Episode 380: Woodpeckers

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Thanks to Joel and Mary for suggesting some really interesting woodpeckers this week!

Further watching:

Rare woodpecker thought extinct spotted in Ohio

The green woodpecker really likes to eat ants [picture by Remyymer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65008314]:

The white-headed woodpecker looks like its face got splashed with paint:

The red-headed woodpecker has the prettiest shade of red [picture by colleen – originally posted to Flickr as Red Headed Woodpecker, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6639146]:

The acorn woodpecker looks like it got its face splashed with white paint and then dipped its beak in black paint [picture by Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=136903489]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to talk about a type of bird that several people have suggested, the woodpecker! Thanks to Joel and Mary for their suggestions, and I could swear someone else suggested woodpeckers a while back. If that was you, thank you and I’m sorry I didn’t write it down!

It’s funny that we haven’t talked about woodpeckers very often, because they are definitely strange animals. How many animals use their head to hammer holes in wood? The woodpecker has a strong, heavy bill that it uses to drill holes in trees to find hidden insects and other invertebrates. A lot of insects dig little burrows in wood, and the woodpecker hammers away at the wood until it exposes the burrow. Then it has to get the insect or grub out of the burrow without it getting away, so it has a long, sticky tongue with barbs at the end. It can stick its tongue into the burrow and use it to drag the insect out and eat it.

When I say woodpeckers have long tongues, I mean their tongues are way longer than you think. The woodpecker’s skull contains a special cavity that wraps all the way around the brain and back down to the right nostril, and this cavity is where the main part of the tongue is when the woodpecker isn’t actually using it. It also helps cushion the brain and keep it from moving too much while the woodpecker is pecking. The skull itself is lined with spongy bone to soften impacts too.

The woodpecker also has a lot of other adaptations to using its entire head like a hammer. To protect its eyes from debris and pressure damage, it has a thick membrane that it uses to cover the eye, like built-in safety goggles. It has tiny, tough feathers that protect the nostrils from debris, and its nostrils are usually very small and thin too. Even its skin is thicker than that of most birds.

Woodpeckers have weird feet too. Almost all species have four toes, two that point forward, two that point backward. This arrangement is called zygodactyly, and it’s a trait also found in parrots and some other birds, and in chameleons. It allows the woodpecker to climb trees and branches securely and easily. The woodpecker also has a relatively short tail with stiff feathers that it uses to prop itself up against a tree trunk while hammering.

The woodpecker doesn’t just use its hammering ability to find food. It also hammers to communicate with other woodpeckers, the same way other birds use song. Each species has its own pattern of drumming, and the sound can attract a mate or tell rivals that this territory is already taken. When it’s communicating, the woodpecker will drum on different surfaces than when it’s just looking for food. This might be a hollow tree that amplifies the sound, or even an artificial surface. The first time I observed this as a birdwatcher was when I noticed a red-breasted woodpecker hammering repeatedly on a metal light post.

Woodpeckers do make ordinary sounds, though. Mary suggested the European green woodpecker and pointed out that its old name is yaffle, which mimics its call. This is what the green woodpecker sounds like:

[green woodpecker call]

Birders still refer to the sound as yaffling, which is the funniest word I’ve said all day.

The green woodpecker is native to much of Europe and parts of Asia. It has a bright red head and a black mask on its face, and its body is mostly an olive green color with a yellow rump patch. It’s a large bird, with a wingspan up to 20 inches across, or 51 cm. It especially likes to eat ants and spends most of its time on the ground looking for them. When it finds an ant nest, it will use its bill to open the nest up and then it licks up all the yummy ants and larvae with its long sticky tongue. As an example of how long a woodpecker’s tongue is, the green woodpecker has a tongue 4 inches long, or 10 cm, while its entire body is 14 inches long, or 36 cm.

Unlike most woodpeckers, the green woodpecker doesn’t do a lot of drumming or woodpecking. When it does, it’s mostly on very soft or rotten wood, and it’s probably not looking for food but excavating a nest hole to lay eggs in. Its favorite habitat is open woodland, since it can nest and hide in the trees but find lots of ants on the ground.

Joel suggested we learn about the white-headed woodpecker. I’d never heard of that one before, probably because it only lives in mountainous pine forests in parts of the Pacific northwest of Canada and the United States. It’s a glossy black in color with a mostly white head and a streak of bright white on its wings. Males have a red head patch too. It mostly eats pine seeds, which are found in pine cones. The seeds are quite large and the white-headed woodpecker is relatively small, only about 9 inches long, or 23 cm.

It will take a pine seed, wedge it into a crevice in a tree, and break it into bite-sized pieces by hammering it. It also eats insects, but it mainly finds them under the bark of trees, and it will sometimes peck little holes into tree trunks and eat the sap that oozes out. Unlike pretty much every woodpecker known, the white-headed woodpecker’s tongue isn’t especially long, probably because it doesn’t need a long tongue to find pine seeds.

This is what the white-headed woodpecker sounds like:

[white-headed woodpecker call]

One of my favorite birds is the red-headed woodpecker, which has a vibrantly red head and a black and white body that almost looks checkered. It’s native to North America and lives year-round in much of the eastern and central United States, but for some reason it took me years as a birdwatcher before I saw one for the first time. I didn’t know just how beautiful it really is until I saw one in person. Red is my favorite color, and the red-headed woodpecker’s red head is my exact favorite shade of red.

The red-headed woodpecker is about the size of the white-headed woodpecker, or a little larger. It eats lots of insects but will also eat seeds, berries and other fruit, and even the eggs of other birds. It sometimes catches insects on the wing. It’s also one of only a few species of woodpecker that stores food, hiding it in crevices in trees or under the shingles of people’s houses. Occasionally when it catches too many grasshoppers to eat, it will wedge the living grasshoppers in crevices so tightly that the insect is stuck there until the bird comes back when it’s hungry. That’s disturbing.

Another bird that caches food is the acorn woodpecker, which lives in parts of southwestern North America down through Central America. It’s mostly black with white patches on the face and black and white streaks underneath. Males have a red patch on the back of the head too. As you probably guessed from its name, it eats a lot of acorns along with insects, fruit, and tree sap. Because acorns are seasonal foods, only available in the fall, the acorn woodpecker stores acorns to eat later in the year. It hides the acorns in holes and crevices, often pecking little holes in a tree specifically for storage, but as the acorns dry out they take up less space. The bird spends a lot of time throughout the year moving its acorns to better hiding spaces.

The acorn woodpecker lives in small flocks of up to about a dozen or 15 birds. All birds in the flock help raise any babies, and in years where there aren’t very many acorns, only a few of the females in the group will lay eggs. In years where there are lots of acorns, all of the females will usually lay eggs. They all lay their eggs in the same nesting cavity and the babies are raised together.

So why do so many woodpeckers have such bright colors and markings? Many are black and white, often with red or yellow markings on the head or neck. They look conspicuous to us, but the black and white patterning blends in with the pattern of light and shadow under trees. The bright spots of color help attract mates, since a bird with brightly colored feathers shows other birds that they’re healthy. In many species, only the male has a red patch, or the female’s red patch may be smaller than the male’s.

Way back in episode 9 we talked about the ivory-billed woodpecker and some of its close relations. The ivory-billed woodpecker was thought to be extinct but possible sightings and audio recordings indicate it may still be alive in remote areas of the southeastern United States. Most recently, video footage of a bird spotted in Ohio has the controversy starting up again. I’ve linked to the video in the show notes. The bird in the video is probably just the very similar-looking pileated woodpecker, but the light isn’t good so it’s hard to tell for sure. It’s just barely possible it might actually be an ivory-billed woodpecker. Let’s hope it is an ivory-billed.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 379: Animals That Inspired Pokemon

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Thanks to Pranav, Isaac, and an anonymous listener for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about some animals that inspired three Pokemon.

Sandshrew:

Possible Sandshrew inspirations:

Drowzee:

Possible Drowzee inspiration:

Fennekin:

Undoubted Fennekin inspiration:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to do something slightly different. At least two people and probably a lot more have suggested that we talk about some animals that were the inspiration for Pokemon, so I picked three that you might not know about. Thanks to Pranav and Isaac for their suggestions, and if you suggested the same topic at some point and I didn’t write it down, thank you too! Thanks also to an anonymous listener who suggested three of the animals we’ll talk about in this episode. I didn’t intend to cover three animals suggested by the same listener but it worked out that way, which is kind of neat.

Some of you may not be familiar with what Pokemon are. The word is a shortened version of the term “pocket monsters,” and it started as a video game where players catch various monsters and store them in little round cages called pokeballs. A lot of Pokemon are so cute you can’t really call them monsters, but they all have different abilities and can evolve into even more powerful versions with enough training. My only real experience with Pokemon is the game Pokemon Go that came out in 2016, although I don’t play it anymore, but the franchise has had multiple games, including a trading card game that is still really popular, TV shows, movies, and of course lots of toys.

Sometimes it’s easy to figure out what animal inspired a Pokemon. Rhyhorn obviously looks like a rhinoceros, Magikarp looks like a goldfish, and so on. But sometimes it’s not so obvious. Let’s start with Sandshrew.

Sandshrew is a sandy-brown color on its back with a lighter belly and muzzle, and prominent claws. Its tail is big and its ears are small. It’s covered with armor plates, and in some versions of Sandshrew, most notably the Pokemon TV show, it can curl up into a ball. What does that remind you of?

Some of you just said “armadillo” and others of you just said “pangolin.” Both were suggested a while back by an anonymous listener. The two animals aren’t related but they do share some physical similarities, like armored bodies and the ability to curl up into a ball to make their armor even more effective.

We talked about the pangolin in episode 65, about animals that eat ants. The pangolin is related to anteaters, and is sometimes even called the scaly anteater, but it’s not closely related to the armadillo. Their similarities are mainly due to convergent evolution.

The pangolin is a mammal, but it’s covered in scales except for its belly and face. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein that makes up fingernails, hair, hooves, and other hard parts in mammals. When it’s threatened, it rolls up into a ball with its tail over its face, and the sharp-edged, overlapping scales protect it from being bitten or clawed. It has a long, thick tail, short, strong legs with claws, a small head, and very small ears. Its muzzle is long with a nose pad at the end, it has a long sticky tongue, and it has no teeth. It’s nocturnal and lives in burrows, and it uses its big front claws to dig into termite mounds and ant colonies. It has poor vision but a good sense of smell. It’s a good fit for Sandshrew and some species are even the same color as Sandshrew. It lives in southern Asia and much of sub-Sahara Africa, and all species are critically endangered.

Meanwhile, the armadillo is also a mammal that’s covered in armor except for its belly, but its armor is much different from the pangolin’s scales. The armor is made up of bands of hardened, bone-like skin covered with scutes, which are tiny flattened knobs of keratin. Ordinary skin connects the bands so that the animal can move around more easily. Some species roll up when threatened, but others rarely do. Instead they just run into the most thorny, prickly plants they can find. The armadillo’s armor protects it from being hurt by the thorns. Like the pangolin, it has sharp claws and can dig well to get at termites and other invertebrates, and like the pangolin it has poor eyesight but a good sense of smell. Its ears are small, its legs are short, and its tail is long but not as thick as the pangolin’s. Most species are grayish, pinkish, or brownish. It looks less like Sandshrew than the pangolin does, but it might have contributed to Sandshrew’s appearance and habits.

The armadillo lives in the Americas, mostly in South America but also Central and parts of North America. Many species are endangered.

Whichever animal you think inspired Sandshrew, I think we can agree that Sandshrew doesn’t have anything to do with actual shrews.

Our next Pokemon is Drowzee. Drowzee is a chonky, strong-looking monster who looks like it’s wearing gray pants but otherwise has ochre yellow skin. Its nose is drawn out into a short proboscis like a miniature elephant trunk, and it has three pointy toes on its hands and what look like cloven hooves on its feet. It doesn’t have a tail.

Drowzee is inspired by the tapir, probably the Asian tapir. The other tapirs alive today live in South and Central America, but the Asian tapir lives in lowland rainforests in parts of south Asia. It’s mostly white or pale gray with black or dark gray forequarters and legs. It’s also the largest species of tapir alive today, standing more than 3 and a half feet tall at the back, or 110 cm. Like other tapirs, it spends a lot of time in water, eating plants and staying cool.

The tapir looks kind of like a pig but it’s actually much more closely related to horses and rhinos. It has four toes on its front legs, three on its hind legs, and each toe has a large nail that looks like a little hoof. It also has a rounded body with a pronounced rump, a stubby little tail, and a long head with a short but prehensile trunk called a proboscis. It uses its proboscis to gather plants, and it can even use it as a snorkel when it’s underwater.

The Asian tapir isn’t a perfect match for Drowzee, but its two-part coloration and short proboscis are pretty close. As far as I know, the Asian tapir doesn’t make you fall asleep and then eat your dreams like Drowzee is supposed to do, but that’s an aspect of a monster in Japanese folklore. The baku is supposed to eat nightmares and traditionally it’s often described as being black and white like a panda, but often with tapir-like traits.

Our last Pokemon today is Fennekin, who is based on the fennec fox, also a suggestion by an anonymous listener. Fennekin is yellow-brown in color with white on its face, a red-orange tip to its tail and red-orange tufts in its gigantic ears.

The fennec fox lives in northern Africa and parts of Asia. Its fur is a pale sandy color with a black tip to the tail. Its eyes are dark and its ears are large. It stands only about 8 inches tall at the shoulder, or 20 cm, but its ears can be six inches long, or 15 cm. It eats rodents, birds and their eggs, insects, and other small animals, as well as fruit. It can jump really far, some four feet in one bound, or 120 cm. Because it lives in desert areas, it rarely needs to drink water. It gets most of its water through the food it eats, and researchers think it may also lap dew that gathers in the burrow where it spends the day.

Fennekin is a fire Pokemon, appropriate since it’s based on a desert animal. It’s also extra adorable, and so is the fennec fox.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 378: Ichthyotitan

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Thanks to Nathan-Andrew for suggesting giant ichthyosaurs!

Further reading:

Paleontologists unearth what may be the largest known marine reptile

Ruby and some other scientists with the ichthyotitan fossils [photos taken from this page]:

How the pieces fit together:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some of the biggest animals that have ever swum through the oceans of this planet we call Earth, a suggestion from Nathan-Andrew.

We talked about ichthyosaurs way back in episode 63, but we haven’t really discussed these giant marine reptiles since. Ichthyosaurs and their close relations were incredibly successful, first appearing in the fossil record around 250 million years ago and last appearing around 90 million years ago. Most ichthyosaurs grew around 6 and a half to 11 feet long, or 2 to 3.3 meters, depending on species, so while they were pretty big animals, most of them weren’t enormous. They would have been fast, though, and looked a lot like fish or dolphins.

Even though ichthyosaurs were reptiles, they were warm-blooded, meaning they could regulate their body temperature internally without relying on outside sources of heat. They breathed air and gave birth to live babies the way dolphins and their relations do. They had front flippers and rear flippers along with a tail that resembled a shark’s except that the lower lobe was larger than the upper lobe. Some species had a dorsal fin too. They had huge eyes, which researchers think indicated they dived for prey. Not only were their eyes huge, they were protected by a bony eye ring that would help the eyes retain their shape even under deep-sea pressures.

We know a lot about what ichthyosaurs ate, both from coprolites, or fossilized poops, and from the fossilized remains of partially digested food preserved in the stomach area. Most ichthyosaurs ate cephalopods like squid and ammonites, along with fish, turtles, and pretty much any other animals they could catch. Ichthyosaurs also ate smaller ichthyosaurs.

Nathan-Andrew specifically suggested we look at Shastasaurus and Shonisaurus, two closely related genera that belong to the ichthyosaur family Shastasauridae. Both genera contained species that were much larger than the average dolphin-sized ichthyosaur. The biggest species known until recently was Shonisaurus sikanniensis, which grew to almost 70 feet long, or 21 meters.

Scientists are divided as to whether S. sikanniensis should be considered a species of Shonisaurus or if it should be placed in the genus Shastasaurus. The main difference is that species in the genus Shastasaurus were more slender and had a longer, pointier rostrum than species in the genus Shonisaurus. Either way, S. sikanniensis was described in 2004 and at the time was the largest ichthyosaur species ever discovered.

But in May of 2016 a fossil enthusiast came across five pieces of what he suspected was an ichthyosaur bone along the coast of Somerset, England. He sent pictures to a couple of marine reptile experts, who verified that it was indeed part of an ichthyosaur’s lower jawbone, called a surangular. Studies of the fossil pieces compared it to S. sikanniensis, and it was similar enough that the new fossil was tentatively placed in the family Shastasauridae. Based on those comparisons, scientists estimated that this new ichthyosaur might have grown to around 72 feet long, or 22 meters, or even longer.

Almost exactly four years after the 2016 discovery, in May of 2020, an 11-year-old named Ruby Reynolds was looking for fossils with her father on the beach at Somerset. She discovered two big chunks of a fossil bone that she thought might be important. Ruby’s father contacted a local paleontologist, who in turn reached out to the man who had found and helped study the 2016 surangular bone. They studied the 2020 fossil and determined that it too was a surangular bone, and looked a lot like the one found in 2016. Not only was it better preserved and more complete, it was bigger.

Ruby and her father joined the team of paleontologists searching for more pieces of the surangular, and they actually found them. The pieces fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.

The bone has been dated as being about 202 million years old, from right before the end-Triassic extinction event and 13 million years after the other most recent ichthyosaur fossils from this era. It was described in early 2024 and named Ichthyotitan, and I’m happy to report that Ruby and her father helped with the research and are both included in the list of authors in the paper describing it. They also helped name it.

The estimated size of this specific Ichthyotitan specimen is about 25 meters, or 82 feet. That’s incredibly huge, rivaling the biggest whales alive today. But one other detail about this ichthyotitan bone is even more stunning. When the animal died, it was still growing. It hadn’t reached its full size yet.

As a comparison, the biggest animal ever known to have lived is the blue whale. A blue whale can grow up to 98 feet long, or 30 meters. Until now, scientists thought that no other animal had ever reached the size of a blue whale. Now, some paleontologists suspect that a full-grown ichthyotitan might have been at least as long or even longer than a blue whale.

The next step, of course, is to find more of the fossils. Ichthyotitan’s only fossils so far have been found in Somerset, England, but fossils of closely related ichthyosaurs have been found in parts of California, Nevada, British Columbia, China, Italy, Switzerland, and Tibet. In other words, they might be found just about anywhere with rocks dating to about 200 million years ago. The next time you’re out for a walk, keep a look-out just in case you spot a bone belonging to the biggest animal that ever lived.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 377: The Giant-est Snake Ever

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Thanks to Max for suggesting Titanoboa!

Further reading:

Largest known madtsoiid snake from warm Eocene period of India suggests intercontinental Gondwana dispersal

This Nearly 50-Foot Snake Was One of the Largest to Slither on Earth

Meet Vasuki indicus, the ‘crocodile’ that was a 50ft snake

Titanoboa had really big bones compared to its modern relatives:

Vasuki had big bones too:

Show transcript:

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

Almost exactly two years ago now, Max emailed to suggest we talk about titanoboa. The problem was that we had covered titanoboa in episode 197, and even though there’s always something new to learn about an animal, in this case since titanoboa is extinct there wasn’t much more I could share until new studies were published about it. But as the years passed I felt worse and worse that Max was waiting so long. A lot of listeners have to wait a long time for their suggested episode, and I always feel bad. But still there were no new studies about titanoboa!

Why am I telling you all this? Because we’re finally going to talk about titanoboa today, even though by now Max is probably old and gray with great-grandkids. But we’re only going to talk about titanoboa to compare it to another extinct snake. That’s right. Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a snake that was even longer than titanoboa!

Let’s start with Titanoboa, because it’s now been a really long time since episode 197 and all I remember about it is that it’s extinct and was way bigger than any snake alive today. Its discovery is such a good story that I’m going to include it too.

In 1994, a geologist named Henry Garcia found an unusual-looking fossil in Colombia in South America, in an area that had been strip-mined for coal. Fifty-eight million years ago the region was a hot, swampy, tropical forest along the edge of a shallow sea.

Garcia thought he’d found a piece of fossilized tree. The coal company in charge of the mine displayed it in their office along with other fossils. There it sat until 2003, when palaeontologists arranged an expedition to the mine to look for fossil plants. A researcher named Scott Wing was invited to join the team, and while he was there he poked around among the fossils displayed by the mining company. The second he saw the so-called petrified branch he knew it wasn’t a plant. He sent photos to a colleague who said it looked like the jawbone of a land animal, probably something new to science.

In 2007, the fossil was sent for study, labeled as a crocodile bone. But the palaeontologists who examined the fossil in person immediately realized it wasn’t from a crocodile. It was a snake vertebra—but so enormous that they couldn’t believe their eyes. They immediately arranged an expedition to look for more of them, and they found them!

Palaeontologists have found fossilized remains from around 30 individual snakes, including young ones. The adult size is estimated to be 42 feet, or 13 meters. The largest living snakes are anacondas and reticulated pythons, with no verified measurements longer than about 23 feet long, or 7 meters. Titanoboa was probably twice that length.

Because titanoboa was so bulky and heavy, it would be more comfortable in the water where it could stay cool and have its weight supported. It lived in an area where the land was swampy with lots of huge rivers. Those rivers were full of gigantic fish and other animals, including a type of lungfish that grew nearly ten feet long, or 3 meters. Studies of titanoboa’s skull and teeth indicate that it probably mostly ate fish.

So if titanoboa was so huge that until literally a few days ago as this episode goes live, we thought it was the biggest snake that had ever existed, how big was this newly discovered snake? It’s called Vasuki indicus and while it wasn’t that much bigger than titanoboa, estimates so far suggest it could grow almost 50 feet long, or over 15 meters. It’s named after a giant serpent king called Vasuki from Hindu folklore, who symbolizes strength and prosperity.

Vasuki indicus was discovered in a mine in India in 2005. The original discovery consisted of 27 vertebrae, including some that were still articulated. That means they remained in place after the rest of the body decayed and were preserved that way, which helps palaeontologists better estimate the snake’s true size.

Like titanoboa, the fossils were misidentified at first. They were labeled as a known giant crocodile and set aside in the discoverer’s lab for decades. In 2022, paleontologist Debajit Datta joined the lab, and one of the things he wanted to study were these giant crocodile fossils. He started preparing them for study by removing the rock matrix from around them, and almost immediately realized they belonged to a snake, not a crocodile.

The fossils have been dated to about 47 million years ago in what is now India, in Asia. Titanoboa lived about 58 million years ago in what is now Colombia, in South America. The two snakes are related, although not closely, and this helps scientists determine how snakes spread across the world as the continents moved into their current positions.

Both snakes lived in what were then very similar habitats, a tropical, swampy area near the coast. The researchers think Vasuki spent most of its time on land, unlike titanoboa. It wasn’t as bulky as titanoboa and could probably maneuver on land a lot more easily.

Until titanoboa was described in 2009, a snake called Gigantophis was thought to be the largest snake that ever lived. It lived around 40 million years ago in what is now the northern Sahara desert and could grow over 35 feet long, or almost 11 meters. It turns out that Vasuki was closely related to gigantophis.

As it stands now, until more fossils are found and more studies are conducted and published, Vasuki is estimated to be slightly longer than titanoboa at maximum, making it the longest snake known, but titanoboa is still estimated to be the heaviest snake known. So they both win the largest snake award, but the real winner is us.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 376: The Horned Lizard AKA Horny Toad

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Thanks to Khalil for suggesting the horny toad, also called the horned lizard or horned toad!

Further reading:

The Case of the Lost Lizard

The Texas horned lizard:

Texas Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum)

The rock horned lizard [photo taken from article linked above]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about a reptile suggested by Khalil, who is Leo’s friend, so a big shout-out to both. Khalil wants to learn about the horny toad, also called the horned toad or horned lizard.

We talked about it briefly back in episode 299. The horny toad is actually a lizard that lives in various parts of North America, especially western North America, from Canada down through much of the United States and into Mexico. The largest species is the Texas horned lizard, with a big female growing about 5 inches long, or almost 13 cm, not counting its tail.

The horny toad does actually resemble a toad in some ways. Its body is broad and rounded and its face has a blunt, froglike snout. Its tail is quite short. It’s also kind of sluggish and spends a lot of time just sitting in the sun, relying on its mottled coloration to camouflage it. If it feels threatened, it will actually just freeze and hope the predator doesn’t notice it. It’s covered with little pointy scales, and if a predator does approach, it will puff up its body so that the scales stick out even more and it looks larger. It also has true horns on its head, little spikes that are formed by projections of its skull, and if a predator tries to bite it, the horny toad will jerk its head up to stab its horns into the predator’s mouth.

Horny toads mainly eat a type of red ant called the harvester ant. The harvester ant is venomous but the horny toad is resistant to the venom and is specialized to eat lots and lots of the ants. Its esophagus produces lots of mucus when it’s eating, which collects around the ants and stops them from being able to bite before they die.

Because it eats so many venomous ants, many scientists think the horny toad stores some of the toxins in its body, especially in its blood. Its blood tastes especially bad to canids like coyotes that are common in the areas where it lives. But it does the horny toad no good to have bad-tasting blood if a predator has to bite it to find out, so the horny toad has a way to give a predator a sample of its blood in the weirdest way you can imagine.

If a horny toad is cornered by a predator and can’t run away, and puffing up isn’t helping deter the predator, the lizard has one last trick up its sleeve. It increases the blood pressure in its head by restricting some of the blood vessels carrying blood back to the heart, and when the blood pressure increases enough, it causes tiny blood vessels around the eyelids to rupture. It doesn’t just release blood, it squirts blood up to five feet away, or 1.5 meters. As if that wasn’t metal enough, the horny toad can aim this stream of blood, and it aims it right at the predator’s eyes.

Imagine for a moment that you are a hungry coyote. You’re young and don’t know that horny toads taste bad, you just know you’ve found this plump-looking lizard that doesn’t move very fast. It keeps puffing up and looking spiky, but you’re hungry so you keep charging in to try and grab it with your teeth in a way that won’t hurt your tongue on those spikes. Then, suddenly, your eyes are full of lizard blood that stings and makes it hard to see, and the blood drips down into your mouth and it tastes TERRIBLE. It doesn’t matter how hungry you are, this fat little lizard is definitely off the menu. Meanwhile, the horny toad is fine.

Scientists aren’t sure if every species of horny toad can squirt blood. Some species probably can’t, while some do it very seldom. It also doesn’t help against some predators, like birds, who don’t have a great sense of taste and aren’t affected by the toxins in the horny toad’s blood.

The horny toad relies on the harvester ant for most of its specialized diet, although it does eat other insects too. It can’t survive without eating harvester ants. The problem is, the harvester ant is in decline after fire ants were introduced to North America from South America. The horny toad doesn’t eat fire ants, and the fire ants out-compete the local harvester ants, leaving the horny toad with less and less food.

Humans really don’t like fire ants, which can cause damage to homes when they dig their huge underground nests, and which inflict really painful bites. When people try to get rid of fire ants, sometimes the treatments also kill harvester ants. Incidentally, some animals that really love to eat fire ants include armadillos, black widow spiders, wolf spiders, and bobwhites.

The Texas horned lizard lives throughout a fairly large range, so although its numbers are in decline along with its ant food, it’s still doing okay for now. But not every horny toad is so lucky.

The rock horned lizard, also called Ditmars’ horned lizard, is only found in one small part of Sonora in northern Mexico. It was first discovered by science in 1891, when an archaeological expedition caught one. The lizard was described in 1906 but by then it hadn’t actually been seen in the wild since 1897, when two more were caught by a man who donated them to the New York Zoological Park. Those were the only three specimens that had ever been collected. Herpetologists worried that the rock horned lizard had gone extinct.

The main issue was that no one was exactly sure where those three specimens had been collected and no one knew exactly where the 1891 expedition had traveled. The man who caught the two lizards in 1897 didn’t say exactly where he’d caught them, just that it was in northern Sonora. But what a scientist named Vincent Roth realized when researching the lizard is that the three preserved specimens probably still contained undigested and partially digested food in their bodies, and that if the insects the lizards had eaten could be identified, it could give an important clue as to where the lizards had lived.

Dr. Roth requested that the gut contents be removed from the 1891 specimen for study, and also from one of the 1897 specimens. The third specimen had been taxidermied and the guts discarded. Dr. Roth cleaned the gut contents with alcohol and examined them microscopically, and found the remains of 14 insects, the seeds of three different species of grass, and some pebbles. All this happened in 1970, so instead of emailing a bunch of experts for help, Dr. Roth had to write physical letters to specialists throughout the world for help identifying the insects.

The specialists were happy to help, and they determined that the pebbles and grass seeds would have been eaten by accident when the lizard slurped up ants carrying them. The lizards had the remains of several different ants in their digestive tracts, including harvester ants, along with weevils, jumping spiders, grasshoppers, and other insects. These were identified, including some rare ones only ever found in certain areas of Sonora. Even the grass seeds and the pebbles were identified.

It all pointed to a particular mountain range in northern Sonora, and an expedition was arranged by Dr. Roth to search for the lizard. But they didn’t find it! They made plans to return, but asked the local people to keep an eye out for a specific type of horned lizard. In 1971 a report came of a rock horned lizard discovered by a local, followed soon by a few others. The lizard was safe, although it’s rare. Scientists had just been looking in the wrong place for it.

Since the rock horned lizard is only a few inches long and blends in so well with its surroundings, it’s no wonder it was hard to find. Fortunately it’s been rediscovered so that scientists can study it and keep it safe. The next step is to keep the harvester ants safe so that all the horny toads have plenty of yummy ants to eat.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 375: The Praying Mantis Re-Revisited

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

Further reading:

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

Dragons and unicorns (mantises) spotted in Atlantic forest

Citizen scientists help discover new mantis species

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

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

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

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 374: PUFFERFISH!

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Thanks to River for suggesting this week’s topic, the pufferfish!

Further reading:

Grass puffer fish communicate with each other using a non-toxic version of their deadly toxin

Mystery pufferfish create elaborate circular nests at mesophotic depths in Australia

Pufferfish, puffed:

A starry puffer, un-puffed [picture by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116912671]:

A grass puffer, un-puffed:

The mystery structure that turns out to be made by pufferfish:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about a weird fish suggested by River, the pufferfish!

Lots of fish have the name pufferfish, and sometimes they’re also called balloonfish, swellfish, bubblefish, or globefish. You might be able to guess from the names what they can do, but just in case you don’t know, the pufferfish can puff up to make itself big and round. The question you might have at this point is why, and how do they do this?

There are lots of pufferfish in various genera, all of them in the family Tetradontidae. Tetradontidae means “four teeth,” because obviously when you find an incredibly poisonous fish that can blow itself up like a balloon, sometimes with spikes that emerge from the skin, of course you’re going to name it after its teeth.

Most pufferfish live in the ocean, although some live in places where freshwater mixes with ocean water, and some species even live in rivers. It prefers warm, shallow water and eats invertebrates and plant material. Larger pufferfish can use their four big front teeth to crush the shells of mollusks, like clams and mussels.

Most pufferfish are quite small and often brightly colored with spots, stripes, and other markings. You’d think the biggest pufferfish has to be the one called the giant freshwater pufferfish, but while it is big, it’s not the biggest. The giant freshwater pufferfish can grow up to 26 inches long, or 67 cm, which is over two feet long. But the starry puffer is almost twice that length, up to 47 inches long, or 120 cm. That’s almost four feet long!

The starry puffer lives in tropical and subtropical parts of the Pacific Ocean, especially in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. It has a big head, two pairs of nostrils, and is a mottled gray and white in color with little black spots all over. It mostly eats crustaceans and mollusks, but will also eat algae, sponges, coral, urchins, and other invertebrates.

The pufferfish is a slow swimmer, but it has two really good defenses. If it feels threatened—for instance if a big fish tries to catch it, or it’s caught in a fishing net and hauled to the surface, or if a diver tries to make friends, the pufferfish will swell up until it looks like a balloon with fins. It does so by gulping air or water into its elastic stomach until it’s completely full.

If you’re wondering how this can help the fish, not only does this make the pufferfish look much larger, it also makes it harder to swallow. Not only that, the pufferfish has spines that may be hidden in the skin most of the time, but when the skin tightens as the fish expands into balloon shape, the spines poke out. Suddenly a potential predator isn’t just trying to swallow a fish way bigger than its mouth is, it’s pointy.

The pufferfish’s second defense is that its body contains a deadly poison. You may have heard about fugu, which is considered a delicacy even though it’s so poisonous that in Japan and some other countries, chefs have to be specially trained and licensed to prepare the fish to eat. It contains tetrodotoxin, or TTX, a neurotoxin that stops your nerves from sending the tiny electrical signals that allow muscles to move. If you’re poisoned with TTX, you start to feel dizzy and sick, then you start having difficulty speaking and moving, then you have trouble breathing, and then, ultimately, you’re paralyzed and can’t breathe, at which point you die. Since the toxin doesn’t affect your brain, you remain completely aware of what’s happening to you but there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no antidote. Fortunately, you have the option of not eating fugu.

Not all pufferfish are poisonous, although most are, and in many species the amount of toxins in the fish’s body can vary according to the time of year and the individual fish. People who have eaten their local pufferfish many times with no problem can suddenly get sick or die from eating the same type of fish. That’s the bad type of surprise.

At least some pufferfish use their toxins for a surprising purpose. In late 2022, a study was published about the grass puffer, also called the grey-spotted puffer. It’s a small fish that grows not quite 10 inches long, or 25 cm, and is gray with tiny white spots. It’s extremely toxic but its body also contains a non-toxic version of TTX, called TDT. Scientists studying the fish determined that other grass puffers can smell TDT in the water so they can find each other. Not only that, other animals found in the same environment where the grass puffer lives also contain both TTX and TDT, and the pufferfish eats those animals. Naturally, it can find its prey by smell.

Let’s finish with a pufferfish mystery that’s been solved. In 1995, divers in southern Japan noticed a series of mysterious underwater structures in the sand. They were about six feet across, or close to two meters, round in shape, and looked sort of like someone had packed sand into a giant one of those fancy decorative cake pans that make designs around the cake, and turned it out upside down underwater. No one could figure out what they were, how they’d been made, or why they were there. People started calling them underwater crop circles.

It wasn’t until 2011 that the mystery was solved, when a diver saw one of the circles being formed by a little pufferfish. The fish turned out to be new to science and was described in 2014, and is popularly known as the white-spotted pufferfish. The male builds the structure by waving his fins to move sand into geometric shapes and concentric rings, a process that takes over a week. Since water keeps moving the sand, he has to keep working on the structure to keep it looking good, and he wants it to look good because that’s how he attracts a mate. The specific patterns he creates direct water currents to the center of the structure, where it deposits fine, soft sand. If a female likes the structure, she will lay her eggs in the soft sand in the middle so that the male can fertilize them.

In 2018, similar nests were discovered off the coast of western Australia, but so far no one knows whether the nests are built by a known species of pufferfish or a species new to science.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 373: The Tasmanian Devil and the Thylacine

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Thanks to Carson, Mia, Eli, and Pranav for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

RNA for the first time recovered from an extinct species

Study finds ongoing evolution in Tasmanian Devils’ response to transmissible cancer

Tasmanian devil research offers new insights for tackling cancer in humans

The Tasmanian devil looks really cute but fights all the time [picture by JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0]:

The Thylacine could opens its jaws verrrrrrry wide:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to cover two animals that a lot of people have suggested. Carson and Mia both want to learn about the Tasmanian tiger, and Eli and Pranav both want to hear about the Tasmanian devil. We talked about the Tasmanian tiger, AKA the thylacine, in episode 1, and I thought we’d had a Tasmanian devil episode too but it turns out I was thinking of a March 2019 Patreon bonus episode. So it’s definitely time to learn about both!

The thylacine was a nocturnal marsupial native to New Guinea, mainland Australia, and the Australian island of Tasmania, and the last known individual died in captivity in 1936. But thylacine sightings have continued ever since it was declared extinct. It was a shy, nervous animal that didn’t do well in captivity, so if the animal survives in remote areas of Tasmania, it’s obviously keeping a low profile.

The thylacine was yellowish-brown with black stripes on the back half of its body and down its tail. It was the size of a big dog, some two feet high at the shoulder, or 61 cm, and over six feet long if you included the long tail, or 1.8 meters. It had a doglike head with rounded ears and could open its long jaws extremely wide. Some accounts say that it would sometimes hop instead of run when it needed to move faster, but this seems to be a myth. It was also a quiet animal, rarely making noise except while hunting, when it would give frequent double yips.

A 2017 study discovered that the thylacine population split into two around 25,000 years ago, with the two groups living in eastern and western Australia. Around 4,000 years ago, climate change caused more and longer droughts in eastern Australia and the thylacine population there went extinct. By 3,000 years ago, all the mainland thylacines had gone extinct, leaving just the Tasmanian population. The Tasmanian thylacines underwent a population crash around the same time that the mainland Australia populations went extinct—but the Tasmanian population had recovered and was actually increasing when Europeans showed up and started shooting them.

Because the thylacine went extinct so recently and scientists have access to preserved specimens less than a hundred years old, and since the thylacine’s former habitat is still in place, it’s a good candidate for de-extinction. As a result, it’s been the subject of many genetic studies recently, to learn as much about it as possible. It’ll probably be quite a while before we have the technology to successfully clone a thylacine, but in the meantime people in Australia keep claiming to see thylacines in the wild. Maybe they really aren’t extinct.

The Tasmanian devil is related to the thylacine. It’s about the size of a small to average dog, maybe a bulldog, which it resembles in some ways. It’s compact and muscular with a broad head, relatively short snout, and a big mouth with prominent lower fangs. It’s not related to canids at all, of course, and if you just glanced at a Tasmanian devil, your first thought wouldn’t be “dog” or “thylacine,” it would probably be “giant mouse.”

The Tasmanian devil is black or grayish-brown, usually with patches of white on the chest and rump. It also has rounded pinkish ears, long whiskers, paws with relatively long toes, and a long tail. Since the devil stores fat in its tail, a fat-tailed devil is a happy, healthy devil.

It’s mainly a scavenger and will eat roadkill and other dead animals, although it will also kill and eat small or even large animals, and will also eat plant material and insects. It often eats every trace of a carcass, including bones and fur. This is good for other animals and for ranchers, since it reduces the presence of insects attracted to dead animals and reduces the spread of disease. Its digestion is extremely fast and efficient, and its jaws are extremely strong.

The Tasmanian devil is usually solitary, but it does get together with other devils to socialize and fight while eating. When a devil finds a carcass, it will make extremely loud calls to alert other devils to come share its meal. Then, because they’re called devils and not angels for a reason, the animals will fight over the food.

Tasmanian devils fight a lot. Researchers think the white markings help direct other devils to attack parts of the body that are less vulnerable to injury. The white fur is more visible in the dark, giving other devils a target. The white markings are usually on the devil’s chest, sides, and rump, with none on the face or legs. Males fight each other during breeding season, and the females pick the winners to mate with. If a female doesn’t like a male, she’ll fight him.

Devils are marsupials, which means babies are born very early and finish developing in their mother’s pouch. The Tasmanian devil’s pouch is rear-facing and contains four teats. The problem is, the mother has 20 or even 30 babies at a time. They’re born about the size of a jellybean and the only part that’s developed at that point is the forelegs so it can crawl into the mother’s pouch. The legs have claws and—you guessed it—the little squidge babies fight for a teat. Once one gets to a teat, it clamps on and doesn’t let go for the next three months. Babies that don’t get a teat die.

Like the thylacine, the Tasmanian devil once lived on mainland Australia but is now restricted to the island of Tasmania. Also like the thylacine, it shows low genetic diversity and was once killed for bounty by early settlers. It’s affected by habitat loss like many other animals, and it’s especially vulnerable to being run over by cars because it eats so much roadkill.

But the devil’s biggest issue today is a disease called devil facial tumor disease, or DFTD. DFTD is spread when an infected animal bites another one, which causes cancerous growths in and around the mouth. After a few months the tumors get so big that the devil can no longer eat and starves to death. Since devils bite each other all the time, the disease spreads quickly throughout a population.

In 2019 some researchers predicted the Tasmanian devil would be extinct by 2024. But here it is 2024 and not only is the devil not extinct, it’s actually doing a lot better now than it was just a few years ago.

Part of that is due to conservation efforts, where healthy devils are quarantined from infected ones in captive breeding programs. But part of it is natural. In 2018 a small population of devils was discovered that appeared to have developed a natural resistance to DFTD. Genetic studies done since then revealed some surprises. Not only are younger devils showing a genetic resistance to DFTD, there’s evidence that resistance to other transmissible cancers has developed in the past. Researchers think the Tasmanian devil might be especially prone to transmissible cancers but is also able to develop resistance relatively quickly. The devils with this resistance start growing tumors, but then the tumors stop growing and soon just disappear. Naturally, scientists are looking at the genetics of this trait to see if it can be applied to humans with certain types of cancer.

While Tasmanian devils fight each other, they don’t actually fight humans. Scientists report that it’s actually quite easy to work with. This makes it a lot easier to check the health of a captured animal. Hopefully it won’t be long before the entire population of Tasmanian devils is healthy and its numbers start to increase again.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 372: Mystery Bovids

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Thanks to Will and Måns for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about some mystery bovids, or cows and cow relations!

Further reading:

A Book of Creatures: Songòmby

Kouprey: The Ultimate Mystery Mammal

A musk ox (top) and a wild yak (bottom):

A young kouprey bull from the 1930s:

Sculpture of two grown kouprey bulls [photo by Christian Pirkl – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73848355]:

A banteng bull (with a cow behind him) [photo taken from this site]:

A qilin/kilin/kirin looking backwards:

The “purple” calf:

The Milka purple cow:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some mystery bovids, or cow relations, suggested by Will and Måns, whose name I am probably mispronouncing.

We’ll start with a mystery about the musk ox, which is not otherwise a mysterious animal. Måns emailed about reading a children’s book about animals that had a picture of a musk ox in the part about the Gobi Desert. The problem is, the musk ox is native to the Arctic and was once found throughout Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. So the question is, was the book wrong or are there really musk oxen in the Gobi Desert?

We’ll start by learning about the musk ox and the Gobi Desert. The musk ox can stand up to 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters. It has thick, dense, shaggy fur all over, a tiny tail only about four inches long, or 10 cm, and horns that curve down close to the sides of its head and then curve up again at the ends.

The musk ox is well adapted to the cold, which isn’t a surprise since it evolved during the ice ages. Its ancestors lived alongside mammoths, woolly rhinos, and other Pleistocene megafauna. Like many cold-adapted animals, its fur consists of a thick undercoat that keeps it warm, and a much longer layer of fur that protects the softer undercoat. The undercoat is so soft and so good at keeping the animal warm in bitterly cold temperatures that people will sometimes keep musk oxen in order to gather the undercoat in spring when it starts to shed, to use for making clothing and blankets. But it’s definitely not a domesticated animal. It can be aggressive and extremely dangerous.

A warm coat isn’t the musk ox’s only cold adaptation. The hemoglobin in its blood is able to function well even when it’s cold, which isn’t the case for most mammals. It lives in small herds that gather close together in really cold weather to share body heat, and if a predator threatens the herd, the adults will form a ring around the calves, their heads facing outward. Since a musk ox is huge, heavy, and can run surprisingly fast, plus it has horns, if a wolf or other predator is butted by a musk ox it might end up fatally injured.

The main predator of the musk ox is the human, who hunted it almost to extinction by the early 20th century. It was completely extirpated in Alaska but was reintroduced there and in parts of Canada in the late 20th century. Similarly, it was reintroduced to parts of Siberia and even parts of northern Europe, although not all the European introductions were successful.

So what about the Gobi Desert? It’s nowhere near the Arctic. Not all deserts are hot. A desert just has limited rainfall, and the Gobi is a cold desert. Parts of the Gobi are grasslands and parts are sandy or rocky, and it covers a huge expanse of land in central Asia, mainly divided between northern China and southern Mongolia. Some parts of it do get limited rainfall in the summer and limited snowfall and frost in the winter, but for the most part it’s dry and therefore has limited vegetation for animals to eat.

Animals do live in the Gobi, though. The wild Bactrian camel, which has two humps, is found nowhere else in the world and is critically endangered. The Mongolian wild ass lives in parts of the Gobi, as do several species of antelope and gazelle, wild sheep, and ibex. The Gobi bear, which is the rarest bear in the world, also lives in the Gobi, along with smaller animals like hares, foxes, polecats, marmots, and various lizards, snakes, and birds. Occasionally wolves and snow leopards visit parts of the Gobi. So do humans, specifically nomadic herders who travel through parts of the desert to find food for their animals.

Of all the animals found in the Gobi, and in central Asia in general, the musk ox is not listed on any scholarly site I could find. Despite its name, it’s not actually closely related to other cattle and is instead most closely related to goats and sheep. However, a close relation of the domestic cow and its ancestors is the wild yak, the ancestor of the domestic yak. The wild yak lives mostly in the Himalayas these days but was once much more widespread, and the domestic yak is farmed by nomadic herders in the colder, more mountainous parts of the Gobi.

The yak isn’t closely related to the musk ox, but it does have a very similar-looking long, shaggy coat. Its horns point forward and up like cattle horns, but to someone who doesn’t really know much about yaks or musk ox, it would be easy to get the two confused. This seems to be what has happened in the case of the children’s book Måns read and in various non-academic websites. I think we can call this mystery solved.

Next, let’s go on to Will’s suggestion of mystery bovids. The family Bovidae includes not just the domestic cow and its relations but goats, sheep, antelopes, and many other animals with cloven hooves who chew the cud as part of the digestive process–but not deer or giraffes, and not the pronghorn even though people call it an antelope. Many bovids have horns, usually only two but sometimes four or even six, and those horns are never branched. Sometimes only the male has horns, sometimes both the male and female. Bovids don’t have incisors in the front of the upper jaw, only in the lower jaw, and instead has a tough dental pad that helps it grab plants.

One mystery bovid is a creature from Madagascar, called the habeby. It’s supposed to look like a big white sheep with brown or black spots. It has cloven hooves and droopy ears but not horns, and it’s supposed to be nocturnal and never seen in the daytime. Its eyes are very large and staring. It’s shy and fortunately not dangerous. Bovids are almost always diurnal, so a nocturnal bovid would be quite unusual.

Since sheep and other bovids aren’t native to Madagascar, it’s much more likely that the habeby is a type of large lemur that looks enough like a sheep at a distance that people thought it was a sheep. Either it’s extinct now or it lives in such remote areas that it’s never seen anymore.

Another Madagascar mystery animal is called the songòmby, which either looks like a wild ox or a horse depending on the story. Like the habeby it has floppy ears, a spotted coat, and hooves. Some stories say it has a single horn, some stories say it has a pair of horns, and other stories say it has no horns at all. It lives in mountainous areas and can run incredibly fast uphill, but is much slower downhill because its long ears flop over its eyes and it has trouble seeing where it’s going. This is fortunate, because it’s also supposed to eat people.

One clue to the songòmby’s possible real identity comes from some stories that state it always looks backwards over its back, and is only ever seen from the side. This is reminiscent of how the Chinese kilin is often represented, and also explains why the songòmby has a varying number of horns and looks like a cow or horse but is supposed to eat people. The kilin is often depicted as having both hooves and fangs, and may have a single horn, a pair of horns, or no horns at all. Arab traders began stopping in Madagascar around a thousand years ago and would have brought Chinese goods, including some items decorated with kilins. It’s possible that the kilin artwork inspired the story of the songòmby, but it’s also so similar to the habeby in some ways that details of that animal may have been incorporated into the story of the songòmby, or vice versa.

Way back in episode 100 we talked briefly about an animal called the kouprey. It’s a wild ox native to southeast Asia, sometimes called the forest ox. It can stand over six feet tall at the shoulder, or two meters, and while bulls are dark brown, cows and calves are a lighter brownish-gray. Both have white lower legs with a dark stripe down the front of the front legs. The bull’s horns look like those of a domestic cow or wild yak, but are extremely large and curve forward, but the cow’s horns grow up and back, more like an antelope’s horns. As a bull ages, the tips of his horns start to fray and end up looking almost tassled. A bull also develops a large dewlap as he ages, which in older bulls can actually be so big it touches the ground.

By 1937, when a kouprey was sent to a zoo in Paris, the animal was probably mostly restricted to the forests of Cambodia. Before then it had been completely unknown to science, but after that, European big game hunters went to Cambodia to kill as many as possible. It was already rare and by the 1950s there were probably fewer than 500 individuals left alive. By the 1960s, there were probably no more than 100 animals left alive. The last verified sighting of one was in 1983.

Recently, some scientists have questioned whether the kouprey actually existed at all. Its description sounds a lot like another bovid, the wild banteng. A bull banteng is dark brown or black while the cows are light brown or reddish-brown. Both have white lower legs and a white patch on the rump. Some scientists started to think that either the kouprey was a misidentification of the banteng or the hybrid offspring of a banteng and a domestic cow.

A 2006 genetic study suggested that this was the case, that the kouprey was just a hybrid animal. But a follow-up study, including genetic testing of a kouprey skull that dated back to before cattle were domesticated, came to a different conclusion. The kouprey was a distinct species, not a hybrid animal. The real mystery now is whether it’s still alive or if it has gone extinct in the last 40 years.

We’ll finish with a domestic cow that’s a little bit of a mystery. A popular brand of chocolate in Europe is Milka, and since 1973 many of its advertisements have included a light purple and white cow with a bell around her neck. Well, in 2012 a calf was born in Serbia that actually looked like the Milka purple cow. It was a purple cow!

In January of 2012 a bull calf was born on a small farm in Serbia. There’s not a lot of information available about it, but it looks like it was a breed of cattle called the busa, or maybe a busa cross. The busa is mainly raised in the mountainous parts of Serbia and mostly raised as a meat animal. It’s rare these days but was once extremely popular in the area, so a lot of cattle raised in Serbia have at least some busa ancestry. The busa can be white with darker markings, or a solid color with no white or very little white. It can be red-brown, black, or gray.

In pictures, the purple calf’s mother looks to be black and white. The calf itself is white with markings that look pale blue-gray, almost lilac. The pictures aren’t very good so it’s hard to tell. The farmer was surprised when he saw the calf and called a veterinarian to make sure it was healthy, which it was. The veterinarian suggested the calf’s strange coloration was just a rare color mutation.

As it happens, a blue-gray coloration is common in a variety of busa cattle raised in Macedonia. It’s also a common coloration in other breeds of cattle. A pale version of this color can look almost like a shade of lilac. Since I can’t find a follow-up to the 2012 articles about the calf, it’s probable that as he grew up, his spots darkened to look more gray than purple. The farmer said that he would be keeping the little purple cow instead of slaughtering him to make steaks and hamburgers, so hopefully there’s still a handsome purple and white bull living his best life in the mountains of Serbia.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 371: The Peacock

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Thanks to Ari for suggesting this week’s episode, about the peacock!

Further reading:

Peacock tail feathers shake at resonance and hold eye-spots still during courtship displays

Indian peafowls’ crests are tuned to frequencies also used in social displays

An ocellated turkey (not a peacock but related):

An Indian peacock male:

An Indian peahen with chicks [photo from this site]:

Close-up of a male Indian peacock’s crest [photo by Jatin Sindhu – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49736186]:

A male Indian peacock with train on display [photo by Thimindu Goonatillake from Colombo, Sri Lanka – Peacock Dance, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19395087]:

A green peacock [photo from this site]:

The mysterious Congo peacock [photo by Terese Hart, taken from this site]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to talk about a beautiful bird that almost everyone has seen pictures of, and a lot of people might have seen in zoos and parks. It’s a suggestion by Ari, who wants to learn about the peacock!

The name peacock is technically only used for the male bird, with the female called a peahen and the birds all together referred to as peafowl. Most people just say peacocks, though, because the male peacock has such a fabulous tail that it’s what people think of when they think of peafowl. I’m happy to report that baby peafowl are called peachicks.

The peacock most people are familiar with is native to India, specifically called the Indian peafowl. It’s a surprisingly large bird, with a big male weighing more than 13 lbs, or 6 kg. Females are smaller. It’s the size of a wild turkey and in fact it’s related to the turkey, along with pheasants, partridges, and chickens. Back in episode 144 we talked about a bird called the ocellated turkey, a brightly colored turkey that lives in the Yucatan Peninsula, which is part of Mexico. The male’s tail feathers have the same type of colorful eyespots seen on a peacock’s tail.

But the peacock’s tail is way bigger than any turkey’s tail. It’s called a train and most of the time it’s folded so that it’s not in the way. A big male can grow a train that’s much longer than the rest of his body, more than five feet long, or 1.5 meters. Most of the train’s elongated feathers end in a colorful eye-spot, around 200 of them in total. The eyespot pattern really does resemble a big eye, with a dark blue spot in the middle surrounded by a ring of blue-green and a bigger ring of bronze. The bronze color is surrounded by pale green and the rest of the feather is a darker green. As far as we know, the eyespots aren’t supposed to look like eyes the way some animal markings are. A leopard or other predator doesn’t attack the tail thinking it’s a peacock’s head. It’s just a pattern.

For a long time scientists were divided as to what the peacock’s train was really used for. Not everyone thought it was for showing off for peahens. Some thought it was just for camouflage in the jungle. The main confusion was why the peacock would grow such a long, conspicuous train, which can be a hindrance to him in thick undergrowth and can attract the attention of predators. But many male birds have long, ornamental tails that may impede their mobility, such as various bird of paradise species, that are definitely meant to show off for females. This appears to be the case for the peacock too.

During mating season, male peacocks gather at what’s called a lekking site, where they hang out waiting for females. When a female approaches a male, he spreads his train into a fan and shivers it, which rattles the feathers together and also shows off the iridescent colors. The male struts around, showing off his tail, and the female may ignore him completely or take a good look at his tail. In studies where scientists snipped all the eyespots off a male’s train feathers, females never bothered to even look at the male, but since immature males don’t have eyespots, it could be the females thought the eyespot-less male was just a kid.

A 2016 study took a closer look at the shivering motion that the male produces during displays. Not only does the sound interest the female, the study discovered that the eyespots are locked together with microscopic hooks that help them stay still while the remainder of any particular feather moves, since it isn’t locked with other feathers. This makes it look like the eyespots are floating against a shimmery green background. Who wouldn’t love watching that? The brighter the eyespot’s iridescence, the more attractive the male is to females.

The rest of the Indian peacock is bright too. His back and most of his body is bronze, while his long neck is a brilliant green-blue. He has white markings on his face and a crest growing from the back of his head. The crest consists of a bundle of mostly bare feather shafts, with a little tuft of blue-green at the end. The female has a similar crest but it’s brown in color along with most of the rest of her feathers, although she does have some metallic green on her neck. She doesn’t have a long train, but she will sometimes spread her tail feathers and rattle them to communicate warnings to other peafowl. A 2018 study learned that the crests of both male and female peafowl are sensitive to vibrations, specifically to the sound frequencies produced by tail rattling.

Peafowl eat plant materials like seeds, fruit, and flower buds, but they also eat a lot of worms, insects, frogs, and other small animals, including small snakes. Because they’re so beautiful and do well in captivity, lots of zoos and parks keep peacocks. They’ve even been selectively bred to produce different colors, including a white peacock and a mostly black peacock.

Ari specifically mentioned hearing that peacocks cry happy tears. Crying tears as a result of emotions, whether happy or sad, is very specific to humans, and scientists aren’t sure why we do it. It seems to be a visual signal to other humans that the person crying needs help or support in some way. Other animals sometimes have weepy eyes, but that’s due to simple eye discharge, not emotions.

The idea that peacocks cry tears dates back many centuries. Medieval bestiaries published in Europe said that the peacock was vain of his beauty and strutted around proudly, but whenever he noticed his ugly feet he would cry. Similar proverbs date back at least several thousand years from ancient Rome and India. Some proverbs say that the peacock tries to hide his feet and that’s why he doesn’t fly very often, or that he cries first thing every morning when he first wakes up, either because he sees his feet and thinks they’re ugly, or because he’s worried he’s lost his beautiful feathers overnight. Some proverbs say that when the peacock cries at his ugly feet, the peahen will swallow one of his tears and that’s how her eggs are fertilized instead of in the usual way.

These stories are interesting, but they don’t have any basis in fact. The peacock doesn’t care what his feet look like because he’s a bird, not a human. Anyway, he has big, handsome feet that let him walk around as much as he wants. The peacock also doesn’t actually cry tears, whether happy or sad.

What he does do, though, is make a wailing noise that can sound like someone crying. It sounds like this:

[peacock sound]

Most of the time it’s only the male bird that makes these calls, as a way to attract a mate or just announce that he’s around. It’s also an alarm call if the peacock spots a potential predator. People in the olden days observed this behavior and thought the peacock might really be crying. That led to the stories about his supposedly ugly feet, because the rest of the bird is so beautiful that he couldn’t possibly be crying about the rest of his appearance.

There’s another species of peacock that’s just as spectacular as the Indian peacock, although it’s less well known because it’s harder to keep in captivity. The green peafowl lives in many parts of southeast Asia and is endangered due to habitat loss, poaching, and capture for the illegal pet trade. It’s more lightly built than the Indian peacock but the male can have an even longer train, over six and a half feet long, or 2 meters. The male is green and blue all over. The female is also mostly green, but with coppery speckles on her neck. Both have crests, although they point straight up instead of back.

That brings us to a mystery peacock, although fortunately it’s not a mystery anymore, or not as much of one.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Congo basin in central Africa was colonized by Belgium, and Belgian authorities kept hearing interesting reports from local people and colonizers alike about a strange, shy animal that lived in the forest. In 1913 a small expedition was sent to find the animal, but it failed. Eventually the animal was discovered by scientists, and we know it by the name okapi. We talked about it in episode 218. (It’s not a peacock, it’s a relative of the giraffe.) One of the scientists in the expedition was James Chapin, and while he was in Africa he bought some feather headdresses from local people and took them home to examine the feathers.

He was able to identify all but one of the feathers. The mystery feather looked like it came from a guineafowl or pheasant, but it was too big and didn’t quite match any known species. Chapin set the mystery feather aside to look at again when he had more time.

Twenty-one years later, in 1936, Chapin visited a museum in Belgium to study a big collection of taxidermied birds that had been donated in 1914. The museum specialized in items and animals from central Africa, so when Chapin noticed two stuffed birds that looked like pheasants, he knew there was something weird going on with them. True pheasants aren’t found in Africa. The card attached to the specimens said they were young peacocks, and that didn’t make sense either. Peacocks are only found in Asia.

Chapin examined the birds and realized that they really were an unusual type of peacock. Not only that, he recognized the feathers. His mystery feather from 1915 matched the mystery peacock.

The following year, Chapin traveled to the Congo to look for the bird in the wild. Sure enough, it was there!

The Congo peacock looks a lot like a turkey at first glance, or a big guineafowl. Instead of a long train, the male has a more turkey-like fan of tail feathers, but they’re deep blue and black in color. He also has blue on his wings and his neck is red, with a black head with a black and white crest. The female has a red neck with a red crest, and her back is green while the rest of her is a soft brown. We don’t know a whole lot about the bird, but it’s increasingly threatened by habitat loss and hunting.

The Congo peacock isn’t a true peacock, although it’s very closely related. While the male does fan his tail during courtship displays, he’s actually fanning a different set of feathers than true peacocks. A peacock’s train is actually made up of the upper tail coverts, a set of feathers near the tail but not actually making up the tail. A peacock’s actual tail feathers are shorter and bronzey-brown in color.

All peacocks can fly, even males with the longest trains, although they prefer to spend most of the time on the ground. Outside of mating season, males shed the long feathers of their train and regrow them the following year. Many zoos that keep peacocks will collect these shed feathers and sell them so that people can use them in crafts and decorations, because everyone loves peacock feathers.

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

Thanks for listening!