Episode 085: Crocs, Gators, and Their Massive Terrifying Cousins

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This week’s episode is all about crocodiles, alligators, and their relations. Thanks to Damian, John Paul, and John Paul’s son for the recommendation!

A Chinese alligator:

It’s easy to tell alligators and crocodiles apart. Just ask them to stand side by side, then lean over and look down to see the head shape. Broad-headed alligator on left, slender-headed crocodile on right:

Saltwater crocodile. Look, I’m only going to say this once: DO NOT SIT ON A CROCODILE OKAY THAT IS JUST DUMB AND YOU WILL GET EATEN ONE DAY IF YOU KEEP ON DOING IT

A gavial:

Black caiman:

Further reading:

A newly discovered difference between alligators and crocodiles

Show transcript:

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

This week’s episode is about crocodiles and alligators, and their relations. Thanks to a couple of different listeners for the suggestion, Damian and John Paul, and John Paul’s son. We’ve touched on crocodiles before in a couple of different episodes, including episode 53 about dragons, but alligators have barely had a mention.

Crocs and gators aren’t actually that closely related, but both are members of the order Crocodilia. This order also includes caimans and gavials, as well as some verrry interesting extinct members.

Crocodilians are amphibious reptiles. They spend much of their time in the water but also spend time on land. They breathe air, lay eggs, and depend on air or water temperature to regulate their body temperature. All crocodilians have evolved to take advantage of their watery habitat: long tails that are flattened laterally, eyes and nostrils close to the top of the head, short legs with webbed toes, and a flap at the back of the mouth that keeps water from flowing into the throat and airways. They can stay underwater for at least 15 minutes without needing to surface for air, and some individuals can stay underwater for close to two hours under the right conditions.

Crocodilians have thick protective scales on much of the body, called scutes, strengthened by osteoderms, or bony plates. Some scutes contain sensory receptors that sense touch, heat and cold, chemical stimuli, and especially the movement of water. Crocodilians see well even in darkness and have good hearing and smell too.

Some mother crocodilians lay her eggs in holes in the sand, but most build a nest out of vegetation. As the vegetation rots, it generates heat that warms the eggs. If the temperature in the nest is constantly above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, or 32 Celsius, more babies develop into males. If the temperature is cooler than that overall, more babies develop into females.

The mother protects the nest, which is usually near her den. Sometimes several females nest close to each other to help each other protect the nests. When her babies start hatching, the mother crocodilian digs them out of the nest since they aren’t strong enough to do it themselves, and carries the babies to water where they are safer. She also protects them for a while after they hatch. This is important, because baby crocodilians are vulnerable to predators—including adults of their own species.

Different species of crocodilians communicate in different ways. Some roar or bellow, some hiss, grunt, slap the jaws shut loudly, splash the head or tail in the water, or blow bubbles. Males often growl infrasonically—a sound humans feel more than hear, and which can cause the water around the male to shiver. That’s creepy. Baby crocodilians still in the egg will mimic tapping sounds, and yelp or grunt to let their mother know when they’re hatching.

One interesting thing about crocodilians is the way they walk. Most of the time a crocodilian walks with its belly touching the ground and its tail dragging. This is called the low walk. But unlike most other reptiles, most crocodilian species have ankle joints that allow it to raise its body up off the ground and walk like a mammal, with only the end of the tail dragging. This is called the high walk. Some smaller species can even run, a bounding gait something like a rabbit’s. Crocodilians can also jump.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “crocodile tears,” which refers to someone who pretends to feel bad while doing something mean, it comes from the belief that crocodiles wept while eating their prey. The belief goes back at least 900 years and probably longer, and it’s actually based on a real phenomenon. When a crocodilian is in the water, its eyes are protected by both a see-through third eyelid, properly called a nictitating membrane, and by a tear-like lubricant that washes any grit out of the eye. The lubricant is visible when the animal is out of the water, and it looks like the crocodile is crying.

Many crocodilians are ambush hunters. They lie mostly submerged, only their eyes and nostrils above the surface of the water, and wait for an animal to approach. Then they grab the animal with their powerful jaws and drag it into the water to drown. This requires massive bite strength, and crocodilians have the strongest bite of any animal alive. Recently, 3D modeling of an alligator’s head revealed a second jaw joint that stabilizes the jaw and helps distribute the bite force throughout the skull.

In case you were wondering how to tell a crocodile from an alligator, crocodile snouts are more slender than alligator snouts. It’s easy to tell the two apart when their mouths are closed, since only the upper teeth are visible when an alligator closes its mouth, while a crocodile shows both upper and lower teeth.

Besides, there are only two species of alligator alive today, the American alligator that lives in the southern United States, and the Chinese alligator, which lives in eastern China. The Chinese alligator is the smaller species, no more than 7 feet long, or 2.1 meters. While most crocodilians have soft bellies, the Chinese alligator has an armored belly. It lives in marshes, lakes, and rivers but these days it’s critically endangered and mostly restricted to the Anhui Chinese Alligator Nature Reserve. In 1999, conservationists estimated that there were only about 150 Chinese gators alive in the wild. Fortunately, since then more protected habitats have been developed for the gators and captive breeding programs have released many young gators into the wild. Their numbers in the wild are increasing slowly, but since the gators also do well in captivity, it’s estimated that as many as 10,000 individuals live in zoos around the world.

As for the American alligator, back in 1967 it was listed as endangered, mostly due to hunting and the sale of baby alligators as pets. Alligators do not make good pets, which you could probably figure out just by thinking about how big gators get. That would be more than 15 feet long for a big male, or 4.6 meters. Fortunately, conservation made a huge difference to the American alligator and it’s now considered fully recovered from its low point in the 1960s.

The American alligator lives in wetlands throughout the deep southern states, including parts of Texas, across to Florida and up through parts of North Carolina. It eats pretty much anything it can catch, including fish, crabs and other crustaceans, birds, mammals, frogs and other amphibians, and reptiles like turtles and snakes. It also sometimes eats fruit. Because the alligator can tolerate a certain amount of salt water, and frequently lives near the ocean, occasionally one will eat a shark. But sharks sometimes eat alligators too. Alligators also help control the spread of exotic species released in the Florida Everglades and other areas, including Burmese pythons. Full-grown alligators frequently hunt on land, but young alligators mostly stay in the water. Young American alligators have thin yellowish stripes that fade as the gator grows.

There’s another crocodilian with a range that overlaps with that of the American alligator, the American crocodile. It’s usually paler in color than the alligator with a relatively narrow snout. It mostly lives in central America, but some do live in southern Florida, which makes southern Florida the only place in the world where gators and crocs live side by side in the wild. But crocodiles can’t tolerate cool weather as well as alligators, so cold snaps in Florida can kill off crocodiles while not harming alligators. Occasionally a big alligator will eat a smaller crocodile, but on average the croc is the bigger animal. Big males can occasionally grow over 20 feet long, or 6.1 meters. It frequently lives in salt water where it mostly eats fish and birds, along with small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and crustaceans. It especially likes to eat lemon sharks. I mean, who wouldn’t, right? They sound delicious. Or maybe I just like lemons.

Unlike the American alligator, the American crocodile is endangered due to habitat loss, poaching, and pollution. It’s more dangerous to humans than the alligator, but not nearly as dangerous as some other species of crocodile.

The saltwater crocodile and the Nile crocodile are the most dangerous species to humans. The Nile crocodile can grow over 21 feet long, or almost 6.5 meters, and lives throughout much of Africa. The saltwater crocodile is the biggest crocodilian alive, and can grow up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters.

Like the American crocodile, the saltwater crocodile can tolerate salt water and frequently lives in coastal areas like the mouths of rivers, lagoons, and mangrove swamps. It’s found in parts of India down to northern Australia, and occasionally one will swim across the ocean to areas far from its usual range, including Japan and Fiji. Saltwater crocodiles, especially males, are territorial, and researchers think that about half of attacks on humans result from the human straying into a croc’s territory. These attacks aren’t usually fatal, but I bet they’re scary.

There are other crocodilians besides just the alligator and the crocodile. The gavial, also called the gharial or fish-eating crocodile, has a long, narrow snout that helps it catch the fish it eats. It lives in parts of India these days, in a few rivers and along the coasts, since it can tolerate salt water. It used to live throughout India and other parts of Asia, but it’s been hunted almost to extinction. In 1976 conservationists estimated that there were fewer than 200 gavials alive in the wild. Even after India put protections in place for the gavial, it continued to decline. In 2006 there were only 182 adult gavials alive. Conservationists are working hard to increase the population, including breeding them in captivity and releasing the babies into protected wildlife preserves in the wild. The main problems these days are loss of habitat and pollution, everything from dams across the rivers where it lives, heavy metal poisoning from polluted water, and drowning after entanglement in fishing nets. But population numbers have grown thanks to the conservation efforts, although there are probably fewer than 1,000 in the wild today.

The gavial can grow as long as the saltwater crocodile, although it’s usually much less heavy, with the longest measured at 23 feet long, or 7 meters. Adult males have a bulb at the end of their snouts that researchers think help them blow bubbles and make hissing and buzzing sounds that attract females.

Baby gavials eat tadpoles, frogs, and small fish. Adults eat fish and crustaceans. The gavial’s jaws are too delicate for it to feed on larger prey. In the past, hunters found jewelry in gavial stomachs and assumed they were maneaters, but it’s more likely they just swallowed jewelry lost in the river because it was shiny like fish scales.

There’s also a false gharial, which looks superficially like a gavial but has a broader snout. It’s reddish-brown with black splotches and some striping on the back and tail. These days it only lives in swamps in Indonesia and some nearby areas, although it used to have a broader range and also lived in rivers and lakes. Like the gavial, it’s been hunted to extinction in much of its former range for its skin and meat, and because people are afraid of it. It’s also vulnerable to habitat loss, including water pollution and draining of wetlands. It eats fish and other water animals, but it also preys on birds and mammals, and can grow more than 13 feet long, or 4 meters.

Caimans are most closely related to alligators and live in Central and South America. Some species are relatively small, from the 5 foot long, or 1.5 meter, Cuvier’s dwarf caiman, to the black caiman that can grow over 16 feet long, or 5 meters. Some researchers think the black caiman may occasionally grow up to 20 feet long, or 6 meters. Caiman scales are stiffened by calcium deposits, which makes caiman hide less valuable to leatherworkers than other crocodilian hides because it’s less pliable.

All crocodilians share an ancestor that lived around 240 million years ago. That same ancestor was also the ancestor of the dinosaurs. So it’s no surprise that crocodilians are considered the closest living bird relatives.

Paleontologists have discovered many extinct crocodilians, some of which look really strange. Mourasuchus, for instance, was a type of caiman that lived in South America during the Miocene, around 13 million years ago. Mourasuchus had long, flat jaws that looked something like a duck’s bill full of tiny conical teeth. Researchers think it may have been a filter feeder, filtering small animals from the mud at lake bottoms. But it was enormously big, some 39 feet long, or 12 meters.

Another possible filter feeding crocodilian was Stomatosuchus, which lived in Northern Africa around 95 million years ago and grew to 33 feet long, or 10 meters. It had a long, flat snout with small conical teeth in the upper jaw and may have had no teeth in the lower jaw. Some researchers think it might have had a pouched lower jaw like a pelican, which it used to catch small fish. It would suck in water, filling its pouch, then close its jaws and push the water out through its teeth. Any fish or other animals left in its mouth when all the water was expelled, it swallowed. But we don’t know for sure because only one Stomatosuchus skull has ever been found, and it was destroyed in 1944 when the museum it was in was bombed during World War II.

Purussaurus was another extinct caiman that lived in South America around 5 to 20 million years ago, and is estimated to grow as much as 41 feet long, or 12.5 meters. We don’t know its length for sure since we don’t have a complete skeleton, but if estimates are right, it was one of the biggest crocodilians that ever lived. It had a strong skull and huge teeth that allowed it to hold onto large prey.

Sarcosuchus was about the same size as Purussaurus, around 40 feet long, or 12 meters, but lived about 112 million years ago in what is now Africa and South America. It ate dinosaurs.

The largest living crocodilian ever reliably measured was a captive saltwater crocodile from the Philippines. He was captured in 2011 after rumors started that he had killed at least two people. He was kept on display in a wildlife center, and caretakers named him Lolong after one of the men who helped capture him. Lolong the crocodile was measured at 20 feet 3 inches long, or 6.17 meters, and he weighed 2,370 lbs, or 1,075 kg.

But crocodilians even larger than Lolong have been measured, just not by wildlife experts. Another saltwater crocodile in India has been estimated at 23 feet, or 7 meters, and a saltwater croc skull from Cambodia suggests that the living animal might also have been 23 feet long. A crocodile killed in Queensland, Australia in 1958 was supposedly 28 feet 4 inches long, or 8.64 meters, but this is probably an exaggeration.

But size is relative. A crocodilian that lived in South America some 60 million years ago and grew to a respectable 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, probably got eaten by the largest known snake that ever lived, titanoboa. Titanoboa grew up to 42 feet long, or 12.8 meters. But that is a story for another day.

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!

Episode 084: Gorillas

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This week let’s learn about a close relative, the gorilla!

But first, if you don’t already listen to these fantastic animal podcasts, definitely check them out!

Species   All Creatures   Life Death & Taxonomy   Animals to the Max   Varmints   Cool Facts about Animals

Why hello there:

This gorilla has some lettuce. It looks pretty good:

Some mountain gorillas with awesome hair:

GORILLA BABY FLOOFY HEAD ALERT:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about gorillas, mostly because I just found out they sometimes hum happily while they eat. And yes, I have audio of happy munching gorillas that will make you want to snack too.

But first, did you notice what happened last week? If you subscribe to several animal podcasts, you might have noticed that the first week of September 2018 suddenly turned into big cat week! A bunch of us animal podcasters thought it would be hilarious to release episodes covering the same topic in the same week.

Species covered snow leopards, All Creatures covered lions, Life Death & Taxonomy covered jaguars, Animals to the Max covered wildcats, Varmints covered tigers, Cool Facts about Animals covered mountain lions, and of course we had our mystery big cats episode. I’ll put links in the show notes to each podcast, but I recommend all of them. One thing I love is that all these podcasts can cover the same topic but approach it so differently that you’ll never get bored and think, Oh, I already know about this animal.

Anyway, let’s learn about gorillas!

The gorilla is a great ape, closely related to chimpanzees, bonobos, humans, orangutans, and gibbons. There are two species, the eastern and the western, separated by the Congo River, and several subspecies. All gorillas live in Africa, but different species and subspecies live in different environments. Eastern gorillas prefer forests, including bamboo forests, but the mountain gorilla subspecies lives at a much higher elevation. Western gorillas live in swampy forests too. The western gorilla’s scientific name is Gorilla gorilla, and the scientific name of the western lowland gorilla subspecies is Gorilla gorilla gorilla. Don’t say you never learned anything from a podcast.

The gorilla is the largest primate alive today. They usually knuckle-walk, but can walk upright for short distances when they want to, usually when carrying something. Gorillas are vegetarian, although they will also eat insects. They have brown eyes and unique fingerprints like humans have. They also have black, brown, or grayish hair, and the western lowland gorilla also has a reddish forehead. Mountain gorillas have longer hair than lowland gorillas. They look awesome. Male gorillas develop silver hair on the back as they mature, which is why they’re usually called silverbacks. A silverback male acts as the leader of his group, making decisions and stopping other gorillas from arguing with each other. The silverback also plays with the children in his troop, even if they aren’t his offspring. If the group is attacked, the silverback will defend his troop to the death—in addition to his silver fur, silverbacks develop large canine teeth that can inflict massive wounds. But the gorilla is so big and strong, it doesn’t have many predators. Leopards will occasionally kill a gorilla if they catch one alone, but generally the only danger to gorillas comes from humans.

The gorilla is vulnerable to habitat loss, poaching, and human disease. More than 5,000 gorillas may have died due to the ebola virus outbreak in the 2000s, and gorillas can also suffer from malaria. But things are looking up for the gorilla, at least a little bit. The population of critically endangered mountain gorillas in the Virunga Volcanoes has doubled in only 25 years, finally climbing over 1,000 individuals, following some intensive conservation efforts.

In the 1990s, researchers estimated that there were only 50,000 western lowland gorillas alive. Then a survey of gorilla populations in the Republic of the Congo made an amazing discovery. In 2007, researchers discovered that there was an entire population of gorillas in the swamps and forests that they had never even known about—and not just a few gorillas, either. Estimates put the population at about 125,000. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about, of course. Gorillas are still endangered, but at least there are more of the western lowland gorilla than we thought.

The gorilla spends most of its time on the ground. Young gorillas will climb trees, but adults are usually too big and heavy and feel more comfortable on the ground unless they’re actually after a specific food. Just like humans—and in fact, a recent study found that the heel bones of our ancestor Australopithecus had more similarities with gorilla heel bones than with chimpanzee heel bones, even though humans and our ancestors are more closely related to chimps. The study gives researchers a better idea of how our ancestors got around.

At night, each gorilla builds a nest to sleep in from branches and leaves. These are on the ground, and since gorilla troops travel sometimes several miles every day to find food, they usually build a new nest every night. Sometimes they’ll build a nest to nap in during the day too. Babies nest with their mothers, but when a young gorilla is around three years old, it will start building its own nest near hers.

As young gorillas grow up, they usually move away from their home troop and join other troops, or in the case of males, they eventually start their own troops. The female chooses her mate, and usually has one baby every four years or so. Baby gorillas are even smaller than human babies, only about four pounds, or 1.8 kilograms. Babies cling to the mother’s fur and ride on her back when she’s walking.

Gorillas eat lots of different types of plant, especially fruit, tree bark, various roots and leaves, and the stems of some plants. An adult gorilla eats around 40 pounds of food a day, or 18 kg. And gorillas frequently sing and hum while eating, especially when a gorilla is eating a food it particularly enjoys. Researchers think that the singing is partly communication with others—sort of a dinner-time conversation—partly just to show their happiness with having food they like. This is what gorillas sound like while eating and humming. I don’t know about you, but this sounds totally appetizing. It sounds like they’re eating popcorn, but in fact it’s the leaves of the banana tree.

[gorillas eating and humming]

Like all great apes, gorillas are highly intelligent. They use tools, laugh, grieve their dead, have a complex system of communication, and even prepare food in ways that varies from region to region. A few captive gorillas have been taught to speak using a form of sign language, most famously Koko.

Koko was an amazing ape. She only died earlier this year, 2018, at the age of 46. She was a western lowland gorilla born in the San Francisco Zoo, and her proper name was Hanabiko, which means ‘fireworks child’ because she was born on the Fourth of July. She spent much of her life in a gorilla preserve in Woodside, California, and was purposefully exposed to spoken English from about age one. By the time she died, she could understand more than 2,000 words in English and knew over 1,000 signs.

Different studies of Koko and her use of language come to different conclusions. Some researchers claim she didn’t demonstrate any kind of grammar, while others claim her language use was extremely human. But everyone except utter curmudgeons agrees that Koko was actually using language to communicate. She even made up some signs when she needed a new word.

Koko also demonstrated a sense of humor, encouraged other gorillas when they attempted to sign, talked about her memories, recognized herself as the individual in a mirror, and even gave her pet kitten a name without being prompted. His name was All Ball, and when he later escaped her enclosure and was killed by a car, she cried. She had other pet cats later, all named by her, including Lipstick, Smoky, Miss Black, and Miss Grey. I’m just saying, Lipstick is a great name for a cat. Koko was reportedly gentle with her pets and when they were kittens, she treated them like baby gorillas.

Young gorillas play games like all young mammals do. Tag, for instance. Young gorillas, and sometimes even older ones, play tag. Researchers say that according to their observations, it appears that the rules of gorilla tag are pretty much the same as the human version of tag. Researchers do not report whether or not there was a big argument about who hit whom when they supposedly called a time-out to tie their shoe, probably because gorillas don’t wear shoes.

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!

Episode 083: Lions, tigers, and other big cats…of mystery!

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I’ve been meaning to do a big cat episode for a while, thanks to listener Damian who suggested lions and tigers! But when I started my research, I immediately got distracted by all the reports of mysterious big cats. So here’s another mysteries episode!

Here are the links to some Patreon episodes that I’ve unlocked for anyone to listen to. Just click on the link and a page will open, and you can listen on the page. No need to log in.

Marsupial lions

Blue tigers and black lions

The Queensland tiger, which is not actually about any kind of actual tiger

A lion and cub. This picture made me die:

The Barbary lion, possibly extinct, possibly not:

Watch out! Tigers!

A king leopard with stripe-like markings instead of spots:

Further reading:

Hybrid and Mutant big cats

Peruvian mystery jaguar skulls studied

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some mystery big cats. We’ve touched on big cats before in various episodes, including the British Big Cats phenomenon in episode 52. We’re definitely going to see some more out of place animals this week, along with lots of information about big cats of various kinds. Thanks to Damian who requested an episode about lions and tigers ages ago.

I’ve also unlocked three Patreon episodes so that anyone can listen to them. They won’t show up in your feed, but there are links in the show notes and you can click through and listen on your browser without needing a patreon login. The first is about marsupial lions and the second is about blue tigers and other big cats with anomalous coat colors. The sound quality on the blue tigers episode is not that great, but it’s a long episode with lots of information about blue tigers, white tigers, black tigers, white lions, king cheetahs, and lots more. The third is about the Queensland tiger, an Australian animal that’s not a feline of any kind, but why not?

The term big cat refers to tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, and jaguars, but it can also include cheetahs and cougars depending on who you ask. Big cats have round pupils instead of slit pupils like domestic cats and other smaller cats.

Lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars can all roar. Snow leopards, cheetahs, and cougars can’t. But snow leopards, cheetahs, and cougars can purr, while lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars can’t. The ability to roar is due to special adaptations in the larynx, but these adaptations also mean big cats can’t purr. So basically a cat can either roar or purr but not both.

The word panther, incidentally, refers to any big cat and not to a specific type of animal. So a black panther, in addition to being an awesome movie, is any kind of big cat exhibiting melanism, which causes the animal’s fur to be black all over. Leopards and jaguars are most commonly referred to as black panthers. Lions, tigers, and cheetahs do not exhibit true melanism as far as researchers have found.

Let’s start with lions. Lions live only in Africa these days, but were once common throughout parts of southern Asia too and possibly even parts of southern Europe. The lion is most closely related to the leopard and jaguar, less closely related to the tiger and snow leopard, but it’s so closely related to all those big cats that it can interbreed with them in rare cases.

There are two species of lion, the African and the Asian. Until recently there were also several subspecies of African lions, including the American lion, which once lived throughout North and South America. It only went extinct around 11,000 years ago. The American lion is the largest subspecies of lion ever known, about a quarter larger than modern African lions. It probably stood almost four feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.2 meters. Cave paintings and pieces of skin preserved in caves indicate that its coat was reddish instead of golden. It lived in open grasslands like modern lions and even in cold areas. There are reports of a reddish, short-maned cat supposedly called a “jungle lion” sighted in South America, but I can’t find much information about it and it’s much more likely to be a jaguar or cougar than a relic population of American lions. But wouldn’t that be awesome if it was.

The Barbary lion was a subspecies of African lion that lived in northern Africa until it was hunted to extinction. The Barbary lion was the one that battled gladiators in ancient Rome and was hunted by pharaohs in ancient Egypt, a big lion with a dark mane. The last one was supposedly killed in 1922, but recent research indicates that they survived much longer—maybe as late as 1958 or later. The last recorded sighting was in 1956, but the forest where it was seen was destroyed two years later.

One zoo in Morocco claims that their lions are purebred Barbary lions, descended from royal lions kept in captivity for centuries. But since we don’t have a full genetic profile of the Barbary lion to start with, it’s hard to determine whether the royal lions are Barbary lions. So far a 2005 DNA test on five of the royal lions indicates they probably aren’t, but DNA testing has come a long way since then and new tests on the royal lions and on preserved Barbary lion skins will hopefully be done soon.

The Sumatran golden lion, also called the cigau [pronounced chee-gow] is a mystery lion that is supposed to be golden in color with no markings, a relatively short tail, and with a mane or ruff of fur that’s sometimes described as white. It’s only about the size of a small donkey or large goat, but stocky like a lion. The most recent sightings are from the 1960s, where one supposedly attacked and killed a man. Some researchers think it may be a subspecies of the nearly extinct Asiatic lion, but others say it’s more likely to be an animal of folklore. Then again, there are tigers on Sumatra and it’s always possible it’s an anomalous coated tiger with no stripes, or stripes that are almost the same color as its coat. Tigers do have a white ruff around the face.

Lions are well known to live on the savanna despite the term king of the jungle, but they do occasionally live in open forests and sometimes in actual jungles. In 2012 a lioness was spotted in a protected rainforest in Ethiopia, and locals say the lions pass through the reserve every year during the dry season. That rainforest is also one of the few places left in the world where wild coffee plants grow. So, you know, extra reason to keep it as safe as possible.

Let’s talk about tigers next. Tigers are awesome animals, with the Bengal tiger being the biggest big cat alive today—on average even bigger than the lion. Tigers are good swimmers and most really like the water, unlike most cats. They live throughout Asia but once were much more common and widespread. I’ve found a lot of mystery tiger reports, but if you’re interested in tigers of unusual colors, I really do recommend you go listen to the unlocked Patreon episode about blue tigers.

The so-called beast of Neamt is a modern mystery from Romania. In spring of 2016, farmers started finding livestock killed during the night, but not eaten. The predator was clearly extremely strong, much stronger and larger than a dog. Its method of killing didn’t suggest a bear, which locals were familiar with anyway.

Some of the sightings seem normal, of a catlike animal the size of a calf. Other sightings were more bizarre. Some people reporting seeing a huge animal running on two legs, one guy said he’d wounded it with an axe but it didn’t bleed, and of course there were the predictable reports that animals it killed were drained of blood.

But in this case, DNA testing solved the mystery of what was killing the animals. The beast was injured by a barbed-wire fence, and a test of its blood indicated it was a Siberian tiger. The Siberian tiger is also called the Amur tiger, which we talked about in episode 44, Extinct and Back from the Brink. But there are probably no more than 500 Siberian tigers alive in the wild, and none of them live within 3,000 miles of Romania, or 5,000 km. So while we know what the beast of Neamt is, we don’t know how it got there. Out of place tigers, hurrah!

Another mystery tiger is from Chad in Africa. This one is sometimes called the mountain tiger, and it’s supposed to be the size of a lion but with reddish fur, white stripes, no tail, and huge fangs.

This doesn’t sound like anything alive today—but it does sound like an extinct cat called Machairodus. It was the size of a lion, or over 3 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1 meter, and around 6 ½ feet long, or 2 meters. It was a type of saber-toothed cat like Smilodon, although it wasn’t closely related to Smilodon and its fangs weren’t as big. It probably had a short tail. But Machairodus and its relatives died out probably a million years ago, although it might have persisted to only 130,000 years ago. That’s still a lot of years, so it’s not too likely that a population of its descendants still lives in Chad. For one thing, northern Chad is part of the Sahara, while southern Chad is a savanna. It’s not dense jungle or remote mountains.

But there are similar reports of the mountain tiger in other parts of Africa, where there are steep mountain ranges that aren’t well explored. And, oddly enough, similar reports also come from South America and even from Mexico. Machairodus did live in Africa, Eurasia, and North America, although its fossils haven’t been found in South America. Maybe the reports aren’t of a living animal but were inspired by fossil remains. Hunters who stumbled across fossil machairodus bones would recognize them as similar to tiger or lion skeletons, but wouldn’t know that the living animal was long gone.

Another South American big cat report comes from Ecuador. It’s called the rainbow tiger or rainbow jaguar, and it sounds really pretty. In the Macas region in southeastern Ecuador, in the Amazon jungle, locals have a story about a big cat properly called Tshenkutshen. The cat is the size of a jaguar, or up to six feet long not counting the tail, or 1.85 meters, but instead of having a pattern of dark rosettes on a tawny background coat, the rainbow tiger is black with stripes on its chest. The stripes are different colors: white, red, yellow, and black, which gives it the rainbow name. One report I saw says it’s white with black spots in addition to the stripes on its chest. It lives in the trees in remote areas, is rare, and at least one report says it has a hump on its shoulders and monkey-like forepaws but with claws. One was supposedly shot and killed in 1959, but there are no pictures of the carcass and no one knows where it went, if it even existed in the first place.

Naturally, the rainbow tiger isn’t actually a tiger since tigers don’t live in South America. If it is a real animal and not a folktale, it’s probably a type of jaguar. But the whole monkey hands thing implies it’s probably more of a mythological creature than a flesh and blood one, because no feline of any kind has forepaws that resemble hands.

There’s an interesting addition to the rainbow tiger mystery. Dutch primatologist Dr. Marc van Roosmalen spotted a strange jaguar during an expedition through Brazil in the late 1990s. It was mostly black, but had a white pattern around its throat.

There are plenty of other South American big cat mysteries, including the yemish that we covered in episode 59 along with the onza, a mystery cat from Mexico and central America. But one especially interesting report is from Peru. Peter Hocking is a Peruvian ornithologist, or someone who studies birds, but he’s also interested in other animals. In 1996 he got his hands on two skulls that were similar to jaguar skulls but reportedly not from jaguars, but from strange striped big cats instead.

In 2010, zoologist Darren Naish asked for and finally received high-quality plaster replicas of the skulls so he could study them. His conclusion is that both skulls are actually from jaguars, but he points out that most big cat species do occasionally produce anomalously striped individuals. No one knows where the pelts of these two jaguars are, unfortunately. Hopefully they’ll turn up eventually, or another striped jaguar will be found and can be studied so we can learn if it’s just an individual with an anomalous coat pattern, or an actual subspecies of jaguar with stripes instead of spots.

I couldn’t find any mystery cheetah reports beyond one called the Tennessee red cheetah. That excited me because I live in Tennessee and I’d never heard of it before. The Tennessee red cheetah is supposed to resemble the cheetah, golden brown with black spots, but with a reddish dorsal stripe and tail. Some reports say it’s reddish-brown all over with black spots.

That’s it. That’s all the information I can find. I was so disappointed, but basically it sounds like a tall tale or maybe a sighting of a jaguar. That’s the problem with mystery big cat reports. There are so many reports of so many animals that don’t correspond to any known species or subspecies of big cat, with few concrete details. In the case of the Tennessee red cheetah, the only details I could find were vague stories about one being shot and skinned, but the skin was missing. No date, no place, no names, nothing.

You can’t treat a report like that with anything but skepticism, so let’s move on to another mystery big cat, the Zanzibar leopard. When I was making notes for this episode, I wrote “probably extinct, may be too depressing to use.” But there’s always a chance it’s not extinct.

The Zanzibar leopard lives on Zanzibar Island off of Tanzania. It’s not a big island, only around 50 miles long, or 85 km, and 20 miles wide, or 30 km. The Zanzibar leopard was probably separated from the mainland population of leopards when sea levels rose after the last ice age. It’s smaller than a mainland leopard, with smaller spots, but not much is known about it since it hasn’t been studied in the wild and it may be extinct now. Unfortunately, many people on the island believed that the leopards were witches’ familiars, and that they should be killed. In 1964 the islanders overthrew the government, but also unfortunately, the newly installed government persecuted people it decided were witches. This included a government-run campaign to kill all leopards on the island. By the mid-1990s, conservationists suspected the Zanzibar leopard was extinct.

But there is hope. Earlier this year an Animal Planet show caught footage on a camera trap of what appears to be a Zanzibar leopard. Hopefully there are still some of the leopards remaining, and if so, hopefully they can also be protected.

Speaking of Tanzania, let’s finish with a big cat that might very well be a real animal—or something even more mysterious. The nunda is supposed to be a huge gray cat with tabby stripes, reported in Tanzania. Its paw prints are supposed to resemble a leopard’s, but are as big as a lion’s.

In a 1927 article, a British administrator named William Hichens reported about his investigation into nunda attacks around the village of Lindi in Tanzania. The attacks occurred in 1922, and started with a night watchman who was found dead one morning. Clutched in the dead man’s hand was a tuft of gray fur that Hichens thought might have been torn from a lion’s mane. But lions were rare in that part of Tanzania, and two locals reported seeing a huge brindled cat attack the man during the night. A few nights after that, another watchman was also killed in the same way, including the tuft of hair clutched in one hand, and that was followed by more attacks in other villages over the next several weeks. The attacks stopped, but resumed in the 1930s. Some huge footprints and more of the gray fur were found by a British hunter who tried to track the animal.

So what might the nunda be? The description doesn’t sound like any known big cat. Cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans suggested it might be a huge African golden cat with anomalous markings. The African golden cat is related to the caracal and the serval, both fairly small, long-legged cats. It has variable markings and coloring, from reddish to grey, from spotted to nearly plain. But it’s only about twice the size of a domestic cat. Its paws are large for its size, but it’s not anywhere near the size of a leopard, much less a lion.

Of course, it might be a larger subspecies of golden cat, or a totally different species. But there is another possibility, one that’s far creepier and darker than an unknown big cat.

According to a book called Wild Cats of the World by Mel and Fiona Sunquist, published in 2012, in the early 20th century a group of witch doctors in that part of Tanzania ran an extortion racket. They demanded money from people and threatened to turn into lions and kill them if they didn’t pay up. And they did kill people—over 100 of them, according to the book. The murders were committed by young men who dressed like lions, including wearing lion paws on their feet so they left lion paw prints.

That would explain the rash of murders in a localized area, and the fact that so many of the victims were found clutching gray fur. The fur was never tested and could have come from any animal and been planted on the victims.

Zoologist Karl Shuker suggests that if the deaths weren’t due to these lion-men, the mystery big cat might be a type of leopard with stripes instead of spots. Leopards with stripes due to genetic coat anomalies are extremely rare, but they aren’t unheard-of. They’re sometimes referred to as king leopards. I have a picture of one in the show notes. While leopards can cross-breed with tigers, tigers don’t live in Africa, so a striped leopard-tiger hybrid wouldn’t be hanging around in Tanzania, certainly not in the 1920s.

Whatever the cause, no one has reported a nunda sighting in about 80 years.

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!

Episode 082: Animals with Face Tentacles

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This week we’re going to learn about animals with TENTACLES ON THEIR FACES oh my gosh

Thanks to Llewelly for the topic suggestion!

Don’t forget to come see me on the panel How to Start Your Own Indie Podcast at DragonCon 2018, at 4pm on Sunday, September 2, 2018 in the Hilton Galleria 6.

A tentacled snake:

A star-nosed mole. Hello, nose star!

A caecilian, with its tiny tentacle circled:

A squidworm:

Show transcript:

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

I’m back from Paris this week and definitely jet-lagged, but this episode should wake everyone up. It’s about animals with TENTACLES ON THEIR FACES

A big thanks to Llewelly who sent me an article about the tentacled snake, which turned into this episode. I love it when people send me links to articles or suggestions for topics. I have a bunch of suggestions I haven’t gotten to yet, but I promise I will as soon as possible. I’m like a dog in a park full of squirrels. There are so many exciting animals to chase, it’s hard to know which one to follow.

That reminds me. If you go to the strangeanimalspodcast.com website, there’s a page with a list of animals that I’ve covered in various episodes. If you don’t see your favorite animal on that list, feel free to email me with your suggestion!

Also, if you’re listening to this episode the week it comes out, this coming weekend I’ll be at DragonCon in Atlanta. If you’re going to be there too, I’m on a panel about how to start your own podcast, part of the podcasting track. It’ll be at 4pm on Sunday in the Hilton Galleria 6.

Now, on to the tentacles.

We’ll start with the tentacled snake, which lives in parts of southeast Asia. It lives in both fresh and ocean water and doesn’t come on land very often. When it does, it has trouble getting around since it’s adapted for swimming. It grows up to three feet long, or about 90 cm, and is brown or gray, sometimes with stripes, sometimes with blotches. Its body and head are flattened and its scales are rough. Basically it looks a lot like an old stick with lichen on it. If something disturbs it, it holds its body completely rigid even if it’s lifted out of the water, which makes it look even more like a stick.

Its nose is squared-off with nostrils at the top so it can more easily grab breaths at the water’s surface. And it has a pair of short tentacles at the corners of its snout that it uses to help it sense the fish and frogs it eats. It has weak venom, but its fangs are in the back of its mouth and not dangerous to humans.

It likes slow-moving water, murky water, or water with a lot of vegetation in it because it doesn’t rely on its eyes to sense fish, although it has good eyesight. The tentacles are finely attuned to movement in the water and the snake can sense when a fish is approaching even if it can’t see the fish.

The tentacled snake is an ambush predator. It uses its tail to anchor itself in the water, and holds its body in a J shape, either head down or head up. When a fish swims nearby, the snake moves the looped section of its body extremely quickly without moving its head, which creates a pressure wave in the water that makes the fish think there’s a predator approaching. The fish doubles back and tries to flee, but in the wrong direction—basically right into the snake’s face.

Another animal with tentacles on its face is the star-nosed mole. It’s a mammal that lives in parts of northeastern North America, especially in marshy areas. Like other moles, it’s not very big, only about six inches long, or 15 cm. Its fur is dense and velvety, it has tiny eyes and ears that are mostly hidden under its fur, and its tail is short. It spends a lot of time in the water but it also digs shallow tunnels. It eats worms, insects, mollusks, and small animals of various kinds, including frogs.

The star-nosed mole has eyes, but they’re tiny and don’t function very well. Instead, it senses prey and navigates using the unique structure at the tip of its snout: 22 tiny tentacles containing over 25,000 sensory receptors. The structure is roughly star-shaped so is usually called a nose star. It actually is more starfish-shaped, if you ask me, like it has a tiny pink starfish growing out of the tip of its nose, with two little nostrils in the middle.

Mammals are not known for their tentacles. The star-nosed mole is the only mammal with tentacles, in fact—at least as far as I can find out. And the star-nosed mole has tons of weird adaptations as a result. The tentacles of its nose star are the most sensitive organ of touch in any mammal. Think about how sensitive your fingertips are and how much information you can learn from just touching something with a fingertip. The star-nosed mole’s star has five times the number of nerve fibers than your entire hand contains, and the star is smaller than your pinky fingernail. It’s so sensitive and the mole can gain so much information from it that researchers compare it more to a sense of sight than of touch. The mole’s nervous system is also extremely efficient in order to process all the information coming from the star, literally just about at the physiological limit of neurons. That means the star-nosed mole can identify prey and decide whether to eat it in only 8 milliseconds.

You know how long it takes you to blink your eyes? About 350 milliseconds. A star-nosed mole could have examined and made eating decisions about 44 things in that same time. And since it can also eat most small prey like bugs in only 200 milliseconds, it could have also eaten one and a half things in the time you blink your eyes. This is blowing my mind, everyone, especially since I am the slowest eater in the world.

You know what else the star-nosed mole can do? It can smell underwater. It blows tiny bubbles into the water and breathes them back in to examine them for scents. The tentacles of the mole’s star keep the bubbles from floating away before the mole can breathe them back in. The star-nosed mole is a good swimmer and the tunnels it digs often start and end underwater. Researchers think that hunting underwater and in swampy soil helps keep the mole’s sensitive nose star from damage. If you rub your fingertips lightly over sandpaper or a brick’s surface, after only a few seconds you’ll feel some discomfort, but soft mud doesn’t hurt fingertips or nose stars.

Another animal with face tentacles is the caecilian. Caecilians are legless amphibians that look like worms or snakes, but are more closely related to frogs and salamanders. Probably. We don’t know a lot about how caecilians developed, and some researchers think they may actually be more closely related to reptiles than amphibians.

The longest caecilian, Thompson’s caecilian, grows to some five feet long, or 1.5 meters. It lives in Colombia in South America and is gray or black. The smallest species only grow to about four inches long, or 10 cm. There are some 180 species of caecilian that we know of, which live in tropical regions in many parts of the world. Many dig burrows and spend most of their time underground, while some live in the water. Most eat small animals like worms and insects. Even though all caecilians are long, unlike worms and snakes, most don’t actually have a tail, or may only have a short tail. It’s just hard to tell because they also don’t have legs. Some species appear snakey while some have what look like body segments like an earthworm, which helps it wriggle its way through soil like a worm. It even moves in what’s called an accordion-type fashion like a worm where it bunches up parts of its body and stretches other parts out to advance.

The caecilian has a pair of tiny tentacles between its eyes and nostrils that grow out of an opening in the snout. The tentacles appear to have developed from the tear duct and eye muscles. Some caecilian species have tiny eyes, although they may be hard to see. Some species have no eyes at all. Some species have eyes, but they’re actually beneath the skull bones. In two species from Africa, the eyes are under the skull but are connected to the tentacles, and the caecilian can extend its tentacles and actually move its eyes out of the skull and into the tentacle. The tentacle tips lack pigment so light can pass through. You see what’s going on here? EYE STALKS. Eye stalks aside, researchers think that the tentacles mostly contain chemical receptors that the caecilian uses to find prey.

Caecilians are really interesting animals. Different species are sometimes radically different from each other in very basic ways. For instance, how babies develop. Some caecilian species lay eggs that hatch into larvae, like tadpoles. Some lay eggs that hatch into miniature caecilians, like certain species of frog whose eggs hatch into tiny frogs instead of tadpoles. Three caecilian species give birth to up to four live babies that are already developed, and those babies grow within the mother by eating a special oviduct lining of her body, which they scrape off with teeth modified for this purpose. Two egg-laying species have a similar process for feeding babies, but in this case the mother caecilian develops a thickened skin that’s full of nutrients, which her babies scrape off with modified teeth. It doesn’t hurt the mother, who grows more of the skin as the babies eat it.

One species of caecilian doesn’t even have lungs, Atretochoana eiselti. Some salamanders don’t have lungs either, and instead absorb oxygen through the skin. But salamanders that breathe this way are either very small or live in cold, fast-flowing water with high oxygen content. Atretochoana grows nearly three feet long, or 80 cm, but seems to prefer warmer, slower water. So researchers aren’t sure how it breathes. Not a lot is known about it in general, but it does have muscles that attach to the skull that aren’t found in any other organism studied. Its head is broad and flat. We don’t even know what it eats.

The caecilian has two sets of jaw muscles, if you were wondering. Researchers aren’t sure why, but they suspect it has something to do with keeping the head and neck rigid while the caecilian pushes its way through the soil. Some caecilians are toxic, and since many species are brightly colored, it’s a good bet that those species probably contain at least some toxins. But again, we don’t know for sure because there haven’t been very many studies on caecilians.

There are other animals with tentacles on their faces, but those are the big three that are alive today. Catfish whiskers, properly called barbels, aren’t technically tentacles, and I have a whole episode on catfish planned eventually so I’ll skip them this time. Snails and slugs have four head appendages that are tentacle-like, two of them eyestalks and the other pair for smell and touch. Back in the Cambrian, the eel-like Pikaia gracilens had a pair of long tentacles on its head and rows of shorter bristles along the sides of its head that may have acted as gills. Some species of modern lancelet look very similar to Pikaia and even have similar sensory appendages, but these are more similar to cilia than actual tentacles.

But another living animal, a deep-sea polychaete worm called the squidworm, has actual tentacles on its head—ten of them. It grows around 4 inches long, or 10 cm, not counting its tentacles, which are as long or longer than the body. It lives in the depths up to 2800 meters down, or almost 1.75 miles below the ocean’s surface. Two of its tentacles are yellowish and usually held in a curled-up position, and those are the ones the worm uses to collect food—probably plankton and detritus that sinks from the upper ocean. The other tentacles are used for breathing, and it also has feathery sensory organs growing from its head.

But the awesome thing is, the squidworm was only discovered in 2007 off the coast of the Philippines. And it’s not rare. In fact, it seems to be really common, which means there are probably other species of squidworm that haven’t been discovered yet. And there might be other tentacled things down there too, who knows?

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!

Episode 081: Little Yard Animals

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This week we’re staying at home and looking around our own yards and gardens to learn about some of the little critters we see every day but maybe never pay attention to. Thanks to Richard E. for the topic suggestion, and thanks also to John V. and Richard J. for other animal suggestions I used in the episode!

The common or garden snail:

A couple of robins:

A brown-eared bulbul nomming petals:

An Eastern hognose snake. srsly, no one believes ur dead snek:

The hognose in happier times:

An Australian water dragon. Stripey!!

The edible dormouse. I think you mean the ADORABLE dormouse:

The eastern chipmunk:

A guppy with normal eyes:

Show transcript:

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

I’m out of the country this week, visiting Paris, France and undoubtedly eating my weight in pastries and cheese as you listen to this. Since I’m away from home, though, I’m probably feeling a little homesick. So this week’s episode is all about the ordinary-seeming little animals found in gardens and yards, a suggestion from Richard E. This is also a perfect opportunity to feature some listener-suggested animals that aren’t really complex enough for a full episode but are still really interesting.

But I’m not going to just look at the animals in my yard. Depending on where you live, hopefully I’ll touch on one or two animals you might be able to see for yourself just by going outside and looking around.

It sounds corny, but no matter how boring you think the nearest patch of greenery is, if you look closely enough you’ll see a world of activity. The other day I was sitting on a bench outside the library, enjoying a breeze and the shade of an oak tree, and because I am sort of disgusting and was wearing flip-flops, I was picking at one of my toenails that was partly broken. I pulled the broken part off and flipped it into the grass nearby. A few minutes later I noticed that a couple of ants had found that piece of toenail and were working hard to wrestle it over the grass and twigs and presumably back to their home. Why? Why did they want my toenail? It’s just a piece of keratin, and while keratin is a type of protein, it’s not digestible by most animals.

I looked it up, and guess what. I am not the first person to notice this. No one’s sure why ants take toenail and fingernail clippings, either. They’re not interested in hair, just nails. Hair and nails have different properties so it’s possible the ants are able to digest the keratin in nails but not the keratin in hair.

That was probably not the best story to start with. Try to forget that picture of me and remember that I’m sipping wine at a sidewalk café in Paris right now, or touring the Louvre.

Let’s move on to a small invertebrate that is sometimes eaten as a delicacy in France and other parts of Europe, the common or garden snail. That’s Cornu aspersum, which is native to the Mediterranean and western Europe, but which has been introduced in other parts of the world. It’s pretty big for a snail, with a shell almost 2 inches across, or 5 cm. The shell varies in color and pattern, but it’s usually brown with yellow markings.

The shells almost always coil to the right, or clockwise, but the occasional rare snail will have a left-coiling shell. Researchers have found that left-coiling shells are due to a genetic mutation and only occur about once in a million snails. A famous lefty snail was called Jeremy, who died in October 2017 at the ripe old age of two years. Since snails are hermaphrodites who both fertilize other snails’ eggs and lay their own, a boy name seems like a random choice. Jeremy was discovered by a retired scientist in his London garden, who gave the snail to the University of Nottingham for study. After a public appeal, two other left-handed snails were found by the public, but while the three snails all laid eggs, all the babies had clockwise shells.

The garden snail mostly eats plants, but will sometimes scavenge on small dead animals like drowned worms and squished slugs. When it’s threatened, it can pull itself all the way into its shell, and if it’s too dry out, it will pull itself into its shell and secrete a thin layer of mucus, which dries out to form a seal.

Snails raised to be eaten are kept in special cages, traditionally made from wine-grape vines. I am probably not going to eat any snails while I’m in France, but you never know. I will let you know if I do.

One animal Richard E. suggested as a topic is the robin, specifically the difference between the American robin and European robin. That’s a good one for this episode, because in both North America and Britain, the robin is a really common bird—so common that most people barely pay any attention to it.

The American robin is a type of thrush. It lives year-round in most of the United States and part of Mexico, spends summers in much of Canada, and winters in parts of Mexico. It’s big for a songbird, around 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It’s dark gray on its back, with a rusty red breast, white undertail coverts, and a long yellow bill. It also has white markings around its eyes. Young birds are speckled. It mostly eats insects, worms, and berries. If you see a bird on the ground, running quickly and then stopping, it’s probably a robin. Mostly the robin hunts bugs by sight, but it has good hearing and can actually hear worms moving around underground. You can sometimes see a robin with its head cocked, listening for a worm, before pouncing and pulling it out of the ground, just like in a cartoon.

American robin eggs are a light teal blue, so common and well-known that robin’s-egg-blue is a typical description of that particular color. In the spring after eggs hatch, the mother robin will carry the eggshells away from the nest to drop them, so predators won’t see the shells and know there’s a nest nearby. That’s why you’ll sometimes see half a robin eggshell on the sidewalk. It doesn’t mean something bad happened to the baby, just that the mother bird is doing her job. Both parents feed the chicks, and the parents also carry off the babies’ droppings to scatter them away from the nest.

This is what an American robin’s song sounds like. If you live in North America, you’ve probably heard this song a million times without noticing it.

[robin song]

The American robin was named after the European robin, also called the robin redbreast, but while the European robin does have a rusty red breast, it doesn’t look much like the American robin. The European robin is much smaller, only around 5 inches long, or 13 cm, with a brown back, streaked gray or buff belly, and orange face and breast. It has a short black bill and round black eyes. It eats insects, worms, berries, and seeds. The eggs are pale brown with reddish speckles.

It lives throughout much of Eurasia, but robins in Britain tend to be fairly tame, probably because they were traditionally considered beneficial in Britain and Ireland, so farmers and gardeners wouldn’t hurt them. In other parts of Europe they were hunted and are much more shy. European robins are also common on Christmas cards in Britain and Ireland, possibly because in the olden days, postmen used to wear red jackets. They started to be called robins as a result, and since postmen bring Christmas cards, the bird robin became linked with card delivery and finally just ended up on Christmas cards. Plus, their orange markings are cheerful in winter. And, of course, in the traditional story Babes in the Wood, which is often associated with Christmas pantomimes, robins cover the children’s dead bodies with leaves. Because nothing says Christmas spirit like a story about dead children.

This is what the European robin sounds like. If you live in Britain or parts of Europe, you’ve probably heard this song a million times without noticing it.

[other robin song]

Another common bird in gardens, this one from Japan and other parts of Asia, is the brown-eared bulbul. It’s about the size of the American robin, around 11 inches long, or 28 cm, including its long tail. It’s gray or gray-brown all over, with a speckled breast and belly, a sharp black bill, and a dark brown spot on the sides of its head that gives it its name. It mostly eats plants, including fruit, seeds, flowers, and even leaves. I have a picture in the show notes of one chowing down on a flower, just swallowing petals like it’s in a video game and petals give it a power-up. It likes nectar too, and in spring and summer especially will look like it has a yellow head or yellow markings because of all the pollen on its feathers. It helps pollinate plants as a result. It also sometimes eats insects. It gathers in large flocks at times and many farmers consider it a pest, especially fruit farmers.

It has a loud song and call that many people dislike. I’ll let you decide, if you’re not already familiar with it. I kind of like it, to be honest. This is what a brown-eared bulbul sounds like:

[brown-eared bulbul call]

Listener John V. recently suggested the Eastern Hognose snake for an episode, and tickled me because he referred to it as the “dramatic hognose snake.” The hognose is a common snake in many parts of North America, and can grow almost four feet long, or 116 cm, although about half that length is much more average. Its snout turns up like a little snub nose. It varies in color and pattern, and some snakes are black or gray, some orange, brown, even greenish. Some snakes have no pattern, some snakes have various colored blotches or even a checkered pattern. The belly is usually yellowish but is sometimes gray or almost white. It has a big head that makes some people believe it’s venomous, but it’s actually harmless to humans and most animals.

The only animals that really need to worry about the Eastern hognose are amphibians, like toads and frogs. As it happens, the hognose does have mild venom, but it’s only effective on amphibians. It especially likes to eat toads, and while some toads are toxic, the hognose snake is resistant to toad toxins. A toad will frequently puff itself up to make it appear larger and make it hard for a snake to eat, but the Eastern hognose has a solution for that too. It has big teeth at the rear of its upper jaws, like fangs in the back of its mouth. It uses those teeth to puncture puffed-up toads so they deflate.

But the most memorable thing about the Eastern hognose, and the thing that earns it the drama snake award, is what it does when it feels threatened. Phase one of the dramatics is aggression. The snake will flatten its neck to look more threatening, raise its head like a cobra, and hiss and strike—but without biting. It’s just trying to scare you away. If that doesn’t work, the snake puts phase two into effect. It will flop down and roll onto its back, its tongue hanging out, and emit a foul musky smell from its cloaca, and play dead. If you call its bluff and roll drama queen snake onto its belly, it will turn onto its back again. It is really insistent that it is dead.

A common reptile visitor to yards in Australia is the water dragon. Of course Australia would have a little dragon running around in suburban neighborhoods. Males can grow up to three feet long, or a little over a meter, with females smaller, but those lengths include a tail that’s almost twice the length of the body. Males are more brightly patterned than females. It’s a long-leggedy lizard with a spiky crest along its head and spine. It’s generally a pale greeny-grey with dark stripes, especially on the tail and legs, or gray with white stripes. Depending on the species and individual, it may also have a colorful blotch on the throat, usually white or yellow, but sometimes orange or red.

It’s a fast runner and can even run on its hind legs if it really needs to hurry. It climbs trees well, but it especially likes water and is semi-aquatic. Its long tail helps it swim. It likes to bask on branches overhanging the water, and if something threatens it, it drops into the water, where it hides. It can stay underwater without needing to take another breath for over half an hour. It eats small animals like frogs and worms, crustaceans and mollusks, insects, fruit, and plants.

In areas where it gets cold in winter, such as Sydney, the water dragon will dig a burrow if it doesn’t already have one, close the entrance off with dirt, and hibernate until spring, when it emerges and starts searching for a mate. Males sometimes fight each other, biting and scratching. Once the weather is warm, the female lays 6 to 18 eggs in a hole she digs in sandy soil.

Water dragons will visit yards if there’s cover and a water source nearby, whether it’s a creek or just a dog’s water bowl. Don’t try to pet one, though. Dragons bite.

Now let’s look at a couple of common rodents. The edible dormouse lives throughout much of western Europe and is big, about the size of a squirrel, which it also roughly resembles. It’s grey or grey-brown with paler underparts. In autumn when it’s preparing for hibernation it gets very fat, which is why it’s also called the fat dormouse. The name edible dormouse comes from the Romans, who used to farm them in captivity and eat them as a delicacy. In some parts of Europe, especially Slovenia, wild edible dormice are still trapped and eaten.

The edible dormouse lives in dense forests, caves, and people’s attics, where it can be a real pest. It eats plants, especially fruit and nuts, but will eat bark and leaves, and sometimes bird eggs and insects. It especially likes beech tree seeds. It’s mostly nocturnal. Unlike most rodents, it doesn’t always breed every year.

If a predator grabs the edible dormouse’s tail, the skin and fur will slide off, allowing the dormouse to escape. The exposed tail vertebrae later break off and the wound heals up, making the tail shorter. That is kind of horrifying.

Chipmunks are rodents common throughout North America, although the Siberian chipmunk lives in Asia. The Eastern chipmunk is the one I’m going to talk about today, primarily because I got audio of one calling this morning on my way to work. I spilled coffee all over myself to get the audio, so I definitely want to share it.

The chipmunk is larger than a mouse but smaller than a squirrel. It has reddish-brown fur with stripes down its sides, a white band in between two thinner black bands. It prefers woodlands with lots of brush and rocks to hide in, but it lives in parks, yards, and definitely all over the college campus where I work. It climbs trees well but mostly it stays on the ground. It digs complex burrows with tunnels that can be more than 11 feet long, or 3.5 meters. It even digs a special latrine burrow to keep droppings out of the rest of the burrow system, and will throw nut shells and other trash into the latrine too. When it’s digging a new tunnel or burrow, it carries the dirt it’s dug away from the tunnel entrance in its cheek pouches, so predators won’t notice newly dug soil and come to take a look.

The chipmunk is omnivorous, and eats everything from bird eggs, worms, snails, and insects to seeds, nuts, and mushrooms. It even eats small animals like baby mice and nestling birds. It carries food in its cheek pouches to store for the winter, and helps disperse some plants as a result. It doesn’t hibernate, but in winter it spends most of its time sleeping, which is pretty much what I like to do in winter too.

THIS is what an Eastern chipmunk sounds like! A cup of coffee died to bring you this audio:

[chipmunk sound]

Our final animal isn’t something you’d typically find in your yard or garden—but you might find it in your house, if you have a freshwater aquarium: the guppy. A different Richard suggested this animal, specifically my brother Richard. He texted me a while back about Poecilia reticulata, a “common aquarium fish that can turn its little eyes black.” Then we texted back and forth about how that would be a really neat superpower, and how we would apply it in our lives if we could turn our eyes black.

The guppy is a tropical fish native to parts of South America, although it’s been introduced into the wild in other parts of the world and is an invasive species in many places. In the wild it eats algae, insect larvae, and various tiny animals. It’s usually between one and two inches long, or 3 to 6 cm, with females being larger. Females are gray or silvery in color, while males are gray with spots of bright color. Aquarium enthusiasts breed different strains of guppy that may have bright colors and striking patterns.

So does the guppy turn its eyes black? Yes, it really does. Most of the time guppies have silver eyes, but some species can change their eye color in only seconds. In the wild, guppies that live in dangerous areas with many predators tend to group together and cooperate. But guppies that live in safer areas tend to be loners and more aggressive toward each other. When a guppy is angry at another guppy, it turns its eyes black to indicate that it’s willing to fight. Other guppies may back off at that point, or if the other guppy is bigger, it may attack. Researchers don’t know yet how guppies change their eye color.

Until next week, when I’m home from Paris and hopefully caught up on my sleep, remember to look around at the strange little animals in your own backyard. But watch out if their eyes turn black.

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!

Episode 080: Mystery Dogs

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This week we’re looking at some strange and mysterious canids from around the world!

The African wild dog:

A dhole:

An old photo of the ringdocus and a newer photo of the ringdocus:

A coyote:

Sri Lankan golden jackal:

The maned wolf MONEY SHOT:

A bush dog:

A stuffed Honshu wolf, dramatically lit:

Show transcript:

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

This week let’s look at a bunch of mystery doggos from around the world! I really like dogs, but for some reason dogs and their relations don’t come up much on the podcast. When I started looking into mystery canids, though, I found so much information that there’s no way I can stuff even half of it into one episode. So we’ll definitely be revisiting mystery dogs in the future.

The family Canidae includes dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, and foxes. Yes, foxes are canids, but not closely related to more dog-like canids. We’re going to skip the foxes this week, since foxes deserve an episode all their own eventually.

Dogs were domesticated at least 9,500 years ago, possibly as long as 14,700 years ago, maybe even as long as 36,000 years ago. Dogs and humans go way back. The closest living relative of the dog is the gray wolf, which is still alive today, but the wild ancestor of the domestic dog was a different species of wolf that has gone extinct.

There are canids called wild dogs, but they’re not the same species as domestic dogs. The African wild dog, for instance, is not very closely related to dogs and wolves—in fact, it’s the only species in its own genus. It’s a tall, lean canid with large ears and no dewclaws. It has a yellowish coat with black blotches and some white spots, including a white tail tip, although some subspecies have darker coats. As the dog ages, it loses its fur until old dogs are nearly bald. It hunts in packs and mostly preys on antelopes, warthogs, ostriches, hares, and rodents.

The nomadic Tuareg people who live in northern parts of Africa around the Sahara have stories of a supernatural creature called the Adjule, among other names. The Adjule’s description makes it sound a lot like the African wild dog, including its lack of a dew claw. Since the African wild dog is rare in that part of Africa, it’s possible that rare sightings of what is a distinctively odd-looking animal may have given rise to the stories.

Another so-called wild dog is the dhole, also called the Indian wild dog, which is closely related to the African wild dog. It used to be common throughout Eurasia and North America, but these days it’s restricted to parts of Asia and is endangered. It looks something like a fox and something like a wolf, but is neither. Like many other canids in this episode, the dhole has its own genus. Because it tends to be easily tamed and is sometimes kept as a pet, researchers once believed domestic dogs might have descended from the dhole or an ancestral species of dhole, but genetic evidence shows that the dhole isn’t closely related to domestic dogs or to wolves.

There are three subspecies of dhole, two of them reddish-brown in color and one with fur that’s pale brown in winter. But there is a mystery animal called the gray dhole that may turn out to be a fourth subspecies or something else.

The gray dhole supposedly lives in the forests and mountains of Myanmar. It’s dark gray with a black muzzle and small, round ears, and is supposed to be smaller than the other dhole species. In 1913 a Major E.G. Phythian-Adams wrote about the grey dhole after he saw one that year, and in 1933 E.H. Peacock mentioned it in his book A Game Book for Bhurma and Adjoining Territories. In 1936 an explorer named Tsaing reported seeing one in Burma. But after these reports, the Bombay Natural History Society tried to find physical evidence of the animal in the 1950s, but couldn’t track down anything. They only found one person who even reported seeing the grey dhole. So even if it is a separate species or subspecies and not just a rare color morph of a known species of dhole, it’s probably extinct now.

Kipling wrote about the dhole in one of his Jungle Book stories, calling it the red whistling dog of the Deccan, and reporting that packs of the animals were so ferocious that even tigers would avoid them. This is true, even the whistling part. Instead of barking or howling, dhole calls are whistles. This is what a dhole sounds like:

[dhole sound]

In 1886 a Montana settler named Israel Hutchins shot a wolflike animal that had reportedly been killing livestock. No one knew what it was, so Hutchins traded it to a taxidermist for a cow. He needed the cow because when he first tried to shoot the canid, he accidentally shot one of his own cows instead. The taxidermist, Joseph Sherwood, also owned a general store in Idaho. He displayed the stuffed canid in the store, where it stayed for almost a hundred years until it disappeared. In 2007 Hutchins’s grandson, Jack Kirby, traced it to the Idaho Museum of Natural History.

The stuffed mystery canid is usually called the ringdocus, a name Sherwood made up. It has a sloping back and some other un-wolf-like features that might be due to bad taxidermy or might be due to physical anomalies in an ordinary wolf—or might be due to the ringdocus being an animal new to science. Suggestions as to what it might be include a thylacine, a hyena, a wolf-coyote hybrid, a wolf-dog hybrid, or a dire wolf. It’s not a thylacine, just going to say that straight out. Since we have the taxidermied specimen, it seems logical that a DNA test would clear up the mystery or bring us a brand new scientific mystery, if it turns out to be an unknown animal. But Kirby doesn’t want a DNA test done. That tells me it’s probably just a wolf, and he knows it’s a wolf. Prove me wrong, Kirby. I bet you ten whole dollars it’s just a wolf.

Around the same time that Hutchens was shooting at the ringdocus and killing his cow, and probably saying some very bad words when it happened, a man called Payze bought what he thought was a fox cub from some men traveling to London. It was 1883 and the men had caught the cub, along with two others, in Epping Forest. Payze named the cub Charlie, but as Charlie grew up, he started looking less and less like a fox. Payze took him to London Zoo and showed him to the superintendent, who identified him as a coyote.

But how had a coyote gotten to England? Coyotes are native to North America. The coyote is smaller than a wolf, usually a bit bigger than a fox but with longer legs, and can look fox-like. It’s gray and brown, or sometimes reddish, with large ears and a brushy tail.

It turns out that four coyotes had been brought to England and released near Epping Forest not long before, presumably for hunting. Clearly they’d had at least one litter of pups, but is it possible they survived and had more offspring? Locals do occasionally report seeing wolves or gray foxes in the area. Since coyotes readily breed with dogs and produce fertile offspring, it’s possible that some local dogs have coyote in their ancestry.

The Sri Lankan golden jackal lives in Sri Lanka and parts of India. It’s a small canid, with grizzled black and white fur above and tan or golden on the belly and legs. It’s a subspecies of the golden jackal, and it’s sometimes called the horned jackal. Local people in Sri Lanka believe that the leader of the pack has a small horn on the back of its skull, although other people report the horn is on its forehead. The horn is supposed to have supernatural powers and is considered a valuable talisman or charm.

That sounds nutty, but we actually have golden jackal skulls with small pointy horns less than an inch long, or a few centimeters. So the horns are real, but they’re not actual horns. They’re most likely bony growths resulting from an injury to the skull. No one’s sure why golden jackals grow them but not other canids.

The Falkland Islands is an archipelago about 300 miles, or 480 km, off the coast of Patagonia at the southern end of South America. When European explorers first discovered the islands in the late 17th century, no people lived there, just lots of birds and a fox-like wolf. Charles Darwin saw it in 1834 and described it as a wolf-like fox, but modern DNA research shows that it’s not only not a fox, its closest living relative is the maned wolf, which still lives in parts of South America.

The Falkland Islands wolf was tawny in color with a white tip to its tail. It had relatively short legs but was a fairly large animal, standing about two feet tall at the shoulder, or 60 cm. Its fur was thick and it barked like a dog. It may have lived in burrows. Because no mammals except the wolf lived on the Falkland Islands until settlers arrived, the wolf probably mostly ate seabirds, insects, and anything it could scavenge from the seashore.

For a long time it was a mystery how the Falkland Islands wolf got to the islands. There were no other wild canids in Patagonia, and the islands were never connected to the mainland. The islands aren’t even visible from the mainland. But the Falkland Islands wolf used to have a close relative that lived in Patagonia and other parts of South America. Dusicyon avus was about the size of German shepherd, and may have been at least partially domesticated. The grave of a young D. avus was found among human graves dating to over 2,000 years ago in Argentina. Estimates of when D. avus went extinct vary from 1,000 BCE to only around 300 years ago. Either way, researchers think that about 16,000 years ago, during the last ice age, the sea level was lower and only a shallow strait separated the mainland from the Falkland Islands. At times the strait may have frozen over, allowing animals to travel to the islands. When the glaciers melted and the sea level rose, some of the wolves were trapped on the islands. They evolved over the centuries to better fit their island habitat.

The Falkland Islands wolf wasn’t afraid of humans since it had no predators. That meant that sailors and other people who visited the islands could kill the wolves easily. It was hunted for its fur, or sometimes just poisoned by settlers who believed it killed sheep. It went extinct in 1876.

So what about the maned wolf, the Falkland Islands wolf’s living relation? It is a very weird animal, and in fact you’ll often see it listed in articles about the weirdest animals ever.

The maned wolf resembles a fox in many ways. It has reddish fur with black legs and muzzle and a black mane along its spine, a white tip to its tail, and a white patch on its throat. Its ears are big and its muzzle relatively short. Oh, and its legs are long. Really, really long. Super long. At first glance, it almost looks like a deer.

The maned wolf’s body is about the size of a good-sized dog’s, but its legs are far longer than any dog’s legs. Researchers think the maned wolf evolved longer legs to better see over the tall grasses where it lives. It’s a solitary animal and hunts small animals and birds, but about half its diet is plants. It especially likes a tomato-like fruit called the wolf apple. It marks its territory with a stinky musk that smells enough like cannabis that at least one zoo security team has mistaken it for people smoking marijuana.

Not only is the maned wolf not a wolf, it’s not a fox either. It’s not really closely related to any other living canids. It is, in fact, its own thing, the only living canid in its genus. While it’s related to the Falkland Islands wolf, its closest living relative is the bush dog, also the only species in its genus, also an odd canid from South America. But while the maned wolf is very tall, the bush dog is very short, only about a foot tall at the shoulder, or 30 cm.

The bush dog has plush brown fur that’s lighter on the back and darker on the belly, legs, and rump. Its ears are small, its snout short, and its tail is relatively short. It actually looks more like an otter or big weasel than a dog. It sometimes hunts in packs, sometimes alone. When it hunts alone it mostly eats small rodents, lizards and snakes, and birds, but packs can kill larger animals like peccaries, a type of wild pig. It lives in extended family groups and hunts during the day.

The bush dog is rare and not much is known about it. Its toes are webbed and it spends a lot of time in the water within its forest habitat. It’s so rare that for a long time it was only known from fossils found in some caves in Brazil, and was thought extinct.

Conversely, the Japanese wolf, or Honshu wolf, is a canid that is supposed to have gone extinct in January of 1905 when the last known wolf was killed. But people keep seeing and hearing it in the mountains of Japan.

The Honshu wolf was also small, not much more than a foot tall at the shoulder, or 30-odd cm, but it was a subspecies of gray wolf. Its legs were short and its short coat was greyish-brown. It was once considered a friend to farmers, since it ate rats and other pests. Wolves were also regarded as protective of travelers in Japanese folklore. But in 1732 rabies was introduced to Japan. That disease combined with loss of habitat made the Honshu wolf more of a threat to humans and their livestock, and led to its persecution.

But sightings of the wolf have continued ever since that last one was killed in 1905. Photographs of a canid killed in 1910 were studied by a team of researchers in 2000, who determined that the animal in the photos was probably a Honshu wolf. People have found tracks, heard howling, seen wolf-like animals, even taken photos of what look like wolves. The problem is that the Japanese wolf looked similar in many ways to some Japanese dog breeds like the Shiba inu and the Akita, which are probably partly wolf anyway since wolves and dogs interbreed easily and produce fertile offspring. People might be seeing dogs roaming the countryside. We can’t even DNA test hairs and old pelts to see if they’re from wolves, because we don’t have a genetic profile of the Honshu wolf. There are only a few taxidermied specimens of the wolf, and none of them have yielded intact DNA.

Another mystery not definitely solved by DNA testing, although at least they’ve tried, is the Andean wolf, sometimes called Hagenbeck’s wolf. It’s another South American mystery canid. In 1927, a German animal collector called Lorenz Hagenbeck bought a wolf pelt in Buenos Aires. The seller said the pelt, and three others, came from a wolf-like wild dog in the Andes Mountains.

The pelt is about six feet long, or 1.8 meters, including the tail, with thick, long fur, especially a thick ruff on the neck. It’s black on the back and dark brown elsewhere.

Hagenbeck didn’t recognize the pelt, so when he got home he sent it for examination. In the 1930s and 1940s, various studies suggested it belonged to a new species of canid, possibly one related to the maned wolf. One mammologist, Ingo Krumbiegel, also thought he might have seen a skull of the same canid in 1935, which he said had resembled a maned wolf skull but was much larger, and was supposed to have come from the Andes. Krumbiegel was convinced enough that in 1949 he described the Andean wolf formally as a new species. But no more specimens have come to light.

In 1954 another study determined Hagenbeck’s pelt was just a dog pelt, possibly of a German Shepherd crossbreed. A 1957 study came to the same conclusion. In 2000, a DNA analysis came back inconclusive due to the pelt having been chemically treated during preparation, and contamination with dog, wolf, human, and pig DNA. Currently the pelt is on display at the Zoological State Museum in Munich.

Finally, the dire wolf is a famous canid from books, games, and movies, but it was also a real animal. It lived throughout North and South America and was bigger than modern gray wolves, standing over three feet tall at the shoulder, or about 97 cm. It had massive teeth and powerful jaws that would have helped it kill giant ground sloths, mastodons, bison, horses, and other ice age megafauna. It wasn’t as fast a runner as modern wolves, though, and some researchers think the gray wolf may have outcompeted the dire wolf.

The dire wolf probably died out about 9,500 years ago, but there’s a group called the Dire Wolf Project that’s attempting to breed a dog that looks like a dire wolf. The group isn’t introducing any modern wolf genes into the breed, though, since they want a dog that looks like a dire wolf but doesn’t act like one. Which is pretty smart considering that dire wolves probably snacked on our own ancestors from time to time.

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!

Episode 079: Starfish and Friends

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This week’s episode is all about echinoderms, or at least the star-shaped echinoderms! Thanks to Llewelly for the suggestion about feather stars and crinoids!

A very pretty starfish:

Crown of thorns starfish. Do not touch:

Pumpkin starfish or orange throw pillow? YOU DECIDE:

Sea daisies. Not much to look at tbh:

A banded arm brittle star:

Ruby brittle stars:

Brittle stars riding around in a jelly:

A basket star:

Basket stars got TEETH THINGS:

A stemmed crinoid:

A lovely feather star:

Further reading:

Echinoblog, a really amazing resource and so much fun to browse

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to look at some marine animals that most people barely think about, but which are really interesting. It was going to just be about starfish and maybe one other animal, but while I was still researching starfish, listener Llewelly suggested I cover feather stars and crinoids. They’re related to starfish, so I thought I’d tack them on. And if you talk about starfish, you really have to talk about brittle stars too, and if you talk about brittle stars you have to talk about basket stars. Basically, I had to stop myself from breaking this episode into two big episodes about echinoderms. It’s just the stars this time.

Before we get into echinoderms, though, a quick note about my schedule. Next week I’m going on a trip to Paris, France! I know it sounds like I’m rich and just travel as my whim takes me, but actually I just have really generous relatives. A week and a half after I return from Paris, I’ll be in Atlanta, Georgia for DragonCon, where I’ll be on a panel about podcasting. In other words, I won’t be around much on social media for the rest of August, but don’t worry, I’ll have episodes recorded and scheduled to run normally while I’m gone.

Okay, now let’s get into echinoderms. Echinoderms include sand dollars, sea urchins, starfish, and many others, and every single echinoderm lives in the ocean. Many of them can regenerate limbs and other body parts, and instead of blood they have a water vascular system. In most echinoderms, seawater enters the body through slits or pores, then travels through canals within the body to transport oxygen to cells and waste products out of cells. Echinoderms have internal skeletons made of calcium carbonate, but they’re invertebrates because they don’t have a backbone. Heck, technically they don’t even have a back.

Echinoderms show radial symmetry, which means their bodies are roughly the same in all directions instead of having a clear front and rear. The echinoderms we’re talking about this week are ones that also exhibit pentaradial symmetry, which means they have five sides. And the best-known echinoderms out there are starfish. There are about 1,500 species of starfish known, and some of them are really weird and some are only kind of weird. Most have five arms but some have a whole lot more.

Starfish are members of the class Asteroidea, which just delights me. A better name for them is sea star, since they’re not fish at all. Starfish have been around for at least 450 million years, but in 2012 paleontologists found a fossil of the oldest known ancestor of starfish in the mountains of Morocco. It’s about 515 million years old, from the Cambrian period. It was only about an inch and a half long, or 4 cm, and looked similar to the modern-day sea lily, or crinoid. If you recall, the Cambrian period was when life was expanding rapidly in the oceans and evolving sometimes quite strange body plans. You know, like things with FIVE LEGS.

Most starfish have ossicles in their skin, little hard beads of calcium carbonate that help protect the animal. In some starfish, the ossicles are more like spines or even spikes. Although cartoons of starfish usually make them look like their legs are always exactly star-shaped, the legs are actually quite flexible. If a starfish is flipped upside down, it bends a couple of its legs down to flip itself back over.

The starfish’s mouth is in the very center of its body, the part in the middle of the legs, known as the disc. Different starfish use their mouths differently. That sounds confusing, but just hang on, because things are about to get weird and gross.

Starfish are primarily predators. Some starfish just swallow their prey whole and digest it in the stomach. Pretty normal. But other starfish—look, I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’ll just say it. They turn their stomach inside out, called eversion, squish it around the prey, and start the digestive process. Part of the stomach stays inside the body, and when the prey has been digested enough that’s it sort of a lumpy soup, the starfish retracts its everted stomach and the food back into the body. This means that the starfish can eat prey that’s bigger than it is.

A lot of starfish eat bivalves of various kinds, like clams. Say a starfish finds a clam and wants to eat it. The clam is closed up tight and starfish don’t have teeth or claws to break the clam open. But starfish do have tiny tubes on the bottoms of their legs, called tube feet. These tubes act like suction cups, although they actually stick to things with a chemical reaction. So the starfish latches onto both shells of the bivalve with its tube feet and pulls. It probably isn’t strong enough to pull the clam open completely, but it doesn’t need to. It just needs a little space so it can evert its stomach and squish it into the clam’s shell. Then it releases digestive enzymes and the clam is doomed.

Starfish can’t move very fast, and lots of animals eat them. But they can regenerate lost legs if some of them are bitten off. The starfish doesn’t have a brain, although it does have a nerve net. Plus, it has sensory bundles at the ends of its arms that can detect smells, along with eye spots at the end of each leg. The eye spots basically just detect light and darkness and they don’t actually look like eyes, which is a good thing because that would be terrifying.

Starfish arms, or legs, are properly called rays. I will continue to confuse everyone by calling them arms or legs depending on which word sounds better to me at the time.

So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. What is the biggest starfish? What is the weirdest starfish? Could a starfish actually kill you, and I don’t mean by making you faint with terror and drown, which is what would happen to me if I accidentally touched one.

Let’s start with the biggest starfish. Starfish don’t actually get all that enormous. Even the biggest ones are typically only about two feet across, or 60 cm. The sunflower star can grow more than three feet across, or over a meter, and can weigh up to 11 pounds, or 5 kilograms. AND it has a ridiculous number of arms, up to 24 of them.

Sunflower stars can be purple, red, pink, brown, orange, yellow, or even white. They live on the sea bed along the Pacific coast, usually where it’s shallow but sometimes nearly 1500 feet deep, or over 450 meters. Young sunflower stars only have five arms, but as they get older they grow more arms. One genus of starfish, commonly called Heliaster, looks similar to the sunflower star even though it’s not that closely related to it, but some individuals can have up to 50 legs.

Recently, a bed of 350 fossil starfish were found in Florida, so well preserved that paleontologists were able to identify them as Heliaster michrobachius, which is still around today. But it lives off the western coast of Central and South America, from Mexico all the way down to Chile—but it’s not found anywhere else. So what were they doing in Florida three million years ago?

Remember the Great American Interchange, where the isthmus of Panama formed, connecting North and South America and allowing animals from both places to spread into the other continents? Before then, North America was separate from South America, so Heliaster undoubtedly lived along North America’s southern coast. After the isthmus formed, currents, salinity, and many other factors changed, which probably led to Heliaster dying out in the Atlantic side of the continent. Fortunately, it survived in the Pacific side.

So, what is the weirdest starfish? It’s really hard to decide. All starfish are weird, frankly. Labidiaster annulatus can grow up to two feet across, or 60 cm, and has 40 to 45 long, thin legs with sharp spines that can actually grab prey. The starfish holds its legs out and wriggles them like fishing lines, and when a little fish or an amphipod comes close, the spines snag it. The starfish wraps its arms around the prey and pulls it to its mouth, where it everts its stomach and starts digesting.

The crown-of-thorns starfish mostly eats coral polyps and is covered with thorny spines that are venomous. It can have up to 21 arms and is the same size as Labidiaster, but with a thicker body and much shorter legs. It looks scary, but it’s actually delicate and rarely survives being lifted out of the water for even a short time. It lives in a lot of areas, including part of the Pacific Ocean, Red Sea, and along the east African coast, but it’s most common around Australia. At one point people worried that it was killing a lot of the coral in Australia’s great barrier reef, but under ordinary circumstances it actually helps maintain biodiversity in coral reefs by preying mainly on fast-growing coral. This allows slow-growing coral to flourish. Every so often, though, there’s a population boom among the crown-of-thorns starfish. Researchers aren’t sure why, and when it happens Australia has tried various population control measures to keep their numbers down and protect the reefs.

The pumpkin sea star is fat, thick, and orange. It’s big too, literally the size of a pumpkin. It’s also rare, and was only discovered in 1997. Even though it’s big, its skeleton is very small and it’s basically very meaty, which makes it look like a star-shaped orange throw pillow. Now I want a pumpkin starfish throw pillow. It lives in the Indo-Pacific up to about 650 feet deep, or 200 meters, but not much is known about it yet.

Luidia maculata has long, flattened arms that are brown and black striped above and white underneath, sometimes with a brown daisy pattern on its body disc. Seriously, who knew these things were so pretty? It lives in shallow water in the Indo-Pacific and often buries itself in the sand with the help of the long spines on the undersides of its legs. It doesn’t have an eversible stomach so it just swallows its prey whole, including sand dollars, sea urchins, clams, other starfish, sea cucumbers, and snails. Whatever’s left over after it has digested its prey, it spits out.

The sea daisy is a deep-sea animal described in 1986 after being discovered by accident. A team collecting samples of wood from the South Pacific seabed found nine of the strange creatures and didn’t know what they were. It’s small, only about 9 mm long, and is shaped roughly like an umbrella without a handle. Its upper surface is covered with plates with spines along the edges, and underneath it has a single row of tube feet and a membrane. Researchers at first decided the sea daisy was so different from other echinoderms that it needed its own class, but further study determined that it’s actually a type of starfish even though it has no arms and no stomach. In fact, it most closely resembles a juvenile starfish, but where starfish grow arms as they develop, the sea daisy never grows arms and instead grows outward along its circumference, like a wheel. It lives among wood that has sunk to the bottom of the ocean to a depth of at least 3300 feet, or 1,000 meters, and researchers think it may eat bacteria that grow on the wood. The membrane on its underside resembles an everted stomach.

Okay, one more. A starfish sometimes referred to as a slime star is covered with a soft, squishy, gelatinous surface. Its body is frequently almost transparent too. It usually lives in the deep sea, with new species found just about every time a deep-sea expedition scouts around on the sea floor. The largest are almost a foot across, or nearly 30 cm. Since they’re so delicate, it’s hard to study them, so not a lot is known about them. But there is a shallow-living species that has been studied a little more, and we know one important thing about them. If you pick up a slime star, it will secrete just ridiculous amounts of slime. This helps it keep from being eaten. The slime may also contain a soap-like toxin.

That brings us to our last question about starfish: can starfish kill you? No. No, they can’t. Even the crown-of-thorns starfish venom won’t kill you, just hurt like crazy for a few hours or as much as a week. The venom actually chemically resembles soap or detergent so isn’t very toxic to humans or other animals, but it does make the starfish taste bad.

Next, let’s look at brittle stars. Brittle stars look superficially like starfish and are closely related to them. Their legs are usually very long and slender, with the legs of some species growing up to two feet long, or 60 cm. The legs are supported by a skeleton made of plates called vertebral ossicles, which resembles a bike chain.

Brittle stars have five arms and a round central disc, with the legs much more differentiated from the disc than starfish legs are. They mostly scavenge for bits of food or eat worms and other small animals. They usually move slowly, but when they need to, they can really zoom around quickly. Their legs are extremely flexible and they can use them for swimming or crawling. Sometimes a brittle star will raise its body disc up and walk on its legs sort of like a spider, which is oddly creepy but also remarkably adorable. Look, I don’t mind telling you, I really like brittle stars. I barely knew what they were before I started researching them, but now I think they’re one of the best things ever.

Some brittle stars are bioluminescent, but only along their arms. Most species can regenerate their arms like starfish can, but not as well as starfish, and some species can’t regenerate at all.

Brittle stars are more freewheeling than their starfish cousins. For instance, one brittle star, Ophiocnemis marmorata, hitches rides on jellyfish. One 2017 study found that 79% of moon jellies examined hosted brittle stars, some riding inside the jellys’ bells, some riding in the tentacles near the oral arms. Larger jellies carry more brittle stars, while small ones usually only have a few. It turns out that the brittle stars steal food from the jellies, known as kleptoparasitism. They also gain some protection from living inside a jelly, and they get a free ride to new parts of the ocean. Researchers hypothesize that the brittle stars find their jelly hosts as larvae, ride around with it for a while, and drop off to live on the sea floor. Since the brittle star prefers tropical waters, it abandons its host jelly when it migrates into colder water.

Brittle stars are divided into two groups, brittle stars and basket stars. Brittle stars live all over and are especially common around coral reefs, but basket stars mostly live in deep water. While brittle stars have relatively simple, snakey arms, basket star arms are long and branched. Sometimes the branches of their arms are so elaborate, they look more like a kind of coral or like a tumbleweed sitting on the bottom of the ocean.

The biggest basket star we know of is probably Gorgonocephalus. There are at least ten species, and they can be hard to tell apart even by experts. Gorgonocephalus’s body disc can grow some 5 ½ inches across, or 14 cm, but its five net-like arms can grow over two feet long, or 70 cm. It’s white or yellowish in color, and its disc is often dark brown. During the day it hides among sponges and corals, but at night it comes out to hunt.

Basket stars mostly eat small animals like krill, jellyfish, and copepods that get tangled in their elaborately branched arms. The arms have hooks and spines all over them too. Basket stars will sit on a rock or a sponge or something similar, and extend their arms as though casting a net. When an animal strays into the net, the basket star carries it to the mouth on the underside of its body disc. And the mouth is full of spikes. Like many deep-sea animals, we don’t know a whole lot about basket stars and new species are discovered pretty frequently.

The last star we’ll look at this time is the feather star, but to learn about the feather star we also have to learn about the crinoid. If you’ve taken a geology class, you probably remember crinoid stem fossils. They’re incredibly common fossils, because crinoids used to be incredibly common animals. Pieces of crinoid stem fossils are sometimes called St. Cuthbert’s beads, and they’ve been used by humans to make jewelry for millennia.

In the past crinoids had five arms, but at some point each arm developed into two, so many modern crinoids have ten arms. In addition, some species have arms that branch. The arms have feathery appendages and tube feet coated with mucus, which helps trap tiny bits of food. Crinoids’ water vascular system is internal, unlike in starfish and brittle stars, which pump water in from outside.

Crinoids with stalks look like plants and are often called sea lilies. Some even have tiny rootlike filaments that help it attach to the sea floor or to rocks or other structures. The stem is slender with the cup-like body disc, called a calyx, and feathery arms at the top. Many species of crinoid have stems as juveniles, but become free-swimming when they reach maturity. Today some deep-sea crinoids can have stems a little over three feet long, or roughly a meter, but one fossil crinoid found had a stem 130 feet long, or 40 meters. But unlike true plants, crinoids can uproot themselves and move to a better location.

Most crinoids today are free-swimming, and these are the feather stars. They may have a vestigial stalk or may have no stalk at all. Most feather stars are sedentary, only crawling around for short distances, but some can swim with their arms. Many are brightly colored and absolutely beautiful.

I could keep talking about echinoderms for hours, but this episode is already getting long. Eventually I’ll do a follow-up episode about other echinoderms, like sea urchins. Until then, if you want to learn more about echinoderms I highly recommend a site called Echinoblog. It’s run by Dr. Chris Mah, a starfish expert, whose enthusiastic and informative posts about echinoderms really helped me learn to appreciate them. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Usually, the more I look at pictures of invertebrates, the more gross they seem, but the opposite is true for feather stars and brittle stars. They’re just gorgeous. Starfish, on the other hand, I would rather admire from afar.

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!

Episode 078: The Great Auk and Penguins

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Let’s learn about the great auk this week, along with some lookalike birds, penguins!

A great auk, as painted by Audubon:

A razorbill, the auk’s closest living relative:

A fairy penguin, so tiny:

An emperor penguin, so big:

Tony Signorini wearing his Hoax Shoes:

Show transcript:

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

This week’s topic is one I’ve had on my list to cover for some time, and a couple of people whose names I forgot to write down also suggested. It’s the great auk, and while we’re at it we’re going to learn about penguins too.

Picture this bird in your mind. It’s big, close to three feet tall, or 85 cm, black with a white belly and white spots over the eyes during breeding season. It has a big dark bill and eats fish and crustaceans. Its feet are webbed and it’s flightless, because instead of flying, it swims, fast and agile in the water but clumsy on land. It’s social, nesting in big colonies and laying one egg, which both parents incubate. Both parents also help feed the chick when it hatches. Pairs mate for life. And it lives in cold waters of the North Atlantic from eastern Canada to Greenland and Iceland over to the western coast of Europe.

Wait a minute, you say, knowledgeably, because you know a thing or two about penguins. Penguins live in the southern hemisphere. What is going on??

The great auk is going on, my friend. And while the similarities between the great auk and the various species of penguin are striking, they’re not closely related at all. The great auk’s scientific name is Pinguinus impennis, and it was sometimes called a penguin, but the penguin is named after the auk because of the similarities between the two. The most obvious difference between the great auk and the penguin is the bill. Penguins have relatively small, sharp bills, but great auk bills were much larger and heavier, grooved and with a hook at the end.

So is the great auk still around? I sure made it sound like it was still around, didn’t I? Unfortunately, no. The last known great auks were killed on June 3, 1844, with a few sightings in the years after. The last probable sighting of a great auk was in 1852. But it had been a really common bird for a long time. What was it like, and what happened to it?

The great auk lived almost its whole life in the water. It only came out to breed and lay eggs, one egg per couple. Its babies grew fast and took to the sea when only a few weeks old, but the parents continued to feed their baby and care for it in the water. Sometimes a young auk would ride on its parent’s back as it swam.

It was incredibly at home in the water. It could hold its breath for something like 15 minutes, could dive deeply and swim so quickly that it could shoot up out of the water to land on ledges well above the ocean’s surface. Because of its swimming ability and its size, it wasn’t scared of very many animals. Polar bears, orcas, and a few other large predators sometimes ate it, but its main predator was these aggressive apes called humans. Maybe you’ve heard of them.

People killed the great auk for food, for feathers, and to use its skin and bones as decorative items. Its remains have been found at Neandertal campsites too. And because it was a large, plentiful bird, people hunted it and hunted it and hunted it. The great auk was already nearly extinct around Europe by the mid 16th century, since it was killed for its down, which was used to stuff pillows. Auk eggs were also collected for food. And as the bird became rarer, museums decided they had better get specimens while they could. The last great auks were killed so they could be stuffed and mounted.

So if there’s a great auk, is there a lesser auk? There is, and it’s still around! The little auk is only about 8 inches long, or 21 cm, but unlike the great auk it can fly. It eats small fish, crustaceans, and invertebrates. But the razorbill is a much closer relative.

The razorbill has a lot in common with the great auk but it’s much smaller, only up to 17 inches high, or 43 cm. It also flies. It was once hunted for its meat and feathers, but after it was protected in 1917 its numbers rebounded. Its primary problem these days is pollution of its breeding sites.

There was once a group of even bigger auks than the great auk. The Mancallinae were flightless and lived on the western North American coast. The largest species was Miomancalla howardae, which went extinct almost 5 million years ago. It stood more than three feet tall, or 1 meter, but was heavier and bulkier than the great auk.

As for penguins, fortunately, they’re still around although they’re all threatened due to pollution, habitat loss, and climate change. They have no natural fear of humans, probably because they have no land predators in Antarctica. Polar bears and walruses live near the Arctic, which is in the northern hemisphere, and sled dogs aren’t allowed in Antarctica. I did not know that until just now. I mean, I knew the polar bears and walruses part, not the dog part.

The smallest penguin is called the fairy penguin, and it’s only 16 inches tall at most, or 40 cm. It lives off the coast of Australia, New Zealand, and Chile. Its head is blue, which is why it’s also called the little blue penguin. Like other penguin species, it eats fish, cephalopods like squid, and crustaceans such as krill. It especially likes jellyfish.

The largest penguin is, of course, the emperor penguin, famous from March of the Penguins. If you haven’t seen that documentary, you’ll learn lots of things about emperor penguins and will also cry. The march in the  title is the migration the penguins take to breeding colonies, where they may walk over the ice up to 75 miles, or 120 km. Penguins are not very good at walking, either. Once they’ve reached the breeding colony, each female lays one small egg, which has a thick shell. The male has a brood pouch to keep the egg warm, basically a fold in his skin above his feet. The egg sits on his feet with the rest of it in the brood pouch. After that, the female leaves to go hunting, because making her egg takes a lot out of her and she needs to replace her body reserves. The male incubates the egg by himself.

It gets really cold in the Antarctic during winter. Seriously, really cold, as cold as -40 degrees. Negative 40 is the same temperature in Celcius and Fahrenheit, which is kind of neat. Emperor penguins choose breeding colonies that are protected from the wind as much as possible, but they still have to deal with wind gusts of 90 mph, or 145 km per hour. To withstand the cold, penguins have dense feathers and a thick layer of blubber. Males huddle together for warmth, with every penguin getting a turn to be on the inside of the crowd where it’s warmer, and spending their fair share of time on the edges of the crowd where it’s colder. During the two months after eggs are laid, males don’t eat anything. When his egg hatches, the male feeds the baby with crop milk, which you may remember from episode 19, about the dodo. Crop milk isn’t milk at all, but a nutritious substance formed from a parent bird’s esophagus. Only male emperor penguins produce crop milk.

A short time after the eggs hatch, female emperor penguins return from hunting. The female takes over care of the chick, feeding it with regurgitated food, so the male can leave to go hunting. Males and females trade off in this way for a couple of months, until the chick is old enough and big enough to be left alone for stretches.

The emperor penguin lives in Antarctica and can grow over four feet tall, or 130 cm, which is just ridiculously large. It can also weigh up to 100 lbs, or 45 kg. In other words, it’s as big as a small person and much bigger even than the great auk was. It’s a strong swimmer and can dive deeply—the deepest recorded dive was well over 1800 feet, or 565 meters, which is whale diving depth.

But the emperor penguin isn’t the biggest penguin that ever lived. Anthropornis went extinct around 33 million years ago, and it was a penguin that was actually the height of a tall human, some six feet tall, or 1.8 meters. It lived off the coast of what is now New Zealand and Antarctica. The New Zealand giant penguin probably lived around the same time as Anthropornis, and was around five feet tall, or 1.6 meters, but probably weighed more. Neither were direct ancestors of modern penguins, but they probably looked and acted very similar. Just, you know, enormous.

A newly discovered giant penguin, also from New Zealand, lived much earlier than the others. It was already almost five feet tall, or 1.5 meters, and well adapted to the water 61 million years ago. Remember that the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event occurred around 66 million years ago. Some researchers hypothesize that penguins had already begun evolving when dinosaurs were still alive, and that they survived the extinction event.

Another extinct penguin, one that was more directly related to modern penguins, lived around South America some 36 million years ago. Icadyptes was almost as tall as the other giant penguins and had a bill that was much longer and pointier than modern penguin bills, more like a heron’s bill. It also lived in much warmer waters than most modern penguins.

Back in the 1920s and 30s, when fossils of giant penguins were first described, they caught the public’s imagination. Giant penguins appeared in science fiction of the day, including Jules Verne and HP Lovecraft. Starting in February of 1948, people in Florida began finding enormous three-toed tracks in sand on a few beaches and along the Suwannee River. The footprints were over a foot long, or 35 cm, and the animal’s stride was measured at between 4 and 6 feet long, or 1.2 to 1.8 meters. Cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson examined the tracks in November of 1948. After weeks of study he reported gravely that they’d been made by a penguin 15 feet tall, or 4.5 meters.

It turns out, though, that it was all a hoax. Two men named Tony Signorini and Al Williams had made gigantic iron feet they could wear as great big shoes, and walked in the sand overnight leaving trails of monstrous tracks ready to be discovered by beachcombers. They actually intended the tracks to be taken for dinosaur or sea monster footprints, but a giant penguin was even better. Each foot weighed about 30 lbs, or 13.5 kg, and Signorini used the weight to swing along in a sort of controlled bound that made his stride remarkably long without too much effort. Williams died in 1969 but Signorini didn’t come clean about the hoax until 1988.

He still has the feet.

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!

Episode 077: The Tratratratra, Lemur of Mystery!

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I swear I didn’t make up the word tratratratra! It’s a real word for an animal that was probably real, although it may be extinct now. Let’s learn about this Lemur of Mystery and some of its friends!

A mouse lemur:

An indri:

King Julian:

Further reading:

Lemur News

The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl P.N. Shuker

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re looking at an animal with a name I swear I’m not making up, the tratratratra. Seriously, it’s a real name. The animal itself…well, we’re not exactly sure.

Tratratratra is the name of an animal that was supposedly common in Madagascar when the Malagasy people settled there around 2000 years ago. It was described as a lemur about the size of a calf with a human face but hands more like a monkey’s. Supposedly it still lives on Madagascar in remote, hard-to-reach areas.

Madagascar is a big island off the coast of East Africa, with smaller islands around it. It has been isolated from both Africa and Asia for 88 million years, so many of its plants and animals are found nowhere else on earth. Lemurs are one example. There are over 100 known species and subspecies of lemur on Madagascar, but lemurs are found nowhere else in the world. Even more species of lemur have gone extinct since humans settled on the island, including one that might be the tratratratra.

First of all, what’s a lemur? If you’ve seen the movie Madagascar, you have a pretty good idea of what a lemur looks like, although you may overestimate the amount of dancing they do.

Technically the lemur is a primate, although it doesn’t look much like other primates at first glance. Different species can look radically different, of course, but in general they’re long-bodied animals with long tails and monkey-like hands and feet with nails instead of claws. They’re mostly social animals who eat plants and fruit, although some eat insects, arthropods, and other small animals. Most lemur societies are female-led. All are endangered due to habitat loss, poaching, and the illegal pet trade.

While we tend to think of apes and monkeys when we hear the word primate, the primate order contains many other types of animal. Lemurs belong to the Strepsirrhini suborder, which includes bushbabies, pottos, and lorises. Apes and monkeys belong to the Haplorhini suborder, along with tarsiers. Researchers think that the ancestors of lemurs migrated to Madagascar from Africa about 50 million years ago on rafts of vegetation. This sounds ridiculous since Madagascar is more than 300 miles, or 500 km, away from Africa at its closest point, and the prevailing winds and ocean currents push floating logs and other vegetation away from the island. But 60 million years ago the currents flowed the other way. By 20 million years ago, continental drift had pushed Africa and Madagascar farther north so that the currents changed to what they are now, which helped isolate the island even further.

The smallest lemur species is the mouse lemur, which is only 11 inches long including its tail, or 27 cm. The largest is the indri, which is a black and white animal with long legs but no tail, which grows to almost 2 ½ feet long, or 72 cm. In other words, even the biggest lemur alive today isn’t all that big. But that didn’t used to be the case.

When humans first settled on the island, there were three kinds of giant lemurs. Let’s take a quick look at them.

Monkey lemurs went extinct around 1500 years ago and probably spent most of their time on the ground. They weren’t huge, probably not any bigger than the indri. We don’t have very many monkey lemur remains so we don’t know much about it, but researchers think it primarily ate seeds, although it might have also eaten grass and leaves. Its limbs were short and powerful with short hands and feet. It had a heavy skull with big molars for grinding plant material. It probably went extinct mostly due to competition with introduced livestock like pigs.

Koala lemurs were bigger than the indri, up to five feet long, or 1.5 meters, and went extinct around 1000 years ago. Incidentally, one thousand years ago there was a terrible drought in Madagascar that caused crops to fail, lakes to dry up, and wildfires to start, and which contributed to many species going extinct. Anyway, the koala lemur was shaped more like a koala than a lemur. It lived its whole life in treetops, eating leaves, and it had some weird features for a primate. Its eyes were on the sides of its head like a rabbit’s or a horse’s, instead of in the front of its head like all other primates. Its snout was long and tapered, but it had a big nasal area that probably indicates an enlarged upper lip, maybe even partially prehensile, that helped it gather leaves. It was also heavier than all other lemurs, and some of the remains we have show evidence that they were butchered by humans to eat.

Finally, sloth lemurs probably ate plants, fruit, and nuts, and some species may have hung from branches the way sloths do. Instead of big claws for climbing, sloth lemurs had long fingers. There were a number of species, so let’s look at a few of them. Don’t worry, we’re getting closer and closer to the tratratratra.

Archaeoindris was the biggest lemur that we know of. It was the size of a gorilla, maybe even a little bigger, which would make it one of the largest primates that ever lived. Its skull was large and heavy, and it probably ate leaves. It may have occasionally climbed trees but probably spent most of its time on the ground. We don’t have any hand or feet bones so we don’t know if it had adaptations for climbing trees or for walking on the ground. It was already rare when humans first came to Madagascar and went extinct shortly afterwards.

Now we’re up to Palaeopropithecus ingens, and this may be our tratratratra. It wasn’t as big as Archaeoindris but it was still much bigger and heavier than the modern indri. It ate leaves, nuts, and seeds and probably spent a lot of time in the trees. Its arms and legs were powerful and it had long fingers and toes, which it used to hang from branches like a sloth. It had other adaptations, like curved arm and leg bones, that shows it was adept at climbing on, hanging from, and brachiating through tree branches. Even the hands were curved, so that the fingers were more like hooks. But it probably wasn’t a very fast mover, so was easily hunted by humans and would have provided a lot of meat.

According to Admiral Etienne de Flacourt in his 1658 history of Madagascar, the tratratratra is “a large animal like a calf of two years old, with a round head and the face of a man: the fore feet are like a monkey (or ape), and the hind feet also. It has curly or frizzy hair, a short tail and ears like those of a man. It resembles the ‘tanacht’ described by Ambroise Paré. It can be seen near the pond of the Lipomami tribe and in that region is where it can be found. It is a highly solitary animal, the people of that country have a great fear of it and flee from it as it also does from them.”

I got that quote from an article in Volume 15 of Lemur News, from 2010. I’ll put a link in the show notes for anyone who’s interested in lemurs, because it has lots of interesting information.

Palaeopropithecus ingens probably had a short tail like the still-living indri, which is a close relative. It probably also had rounded ears like the indri. And like the indri also, it may have had wavy or curly hair.

The tratratratra’s name probably came from its call, which might have been an alarm bark or a chattering sound. Many local lemur names do come from the animals’ calls. Some researchers consider the tratratratra’s name to be a fossil sound, and one of the very few we have.

We don’t know exactly when Palaeopropithecus went extinct. It might have been as recently as four hundred years ago, maybe even more recently. There have only been a few modern-day sightings of an animal that might be the tratratratra. A French forester in the 1930s saw what he claimed was a gorilla-like lemur with a human-like face, four feet tall, but that’s about it. So whatever the tratratratra might be, it’s probably extinct by now. But maybe it’s hanging on in the forested hills north of Tulear, where the last fragments of Madagascar’s original forests remain.

There is an interesting Malagasy tradition reported in 2003 about an ogre with the face of a human, which was helpless on smooth rocks. Since Palaeopropithecus was so well adapted to living in trees, like modern sloths it probably couldn’t walk on the ground very well. So even if the tratratratra is extinct, its memory lives on in modern culture.

The tratratratra isn’t the only mystery lemur in Madagascar. The kidoky is supposed to be a big lemur with dark fur but a couple of white spots on its face. It has a rounded face, a loud whooping call, and spends at least part of the time on the ground. When it runs, its gait is more like a baboon’s than a lemur’s.

Some people think the kidoky might be one of the giant lemur species that are supposedly extinct. Zoologist Karl Shuker suggests Archaeolemur or Hadropithecus as possible identities, both of which spent a lot of time on the ground. In fact, they resemble baboons in so many ways that they’re both known as baboon lemurs. But Hadropithecus went extinct around 1200 years ago and Archaeolemur around 800 years ago, as far as we know. But an ethnographic survey published in 1998 reports one native villager who saw a kidoky in 1952 at close range.

The tokandia is another mystery lemur, this one even bigger than the kidoky—as big as a bear. Not that they have bears in Madagascar. It’s supposed to live mostly on the ground but sometimes it would jump up into trees. It didn’t look like a human but its calls sounded like they were made with a human voice. Again, Shuker suggests it might be a koala lemur, specifically Megaladapis edwardsi—you know, the one that could grow five feet long, or 1.5 meters.

The kalanoro is a more human-like creature from folklore, usually described as a small person who steals food. Some stories say it lives in the water. If it’s based on a real animal and isn’t just the Malagasy version of little folk common throughout the world’s cultures, it might be based on a type of lemur.

One last note. In the quote earlier about the tratratratra, de Flacourt mentions an animal called the tanacht. Is it another type of lemur? Is there no end to lemur mysteries?

It’s not a lemur, no. A French priest called Father André Thévet wrote about the tanacht in 1575, but he said it lived in India. It was supposedly the size and roughly the shape of a tiger, but it didn’t have a tail, and it did have the face and hands of a human with a snub nose. It might have been a species of Asian colobine monkey such as the pig-tailed langur, which can have orangey or golden fur and only has a short tail, or it might have been a stump-tailed macaque, which has pale brown fur and no tail. But neither of those monkeys are anywhere near as big as a tiger, so who knows what the tanacht might actually be?

But for now, I’m primated out, so check back next week for an episode that’s not about primates!

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!

Episode 076: The Orang Pendek

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This week we’re back to Sumatra, that island of mystery, to learn about a mysterious ape called the orang pendek.

A beautiful Sumatran orangutan:

This orangutan and her baby have won all the bananas:

This picture made me DIE:

An especially dapper siamang, a type of gibbon:

Here’s a walking siamang:

The sun bear, looking snoozy:

The sun bear, standing:

Further reading:

These are the articles where I got my quotes.

This one has some general information.

This one is by Debbie Martyr herself.

Show transcript:

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

The island of Sumatra is a place that keeps popping up in our episodes. We’ve barely scratched the surface of weirdness in Sumatra and nearby islands, but this week’s episode is about a Sumatran mystery ape called the orang pendek. That means “short person” in Indonesian.

The story goes that a human-like ape lives in the forests of western Sumatra. It walks on two legs, has short black, gray, or golden fur on its body with longer hair on its head, human facial features, and is shorter than a human but not by much. The people of the remote Sumatran villages where the orang pendek is reported say that it’s enormously strong, and has small feet and short legs but long arms. It mostly eats plants and will raid crops occasionally, but it also eats insects, fish, and river crabs.

Many people think the first report of the orang pendek outside of the Sumatran people is from a 14th century traveler called John of Florence, who visited China around 1342 and many other countries afterwards, including either Java or Sumatra. He reported seeing hairy men who lived on the edges of the forest, but since he also said that the hairy men planted crops and traded with the locals, it’s possible he was talking about a tribe of people who lived on the outskirts of mainstream society.

The various native groups in Sumatra have stories of creatures that sound like the orang pendek, including a demon-like entity called the hantu pendek, which means short ghost. But as I’ve said before in other episodes, it’s a mistake to treat folktales as if they were scientific observations. People tell stories for lots of reasons, only one of which is imparting knowledge about a particular animal. Plus, those aren’t the only stories of strange people told in the area. There are stories of giants, of people with tails, and many others. For instance, the orang bati is a bat-winged man that’s supposed to live in extinct volcanic craters in Seram, Indonesia, and who flies out at night and steals babies.

The Dutch colonized Indonesia in the early 19th century, around 1820, after centuries of varying levels of control in what was known as the Dutch East Indies. Colonists reported seeing apes or strange small people in the forest too. One fairly typical report is this one from 1917, from a Mr. Oostingh, who saw what he took to be a man sitting on the ground in the forest about 30 feet away from him, or nine meters. He said,

“His body was as large as a medium-sized native’s and he had thick square shoulders, not sloping at all. The colour was not brown, but looked like black earth, a sort of dusty black, more grey than black.

“He clearly noticed my presence. He did not so much as turn his head, but stood up on his feet: he seemed quite as tall as I. Then I saw that it was not a man, and I started back, for I was not armed. The creature took several paces, without the least haste, and then, with his ludicrously long arm, grasped a sapling, which threatened to break under his weight, and quietly sprang into a tree, swinging in great leaps alternately to right and to left.”

Expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s found nothing out of the ordinary. Interest trailed off until around 1990, when a journalist named Debbie Martyr decided she was going to get to the bottom of the mystery. She had traveled to Sumatra in 1989 for a story she was writing, and while she was there she learned about the orang pendek. She spent the next fifteen-odd years interviewing witnesses and setting up camera traps, but without uncovering any proof. She did spot what she thought might be an orang pendek at least once, but got no clear photos, no remains, no conclusive footprints. Martyr states that the ape she saw had much different proportions than an orangutan, much more human-like.

Other people have searched for the orang pendek too, also without success. National Geographic set up camera traps between 2005 and 2009 without getting any photos of unknown apes. One expedition found some hairs that they later sent for DNA testing, but the results were inconclusive due to the hairs’ poor quality and possible human contamination.

Interest in the orang pendek spiked after remains of the Flores little people were found in 2003, and after anthropologists made connections between those remains and local stories about small, mischievous people called the ebo gogo. As you may remember if you’ve listened to episode 26, researchers initially thought the Homo floresiensis remains were only some 12,000 years old. More recent studies have pushed this back to around 50,000 years old. But the island of Flores is not all that far from the island of Sumatra, so it’s not out of the question that the Flores little people also lived on other islands.

Sumatra is a big island with a lot of animal and plant species found nowhere else in the world. It’s certainly a big enough island to hide a population of shy apes or small human relations. But the only proof we have that the orang pendek exists, after a couple of decades of intensive searching, are a bunch of witness reports, some blurry photos and video, inconclusive plaster casts of footprints, and some ape hairs too degraded for DNA testing. If the orang pendek was a real animal, no matter how elusive, you’d think we’d at least have one good clear photo by now.

There have been hoaxes in the past. A “young orang pendek” turned out to be a dead langur monkey with its tail cut off. A video released in 2017 that purports to show a group of motorbikers who startle an orang pendek is probably a hoax. I’ve sent an alert to Captain Disillusion. If he covers the video I’ll let y’all know.

Despite the hoaxes and the lack of evidence, people are obviously seeing something. Witnesses include forest rangers, zoologists, hunters, and other people who know the local animals well. So what could they be seeing? Let’s take a look at some of the animals of Sumatra that might be mistaken for an orang pendek, at least some of the time.

The orang pendek is supposed to have small feet, about the size and shape of a human child’s foot. This sounds like the tracks of the Malayan sun bear. In fact, a footprint found in 1924 that was supposed to belong to an orang pendek was identified as that of a sun bear once it was seen by an expert.

The sun bear has sleek black fur, although some are gray or reddish, and a roughly U-shaped patch of fur on its chest that varies in color from gold to almost white to reddish-orange. Its muzzle is short and its ears are small. It’s the world’s smallest bear, only around three feet long from head to tail, or 150 cm, and four feet tall when standing on its hind legs, or 1.2 meters. It has long front claws that it uses to climb trees and tear open logs to get at insect larvae, which it licks up with its long tongue. It also eats a lot of plant material, especially fruit. It’s mostly nocturnal.

Orangutans also live on the island, but currently only in the northern part of the island, although they lived all over Sumatra and in Java until the end of the 19th century. The Sumatran orangutan is one of only three orangutan species in the world, and is critically endangered due to habitat loss. It’s slenderer than the other species, with pale orange fur. Like the sun bear, it eats a lot of insects and fruit; unlike the sun bear, it uses tools it makes from sticks to gather insects, honey, and other foods more easily. It also uses large leaves as umbrellas. It communicates not by sound, like other orangutans, but by gestures. In short, it sounds like a pretty awesome ape. Orangutan means “forest person,” if you were wondering.

Other apes and monkeys live on the island too, including several species of gibbon. Gibbons are apes, but they’re not considered great apes, only lesser apes. They look more like monkeys, although they don’t have tails. They’re also fairly small, generally about two feet long, or 60 cm, and quite slender. They live in the treetops and swing from branch to branch, which is called brachiation. Orangutans brachiate sometimes too, but they’re much heavier than gibbons and move much more slowly and cautiously. Gibbons can move. They also have loud voices and melodic calls.

The Siamang, a type of gibbon, has a throat pouch called a gular sac which, when inflated with air, enhances the voice and helps it resonate. Family groups of siamangs sing together. The siamang has shaggy black fur and is a little larger than other gibbons, around 3 feet tall, or one meter. Its arms are long, its legs short, and it mostly eats plants, especially fruit, although it also eats insects. Like orangutans and many other animals on Sumatra, it’s threatened by habitat loss.

There’s one thing that the sun bear, the orangutan, and the siamang all sometimes do that is suggestive of the orang pendek. All three sometimes walk on their hind legs. Bears usually only stand on their hind legs to get a better view of something, but they can certainly walk on their hind legs if they want to. While the orangutans of Sumatra spend most of their time in trees, since the Sumatran tiger likes to eat orangutans, it can and does come down to the ground sometimes. Males in particular sometimes walk upright for short distances. Siamangs walk upright along branches, and occasionally on the ground, usually with their long arms held above their heads for balance but not always.

So we have three animals that when seen clearly, really don’t look much like the orang pendek is supposed to look. None have especially human faces, although I’ve just spent half an hour looking at pictures of orangutans and siamangs, and those are some handsome apes. But they all have a number of features that sound like orang pendek features. They’re all the right size, they can all walk upright, their fur is black, gray, or golden, and they eat the things the orang pendek is supposed to eat.

At least some orang pendek sightings are mistaken identity of these three animals, I guarantee it. Even the most knowledgeable zoologist or forest ranger can make a mistake, especially if they only catch a glimpse of the animal or see it in poor light. And, as I often point out, people tend to see what they expect to see. In a 1993 article, Debbie Martyr herself says that when she first started studying the orang pendek sightings, people in Sumatra laughed at the thought that the orang pendek was a real animal. But, she writes, “Times have changed in Sumatra. The officials of the Kerinci Seblat have become, if not converts to the orang pendek cause, then at least openly curious about the animal. Pak Mega Harianto, director of the park, admitted, ‘We now have too many sightings, from all over the national park. It is always the same animal. Always the same description.’”

In other words, as the legend becomes more and more popular, more and more people report seeing a mystery animal that fits the orang pendek’s description. And yet, there is no more proof now than there was in 1925 of the animal’s existence.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t an unknown ape living in Sumatra, of course. I just don’t think that’s what people are seeing. It would be fantastic if the orang pendek did turn out to be a real animal. It would focus more attention on the loss of rainforest and other habitats in Sumatra, and would probably bring more tourists to the island, which would help the local economy. But until someone actually finds a body or captures a live orang pendek, I have to remain skeptical.

I’m sure we’ll revisit Sumatra and other parts of the Malay Archipelago soon to learn about other little-known and mystery animals. Until then, remember that you now know at least one word of the Indonesian language. ‘Orang’ means person, whether it’s an ape-type person or a ghost-type person.

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!