Category Archives: South America

Episode 152: The Freshwater Seahorse and Other Mystery Water Animals

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:38 — 15.9MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week let’s look at some (mostly) smaller mystery animals associated with water! Thanks to Richard J., Janice, and Simon for the suggestions!

Further reading:

What Was the Montauk Monster?

The black-striped pipefish. Also, that guy has REALLY BIG FINGERTIPS:

The Pondicherry shark, not looking very happy:

A ratfish. What BIG EYES you have!

The hoodwinker sunfish, weird and serene:

The Montauk monster, looking very sad and dead:

Show transcript:

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

Let’s finish off the year with an episode about a few mystery animals, specifically a few mystery animals associated with water. Thanks to Richard, Janice, and Simon for the suggestions!

We’ll start off with a mystery suggested by Richard J, but not the Richard J. who is my brother. A different Richard J. Apparently half the people who listen to my podcast are named Richard, and that’s just fine with me.

Richard wanted to know if there are there such things as freshwater seahorses. We’ve talked about seahorses before in episode 130, but seahorses are definitely marine animals. That means they only live in the ocean. But Richard said he’d heard about a population of seahorses native to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, which is in South America. I put it on my suggestions list, but Richard was on the case. He sent me a link to an article looking into the mystery, which got me really intrigued, so I bumped it to the top of my list. Because I can do that. It’s my podcast.

Freshwater seahorses are supposedly known in the Mekong River and in Lake Titicaca, and sometimes you’ll see reference to the scientific name Hippocampus titicacanesis. But that’s actually not an official scientific name. There’s no type specimen and no published description. Hippocampus is the generic name for many seahorse species, but like I said, they’re all marine animals and there’s no evidence that any live in freshwater at all. Another scientific name supposedly used for the Mekong freshwater seahorse is Hippocampus aimei, but that’s a rejected name for a seahorse named Hippocampus spinosissimus, the hedgehog seahorse. It does live in parts of the Indo-Pacific Ocean, including around Australia, especially in coral reefs, and sometimes in the brackish water at the Mekong River’s mouth, but not in fresh water.

On the other hand, there’s no reason why a seahorse couldn’t adapt to freshwater living. A few of its close relatives have. There are a few species of freshwater pipefish, and in the world of aquarium enthusiasts they are actually sometimes called freshwater seahorses. The pipefish looks like a seahorse that’s been straightened out, and most of them are marine animals. But some have adapted to freshwater habitats.

This includes the black-striped pipefish, which is found off the coasts of much of Europe but which also lives in the mouths of rivers. At some point it got introduced into the Volga River and liked it so much it has started to expand into other freshwater lakes and rivers in Europe.

The pipefish is closely related to the seahorse, but while it does have bony plates like a seahorse, it’s a flexible fish. It swims more like a snake than a fish, and it can anchor itself to vegetation just like a seahorse by wrapping its tail around it. It mostly eats tiny crustaceans and newly hatched fish, since it swallows its food whole. It usually hides in vegetation until a tiny animal swims near, and then it uses its tube-shaped mouth like a straw to suck in water along with the animal. Just like the seahorse, the male pipefish has a brooding pouch and takes care of the eggs after the female deposits them in his pouch.

So where did the rumor that seahorses live in the Mekong come from? The Mekong is a river in southeast Asia that runs through at least six countries, including China, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Parts of it are hard to navigate due to waterfalls and rapids, but it’s used as a shipping route and there are lots of people who live along the river. Like all rivers, it’s home to many interesting animals, including a type of giant softshell turtle that can grow up to six feet long, or 1.8 meters, a type of otter, a bunch of enormous fish, including three species of catfish that can grow up to almost ten feet long, or 3 meters, and a giant freshwater stingray that can grow up to 16 feet long, or 5 meters, and of course lots more animals that aren’t as big or as impressive, but which are still important to the river’s biodiversity. But there’s no evidence of seahorses anywhere throughout the Mekong’s 2700 mile length, or 4,350 km.

But there is a hint about where the rumor of a Mekong seahorse could have come from. One researcher named Heiko Bleher chased down the type specimens of the supposed Mekong seahorse in a Paris museum, which were collected in the early 20th century by a man named Roule. Roule got them in Laos from a fisherman who had nailed the dried seahorses to his fishing hut. The fisherman told Roule the seahorses were from the Mekong, but when they were further studied in 1999 Roule’s specimens were discovered to actually be specimens of Hippocampus spinosissimus and Hippocampus barbouri. Both are marine fish but do sometimes live in brackish water at the mouth of the Mekong. So the fisherman wasn’t lying, but Roule misunderstood what he meant.

As for the freshwater seahorse supposedly found in Lake Titicaca, that one’s less easy to explain. Titicaca is a freshwater lake in South America, specifically in the Andes Mountains on the border of Bolivia and Peru. It’s the largest lake in South America and is far, far above the ocean’s surface—12,507 feet above sea level, in fact, or 3,812 meters. It’s also extremely deep, 932 feet deep in some areas, or 284 meters. It’s home to many species of animal that live nowhere else in the world. Why couldn’t it be home to a freshwater seahorse too?

Titicaca was formed when a massive earthquake some 25 million years ago essentially shoved two mountains apart, leaving a gap—although technically it’s two gaps connected with a narrow strait. Over the centuries rainwater, snowmelt, and streams gradually filled the gaps, and these days five rivers and many streams from higher in the mountains feed water into the lake. Water leaves the lake by the River Desaguadero and flows into two other lakes, but those lakes aren’t connected to the sea. Sometimes they dry up completely. So Titicaca isn’t connected to the ocean and never was, and even if it was, seahorses are weak swimmers and would never be able to venture up a river 12,000 feet above sea level. Some 90% of all fish in the lake are found nowhere else in the world. There’s just simply no way a population of seahorses could have gotten into the lake in the first place, even if they could survive there.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any freshwater seahorses out there ready to be discovered, of course. But I don’t think you’re going to find any in Lake Titicaca. And I have no idea how the rumor got started that any live there.

From a tiny seahorse let’s move on to a small shark, another topic suggested by Richard J. The Pondicherry shark grows to about 3.3 feet, or 1 meter, and once lived throughout the Indo-Pacific, especially in coastal waters. It’s considered critically endangered, but it’s so rare these days that we hardly know anything about it except that it’s harmless to humans, eats small fish and other small animals, and was once common. But until the mid-2010s, scientists were starting to worry it was already extinct. Then in 2016 two different Pondicherry sharks were photographed in two different places—and not where anyone had expected to find it. Some tourists took a photo of one in a river called the Menik and a freshwater fish survey camera caught a photo of one in the Kumbuk River. Both rivers are in Sri Lanka. Since then researchers have spotted a few more. The shark is protected, and hopefully the excitement around the shark’s rediscovery has helped people in the area learn about it so they know not to bother it. Some sharks tolerate fresh water and brackish water quite well, so it’s not surprising that the Pondicherry shark has moved into the rivers where it has less competition from commercial fishing boats.

Our next water mystery is actually not really a mystery, just a really strange-looking fish related to sharks. This one was suggested by my aunt Janice who doesn’t actually listen to the podcast but who likes to send me links to strange animal articles that she comes across on the internet. This one is called Chimaera Monstrosa, sometimes called the rat fish.

The rat fish mostly lives in the deep sea, although it’s sometimes seen in shallower water, and can grow up to 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters. It’s mostly brown but has white markings. Its body looks more or less like a regular plump shark-like fish, but it has great big round green eyes, relatively long pectoral fins, and a very long tail that tapers to a point. The tail gives it its common name, since it kind of resembles a rat’s tail. It eats whatever it can catch on the ocean floor, including crustaceans and echinoderms.

Ratfish, and other chimaeriformes, are most closely related to sharks, and like sharks they have skeletons that are made of cartilage instead of bone. Since they’re rarely seen and look really weird, every so often someone catches one and posts about it online, and then my aunt sends me a link. They are really interesting fish, though.

Simon also sent me an article about an interesting fish a while back, the hoodwinker sunfish. We talked about the sunfish, or mola mola, in episode 96. The hoodwinker sunfish, or mola tecta, was only discovered in 2017 despite its large size. So far it’s known to live in the South Pacific around New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and Chile, but only off the southernmost parts of those countries. But in early 2019 one washed up in Southern California.

The mystery sunfish was measured at almost 7 feet long, or 2.1 meters. An intern at the University of California at Santa Barbara found it, but didn’t know what it was. But once photos of the fish were posted online, two experts from Australia recognized it immediately—but because it showed up so far out of its known range, they were cautious about IDing it from just a photo. That’s despite the fact that one of the experts, Marianne Nyegaard, was actually the person who named the species. She asked for samples and more photos, and when she got the results, it really was a hoodwinker sunfish. But what was it doing in the warm waters of the northern Pacific instead of the cold southern waters? No one knows except the sunfish.

Let’s finish with another mystery animal you may have heard of. On July 12 or 13, 2008, depending on which source you consult, three friends visited Ditch Plains Beach, two miles away from the little town of Montauk in New York state in eastern North America. It was a hot day and the beach was crowded, and when the three noticed people gathered around something, they went to look too. There they saw a weird dead animal that had obviously washed ashore. One of the three took a picture of it, which appeared in the local papers and then the local TV news along with an interview with the three. From there it went viral and was dubbed the Montauk monster.

The monster was about the size of a cat, but with shorter legs and a chunkier body, and a relatively short tail. It didn’t have much hair but it did have sharp teeth, and the front part of its skull was exposed so that it almost looked like it had a beak. Its front paws were elongated with long fingers, almost like little hands.

So what was the monster? People all over the world made guesses, everything from a sea turtle without a shell to a diseased dog or just a hoax. Some people thought it was a mutant animal that had been created in a lab on one of the nearby islands, escaped, and died trying to swim to the mainland.

But while no one knows what happened to the animal’s body, scientists have studied the photo and determined that it was probably a dead raccoon that had been washed into the ocean. The waves had tumbled the animal’s body around through the sand long enough to rub off most of its remaining fur and some of its facial features, and then it washed ashore during the next high tide. It was also somewhat bloated due to gases building up inside during decomposition. It’s the animal’s teeth and paws that made the identification possible, since both match a raccoon’s exactly. Remember that raccoons have clever front paws that help them open locking trash bins, as we learned in episode 138.

So the Montauk monster isn’t actually a mystery, except what happened to it, but don’t be discouraged. There are still lots of genuinely mysterious animals in the ocean, from misplaced sunfish to creatures no one has ever seen yet. Maybe you’ll be the one to discover them.

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!

Episode 148: Gastric Brooding and Other Frogs

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:59 — 13.1MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Thanks for Merike for suggesting the gastric brooding frog and to Hally for suggesting newly-discovered frogs!!

The Gastric brooding frog:

Darwin’s frog, round boi:

The Surinam toad carries her eggs and tadpoles in the skin of her back:

Kermit the frog and a newly discovered glass frog:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have another fantastic listener suggestion, about frogs! Merike is a herpetologist from Estonia, who suggested the gastric brooding frog, and another listener, Hally, also wanted to learn about some of the new frog species discovered recently.

The gastric brooding frog is native to eastern Australia, specifically Queensland. There are two species, and both of them live in creeks in separate rainforests. The habitat is specific and small, and unfortunately both species went extinct less than forty years ago. Researchers aren’t sure why they went extinct, but it was probably due to pollution and habitat loss.

The gastric brooding frog was a slender frog, with the northern gastric brooding frog being about three inches long, or about 8 cm, while the southern gastric brooding frog was about half that size. Females were larger than males. It was grey or brown-gray in color with some darker and lighter patches on the back with a lighter belly. During the day it spent most of its time at the water’s edge, hidden in leaf litter or among rocks, although it generally only fully came out of the water when it was raining. It ate insects and may have hibernated in winter.

As you may have guessed from its name, the gastric brooding frog had a unique way of taking care of its eggs. After the eggs were fertilized, the female would actually swallow the eggs and keep them in her stomach while they developed. Even after the eggs hatched into tadpoles, they stayed in the mother’s stomach. As they grew larger, the stomach also grew larger, until it pretty much filled up the mother’s insides, to the point where she couldn’t even use her lungs to breathe. Fortunately many frogs, including the gastric brooding frog, can absorb a certain amount of oxygen through the skin. Finally the tadpoles metamorphosed into little frogs, at which point the mother regurgitated one or a few of them at a time, or sometimes all of them at once if she felt threatened.

So how did the mother keep from digesting her own eggs or tadpoles? How did she eat when her stomach was full of babies? How did the babies eat?

The jelly around the gastric brooding frog’s eggs contained prostaglandin E2, also called PGE2, which causes the stomach to stop producing hydrochloric acid. That’s a digestive acid, so once the eggs were inside the stomach, the stomach basically stopped stomaching. There is some speculation that the first eggs the mother frog swallowed actually got digested, but then the acid production stopped and the rest of the eggs remained. Once the eggs hatched, the tadpoles also produced PGE2 in the mucus in their gills.

The tadpoles continued to live off the yolk sac from their eggs as they developed, and in fact their mouths weren’t even connected to their gut yet. As for the mother, she just didn’t eat until the babies were developed and released into the water on their own, which took about six weeks.

The gastric brooding frog is the only frog known to raise its babies this way, but other frog species have interesting variations of the usual way frogs reproduce. Most female frogs lay their eggs, and then the male fertilizes them. But about a dozen species of frog have developed internal fertilization, where the female retains the eggs in her body until the male fertilizes them. The tailed frog from California in the United States, in North America, gets its name from a structure that looks like a tail, but is actually an extension of the cloaca. That’s the opening used for both excretion and reproduction. Only males have the tail, and it works like a penis to fertilize the female’s eggs without her needing to lay the eggs first. Once they’re fertilized, she can choose just the right spot to lay the eggs.

Another weird way frogs take care of their eggs is something that Darwin’s frog does. Darwin’s frog lives in Chile and Argentina in South America, and grows to a little over an inch long, or 3 cm. It has a pointy snout that gives its head a wedge  shape something like a leaf, which helps keep it camouflaged on the forest floor. The female lays her eggs in damp leaf litter, and after the male fertilizes them he guards them for several weeks. When they start to move as they develop, the male swallows them—but instead of his stomach, he stores them in his vocal sac. That’s the expandable sac in the frog’s throat that males use to make their croaking sounds by filling the sac with air.

The eggs hatch into tadpoles, which the male carries around as they grow. They live off their egg yolks, but they also eat secretions from the lining of the vocal sac. Once the tadpoles metamorphose into little frogs, they hop out of the male’s mouth and are on their own. Until then, the male doesn’t eat.

The Surinam toad is a species of frog. Remember that all toads are frogs but not all frogs are toads. It lives in wetlands and forests in northern South America, and has a radically different way of keeping its eggs safe. The Surinam toad is a flattened, broad toad that can grow up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm, and looks a lot like a dead leaf. It lives in slow-moving water. Unlike other frogs it doesn’t have a tongue, so instead of catching insects with its sticky tongue, it grabs them with its hands. It’s sometimes called the star-fingered toad because its long, thin fingers have tiny star-shaped appendages that help it catch prey. Instead of croaking, male Surinam toads make a clicking noise by moving a small bone in the throat back and forth.

When the female is ready to lay her eggs, a male clasps her around the middle like most frogs do while mating. But instead of just releasing her eggs and letting the male release sperm to fertilize them, the female makes a sort of flipping movement in the water as she releases a few eggs at a time. The male fertilizes them, then presses them onto her back. The skin of the female’s back grows up over the eggs, embedding them in the skin in little pockets. When the tadpoles hatch they stay in these little pockets as they develop. They only leave when they’ve metamorphosed into tiny toads, at which point they emerge and live on their own. The mother then sheds the layer of skin on her back where her babies lived.

A frog described in 2014 that lives in parts of South Asia gives birth to tadpoles instead of laying eggs. It’s a species of fanged frog, which are frogs that do actually have teeth unlike most frogs. Limnonectes larvaepartus grows about 1 ½ inches long, or just under 4 cm. The eggs are fertilized internally, but instead of laying them the female keeps them in her oviducts until they hatch. They remain inside her until they no longer have any yolk left to nourish them, at which point the mother releases them into a slow-moving stream.

Lots of other interesting frogs have been discovered recently. A new frog discovered in southern India in 2018 was recently determined to be a member of its own genus. It’s called the narrow-mouthed frog and had gone unnoticed even though it lives in an area that’s been extensively explored by scientists. It only comes out into the open for less than one week out of the year during the short breeding season, and the rest of the time it hides. Obviously, we don’t know much about it yet.

In 2016 in the same area as the narrow-mouthed frog, researchers discovered a new species of frog with a tadpole that burrows through sand. It’s a member of the Indian dancing frog family, and not only do the tadpoles burrow through wet sand at the bottom of streams, they have ribs that help them move around more easily. Tadpoles are usually just squidges without bones. Dancing frogs get that name because the males wave their feet to attract females during mating season.

There are so many recently discovered frog species that it’s hard to know which ones to highlight. You know, like the new glass frog from Costa Rica described in 2015 that honestly looks just like Kermit the Frog, if Kermit had a translucent belly that showed his organs. Scientists don’t know why glass frogs have no pigmentation at all on their bellies. Or the three tiny frog species discovered in Madagascar and described earlier in 2019, all of them smaller than your thumbnail, that belong to a new genus, Mini. Their scientific names are therefore Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini ature. The three are related to one of Madagascar’s biggest frogs, which grows over four inches long, or 10.5 cm, as opposed to the Mini frogs which top out at about 15 mm long. Hally sent me an article about eleven new species of frog discovered recently in the Andes, including the multicolored rain frog. It’s sometimes yellow, sometimes brown, sometimes green, speckled, splotched, spotted–so variable that at first scientists thought they were different related species. All eleven of the Andes frogs lay their eggs on land, and instead of hatching into tadpoles the eggs hatch into tiny froglets.

Frogs and other amphibians are sensitive to environmental change, which means a lot of species have either recently gone extinct or are critically endangered. Habitat loss and an amphibian fungal disease that has spread around the world are also making things hard for frogs and their relations. Scientists have been working hard lately to find species that are rare, suspected to be extinct, or are unknown to science, to learn about them while we can and do our best to preserve the species, either in the wild or in captivity. There are even multiple genetic resource banks, or biobanks, to preserve genetic material of frogs and other animals so that future scientists might be able to clone them.

There’s always the possibility that the gastric brooding frog isn’t actually extinct. The southern gastric brooding frog hasn’t been seen since at least 1981 despite extensive searches, though, with the last captive individual dying in 1983. The northern gastric brooding frog was only discovered in 1984 but hasn’t been seen since 1985.

But even if there aren’t any left in the wild, all hope isn’t lost. The gastric brooding frog is a good candidate for de-extinction, and cloning has actually been successful to a limited degree already. In 2013 a living embryo was produced from preserved genetic material, although it didn’t survive. Researchers are still working to clone the frogs and keep them alive. With luck the attempt will be successful, and not only can a population of the frogs be kept in captivity, they can be reintroduced to their former habitat one day.

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 if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 139: Skunks and Other Stinkers

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:17 — 14.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week we’re commemorating my HOUSE getting SKUNKED by a SKUNK and it was STINKY

The skunk, stinky but adorkable, especially when it’s eating yellow jackets:

The stink badger looks like a shaved skunk with a bobbed tail:

The zorilla wants to be your stinky friend:

A woodhoopoe, most magnificent:

A Eurasian hoopoe, looking snazzy:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some animals that are infamous for their stinkiness. This wasn’t the topic I had planned on for this week, but last week my house got skunked. That is, a skunk sprayed an animal very close to my house, which means I woke up at 4:45am gagging from the smell of point-blank skunk odor. And this was with the windows closed and the air conditioning going. It was so bad I thought I would throw up, so I yanked on my clothes, grabbed my purse, and fled the house at 5:30am. I went to work early—don’t worry, I got coffee on the way—and spent the whole day smelling skunk faintly where the smell clung to my hair and, oddly, my phone case. Also I spent the whole day complaining to my coworkers.

Fortunately, when I got home the smell had dissipated somewhat, so I opened all the windows and doors and by the next morning it was mostly gone. But it got me wondering why skunk spray smells so, so bad and how many other stinky animals are out there.

The skunk is native to North and South America, although there are two species of related animals that live in some of the islands of the Malay Archipelago, called stink badgers. No seriously, that’s really what they’re called. Skunks and stink badgers are related to actual badgers and to weasels, but not closely.

The stink badger is black or dark brown with a white stripe that runs from its head down the back of its neck and along its spine, and finishes at its little short tuft of a tail. The skunk is black or dark brown with one or two white stripes or white spots, depending on the species, which continues down its long fluffy tail. In all cases, though, these stinky animals are vividly patterned with dark fur and bright white markings as a warning to other animals. Do not get too close or there’s a world of stink coming your way. Also, I can verify from my own experience that the white markings of a skunk make it much easier to see in the darkness and therefore avoid. Since the skunk is crepuscular, meaning it’s most active around dusk and dawn, that’s important. The stink badger is more nocturnal than the skunk.

Both the skunk and the stink badger have relatively short legs with sharp claws. Both are relatively small, about the size of a cat. Both are also good diggers and spend the daytime asleep in their burrows. In winter the skunk doesn’t hibernate but it does stay in its burrow more, spending most of its time asleep. This is the best way to deal with winter cold, if you ask me.

Female skunks share a den in the winter but males are usually solitary. This means the females retain a higher amount of body fat when the weather warms up, since they didn’t need to burn that fat to keep themselves warm. Researchers think this helps the females stay in better condition for a spring pregnancy. Meanwhile, males are skinnier at the beginning of the winter but by staying alone they’re less likely to contract disease or parasites.

Mating season for skunks is in spring and babies are born in early summer. They mostly stay in the burrow for about two months, then start accompanying their mother when she goes out foraging. The mother is really protective of her babies and will spray any animal that approaches.

Although the skunk can hear and smell well, it has poor vision. That’s why so many are killed by cars. The skunk’s biggest predator is the great horned owl, because owls don’t have much of a sense of smell and don’t care about being sprayed.

The skunk and the stink badger are both omnivorous and will dig up grubs and earthworms, will sometimes eat carrion, and also eat frogs, crustaceans, and other small animals, leaves and other plant parts, especially berries and nuts, and insects. The skunk especially likes bees. It has thick fur that helps protect it from stings, and will eat all the bees it can catch.

The skunk also eats other stinging insects, including the dreaded yellow jacket. That’s a type of wasp that’s common where I live, with incredibly painful stings. A few years ago I noticed a yellow jacket nest in the ground behind my garage, and that night when the yellow jackets were asleep I carefully trimmed the long grass around the nest opening to see how extensive it was. Then I made a mental note to get some yellow jacket poison the following day. When I went back out to deal with the nest the next night, it was gone. A skunk had discovered it, probably because I’d exposed it by trimming back the grass, and had dug the whole nest up to eat the yellow jackets. There wasn’t a single one left. Ever since I have been lowkey fond of skunks, although I do wish they wouldn’t spray so close to my house.

So what is skunk spray and why is it so stinky? The skunk has two anal glands that contain an oily liquid made up of sulfurous chemical compounds. If a skunk feels threatened, it will raise its tail and fluff it out as a warning. It may also hiss, stomp its feet, and pretend to charge its potential attacker. The skunk doesn’t actually want to spray if it can avoid it, though. Its anal glands only hold enough of the oil to spray a few times, and when the skunk runs out it can’t spray again for almost two weeks. But if its warnings don’t work, it will use muscles to contract the glands and spray the oily liquid more than ten feet, or 3 meters.

If you’ve only ever smelled skunk spray in the distance, you may not think it’s so bad. But the smell is horrific up close, strong enough to induce vomiting, and it can cause irritation to the skin or even temporary blindness if it gets in the eyes. And the skunk is really accurate when spraying, aiming at the face. Not only that, because it’s an oil, the spray clings to skin, hair, or fur, and it won’t just wash off. It can literally take weeks to wear off normally. If your clothes get sprayed, or your dog’s collar, the smell will never come out and you will have to throw the clothes away.

Domestic dogs get sprayed by skunks a lot. Some dogs just never learn. I once had a cat who was sprayed by a skunk too. You may have heard that you can remove the smell by washing your pet in tomato juice, but this actually doesn’t work. I asked a veterinarian how to clean up my cat, and this is what she told me. This worked great, by the way.

Mix hydrogen peroxide about half and half with warm water and add about a spoonful of dishwashing liquid. Rub the mixture into the fur thoroughly, making sure to work it in well right down to the skin. If you can tell where the spray is, concentrate on that part. Do your best not to get the mixture into your pet’s eyes, and make sure to use good warm water. Part of the reason animals hate getting bathed is because they get cold really easily once their fur is wet, so using really warm water helps. Then rinse your pet thoroughly, making sure to get all the soap out so they won’t get itchy. You may need to mix up another batch of the hydrogen peroxide, water, and soap and give the stinkiest areas another wash. After you’ve rinsed your pet thoroughly, wrap them up in a towel and gently squeeze as much of the water out of the fur as you can. Then make sure you have a dry towel to put in your pet’s bed or basket or wherever it wants to hide after its horrible bath.

In July of 2019 a research team published a report about a type of fungus that makes a chemical called pericosine A that neutralizes noxious chemicals. The researchers tested pericosine on skunk spray and discovered that it neutralized the smell harmlessly. So it’s probably just a matter of time before pericosine is marketed to veterinarians to help pet owners. Let’s hope so.

Even skunks don’t like to be sprayed, incidentally. Males fight each other during mating season and will sometimes spray each other. A skunk reacts like any other animal when it gets sprayed.

The zorilla is another stinky animal related to the skunk, although it lives in parts of Africa. It’s brown with white markings and is sometimes called the striped polecat or African skunk. It’s about the same size as a skunk or stink badger and looks and acts very similar, although it’s a carnivore and much more social than the skunk. It’s also related to the honey badger, which we talked about in episode 62. If you remember, the honey badger is also black with a broad white or silvery stripe down its back, and it can invert its anal sacs and discharge a stinky oil, although it doesn’t spray like a skunk.

It’s not really surprising that all these animals are related, since most members of the weasel family, known as mustelids, have anal scent glands that produce a strong odor. Most species just use the glands to mark their territory, though.

But are there animals who spray like skunks but aren’t related to the skunk? Many animals have anal glands for marking territory, and if threatened some animals will empty the anal glands as a form as defense. The king ratsnake will sometimes do this, as will the lesser anteater, the opossum, and others.

But there’s another animal that actually sprays a smelly substance for defense, and it’s not one you’d expect. It’s a bird called the hoopoe, along with its relative the woodhoopoe.

The woodhoopoe lives in woods, savannah, and rainforests of Africa. It looks something like a cuckoo, with a very long tail marked with white spots. It’s mostly a metallic black in color, although some species have markings in other colors. Males have longer, more curved bills than females because they eat larger insects that live in bark and rotten wood while females eat smaller insects that live mostly on leaves. In this way, mated pairs don’t compete with each other for food.

The hoopoe lives across Eurasia and parts of Africa, and while it’s related to the woodhoopoe, it looks very different. It has a long crest that it can raise and lower like a crown, and it’s a pretty tan or brown color with black and white markings. Both males and females have long, slightly curved bills that they use to catch insects and other small animals.

Female hoopoes and woodhoopoes are picky about nesting spots. The female likes to nest in dead trees in rotting wood, or sometimes in a gap in a rock wall. The female incubates her eggs alone. But animals find dead trees and crumbling walls easy to climb, so to protect her nest the female can spray a foul-smelling liquid from the gland that most birds just use to secrete preening oil. This is the case for the female hoopoe and woodhoopoe too most of the time, but after she lays her eggs the gland becomes weaponized. Not only that, when the babies hatch, they develop the same gland. The female rubs the stinky oil on her babies and on the nest to deter predators, and researchers think it may also deter parasites. If an animal approaches the nest anyway, the female can spray the oil at it. And if the female is off catching food for her babies, the babies will hiss, peck, and squirt liquid poop at the predator. At that point, most predators probably just decide to go hunt something else. After they clean up.

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 if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 133: The mangrove killifish and the unicorn pig

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:05 — 8.1MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week’s (short) episode is about two animals that should have been in the strangest small fish and weird pigs episodes, respectively. I left them out by accident but they’re so interesting that they deserve an episode all to themselves anyway. Thanks to Adam for suggesting the mangrove killifish!

Further reading:

25 Years in the Mud: How a Quirky Little Fish Changed My Life

The mangrove killifish just looks normal:

Not a unicorn pig (okay yes technically a unicorn pig):

Unicorn pig skull:

Show transcript:

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

A few weeks ago we had an episode about strange small fish. Shortly after that episode released, I was going through my disorganized ideas and suggestions file and realized I’d left out one of the best weird small fish ever, a suggestion by Adam. I also discovered I’d missed an extinct pig I’d planned to include in the recent weird pigs episode. So let’s play catch up in a short episode and learn about both this week.

The fish Adam suggests is called the mangrove killifish, also called the mangrove rivulus, which lives in parts of Florida and Mexico, down to Central and South America. It’s technically a marine fish, meaning it lives in salt-water, but it also likes brackish water, that’s less salty than the ocean, and occasionally it even lives in freshwater. It especially likes mangrove swamps. It grows up to 3 inches long, or 7.5 cm and is a mottled brown in color with an eye spot on its tail. It doesn’t look like anything special.

But the mangrove killifish has a lot in common with amphibians, especially the lungless salamanders. Many types of salamander absorb air through the skin instead of through lungs or gills. The mangrove killifish does this too. It often lives in abandoned crab holes, which may not have very high quality water. But that’s okay, because it can absorb air through its skin and can live out of the water for well over a month as long as its skin stays damp. It’s sometimes found in places where you wouldn’t expect to find a fish, like the inside of rotting logs or buried in damp dead leaves.

So how does the killifish get into the rotting logs or the leaf litter or the crab burrows that aren’t connected to waterways? It actually uses its tail to flip itself out of the water and onto land, and then it continues to flip here and there until it finds a place where it wants to live for a while. It can direct this jumping, not just flop around like most fish out of water, and can jump several times its own length.

A lot of times when the tide goes out, fish get trapped in crab holes, dimples in the sand or mud, and other shallow water. That’s okay if the tide comes back in far enough to re-submerge the holes, but if the water doesn’t quite reach, it’s not long before fish start to suffocate as all the oxygen in the water is used up. But the killifish doesn’t have that problem. It just flips itself out of the water. It can also leave the water if it gets too hot.

The killifish is also territorial in water, which requires a lot of energy. When it’s out of the water, or in a little temporary pool or a crab burrow where it doesn’t have to worry about other killifish, it can relax. On the other hand, it loses a lot of weight while it’s out of the water since it doesn’t eat as much. So there are trade-offs.

Even the killifish’s eggs can survive out of water. The fish usually lays its eggs in shallow water, sometimes even on land that’s just near water. The eggs continue to develop just fine, in or out of water, but they delay hatching until they’re submerged.

And that leads us to the most astonishing thing about the mangrove killifish. In most populations, almost all killifish are females, and most of the time they don’t need a male fish to fertilize their eggs. Females produce eggs but they also produce sperm that fertilize the eggs before they’re even laid. The eggs hatch into genetic duplicates of the parent—clones, basically. The term for an organism that produces both eggs and sperm is hermaphrodite, and while it’s common in some invertebrates, the killifish is the only known vertebrate hermaphrodite. Vertebrate, of course, is an animal with a backbone.

But while most killifish are females, there are occasionally males. Male killifish are orangey in color. When a male is around, females suppress their ability to self-fertilize eggs and they lay the eggs for the male to fertilize, just like any other fish. This helps keep the species genetically diverse and able to adapt to external pressures like increased numbers of parasites.

Next, let’s talk about the unicorn pig. Or pigicorn, if you like. It’s called Kubanochoerus [koo-ban-oh-ko-rus] and there were several species. It was related to modern pigs and lived throughout most of Eurasia and parts of Africa around 10 million years ago.

It was big, up to four feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.2 meters, and had tusks like other pigs. It probably looked a lot like a wild boar. But its skull is longer than modern pig skulls and it had horns. Three horns, specifically. Two of the horns were small and grew above the eyes, while a bigger horn grew forward from its forehead. The forehead horn wasn’t very long and was probably blunt. Researchers used to think males used these forehead horns to fight each other, but females had them too so they may also have been used for defense from predators.

That is literally all I can find out about this fascinating animal. I can’t even speculate about the horns since literally no other pig has horns, at least that I can find. Presumably the warty protrusions that many modern pig species have are similar to the horns that Kubanochoerus had. The eyebrow horns might have had the same purpose as the facial protrusions on warthogs and other pigs, as a way to protect the eyes when the pigs fight. The forehead horn, though…well, that’s just weird. It probably wasn’t covered with keratin, but we don’t know. My own guess is that it was something more like an ossicone and was covered with skin and hair. But again, we don’t know. Not until we invent a working time machine and go back to look at one.

That’s it, a very short episode. I’m actually in Dublin, Ireland right now attending WorldCon, so while I’m here I will keep an eye out for leprechauns, fairies, and pigicorns, just in case.

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 if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 127: New World Vultures

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:42 — 19.1MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week we’ll learn about some vultures from North and South America–some living, some extinct, and one mystery! Thanks to Maureen and Grady for their suggestions!

Thanks also to Kat White for the Turkey Vulture Song that opens the podcast! If you’d like to buy her album “In the Eye of the Owl,” visit her website at katwhitemusic.com/

Further listening:

CritterCast episode 35 Turkey Vultures

How to tell a turkey vulture apart from a black vulture:

The king vulture has a very bright head:

The Andean condor soaring:

The painted vulture:

Show transcript:

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

Way back in episode 40 we learned about the bearded vulture and some of its close relatives. This was a suggestion from Maureen, and I always meant to revisit vultures so we could learn about more vulture species. Then Grady wanted to know how long buzzards stay in the sky until they come down for food, and why do they soar for so long? That’s a great question that shows some good observation skills, so let’s go back to vultures and learn more about them.

Those of you listening in Europe may be wondering why I’m talking about buzzards in a vulture episode. That’s because we’re going to learn about new world vultures today, and in North America the general term for a vulture is a buzzard. In Europe, a buzzard is actually a type of eagle.

Before we get into the episode, though, I should mention that the intro music we heard is by Kat White, who was kind enough to let me use a snippet. It’s from the album “In the Eye of the Owl,” which is all about animals and so much fun I wanted to let everyone know about it. I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can find out more about the songs.

Kat also let me know about a turkey vulture named Lord Richard who lives in a park called Lindsay Wildlife Experience in California. Lord Richard just turned 45 years old and got a huge birthday party! So as you can see, vultures can live a long time in captivity, although usually not as long in the wild. Then again, the oldest verified vulture is an Andean condor born in captivity in 1930 who died in 2010 at the age of 79. Andean condors in the wild can live more than 50 years. This makes Lord Richard sound like a positive youngster.

New World vultures are native to the Americas and all of them are pretty big. In fact, condors are vultures and they’re extremely large birds. The New World vultures aren’t very closely related to each other but they all share some traits.

Vultures are scavengers that find dead animals to eat. The meat from dead animal carcasses is referred to as carrion. Vultures will also eat rotting fruit and garbage sometimes. Because they eat meat that is often spoiled, vultures have an extremely acidic digestive system that helps the bird digest its food quickly and kills off any bacteria that might make it sick. It also has beneficial bacteria in its digestive system that neutralize toxins.

But that’s not where the adaptations to eating carrion end. The vulture is a highly specialized bird. Most vultures don’t have many feathers on their heads, unlike other birds. If you’re snacking right now, you might want to pause this until you’re done. Quite often a vulture will actually stick its head into a rotting animal carcass to get at the, uh, softer parts. This means its head gets covered in rotting gunk and a lot of bacteria. If it had head feathers, they would be destroyed by bacteria.

One interesting thing about vultures of all kinds is that they actually help stop the spread of diseases like rabies and anthrax. Their digestive tract is so effective that it kills off viruses that caused the animal to die, so it’s actually beneficial to the environment in general and to farmers. Unfortunately, farmers don’t always know this and think vultures spread disease. Many vultures are protected species in most countries to stop farmers and other people from shooting them.

Quite often you’ll see a vulture perched somewhere up high with its wings spread. It does this to dry them when it’s been rainy or foggy, but also so that sunlight will help kill off any bacteria on the feathers. That’s another reason the vulture has no feathers on the head, so that sunlight can kill off any bacteria on its skin.

Vultures do some other gross stuff, like pee on their own legs. They do this to cool down in hot weather, since as the liquid droppings evaporate it cools the legs, and therefore cools the blood flowing through the legs, and therefore cools the vulture’s body temperature overall. But vultures also like to bathe in shallow water, which helps clean the skin and the feathers, and which of course washes any droppings off their legs.

Vultures also puke up what they’ve eaten if they feel threatened. This serves two purposes. The vulture is immediately much lighter and can fly away more easily, and the horrible stench of partially digested rotting meat may drive away a potential predator.

There are seven species of new world vulture alive today. The most common one is the turkey vulture, which lives throughout most of North and South America. The next most common is the American black vulture, which lives in South America up to the southern parts of North America. From a distance it can be hard to tell the two apart, but the black vulture has silvery tips on its wings.

The turkey vulture is the vulture most often referred to as a buzzard. It has a wingspan of about six feet, or over 1.8 meters, although it doesn’t weigh more than about five pounds at most, or 2.4 kg. It’s kind of a picky eater, surprisingly, and doesn’t like really rotten meat. It often hangs out with black vultures, but black vultures are more aggressive even though they’re a little smaller, and the turkey vulture will wait until the black vultures are done eating before it moves in to finish off what’s left.

Black vultures and turkey vultures aren’t very closely related and don’t really look very similar if you see them up close. The turkey vulture has a red head that looks a lot like a male turkey’s, which is where it gets its name. The black vulture has a gray head.

Unlike the turkey vulture, which almost exclusively eats carrion and rotting fruit and sometimes vegetables, the black vulture will also eat eggs and sometimes kills small animals, especially baby animals. It hunts in groups and can even kill newborn calves.

If you want to learn more about the turkey vulture, the Critter Cast Podcast has a really good episode all about it. I’ll put a link in the show notes in case you don’t already listen to Critter Cast.

The other new world vultures are mostly restricted to South America, except for the California condor. We’ll talk about condors in a minute. The king vulture is most common in South America although it also lives in parts of southern Mexico and in Central America. Unlike most vultures, which are mostly black, its feathers are mostly white with some gray and black markings. The skin of its bald head is brightly colored, with different individuals having different coloration—red, orange, yellow, purple, even blue, with an orange crest on its bill in adult birds. It also has a white eye with a red rim, and short bristles on the head. The ancient Maya people considered the king vulture a messenger of the gods, which is pretty neat.

The king vulture is big even for a vulture, with a wingspan of up to about 7 feet, or 2 meters, which makes sense since it’s most closely related to the Andean condor. It has a stronger bill than most vultures, which helps it tear open an animal carcass that other vulture species might not be able to access. Often, other vulture species will wait until a king vulture has opened a carcass and eaten its fill before they move in and eat too. It especially likes the skin and tougher meat of a carcass, and its tongue is raspy to help it pull meat off bones.

The king vulture’s ancestors lived farther north, into parts of North America, but went extinct around 2 ½ million years ago. We don’t really know all that much about the ancestors of the New World vultures, though, because they’re not very common in the fossil record. But the New World vultures are related to the terratorns, huge birds that are extinct now. We’ve discussed terratorns once before way back in episode 17, about the Thunderbird, but let’s discuss them again because they were incredible birds.

We have a decent number of terratorn remains from the La Brea Tar Pits and a few other places. The terratorns were bigger even than condors. A number of species lived throughout the Americas, with even the smaller species having an estimated wingspan of around 12 feet, or 3.8 meters. The largest species known, Argentavis magnificens, lived in South America around six million years ago. It’s estimated to have a wingspan of at least 20 feet, or 6 meters, and possibly as much as 26 feet, or 8 meters. That’s the size of a small aircraft.

Researchers think Argentavis was an efficient glider, hardly needing to flap its wings. But it wasn’t very maneuverable, so researchers also think it was probably a scavenger like modern vultures. Smaller terratorns may have been active hunters, more like eagles than vultures. Argentavis had strong legs and probably took off by running into the wind with its massive wings spread, sort of like an airplane taking off, so it didn’t have to flap its wings at all.

That brings us to Grady’s question about why and how buzzards soar for so long. Argentavis would have spent most of its time soaring, hardly ever needing to flap its wings. Its wings weren’t even very strong, and it might not even have been able to flap them when they were extended. The turkey vulture, or buzzard, is especially good at soaring for long periods of time, sometimes for hours, without needing to flap its wings.

If you’ve noticed, soaring birds like vultures, eagles, and hawks tend to fly in circles. There’s a reason for this. When the wind blows over a hill or mountain, it creates an updraft, a breeze that blows directly upward. Similarly, air rises from land that’s been warmed by the sun, causing columns of warm air called thermals. A soaring bird stays in these updrafts and thermals by flying in circles. Vultures also have wingtips where the feathers are spread out, so that each flight feather is separated from the next by a small space. Each of these feathers acts like a tiny wing of its own, which helps keep the vulture gliding forward and not downward. All this wind over the wingtip feathers causes a lot of pressure, though, and vultures have a special bone at the wingtip that helps strengthen and support the flight feathers. Soaring instead of flapping conserves a lot of energy, which is why vultures will soar for as long as they can, looking for food.

Most New World vultures have a good sense of smell, which is unusual for birds. The turkey vulture finds a lot of its food by smell. The black vulture doesn’t have nearly as good a sense of smell, though, and as a result it often follows turkey vultures to find carcasses, then bullies the turkey vultures out of the way to eat first. That’s not very nice, birds. In addition, the turkey vulture has keen eyesight, which helps it find dead animals that might not have started to smell yet.

So let’s talk about those condors now. There are two species of condor alive today, the California and the Andean. We covered the California condor in episode 44, extinct and back from the brink. The California condor actually went extinct in the wild in 1987, with only 22 birds alive in captivity, but an ongoing captive breeding program saved it from extinction and captive-bred birds started to be released into the wild in 1991. But there are still fewer than 500 individuals alive today, so it’s still in danger of extinction. The California condor only lives in a few small areas of western North America today, but around 40,000 years ago it lived throughout North America. Part of the reason it’s still so rare is that it reproduces very slowly. A pair doesn’t nest every year, and even when they do, the female only lays one egg. A young condor depends on its parents for a full year, both for food and to learn how to fly. It can take a young condor months to learn how to fly properly, and researchers sometimes observe awkward crash landings that are probably pretty funny, although maybe not so funny to the condor.

The California condor’s wingspan can be up to almost ten feet, or 3 meters. This is huge, but the Andean condor is even bigger. Its wingspan is nearly eleven feet, or 3.3 meters. The Andean condor lives in and near the Andes Mountains along the western coast of South America. It’s mostly black with silvery patches on the wings and a white ruff around the neck, and its head is gray in color but can flush reddish to communicate with other condors. The male also has a comb on the top of its head.

The Andean condor’s feet are adapted for walking, not fighting. Its feet aren’t very strong and its talons aren’t very sharp. It does sometimes kill small animals like rabbits, but its feet are so weak that it can’t use them to attack. Instead, it stabs the animal to death with its beak.

Like Argentavis, the Andean condor’s wings are built for soaring, not flapping. It can soar for hours without needing to flap its wings once, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles in a day to find food.

It’s a social bird that mates for life, and one of its courtship rituals is a hopping, flapping dance. Keep in mind that this is a bird with wings over five feet long. That would be a pretty impressive dance. The Andean condor nests high in the Andes Mountains on cliffs that predators can’t reach and lays one or two eggs.

Let’s go back to the king vulture now to finish up, because there’s a mystery associated with the king vulture. In the 1770s, a man named William Bartram traveled through Florida and took notes about the animals and plants he saw. He published a book of his travels in 1791 and in it, he included information about a bird he called a painted vulture. He said it was fairly common in Florida and that he’d even shot one himself. The description he gave sounds like a king vulture except that Bartram described its tail as white with a black tip, not entirely black.

But remember, the king vulture primarily lives in South America. It is known in the very southern parts of North America in Mexico, but not Florida. What’s going on?

Some people think Bartram included the painted vulture as a hoax. Some people think he got it mixed up with a different bird, the Northern caracara, a bird of prey which only looks slightly like a king vulture. Some people think there may have been a small population of king vultures in Florida at the time that later went extinct, possibly a subspecies of king vulture with a mostly white tail instead of all black.

Bartram wasn’t the only person who reported seeing the painted vulture. In 1734 an English naturalist and artist, Eleazar Albin, painted a vulture that looked almost identical to the one Bartram described 30-odd years later, tail and all. It’s not completely clear where Albin saw his bird, but as far as researchers can determine Bartram wasn’t aware of the painting. So it’s possible that a subspecies of king vulture once lived in Florida but went extinct soon after Bartram saw it. If he and Albin hadn’t documented it, no one alive today would have any idea the painted vulture ever existed.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 118: The Hummingbird

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:46 — 15.3MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week’s episode is about the world’s tiniest birds, the hummingbird! Thanks to Tara for the suggestion!

The bee hummingbird:

The giant hummingbird:

The giant giant hummingbird:

If you’re interested in my little side project, Real Life Cooking Podcast, here’s the URL (or you can just search for it in your regular podcast app): https://reallifecooking.blubrry.net/

Show transcript:

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

This week is another listener suggestion, this one from Tara! Tara’s favorite bird is the hummingbird, and I can’t believe I didn’t know that before she texted me, because I’ve known Tara for a long long time and in fact she is married to my brother. Tara, I hope you are ready for hummingbird-themed birthday gifts for the rest of your life!

The smallest birds in the world are hummingbirds, but not all hummingbirds are the smallest birds in the world. If that makes sense. The very smallest hummingbird, and definitely the smallest bird alive today and possibly alive ever, is the bee hummingbird.

The bee hummingbird is literally the size of a bee. Males are slightly smaller than females and barely grow more than two inches long, or 5.5 cm, from the tip of its long bill to the end of its tail. It weighs less than an ounce, or 2 grams. A penny weighs more than this bird does.

The bee hummingbird lives in Cuba and parts of the West Indies. Males are iridescent green and blue while females are more green and gray. During the breeding season, in spring and early summer, males also have red or pink spots on the head and throat.

Just like other birds, the bee hummingbird builds a nest and lays one or two eggs. The female takes care of the eggs and babies by herself. But her nest is so incredibly small! It’s barely an inch across, or 2.5 cm, lined with soft items like dandelion fluff and cobwebs. And the bee hummingbird’s eggs are the size of peas. I have some peas in my lunch today. Peas are really small. Can you imagine the smallness of an egg the size of a pea, and the smallness of the baby that hatches from the egg? I just died. I literally just died because it’s so cute and tiny I can’t stand it. Don’t worry, I came back to life to finish telling you about hummingbirds.

The largest hummingbird is called the giant hummingbird. It’s just over 9 inches long, or 23 cm, which sounds enormous, especially compared to the bee hummingbird. But keep in mind that its long bill is included in that length, so if you go by actual body size it’s only about the size of a sparrow. It has relatively long, pointed wings and sometimes actually glides instead of flapping its wings, which is practically unheard-of among hummingbirds. The giant hummingbird lives in the Andes Mountains in western South America, with some populations even living in high altitudes where the air is thinner. You know the so-called Nazca lines, the giant geoglyphs created by the ancient Nazca people that are shaped like animals? One of the geoglyphs is a hummingbird that’s 305 feet long, or 93 meters. It’s based on the giant hummingbird that lives in the area, so I guess you could say it’s a GIANT giant hummingbird.

*rimshot!* [it’s actually called a sting, and I played this one myself. Years of drum lessons have finally paid off!]

All hummingbirds are specialized to eat nectar from flowers. A hummingbird has a long, slender bill that can reach down into a flower to get at the nectar. In the process, the hummingbird gets pollen on its feathers that it then transfers to the next flowers it visits, helping pollinate the flowers. So the hummingbird gets a good meal and the flowers get pollinated, so everyone wins. Some hummingbird species have co-evolved with certain plant species so that only the bird can reach the nectar and only the bird can pollinate the flowers.

But the hummingbird’s bill isn’t a straw. It can open its bill just like other birds, and in fact hummingbirds eat a lot of tiny insects they find while foraging for nectar. They need to eat insects because while nectar provides a ton of energy, since it’s mostly just sugar, it doesn’t supply many nutrients. The upper part of the bill is much longer than the lower part, and the lower bill actually fits tightly inside the upper bill. That’s why it looks like a hummingbird’s bill is a tiny needle-like tube, since even if the bird has its mouth open it’s hard to tell.

A hummingbird actually uses its tongue to lap up nectar. The hummingbird’s tongue is extremely long, up to twice the length of the bill, and has a forked end. The tongue also contains grooves. When a hummingbird puts its bill into a flower, it sticks its tongue out and laps up the nectar rapidly, something like 13 licks a second. The nectar travels up the grooves into the bird’s mouth.

If you were wondering, a mother hummingbird feeds her babies nectar and tiny insects. Also, the reason hummingbirds use so much spiderweb silk in their nests is because it will expand as the babies grow. I’m sorry, I just died again. Give me a second to stop dying of cute. A baby hummingbird grows quickly and some species learn to fly at only two weeks old, although the mother bird continues to feed the babies for a little longer.

Hummingbirds move fast, which is why they need all that energy from nectar. Their energy needs are incredibly high. When a hummingbird flies, its metabolic rate increases to the highest ever measured in an animal that’s not an insect. Its heart can beat over 1,200 times per minute and it may breathe 250 times per minute. At night, or if there’s not a lot of food around, the hummingbird’s metabolism slows dramatically and the bird enters a state called torpor. Its body temperature falls, its heartrate can drop to only 50 beats per minute—which is on the slow side for a human—and its breathing rate drops too. Torpor is basically a very short hibernation where the bird will sleep deeply until morning or until it needs to go out and find more food. Even so, a hummingbird can lose up to 10% of its body weight overnight as its body burns fat reserves to keep it alive.

So that makes it all the more amazing that some species of hummingbird migrate long distances, including over the ocean. All hummingbird species are native to the Americas, but many species that spend the summer in North America migrate south to spend winter in Central America or Mexico. Some species in South America migrate north to winter in warmer areas too. The rufous hummingbird migrates from Alaska to Mexico, about 3,900 miles, or almost 6,300 km, and then it migrates back up the western coast of North America in spring.

The hummingbird doesn’t fly like other birds. It flaps its wings in a figure 8 motion that provides lift, which allows it to hover. Its wings beat incredibly quickly, up to 80 times a second. Even the slowest-moving hummingbird, the giant hummingbird, beats its wings 12 times a second. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure I can’t do anything 12 times a second except maybe flutter my eyelashes, and even then my eyelids would get tired after a few seconds. Also, that’s not going to help me fly. Not even if I wear really long false eyelashes.

The hummingbird gets its name from the humming sound its wings make as they beat so incredibly fast. But the hummingbird’s feathers also make other sounds as the bird flies. In some species of hummingbird, the male grows special feathers that vibrate as he flies and make a whistling or chirping sound. This helps females find a male and helps the male defend his territory by announcing his presence to other males.

Oh, you didn’t know hummingbirds were territorial? They sure are. They may be tiny and pretty, but they’re fierce too. A male will chase other males away from his flowers, even stabbing other males with his long bill.

My aunt likes to tell a story of a cat she had years and years ago who liked to go into her garden and lie in the sun. One day the cat leaped at what my aunt thought was a bee. The cat stopped with a startled look on his face and opened his mouth. A hummingbird backed up out of the cat’s mouth and flew away and the cat never bothered a bird or a bee again, since the hummingbird’s beak had stabbed him in the back of the throat.

Needless to say, the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards.

It’s one thing to think, “Oh, hummingbirds are so small” but it’s another thing to see a hummingbird in the wild and really understand how small they are. When I’m out birdwatching I almost always mistake hummingbirds for bees when I first see one. The hummingbird is so small, in fact, that it’s eaten by some larger insects, like the preying mantis, and by larger spiders. Anything that will eat an insect will eat a hummingbird, and that includes some other birds.

Fortunately, the hummingbird is so fast that it can usually get away from predators. It can fly up to 30 mph, or 48 km per hour. Its tail feathers also come out easily and grow back quickly, so anything that grabs it by the tail is probably just going to end up with a few feathers to eat.

The hummingbird flies so quickly through dense vegetation that its brain processes images in a different way from other birds so it doesn’t run into things. It has excellent vision, too, since it finds flowers by sight.

You can attract hummingbirds to your garden by planting flowers they like, such as bee balm, hollyhocks, petunias, trumpet vine, and lots more. You can also put out hummingbird feeders that you fill with imitation nectar. It’s important to keep the feeders cleaned, since the nectar will spoil after a while, mold will grow inside the feeder, and insects may get into the nectar and drown. Also make sure to hang the feeder where the birds will be safe from predators like cats and snakes.

Some of you may have heard that I’ve started a little side project, another podcast called Real Life Cooking where I share recipes and explain how to make them. So as a sort of crossover event, I’ll give you a recipe for making hummingbird nectar.

You don’t need anything expensive, just plain tapwater and plain white sugar. Use one part sugar to four parts water. So if you use one cup of water, add ¼ c sugar. Put them together in a small pot on the stove and heat the water, stirring occasionally, until the water is boiling. Let it boil for about a minute, then remove it from the heat and let it cool to room temperature. Once it’s cool, you can pour it into your hummingbird feeder. Don’t add red food coloring or any kind of flavoring, and don’t use any sugar except regular white sugar. Brown sugar and natural-colored sugars can contain iron, which is toxic to hummingbirds. If the feeder you use isn’t attracting hummingbirds, you can tie a red ribbon around it to make hummingbirds notice it. Make sure to change out the nectar every couple of days so it won’t go bad.

Sugar-water sounds like a horrible thing to feed a wild animal, but it’s exactly what hummingbirds need and what they eat naturally.

Hummingbirds are such unusual birds that it’s hard to imagine what they’re related to. There are birds that resemble hummingbirds in some ways, especially the sunbird that lives in Africa, parts of Asia, and Australia. But the hummingbird and the sunbird aren’t related. They just share a very specific ecological niche, which has resulted in similarities due to convergent evolution.

No, the hummingbird is most closely related to the swift! Not closely related, of course, because the two started evolving separately as much as 42 million years ago. The first ancestral hummingbird is found in the fossil record in South America around 22 million years ago, where they spread throughout the Americas and evolved into the hundreds of species we have today. In the Andes Mountains alone, there are 140 species of hummingbird and researchers keep finding new ones. The blue-throated hillstar was only discovered in 2017, for instance, since it lives in a very small area of the Andes in Ecuador and is very rare.

Researchers keep finding out more about hummingbirds, too. The black Jacobin hummingbird from the mountains of eastern Brazil makes complex sounds that are so high-pitched that the researchers have to record them using equipment developed to record bat calls. So who knows what else we’ll learn about hummingbirds next? I can definitely see why they’d be anyone’s favorite bird.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 102: Three Mystery Apes

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:56 — 22.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

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

The only photograph we have of de Loys’ ape:

A white-fronted spider monkey:

Oliver the so-called “ape man”:

A better picture of Oliver late in his life:

A Bili ape:

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

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 098: River Dolphins

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:13 — 14.0MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week let’s learn about some unusual cetaceans, river dolphins!

An Amazon river dolphin and the nose of another Amazon river dolphin:

Another Amazon river dolphin. Note the teeny eye and disk-like teeth:

A South Asian river dolphin. Note the almost nonexistent eye:

A Chinese river dolphin in better days:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about an animal I’ve wanted to cover for a long time but never got around to, the river dolphin.

All whales and almost all dolphins live in the ocean. They can survive for a short while in fresh water but need saltwater to thrive. But as the name suggests, the river dolphin lives in rivers, usually in fresh water and sometimes in the brackish water where rivers empty into oceans. Brackish just means a mixture of fresh and salt water, so it’s saltier than fresh water but not as salty as ocean water. When I was a kid I thought it meant ocean water with a lot of seeweed and dead leaves in it, because I thought the word brackish had something to do with bracken, which is a type of fern.

There are only a few species of river dolphin alive today. They live in warm water and have very little blubber as a result. They primarily use echolocation to navigate since river water tends to be muddy and hard to see through. Their flippers are broad and most have long snouts and flexible necks, or at least flexible compared to other cetaceans. All river dolphins are endangered due to pollution, habitat loss, and accidental drowning in fish nets, with the Chinese river dolphin only having been declared extinct in 2006.

River dolphins evolved from dolphins that once lived in the ocean, but most aren’t closely related to the marine dolphins alive today. Researchers think that when modern dolphins and other toothed whales evolved, they outcompeted their more primitive cousins, who moved into freshwater habitats as a result.

A few years ago, fossils of an extinct river dolphin that grew more than nine feet long, or almost three meters, were found in Panama. It lived around 6 million years ago in the Amazon River, but researchers don’t think modern river dolphins are closely related to it. In other words, freshwater dolphins have evolved repeatedly in different parts of the world to fit an available ecological niche.

In the case of the newly discovered fossil river dolphin, Isthminia panamensis, it probably lived in the warm, shallow Caribbean Sea between North and South America before the Isthmus of Panama formed. It took millions of years for the isthmus to form, with undersea volcanos first emerging from the ocean around 15 million years ago to form islands, then the land itself being pushed upward as the Pacific Plate slid underneath the Caribbean Plate. Researchers think the isthmus became fully formed around 3 million years ago, separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific and connecting North and South America. Because we have Isthminia panamensis’s fossil from the Amazon River, we can hypothesize that by around 6 million years ago, there wasn’t enough of the original Caribbean Sea habitat to support the dolphins and they had already moved into the Amazon River and adapted to life in freshwater.

The river dolphin isn’t the only cetacean that lives in freshwater. There’s a species of porpoise called the finless porpoise that lives around Asia in shallow coastal waters, but often spends at least part of the time in mangrove swamps and in rivers not too far from the sea. Porpoises and dolphins look very similar but belong to different families, which means they aren’t actually very closely related at all. Like, seriously not related at all. Like, the difference between horses and cows. The finless porpoise can grow almost seven and a half feet long, or over two meters, and is called finless because it doesn’t have a dorsal fin. Instead, it has a dorsal ridge lined with tubercles, or bumps, that contain nerve endings. Researchers don’t know what purpose the tubercles serve. Porpoises use echolocation but their clicks are much higher in frequency than dolphins’, so high that humans can’t hear most of them.

There are three families of river dolphins still living today, Platanistidae, Iniidae, and Pontoporiidae.

Platanistidae are the Indian dolphins, with only one species alive today. The South Asian river dolphin lives in South Asia. There are two subspecies, the Ganges River dolphin and the Indus River dolphin. Young South Asian river dolphins have sharp, thin teeth, but as the dolphin matures, its teeth become flatter and squarish, almost like disks. It eats fish, crustaceans like shrimp, and some dolphins may also eat water birds and even turtles. Its rostrum, the word for a cetacean’s beak, is considerably longer in females than in males, sometimes like 8 inches longer, or about 20 cm.

The South Asian river dolphin is sometimes called the blind dolphin because its eyes are basically only useful for sensing light. They don’t even have lenses. It has a very small dorsal fin, not much more than a bump, a powerful tail, and is brown in color, and grows up to ten feet long, or almost 3 meters. It uses echolocation to navigate in the murky river water and find prey. It also usually swims on its side, which also gives it the name side-swimming dolphin. It does this so it can trail the tip of a flipper along the river bottom to feel for shrimp and mollusks.

It’s such an unusual dolphin, even for river dolphins, that researchers are studying fossil dolphins to figure out how the South Asian river dolphin evolved. Two years ago, a fossilized dolphin skull found in 1951 in Alaska and held in the Smithsonian’s collection ever since was evaluated and determined to be a distant relative of the South Asian river dolphin. It lived about 25 million years ago, around the time that ancient whales were evolving into the two groups we have today, toothed whales, which includes dolphins, and baleen whales.

The South Asian river dolphin has been evolving separately from marine dolphins for at least the 25 million years since its relative was swimming around in the Arctic Ocean. Research on its echolocation suggests that the Ganges River subspecies of the South Asian river dolphin probably has biosonar that more closely resembles that of ancient toothed whales than modern toothed whale and dolphin echolocation does. It has a much deeper voice than marine dolphins of about the same size have.

I tried very hard to find a recording of a Ganges River dolphin, or any South Asian river dolphin, but all I found was this, the echolocation of an Amazon river dolphin:

[river dolphin sound]

The Amazon river dolphin is a member of the Iniidae family of river dolphins. It’s the biggest of the river dolphins, and adults are often pink in color. In all other river dolphins, and most cetaceans in general, females are larger than males, but male Amazon river dolphins are larger than females. Babies are dark gray, fading to lighter gray as they grow up. Adults can appear pink because the skin is often pale and in warm water, the blood shows through the skin. The Amazon river dolphin has small eyes, but it sees a lot better than the South Asian river dolphin.

Most river dolphin species aren’t nearly as sociable as marine dolphins and are usually only found singly or in groups of two or three. Male Amazon river dolphins often fight each other when females are around. If a male Amazon river dolphin meets some females, he will pick up a branch or stone and carry it around to impress them.

Amazon river dolphins eat fish, including piranhas, freshwater crabs, turtles, and other small animals. Sometimes a dolphin will participate in cooperative hunting with giant otters and the tucuxi, another species of dolphin that lives in the Amazon basin. The three species eat different types of fish so they all benefit from hunting together.

The tucuxi isn’t actually a river dolphin although at least some individuals live in rivers. It’s considered a marine dolphin, and you can tell the difference just by looking at it. It looks like a small bottlenose dolphin, about five feet long, or 1.5 meters, and unlike river dolphins its rostrum is relatively short.

The third family of river dolphin is Pontoporiidae, and there’s only one species alive today. Just to show that nature isn’t cut and dried, the La Plata dolphin doesn’t always live in fresh water. It lives around the coast of southeastern South America and while some do spend their whole lives in rivers, most La Plata dolphins live in the ocean.

Finally, let’s talk about the Chinese river dolphin, the one that’s recently extinct, also called the baiji. Technically it’s functionally extinct because although there may be one or two still alive, there aren’t enough to continue the species into another generation. River dolphins do very poorly in captivity, usually dying within months, so even if conservationists had billions of dollars and the cooperation of every single person on earth to save the Chinese river dolphin, there’s nothing they could do at this point. In fact, in 2006 a research team searched for the dolphin for six weeks to put a conservation action plan into place for it, but they didn’t find any. That’s when it was declared extinct.

The Chinese river dolphin lived in the Yangtze River and grew up to 8 feet long, or 2.4 meters. It was blue-gray with a paler belly, and like many other river dolphins, its rostrum was slightly upturned. It also had poor vision. It was once common along much of the Yangtze, some 1,100 miles of river, or 1,700 km, but massive increases in pollution of the river, collisions with boats caused by the noise of boats overwhelming the dolphins’ echolocation, poaching, entanglement in fishing nets, loss of habitat due to damming of the river, and overfishing drove it to extinction within about five decades. The last confirmed sighting of a Chinese river dolphin was in 2002, with an unconfirmed sighting in 2007.

This is a depressing way to end the episode, so let’s finish up with a long-ago relative of the South Asian river dolphin. Zarhachis flagellator lived during the Miocene, about 16 million years ago, and had a really long rostrum. Like, super super long. Its skull was about four feet long, or 1.2 meters, which makes it sound like it must have been a really big dolphin, but it wasn’t. Its actual braincase was less than a foot long, maybe 8 inches or so, or 20 cm. The rest of the length was rostrum. In other words, it had a head about the size of your head, and a long thin beak full of sharp teeth that was something like three feet long, or almost a meter. Tonight when you brush your teeth, think about that. Think about how hard it would be to reach all your teeth if you had a mouth that stuck out three feet from your head. You’d need a really long toothbrush.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 097: Unusual Reptiles

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:19 — 18.8MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Thanks to listeners Finn and Leo, who suggested this week’s topics of strange lizards, and the thorny devil and mata mata turtle, respectively! Join us this week to learn about those reptiles and a bunch more!

Thorny devil. Definitely do not eat.

The mata mata turtle. Big leafhead boi

A frilled lizard BWAAAAAMP

A Pinocchio lizard. Wonder where that name comes from.

Poke poke poke does this bother you? poke poke

om nom nom

A shingleback, or as I like to call it, an ambulatory poop:

Show transcript:

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

We have more listener suggestions this week! Ages ago, listener Finn suggested strange lizards, and more recently, listener Leo suggested a particular type of strange lizard and a strange turtle.

We’ll start with Leo’s suggestion, the thorny devil. He describes it as “a cool animal with spikes all around it,” which is definitely a good way to put it. The thorny devil is a lizard from Australia, and it does indeed have spikes all over its head, back, and tail, and smaller spikes on its legs. The spikes are modified scales and are sharp.

The thorny devil grows to around 8 inches long, or 20 cm, with females being larger than males on average. In warm weather its blotchy brown and yellow coloring is paler than in colder weather, when it turns darker. It can also turn orangey, reddish, or gray to blend in to the background soil. Its color changes slowly over the course of the day as the temperature changes. It also tends to turn darker if something threatens it.

It has a thick spiny tail that it usually holds curved upward, which makes it look kind of like a stick. It moves slowly and jerkily, rocking back and forth on its legs, then surging forward a couple of steps. Researchers think this may confuse predators. It certainly looks confusing.

As if that wasn’t enough, the thorny devil has a false head on the back of its neck. It’s basically a big bump with two spikes sticking out of the sides. When something threatens the lizard, it ducks its head between its forelegs, which makes the bump on its neck look like a little head. But all its spines make it a painful mouthful for a predator. If something does try to swallow it, the thorny devil can puff itself up to make itself even harder to swallow, like many toads do. It does this by inflating its chest with air.

The thorny devil eats ants and only ants, specifically various species of tiny black ants found only in Australia. It has a sticky tongue to lick them up. Because it has such a specific diet, it’s hard to keep in captivity. Only a few zoos in Australia have thorny devils on display. If you listened to episode 93, where we talked about invasive ant species having an effect on entire ecosystems, the thorny devil is an example of this. Fortunately the ants it eats are doing just fine, but if an invasive ant species were introduced to the areas where it lives, the thorny devil would probably be in trouble. So no moving ants around, everyone, I mean it.

The thorny devil lives in desert and scrubland regions, and in hot weather it digs a burrow to shelter in. Females lay their eggs in burrows. To get enough water in its desert environment, the thorny devil has microscopic grooves between its scales that suck up water by capillary action. At night dew condenses on the lizard’s body, and it also collects dew by brushing against dewy vegetation or just by standing or lying on damp sand. If it does happen across water in a puddle, it will put a leg in the water and the tiny grooves in its skin suck up water and funnel it to the mouth. It’s like a living straw.

While I was researching this, I found some information on how rattlesnakes drink. When it starts to rain, a rattlesnake will coil up tightly so that rainwater collects in its coils. Then it drinks the water. This sounds like something someone just made up, but it’s real.

Let’s skip right from a snake fact to a weird turtle, because Leo also suggested the mata mata turtle as a topic. This is where I got distracted while researching, and ended up with an entire episode about giant tortoises. If you were wondering, the main difference between a turtle and a tortoise is that turtles spend most or all of their time in water, while tortoises live only on land.

The mata mata turtle lives in shallow, slow-moving water in South America, especially swamps around the Amazon and Orinoco river basins. It isn’t closely related to the snapping turtle of North America, but it does resemble a snapping turtle in some ways. Its shell is brown or black, its skin is grayish, and its plastron, or the belly section of its shell, is yellow or brown. It grows to around two feet long, or 60 cm, with a long, broad neck and wide, triangular head. Its nose comes to a point like the stem of a leaf. In fact, if you look down on a mata mata in the water, the shape of its head looks exactly like a dead leaf. It has notches and ridges on its shell, and its knobbly skin has flaps that helps camouflage the turtle among dead leaves and sticks in the water. It also has claws and webbed toes.

Unlike the snapping turtle, the mata mata is harmless to humans and most animals. It doesn’t have a sharp bill and it won’t bite. It can’t even chew its food, just swallows it whole. It eats fish, water insects, and other small animals that it captures by opening its large mouth suddenly under the water. This creates suction, sucking a lot of water and the prey right into the turtle’s mouth.

The only time the mata mata leaves the water is to lay eggs. Unlike many other turtle eggs, the mata mata eggs have hard shells, more like bird eggs. It takes the eggs about 200 days to hatch.

The mata mata spends almost all of its time motionless in the water, waiting for prey to come near, and occasionally extending its ridiculously long neck so it can take a breath from the surface. Its pointy nose is a proboscis that it breathes through. It can swim, but it usually prefers to walk along the bottom of the pond or marsh. I bet its feet squish in the mud. Squish squish squish.

Speaking of pointy-nosed reptiles, the male Pinocchio lizard has a nose that points forward and slightly upward like a rhinoceros horn. But it’s not a horn, because it’s flexible, made of cartilage. It lives in the Mindo cloud forest in Ecuador, and was only discovered by scientists in 1953, when researchers collected six specimens. And that was the last time anyone saw the Pinocchio lizard—until 2005, when some birdwatchers saw a weird lizard, took pictures and posted them online, and herpetologists started freaking out.

The Pinocchio lizard blends in so well with its environment that it’s hard to spot. It turns white when it’s asleep, which helps it look like part of a tree branch. It always perches on the end of a branch to sleep, too. During the day, it climbs verrry slowly into the treetops. It’s not a big lizard, only about three inches long, or 7.5 cm, not counting its tail, which is as long as its body. We still don’t know much about it because it’s so hard to study.

It’s not the only lizard with a horn on its nose. For instance, the rough-nosed horned lizard lives in Sri Lanka and is an ordinary-looking lizard for the most part, although it’s covered with short bristly scales that make it look like it would work well for scrubbing out dirty pots and pans. But it has a really long nose, also covered in bristly scales. Oh, and yellow or orange markings on its face that make it look like it has a big orange clown mouth. Males have longer horns than females. Male mountain horned agamas, which also live in Sri Lanka, have a single white or cream-colored horn that sticks directly forward from their nose like a tiny unicorn horn, except it’s not spiraled. In fact, it’s not a horn at all, it’s a single big pointy scale. But those lizards aren’t related to the Pinnocchio lizard.

The La Gomera giant lizard doesn’t have any horns and it’s not all that giant, less than two feet long, or around 49 cm long, including the tail. It’s black or brown on its back with a white belly. Males also have a white throat, and during mating season males inflate their throat and bob their head to attract females. It mostly eats plants, although it will eat insects too, and it lives in the Canary Islands. It’s not the most exciting lizard to look at, but it has an interesting history.

The Canary Islands are a group of islands off the coast of Morocco. It was once called the Fortunate Isles, so if you ever see that in an old book you know what islands it’s talking about. Pliny the Elder, a historian from ancient Rome, said the name Canaria came from the number of dogs on the islands. The word for dog in Latin is canis. The people of the islands were supposed to worship dogs, and some modern historians believe the old accounts of dog-headed people may be a garbled account of the Canary Islanders. Oh, and the little yellow songbirds that live on the Canary Islands took their name from the islands, not vice versa.

The islands were probably visited in ancient times by Phoenician and Greek sailors, but reportedly no one lived there when the Romans explored it in the 1st century. But when Europeans returned in the late middle ages, there were inhabitants that may have been settlers from North Africa. The islands were invaded by Europeans, who then spent centuries fighting with each other over who ruled them. It’s Spain, currently. Scientific expeditions started in the late 18th century. One of the animals the expeditions reported seeing was the La Gomera giant lizard, but it disappeared sometime after about 1900. Researchers assumed it had gone extinct.

Then a 1999 expedition from the University of La Laguna on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, heard stories from local residents on the island of La Gomera. They said there was a big lizard living in a few places on the island. The biologists in the expedition checked it out…and sure enough, there were giant lizards. Specifically, six of them. Just six lizards. Later they found another small group of the lizards in another area, but the total population was still no more than fifty.

Fortunately, a captive breeding program has been successful and today there are around 250 of the lizards in the wild, living only on two hard to reach cliffs. They’re vulnerable to introduced predators, especially cats, which eat the eggs and young lizards. Another 300 or so live in a recovery center where they’re protected from predators before being released into the wild. So basically, the La Gomera giant lizard isn’t so much strange as just very, very lucky.

Another lizard that is definitely strange is the frilled lizard from northern Australia and southern New Guinea. It’s bigger than the La Gomera giant lizard, almost three feet long, or 85 cm, and eats insects, spiders, and small animals. It lives in trees and is well camouflaged with blotches and spots on a gray or brown background to help camouflage it among branches and against bark.

The frilled lizard gets its name from the frill on eitherside of its head. Most of the time it keeps the frill folded back against itsneck. When it’s threatened, though, it spreads the frill out and opens itsmouth wide. The inside of its mouth is bright yellow or pink, and the frill hasbright red or yellow scales that don’t show when it’s folded. It’s the lizardequivalent of a jump scare in scary movies. Regular lizard, regular lizard…BWAMP BIG SCARY BRIGHT LIZARD

The frill is made up of spines of cartilage that grow from the lizard’s jaw bones, with skin connecting the spines. It’s not small, either. When expanded, it can be almost a foot across, or 25 cm.

The frilled lizard isn’t dangerous, though, and if its threat display doesn’t scare off a predator, it runs away until it finds a tree to climb. It runs so fast, in fact, that it lifts its body up and just runs on its hind legs, which helps it navigate uneven ground and gives it a better view of what’s around it. It also holds its long tail out as a counterweight to keep its body upright.

That’s supposed to be all the strange details about the frilled lizard…but there are sightings of it doing something unexpected on rare occasions. People occasionally report seeing a frilled lizard fall or jump from a tree, and glide down using its frill as a parachute. There’s no proof that this actually happens, but it sounds plausible.

Another Australian lizard called the shingleback, or bobtail, looks kind of like a pinecone with legs. Or a poop with legs, just going to set that down and walk away. It’s brown with darker and lighter speckles or yellow splotches, large overlapping scales, a stubby thick tail, and a broad head. In fact, its head and tail look a lot alike, which confuses predators. It also stores fat in its tail for winter. It grows about a foot long, or 30 cm, and eats snails, insects, flowers, and other small animals and plants. It lives in arid and desert areas, and their tough skin and overlapping scales help reduce water loss. Its eyes are tiny, like little black beads.

The shingleback looks nothing like the frilled lizard, but it has one thing in common with it. When threatened, the shingleback 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 otherwise pale, so it’s startling, to say the least.

The shingleback mates for life. Most of the year the shingleback is solitary, but in spring mated pairs find each other again and go around together while they hunt for food. The female gives birth to two live babies instead of laying eggs.

I could go on and on and on about all the weird reptiles in the world. There are just so many! We’ll definitely come back to this topic in the future, but for now, let’s finish up with a snake called Iwasaki’s snail-eater.

The snail-eater lives on a few small islands southwest of Japan’s main islands. It’s small, only about 7 inches long, or 22 cm, and is orangey in color with darker markings and bright orange eyes. And it only eats one thing: snails.

It’s so perfectly adapted to its diet of snails that its jaw is asymmetrical so it can more easily wedge it into the typical snail’s shell, which coils clockwise. If you remember from the little yard animals episode, some snails very rarely coil the opposite way, and the snail-eater snake is so specialized to eat ordinary snails that it has trouble with counter-clockwise coiled snail shells. It has more teeth on its right mandible. There are other snail-eater snakes closely related to Iwasaki’s snail-eater that have this same adaptation, and in some areas where the snakes are numerous, counter-clockwise snails are much more common than in areas without a lot of snail-eater snakes.

So that’s a reminder that whether you’re a little snail-eating snake or a regular human being, the things you do have an effect on the world around you, even if it’s in ways too small for you to notice without looking very closely.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 095: Giant Tortoises

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:20 — 10.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week let’s learn about giant tortoises! What’s the difference between a turtle and a tortoise? The most basic difference is that the turtle lives in water and the tortoise lives on land. And there are some really, really big tortoises in the world!

A Galapagos tortoise:

Show transcript:

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

This episode was supposed to be about strange reptiles, with more awesome suggestions from listeners. I was going to include some information about a couple of giant tortoises…but the more I researched, the longer that part of the episode became, until it just took over. So here’s an episode about giant tortoises, and we’ll have the strange reptiles episode in a couple of weeks instead. I’m going to give a shout-out to listeners Leo and Finn, who have been waiting patiently to hear their suggestions. Sorry you’ll have to wait a little bit longer.

The biggest tortoise in the world is the Galapagos Tortoise, which as you probably know, or can guess from the name, lives in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. In fact, the islands were named after the tortoises. Galapago means tortoise in Old Spanish. There are eleven species of Galapagos tortoise alive today, but there used to be 15. The others were mostly eaten to extinction by sailors who would stop by the Galapagos Islands, capture tortoises, and sail away with them to eat later.

The biggest individual Galapagos tortoise ever measured was a male named Goliath. When he died in 2002, Goliath was 4.5 feet long, or 1.36 meters, 2 feet three inches high, or 68.5 cm, and weighed 919 pounds, or 417 kg. He was only 42 years old when he died, but Galapagos tortoises frequently live for more than 150 years. Adult tortoises have no predators except humans. They’re just too big, too heavy, too strong, and have too tough a shell for other predators to bother with.

The Galapagos tortoise eats plants, including grass, leaves, fruit, and even cacti. Its neck is long, which allows it to reach plants that are farther away, since it can’t exactly climb trees. It can survive up to six months without water, getting most of its moisture from the plants it eats, but some tortoises on more arid islands will lick dew from rocks to get moisture. Some of the boulders have been licked by tortoises so much over the centuries that they have deep grooves worn in the surface from turtle tongues.

As I’ve mentioned before in other episodes, sometimes herbivores will eat meat when they can get it. The Galapagos tortoise does this too on occasion. There’s a type of finch on the Galapagos that cleans parasites off the tortoises, and to help the finch reach as much of its skin as possible, the tortoise will stand up straight with its legs extended. The finches hop underneath and clean ticks and other parasites from the tortoise’s legs, neck, and the skin between the carapace, or upper shell, and the plastron, the lower shell. But occasionally a tortoise will suddenly pull its legs into its shell and drop, smashing the finches flat. Then it stands up and eats the squashed birds. This is not cool, tortoise. Those birds are trying to help you.

Galapagos tortoises lay round, hard-shelled eggs. The female digs a hole in the dirt that’s about a foot deep, or 30 cm, and lays about a dozen eggs in it. She covers the eggs with dirt, tamps it down with her plastron, and leaves. When the babies hatch, they have to dig their way out of the hole. This can take weeks, but fortunately the babies still have yolk sacs attached that keep them from starving.

One of the Galapagos tortoise species that went extinct recently was the Pinta Island tortoise. The last known individual was called Lonesome George. He was found in 1971 on Pinta Island and taken to the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island. Although researchers tried to find more Pinta Island tortoises, even offering $10,000 if someone found a female, George turned out to be the very last one. He lived with two females of another Galapagos giant tortoise species, in hopes that they were closely related enough to produce babies, but none of the eggs the females laid ever hatched. Lonesome George died in 2012.

Since then, in 2015, DNA testing on a population of tortoises living on Santa Cruz Island showed that they are a subspecies of their own, and closely related to the Pinta Island tortoises. This had to be an “if only we’d known” moment for the conservationists, who could have paired George with females from that population to produce offspring that were genetically close to the Pinta Island tortoise.

Other Galapagos tortoise species were luckier. The Española Island tortoise was down to only 14 individuals in the wild in 1963. They were all taken to the research station on Santa Cruz Island, joined a few years later by another Española tortoise that had been living in the San Diego Zoo. The breeding program was successful and these days there are over a thousand Española tortoises on the island. Similarly, rats introduced to Pinzón Island in the late 19th century nearly drove that island’s species of tortoise to extinction by eating their eggs and hatchlings. By 1965 there were fewer than 200 adults left alive, and no babies had survived for the better part of a century. Scientists started collecting eggs to incubate in safety at the research station, and rear in captivity until they were big enough to survive rat attacks. By 2012, all the rats had been removed from the island and tortoise nests started to hatch naturally in the wild again.

But the Galapagos tortoise isn’t the only giant tortoise alive. The Aldabra giant tortoise is from the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles [pronounced say-SHELZ], a collection of 115 islands off the coast of East Africa. It’s about the same size as the Galapagos tortoise and looks similar, but it’s not closely related. Females lay leathery-shelled eggs in shallow nests. In hot weather, some Aldabra giant tortoises will dig burrows to shelter from the heat. It eats plants and has a long neck like the Galapagos tortoise to reach branches, but unlike the Galapagos tortoise it will sometimes rear up on its hind legs to reach leaves. This is dangerous for a tortoise, because if it topples over on its back, it might not be able to right itself and can die.

Like the Galapagos tortoise, some species of Aldabra giant tortoise have gone extinct in the recent past, and for the same reasons. This included Arnold’s giant tortoise, which lived on one of the central Seychelles islands.

In 1995, the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles was told about two unusual tortoises in a hotel garden. A couple of scientists went to investigate. The tortoises were both male, extremely old, and appeared to fit the description of Arnold’s giant tortoise, which had supposedly gone extinct over a hundred years before. Where had they come from?

It turns out that the hotel had recently bought the tortoises from a very old local man. They had been in the man’s family for longer than anyone alive could remember. Originally there had been three tortoises, but one had died only a matter of months before the scientists discovered them. They were able to get the dead tortoise’s skeleton for study, which proved that these weren’t just regular old Aldabra giant tortoises, they were Arnold’s giant tortoises—possibly the last two alive in the world.

But the researchers weren’t going to give up that easily. They started digging into reports of other unusual tortoises on the islands. Not only did they eventually find a handful of other Arnold’s giant tortoises, they found a second subspecies that had supposedly gone extinct in 1840, referred to as hololissa after its scientific name, Aldabrachelys hololissa.

As if that wasn’t awesome enough, after all this excitement in the tortoise studying community, the Blackpool Zoo in England took a closer look at the Aldabra giant tortoise that had been living there for the last 25 years, named Darwin. It turns out that Darwin was a hololissa tortoise all along. After that, other zoos brought in experts to examine their giant tortoises, and more hololissa and Arnold’s individuals turned up. The problem is that these tortoises all look pretty much alike except to experts. The tortoises have been placed in a successful captive breeding program in the Seychelles.

Researchers used to think that giant tortoises grew so big due to island gigantism, where a species isolated on an island evolves to become larger. In addition to the Seychelles and the Galapagos, giant tortoises used to live on the Canary Islands and the Mascarene islands, including on Mauritius. You know, where the dodo used to live.

But giant tortoises used to be common all over the world, not just on islands where they mostly live today. Big as these living tortoises are, there used to be giant tortoises even bigger.

The biggest known giant tortoise lived in what is now India and Pakistan, and probably in other places too. It lived around two million years ago and may have only gone extinct about 100,000 years ago, or maybe even more recently. It was twice the size of the Galapagos tortoise, possibly as much as nine feet long, or 2.7 meters, and six feet high, or 1.8 meters.

The giant land tortoise, Hesperotestudo crassiscutata, lived even more recently in North and Central America. It was a little bit larger than the Galapagos tortoise, maybe six feet long, or 1.8 meters, but it went extinct only 12,000 years ago. Researchers think humans may have played a part in driving that tortoise to extinction too, by eating it and its eggs. Since I’m recording this episode on Thanksgiving day in the United States, I’m feeling a little guilty about eating so much turkey. Fortunately, turkeys, unlike giant tortoises, are not endangered.

I’m thankful that some species of giant tortoises have survived until today. They’re awesome animals.

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

Thanks for listening!