hang out together and probably never clean up their apartments.

Vampire bats belong to the leaf-nosed bat family, and like other leaf-nosed bats they sleep during the day and hunt at night. But the vampire bat doesn’t actually have a nose leaf. That’s a structure that aids with echolocation, and vampire bats don’t need the high level echolocation ability that insect-eating bats do. They get by with a reduced ability to echolocate, but they have another highly developed sense that no other mammal has: thermoreception. They use it to determine the best place to bite their prey. The warmer, the better. That’s where the blood is.

The vampire bat also has good eyesight, a good sense of smell, and hearing that’s attuned to the sound of breathing. A bat frequently remembers the sound of an individual animal’s breathing, and returns to it to feed night after night. What vampire bats don’t have is a very good sense of taste. They don’t really need it. In fact, they don’t have the kind of bad food avoidance that every other mammal has. In a study where vampire bats were given blood with a compound that tasted bad and made them throw up, the next time they were offered the bad-tasting blood, they ate it anyway.

Most bats are clumsy on the ground. They’re built for flying and for hanging from perches. But vampire bats are agile. They crawl around and even run and jump with no problems.

Two species of vampire bat prey mainly on birds, while the third—the common vampire bat—feeds on mammals. Bird blood has a much higher fat content than mammal blood, which is higher in protein. But results of a study released in January 2017 found that hairy-legged vampire bats, which usually prey on large wild birds, had started feeding on domestic chickens as their wild prey became scarcer—and then they started feeding on human blood.

A vampire bat doesn’t suck blood. It makes a small incision with extremely sharp fangs and laps up the blood with its grooved tongue. It may even trim hair from the bite site first with its teeth. Its saliva contains an anti-coagulate called draculin that keeps the blood flowing. The bat doesn’t eat much, because let’s face it, it’s just a little guy. In order to hold more blood, as soon as it starts to feed its digestion goes into overdrive. Within some two minutes after it starts to eat, the bat is ready to urinate in order to get rid of the extra fluid so it can hold more blood. A feeding session may last about 20 minutes if the bat isn’t disturbed, and the bat may drink about an ounce of blood in all.

A vampire bat needs to eat at least every two days or it will starve. A bat that hasn’t found prey in two nights will beg for food from its colony mates, which often regurgitate a little blood for the hungry bat to eat. New mother bats may be fed this way by her colony for as much as two weeks after she’s given birth so that she doesn’t have to hunt. Baby vampire bats drink their mother’s milk just like any other mammal.

If a mother bat doesn’t return from hunting, other colony members will take care of her baby so it won’t die. Colony members groom each other and are generally very social. Even the male bats that aren’t part of the colony are allowed to roost nearby. Nobody fights over territory. These are nice little guys.

Vampire bats do sometimes carry rabies, but it’s pretty rare compared to infection rates in dogs. They are more dangerous to livestock than to humans. Attempts to kill off vampire bat colonies to stop the spread of rabies actually has the opposite effect, since bats from a disturbed colony will seek out another colony to join.

Vampire bats have considerable resistance to rabies and frequently recover from the disease, after which they’re immune to reinfection, and there’s some preliminary evidence to suggest that native human populations in areas where vampire bats are common may also have developed some resistance to rabies. Researchers hope that this finding will lead to better treatment of rabies in the same way that the draculin anticoagulant in vampire bat saliva led to advances in blood-thinning medications.

I like to imagine a vampire bat hanging out with a vampire squid. The bat would sip blood from a tiny wineglass and fidget with its jewelry while it tries to conversation. The squid would just stare at the bat. Then it would eat a globule of crap. The bat would pee on itself and the whole evening would just be a bust. Also, one of them would drown but if I can imagine a tiny wineglass I can imagine a tiny bat-sized bathysphere or something. Never mind.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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 and get twice-monthly bonus episodes for as little as one dollar a month.

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Episode 010: Electric Animals

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This week’s episode is about electric animals! There are so many of them that I could only touch on the highlights.

We start with the electric eel. It’s not actually an eel but it is most definitely electric. This one has just read some disturbing fanfic:

The oriental hornet is a living solar panel:

The platypus’s bill is packed with electricity sensors. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried:

Amphisbaenids are not electric AS FAR AS WE KNOW. Bzzt.

Thanks for listening! We now have a Patreon if you’d like to subscribe! Rewards include patron-only episodes and stickers!

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re looking at electric animals! You’ve probably heard of the electric eel, but you may not know there are a lot of fish, insects, and even a few mammals that can sense or generate electric impulses. This is a re-record of the original episode with some updated information.

All animals generate electric fields in their nerves and the contracting of muscles. Animals that can sense these fields are called electroreceptive. An electroreceptive animal can find hidden prey without using its other senses.

To take that a step further, many electroreceptive animals can also generate weak electrical fields, usually less than a single volt—small electrical pulses or a sort of wave, depending on the species, that can give them information about their environment. Like a dolphin using echolocation, a fish using electro-location can sense where potential prey is, where predators, plants, and rocks are, and can even communicate with other fish of its same species. Of course, those same electric pulses can also attract electroreceptive predators. It’s hard being a fish.

But in some cases, the animal can generate an electric shock so strong it can stun or kill other animals. The most famous is the electric eel, so let’s start with that one.

The electric eel isn’t actually an eel. It’s a type of knife-fish related to carp and catfish. Some other species of knife-fish generate electric fields, but the electric eel is the only one that uses it as a weapon.

The electric eel is a weird fish even without the electric part. It can grow over eight feet long, or 2.5 m, lives in freshwater in South America, and gets most of its oxygen by breathing air at the surface of the water instead of through its gills. It has to surface for air about every ten minutes or it will drown. That’s a weird habit for a fish, but it makes sense when you consider that many electric eels live in shallow streams or floodplains with a tendency to dry up between rains. Oh, and electric eels frequently swim backwards.

A male electric eel makes a foam nest for females with his spit, and the female lays her eggs in it—as many as 17,000 eggs, although 1,200 is more common. The male defends the nest and hatchlings until the rainy season starts and the young electric eels can swim off on their own.

The electric eel has rows of some 6,000 specialized cells, called electrocytes, that act like batteries to store energy. When all the electrocytes discharge at the same time, the resulting shock can be as much as 860 volts, although it’s only delivered at about one amp. I have no idea what that means because I don’t understand electricity.

Since the electrocytes are all found in the animal’s tail, and electric eels are mostly tail, the fish will sometimes curl up and hold its prey against its tail to increase the shock it receives. This honestly sounds like something a villain from a superhero movie would do. The electric eel will also sometimes leap out of the water to shock an animal it perceives as a threat.

You do not want to be in the water when an electric eel discharges. It probably won’t kill you unless you have a heart problem, but it could stun you long enough that you drown. And if more than one electric eel discharges at the same time, the danger increases. There’s a River Monsters episode about electric eels that shows a whole bunch of them in water so shallow that they’re barely covered. Walking through that pond would probably be deadly. I also really love that show.

How does the electric eel not shock itself? Well, it probably does. All of its vital organs are in the front fifth of its body, and well insulated by thick skin and a layer of fat. But its discharges are extremely fast. Think taser, not sticking a fork in a wall socket, which by the way is something you should not do. The charge naturally travels away from its tail and into the nearest object, usually its prey.

There are three known species of electric eel, all of which live in the Amazon basin in South America. Two of the three species were only identified in 2019 after DNA studies of 107 specimens. One of the new species, Electrophorus voltai, can discharge up to 860 volts of electricity, higher than the well-known E. electricus. Researchers think E. voltai has evolved to generate higher jolts because it lives in the highlands of the Brazilian Shield, where the water is clear and doesn’t conduct electricity as well as the mineral-rich water in other electric eel habitats.

One last thing about the electric eel. It can shock people who touch it up to eight hours after it dies.

Most electric animals are fish since water conducts electricity well. Some other notable electric fish are the stargazer, a venomous bottom-dwelling ocean fish that generates shocks from modified eye muscles; the paddlefish; the electric catfish; and of course sharks.

Sharks are the kings of electroreceptive animals. Some sharks can sense voltage fluctuations of ten millionths of a volt. Sharks only sense electricity; they can’t generate it. But some of their cousins, the electric rays, can generate an electric shock equivalent to dropping a toaster in a bathtub, which by the way is another thing you shouldn’t do although why would you even have a toaster in the bathroom?

Scientists are only just discovering electric use in insects. It’s probably more widely spread than we suspect, and it’s used in ways that are very different from fish. The oriental hornet, for instance, converts sunlight into energy like a tiny flying solar panel. Researchers think the hornet uses that extra energy for digging its underground nests.

Flying insects generate a positive charge from the movement of air molecules, which is basically what static electricity is. It also happens to moving vehicles, and which is why you should touch the metal of your car to discharge any static electricity before pumping gasoline so you don’t spark a fire. This episode is full of safety tips. In the case of bees, this static charge helps pollen adhere to their bodies. You know, like tiny yellow socks stuck to a shirt you’ve just taken out of the dryer. When a bee lands on a flower, its charge also temporarily changes the electrical status of the flower. Other bees can sense this change and don’t visit the flower since its nectar has already been taken.

Spiderwebs are statoelectrically charged too, which actually draws insects into the web, along with pollen and other tiny air particles. This helps clean the air really effectively, in fact, so if you have allergies you should thank spiders for helping keep the pollen levels down. The webs only become electrically charged because the spider combs and pulls at the thread during the spinning process.

Only three living mammals are known to be electroreceptive. The South American Guiana dolphin has a row of electroreceptors along its beak, visible dots called vibrissal crypts. They’re basically pores where whiskers would have grown, except that marine mammals no longer grow whiskers. The vibrissal crypts are surrounded by nerve endings and contain some specialized cells and proteins. Researchers think the dolphins use electroreception to find fish and other prey animals in murky water when the animals are so close that echolocation isn’t very effective. A lot of toothed whales, including other dolphins, show these dots, and it’s possible that the Guiana dolphin isn’t the only species that is electroreceptive.

The platypus and its cousin the echidna are the other two electric-sensing mammals. These two are both such odd animals that they’re getting their own episode one day—and that episode is # 45! They are weird way beyond being the mammals that lay eggs deal. So I’ll just mention that their bills are packed with electroreceptors. The platypus in particular uses electroreception as its primary means of finding prey in the mud at the bottom of ponds.

There are undoubtedly more animals out there that make use of electrical fields in one way or another. One possible addition to the list, if it exists at all, is called the Mongolian death worm.

Nomadic tribes in the Gobi Desert describe a sausage-like worm over a foot long, or 30 cm, and the thickness of a man’s arm. Its smooth skin is dark red and it has no visible features, not even a mouth, which makes it hard to tell which end is the head and which is the tail. It squirms or rolls to move. It spends most of its life hidden in the sand, but in June and July it emerges, usually after rain, and can kill people and animals at a distance.

In his book The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals, zoologist Karl Shuker discusses the death worm at length, including the possibility that it might be able to give electric shocks under the right conditions. Among the reports he recounts are some that sound very interesting in this regard, including that of a visiting geologist poking an iron rod into the sand, who dropped dead with no warning. A death worm emerged from the place where the geologist had been prodding the sand. I’m going to add “don’t poke an iron rod into the sand of the Gobi Desert” to my list of warnings.

The Gobi is a cold desert and has bitter winters, but it’s still a desert, which means it’s arid, which means the death worm probably isn’t a type of earthworm or amphibian—nothing that needs a lot of moisture to stay alive. On the other hand, two types of earthworms have recently been discovered in the Gobi, and there are a few amphibians, especially frogs, that have evolved to live in areas that don’t receive much rain. In episode 156, about some animals of Mongolia, we talk about the Mongolian death worm again if you want to know a little more. Some parts of the Gobi get more moisture than others and may be where the death worm lives.

Shuker suggests it might be a kind of amphisbaenid. Amphisbaenids are legless lizards that look more like worms than snakes. They move more like worms than snakes too, and spend a lot of their lives burrowing in search of worms or insects. No known species of amphisbaenid can generate electric shocks, but then again, only one of the over 2,000 known species of catfish generates electricity.

It’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that electrogenesis might develop in a reptile, assuming that’s what the death worm is. Sand isn’t a good conductor of electricity, but wet sand is. The death worm might ordinarily use weak electrical pulses to stun its small prey, but if it emerges after rain because its tunnels are temporarily flooded, it might feel vulnerable above ground and be more likely to discharge electrically as a warning when approached.

Of course, as always, until we have a body—until we know for sure that the Mongolian death worm is a real animal and not a folktale, we can’t do more than speculate. But it is interesting to think about.

As far as I can find, no living reptiles or birds show any electrical abilities akin to those in fish and other aquatic animals. But electroreceptors in fish were only discovered in the 1950s. There’s a lot we still don’t know. Always another mystery to solve!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online 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 and get twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!