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Episode 364: Animals Who Will Outlive Us All

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Thanks to Oz from Las Vegas for suggesting this week’s topic!

Further reading:

Bobi, the supposed ‘world’s oldest dog’ at 31, is little more than a shaggy dog story

Greenland sharks live for hundreds of years

Scientists Identify Genetic Drivers of Extreme Longevity in Pacific Ocean Rockfishes

Scientists Sequence Chromosome-Level Genome of Aldabra Giant Tortoise

Giant deep-sea worms may live to be 1,000 years old or more

A Greenland shark [photo by Eric Couture, found at this site]:

The rougheye rockfish is cheerfully colored and also will outlive us all:

An Aldabra tortoise all dressed up for a night on the town:

Escarpia laminata can easily outlive every human. It doesn’t even know what a human is.

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a great suggestion by Oz from Las Vegas. Oz wanted to learn about some animals that will outlive us all, and gave some suggestions of really long-lived animals that we’ll talk about. We had a similar episode several years ago about the longest lived animals,where for some reason we talked a lot about plants, episode 168, but this is a little different.

But first, a quick correction! Last week we talked about the dodo and some of its relations, including the Nicobar pigeon. I said that the Nicobar pigeon lived in the South Pacific, but Pranav caught my mistake. The Nicobar pigeon lives in the Indian Ocean on the Nicobar Islands, which I should have figured out because of the name.

Anyway, back in the olden days when I was on Twitter all the time, I came across a tweet that’s still my absolute favorite. Occasionally I catch myself thinking about it. It’s by someone named Everett Byram who posted it in January 2018. It goes:

“DATE: so tell me something about yourself

“ME: I am older than every dog”

Not only is it funny, it also makes you thoughtful. People live a whole lot longer than dogs. The oldest living dog is a chihuahua named Spike, who is 23 years old right now. A dog who was supposed to be even older, 31 years old, died in October of 2023, but there’s some doubt about that particular dog’s actual age. Pictures of the dog taken in 1999 don’t actually look like the same dog who died in 2023.

The oldest cat who ever lived, or at least whose age is known for sure, died in 2005 at the age of 38 years. The oldest cat known who’s still alive is Flossie, who was born on December 29th, 1995. If your birthday is before that, you’re older than every cat and every dog.

The oldest human whose age we know for sure was Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years. We talked about her in episode 168. The oldest human alive today, as far as we know, is Maria Branyas, who lives in Spain and will turn 117 years old on her next birthday in March 2024.

It’s not uncommon for ordinary people to live well into their 90s and even to age 100, although after you reach the century mark you’re very lucky and people will start asking you what your secret for a long life is. You might as well go ahead and make something up now to tell people, because it seems to mainly be genetics and luck that allow some people to live far beyond the lives of any dog or cat or most other humans. Staying physically active as you age also appears to be an important factor, so keep moving around.

But there are some animals who routinely outlive humans, animals who could post online and say “I am older than every human” and the others of its species would laugh and say, “Oh my gosh, it’s true! I’m older than every human too!” But they don’t have access to the internet because they are, for instance, a Greenland shark.

We talked about the Greenland shark in episode 163. It lives in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans where the water is barely warmer than the freezing point. It can grow up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters, with females being larger than males. Despite getting to such enormous sizes, it only grows one or two centimeters a year, and that was a clue for scientists to look into how old these sharks can get.

In 2016, a team of scientists published a study about how they determined the age of Greenland sharks that had been accidentally caught by fishing nets or that had otherwise been discovered already dead. The lenses inside vertebrate eyeballs don’t change throughout an animal’s life. They’re referred to as metabolically inactive tissue, which means they don’t grow or change as the animal grows. That means that if you can determine how old the lens is, you know when the animal was born, or hatched in the case of sharks.

In the past, scientists have been able to determine the age of dead whales using their eye lenses, but the Greenland shark was different. It turns out that the shark can live a whole lot longer than any whale studied, so the scientists had to use a type of carbon-14 dating ordinarily used by archaeologists.

The Greenland shark may be the oldest-living vertebrate known. Its life expectancy is at least 272 years, and probably closer to 500 years. Individual sharks can most likely live much longer than that. It’s not even mature enough to have babies until it’s about 16 feet long, or 5 meters, and scientists estimate it takes some 150 years to reach that length. Females may stay pregnant for at least 8 years, and maybe as long as 18 years. Babies hatch inside their mother and remain within her, growing slowly, until they’re ready to be born.

The Greenland shark is so big, so long-lived, and lives in such a remote part of the ocean that taking so long to reproduce isn’t a problem. Its body tissues contain chemical compounds that help keep it buoyant so it doesn’t have to use very much energy to swim, and which have a side effect of being toxic to most other animals. Nothing much wants to eat the Greenland shark. But it is caught by accident by commercial fishing boats, with an estimated 3,500 sharks killed that way every year. Scientists hope that by learning more about the Greenland shark, they can bring more attention to its plight and make sure it’s protected. There’s still a lot we don’t know about it.

At least one species of whale does live much longer than humans. In 2007, researchers studying a dead bowhead whale found a piece of harpoon embedded in its skin. It turned out to be a type of harpoon that was manufactured between 1879 and 1885. After that, scientists started testing other bowhead whales that were found dead. The oldest specimen studied was determined to be 211 years old when it died, and it’s estimated that the bowhead can probably live well past 250 years if no one harpoons it and it stays healthy. It may be the longest-lived mammal. It has a low metabolic rate compared to other whales, which may contribute to its longevity.

Most small fish don’t live very long even if nothing eats them. Rockfish, for instance, only live for about 10 years even if they’re really lucky. Well, most rockfish. There is one species, the rougheye rockfish, that lives much, much longer. Its lifespan is at least 200 years old.

The rougheye rockfish has a lot of other common names. Its scientific name is Sebastes aleutianus. It can grow over 3 feet long, or 97 cm, and is red or orangey-red. It lives in cold waters of the Pacific, where it usually stays near the sea floor. It eats other fish along with crustaceans.

Naturally, scientists are curious as to why the rougheye rockfish lives so long but its close relations don’t. In 2021 a team of scientists published results of a genetic study of the rougheye rockfish and 87 other species. They discovered a number of genes associated with longevity, along with genes controlling inflammation that may help the fish stay healthy for longer.

The rougheye rockfish only evolved as a separate species of rockfish about ten million years ago. Because the longest-living females lay the most eggs, the genes for longevity are more likely to be passed on to the next generation, which means that as time goes on, lifespans of the fish overall get longer and longer. The rougheye also isn’t the only species of rockfish that lives a long time, it’s just the one that lives longest. At least one other species can live over 150 years and quite a few live past 100 years.

Another animal that can easily outlive humans is the giant tortoise, which we talked about in episode 95. Giant tortoises are famous for their longevity, routinely living beyond age 100 and sometimes more than 200 years old. The oldest known tortoise is an Aldabra giant tortoise that may have been 255 years old when it died in 2006. The Aldabra giant tortoise is from the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles, a collection of 115 islands off the coast of East Africa.

Scientists studied the Aldabran tortoise’s genetic profile in 2018 and learned that in addition to genes controlling longevity, it also has genes that control DNA repair and other processes that keep it healthy for a long time.

Oz also suggested the infinite jellyfish, also called the immortal jellyfish. An adult immortal jelly that’s starving or injured can transform itself back into a polyp, its juvenile stage. We talked about it in episode 343 in some detail, which was recent enough that I won’t cover it again in this episode. Scientists are currently studying the jelly to learn more about how it accomplishes this transformation and how long it can really live.

So far all the animals we’ve talked about, except the immortal jellyfish, are vertebrates. It’s when we get to the invertebrates that we find animals with the longest lifespans. The ocean quahog, a type of clam that lives in the North Atlantic Ocean, grows very slowly compared to other clams, and populations that live in cold water can live a long time. Sort of like tree rings, the age of a clam can be determined by counting the growth rings on its shell, and a particular clam dredged up from the coast of Iceland in 2006 was discovered to be 507 years old. Its age was double-checked by carbon-14 dating of the shell, which verified that it was indeed just over 500 years old when it was caught and died. Researchers aren’t sure how long the quahog can live, but it’s a safe bet that there are some alive today that are older than 507 years, possibly a lot older.

The real long-lived animals are very simple ones, especially sponges and corals. Some species of both can live for thousands of years. Various kinds of mollusks and at least one urchin can live for hundreds of years.

It’s probable that there are lots of other animals that routinely outlive humans, we just don’t know that they do. Scientists don’t always have a way to check an animal’s age, or they don’t think to do so while studying an organism. There are also plenty of animals that we just don’t know exist, especially ones that live in the ocean. For example, a species of tube worm named Escarpia laminata wasn’t even discovered until 1985, and it wasn’t until 2017 that scientists realized it lived for hundreds or even thousands of years.

The tube worm doesn’t have a common name, since it lives in the deepest parts of the Gulf of Mexico around what are called cold seeps, so no one ever needed to refer to it until it was discovered by scientists. A cold seep isn’t actually cold, it just isn’t as hot as a hydrothermal vent. In a cold seep, oil and methane are released into the ocean from fissures in the earth’s crust. Life forms live around these areas that live nowhere else in the world.

Many tube worms can grow quite long and can live over 250 years, with the giant tube worm growing almost 10 feet long, or 3 meters. Escarpia laminata is smaller, typically only growing about half that length. In a study published in 2017, a team of scientists estimated that it routinely lives for 250 to 300 years and potentially much, much longer. A tube worm doesn’t actually eat; instead, it forms a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that live in its body. The bacteria have a safe place to live and the tube worm receives energy from the bacteria as they oxidize sulfur released by the cold seeps. The tube worm, in other words, lives a stress-free life with a constant source of energy, and nothing much wants to eat it. The limit to its life may be the limit of the cold seeps where it lives. Cold seeps don’t last forever, although many of them remain active for thousands of years.

Humans are probably the longest-living terrestrial mammal. This may not seem too impressive compared to the animals we’ve talked about in this episode, but our lives are a whole lot more interesting than a tube worm’s.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 315: Dogs and Cats

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Thanks to Fabiana and Hazel for their suggestions this week, where we learn more about dogs and cats!

Further reading:

Gene mutation that makes dogs small existed in ancient wolves

Feline genetics help pinpoint first-ever domestication of cats

Cats Learn Names of Their Feline Friends

A cat (Dracula, specifically, with Dracula the toy):

A dog, in case you’ve never seen a dog before:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to revisit two great topics suggested by two great listeners, Fabiana and Hazel. They suggested dogs and cats, respectively. We’ve covered both before, but there’s always more to learn about any animal. Let’s look specifically at two recent studies that can add to our knowledge.

We’ll start with Fabiana’s suggestion of dogs. Results of a study published in January of 2022 examined the genetics of wolves and dogs to see how small dog breeds developed. We’re not completely sure how domestic dogs are related to wolf species alive today, since dogs have been domesticated for tens of thousands of years, and were probably domesticated at different times in different places by different groups of people, and potentially domesticated from different species of wolf, and since wolves and dogs can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. It’s very complicated, to say the least.

Wolves are roughly the same size throughout the world, depending on species and environment. The gray wolf, which is native to the northern parts of North America and most of Eurasia, stands about 2 and a half feet tall at the shoulder, or about 85 cm, and weighs around 88 lbs, or 40 kg, on average, although wolves who live in warmer areas tend to be smaller. There are certainly dog breeds bigger than this, but there are lots of dog breeds that are much, much smaller. I mean, the Chihuahua only grows around 9 inches tall, or 23 cm, and usually barely weighs 6 lbs, or 2.7 kg.

The prevailing belief is that small dog breeds came about because people bred the smallest dogs together and chose the smallest puppies from that pairing to breed to other small dogs. That’s true, but the genetic capacity for small size had to be there to start with in order to breed a 6-lb Chihuahua from an 88-lb wolf, no matter how many generations of dogs were in between. Researchers knew the genetic code for this size difference had to be somewhere, but it took a decade of study before they found it.

Once they found the growth hormone mutation that could allow for very small size when expressed, they searched for it in over 200 dog breeds to see if it was there in all dogs. Sure enough, it was. The scientists hypothesized that the genetic mutation showed up after dogs were domesticated, somewhere around 20,000 years ago. To test this, they looked for the mutation in the genetic profiles of both living and extinct canid species.

To their surprise, the mutation was present in all of them, including the genetic profile of a Siberian wolf that lived 54,000 years ago. Without this mutation, we wouldn’t have Chihuahuas or Yorkshire terriers or other small dog breeds that so many people love. That means the mutation was beneficial for domesticated dogs, but at the same time it was mostly non-beneficial for wild canids.

When dogs were domesticated around 20,000 years ago, and possibly well before that, the world was in the middle of a glacial maximum. The climate throughout the entire Earth was considerably colder than it is today. Ocean levels were lower because so much water was frozen, with ice sheets covering northern Europe and North America to a depth of about 2 1/2 miles, or 4 km. Northern Asia had fewer ice sheets but was much dryer than it is today. In fact, the world was a lot dryer overall, so places that weren’t covered in ice were more likely to be deserts, leading to massive dust storms and just a general dustiness throughout the world. Most of northern Africa and central Australia were what’s called “tropical extreme desert,” which doesn’t sound like any fun, but a lot of Asia was a polar desert. Most of Europe and eastern North America that wasn’t covered in ice was tundra or taiga, and even the most hospitable parts of the world were mostly open woodland and savannas. In other words, this was a world that favored really big animals like mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses and giant deer and buffalo and moose, and wolves needed to be big in order to hunt this megafauna.

But the world wasn’t going to be so cold for much longer. The ice sheets began to melt as the climate worldwide warmed up around 19,000 years ago, which led to sea levels rising and all sorts of other dramatic changes. Humans took their dogs and migrated to lots of places where they’d never been able to live before. Before this, dogs were probably mostly hunting partners, but as life got easier for people as mild winters and rainy spring weather became more common, dogs were more likely to be pets as well as working animals. People started selecting for smaller dogs, since a small dog eats less and is just plain cute. If it weren’t for that little genetic mutation in canids, the smallest dogs wouldn’t be all that much smaller than a Labrador.

Next, Hazel suggested we learn more about cats. Cats were domesticated a lot more recently than dogs, and a genetic study published in December 2022 determined that all pet cats in the world today are descendants of wild desert cats domesticated about 10,000 years ago in the fertile crescent in the Middle East. As we learned in episode 166, this was around the time that people were developing farming, and farming means you need to store grain. If you store grain, you attract mice and other rodents. Wildcats started hanging around farms and houses to catch rodents, and since the humans didn’t want the rodents, they were fine with the cats. Farms that didn’t have any cats had more rodents eating their stored grain, so it was just a matter of time before humans made the next logical step and started taming wildcats so they could trade cats to people who needed them.

The study was led by a feline geneticist named Leslie Lyons, and I only mention her name because it’s so perfect that someone with the last name Lyons would study cats and their relatives. Lyons and her team compared genetic samples taken from cats throughout the world and determined that all domestic cats are descendants of animals who originally lived in the Fertile Crescent. This is the same conclusion as a 2008 study by a different group of scientists, but the genetic tools used these days are much more sophisticated.

Cats definitely started out as working animals just like dogs did, but it probably wasn’t too long until people were treating them like pets. Cats are cute and soft, and people just like animals. We know that cats were treated as more than just a useful thing to have around because of an archaeological discovery from 2004. A human burial site on the island of Crete dated to about 9,500 years ago contained the remains of a human along with jewelry and other items, but also the remains of a cat. The cat had been buried separately in its own tiny grave right next to the person. There’s no sign that the cat was killed on purpose, so it’s possible it died separately and was buried next to the person who loved it.

Two separate studies were published in 2022 about cats and names. One study determined that cats who live in a household with at least one other cat learn the other cats’ names as well as their own. The other study determined that cats who live in a household with more than one person learn the names of their people. Personally, I don’t know how my cats can possibly know their names considering I call them by so many pet names, including puppy and bunny and squishmallow and you horrible little monster. However, in an unscientific study conducted just now by me, with a sample of one, when I called Poe’s name, he looked up at me and Dracula, who was lying on the bed next to me, looked at Poe. So I guess they’ve figured it out.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 286: Chimerism, Mosaicism, and Venus the Cat

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Thanks to Vaughn for suggesting this week’s episode topic about Venus the cat and her unusual coat pattern!

Further reading:

Mystery Cats of the World Revisited by Dr. Karl P.N. Shuker

Further listening:

Half-siders and sea monkeys Patreon episode from December 2018 (unlocked episode)

Venus the cat:

“Half-sider” birds can be spectacular:

Half-side chimeras are not just restricted to birds:

Ranger the “black lion” (photo by Peter Adamson, from this site which you should also read). Note the black patch on his right front leg:

Show transcript:

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

This week I had planned to release our updates episode, but I didn’t have time to finish it. The 2022 updates episode will run in September instead, since we’re doing Invertebrate August again this year!

Way back at least a year ago and possibly more, Vaughn suggested we do an episode about “rare two-tone animals like Venus the cat.” I put the suggestion on my list and totally forgot about it until today, when I saw it and thought, “hmm, who’s Venus the cat?”

If you don’t already know, Venus is a beautiful cat whose coloration is mostly what’s called tortoiseshell, meaning she has a mixture of colors on her body, in her case black and orange. But Venus’s face is completely black on one side with a green eye, but orange tabby on the other side with a blue eye. She also has a white bib and white on her paws.

Venus became famous after the family who adopted her as a stray in 2009 posted pictures of her online. Her coloration is so unusual that everyone wondered what caused it. The answer is that we aren’t exactly sure, but veterinarians and experts in cat genetics do have some pretty good ideas.

There are probably several things going on genetically with Venus that resulted in her interesting coloration. Her different-colored eyes are one result. When an animal has different-colored eyes, called heterochromia iridis, there are a number of possible causes, from an injury to one eye to various genetic conditions. Sometimes it’s not complete, meaning one eye may be partly a different color. It even happens in people sometimes, although it’s rare.

In Venus’s case, researchers think her heterochromia may be due to a gene that produces what’s called piebaldism. A piebald animal has white markings when an ordinary animal of the same species doesn’t have any white markings. Some animals who naturally have a white pattern may have the word pie or pied or just bald hidden in their name, such as the magpie and the bald eagle, because it used to mean just an outfit with different contrasting colors. In the story of the pied piper, the piper had on a suit made of different colors.

The white patches of a piebald animal actually don’t have any pigment, and if a white patch is over an eye, the eye may also lack pigment and appear blue. That’s pretty common in piebald or pinto horses or in some dog breeds with white markings. The piebald gene may also affect one or both eyes even if a white patch doesn’t cover the eye, which some researchers think may be the case in Venus. Her left eye is blue even though the left side of her face is orange tabby.

Venus’s unusual facial fur coloration may be due to a condition called chimerism. Chimerism happens long before an animal is born—in fact, it happens within a few hours after an egg cell is fertilized. I’ll do my best to explain it. A lot of the next section comes from a Patreon episode from 2018, and if you want to listen to the original I’ve unlocked it for anyone to listen to and put a link in the show notes.

As soon as an egg cell is fertilized, it starts to divide into more cells, which divide into more cells, which divide into more cells, and on and on. After a while, the groups of cells start to differentiate into parts of the body. Some cells become a heart, others become toes, and so on. Eventually there’s a whole finished baby ready to be born or hatched.

If there are two fertilized egg cells, they develop into two separate babies, which are fraternal twins that don’t necessarily look alike. Occasionally, a fertilized egg cell will split and each of the two resulting cells will start to develop separately. In that case, you get identical twins.

But very rarely, you start with two egg cells that should develop into fraternal twins—but for some reason, in those very first hours when each egg cell has only divided a few times, the egg cells fuse together. The cells continue to divide and develop into not two babies, but one that contains the genetic markers for both twins.

Since the resulting single baby has genes for both twins, sometimes it will show physical traits of both twins. For instance, if one twin’s genetic makeup would have developed into a green budgie, and the other twin’s genetic makeup would have developed into a blue budgie, you get a budgie that’s green on one side and blue on the other. Occasionally one side has the markings and coloration of a male, and the other side has the markings and coloration of a female. An animal with this kind of genetic anomaly is properly called a tetragametic chimera, but it’s often called a half-sider.

This doesn’t just happen in birds. Occasionally someone will come across a butterfly where the pair of wings on one side is colored like a male of that species and the pair of wings on the other side is colored like a female. Occasionally someone will adopt a kitten that’s one color on one side and a totally different color and pattern on the other side.

So I bet now you’re wondering if it happens in humans. Yes, it does! It happens occasionally in everything, including plants. Usually no one knows if a particular animal is a chimera because most of the time it doesn’t show. It’s only when it produces a spectacular coloration difference like in half-siders that anyone takes a second look.

Venus’s facial markings look a lot like those of a half-sider, but the markings on the rest of her body don’t, so she’s probably not a half-sider. That doesn’t mean she isn’t a chimera, since while all half-siders are chimeras, not all chimeras are half-siders. However, she might have a genetic mutation called mosaicism instead.

Mosaicism is similar to chimerism, but instead of being caused by two fertilized egg cells fusing together, it’s caused by a chromosomal mutation in one cell during the embryo’s very early development. The mutation is replicated as that cell divides, and then replicated in the divided cells, and so on, so that when the organism has finished developing into a baby, part of its body contains the mutation while the rest doesn’t. The part of the body with the mutation has a different genetic profile from the rest of the body.

Mosaicism can result in various physical conditions, but for the most part you can’t tell by looking if an organism exhibits mosaicism. But sometimes you can. In 1975 a lion cub was born in Glasgow Zoo in Scotland, and he had a big black patch on his chest and right front leg, with a less dark patch on his left hind leg. Since black lions are rumored to exist but have never been scientifically documented, or even photographed, this was a big deal. When Ranger the lion grew up he was introduced to several different females in hopes that he would sire cubs that also had black patches, or which were even black all over. Unfortunately Ranger seemed to be sterile and none of his mates got pregnant.

Ranger lived to be 22 years old but died before genetic testing became widespread and sophisticated. These days we know a lot more about big cat genetics and researchers are pretty sure Ranger’s black patches resulted from somatic mosaicism, which affected some of his skin cells. Since the right side of Venus’ face is solid black, some researchers think she might have a similar condition.

Whatever the cause or causes of Venus the cat’s coloration, though, one thing is for sure. She’s an absolutely beautiful cat!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 238: The Pink Fairy Armadillo and Two Adorable Friends

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This week we’ve got three adorable little animals to learn about! Thanks to Simon and Thia, Elaine, and Henry for their suggestions!

Further reading:

Turning the spotlight on the rusty-spotted cat (Wildlife SOS)

The cute and fuzzy pink fairy armadillo:

The cute and fuzzy rusty spotted cat:

The cute and fuzzy baby Arctic tern:

Adult Arctic terns:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’ve got three strange and adorable animals for you, all listener suggestions because I’m getting really behind on those. Thanks this week to Simon and Thia, Elaine, and Henry!

First, Simon and Thia suggested the pink fairy armadillo. That’s one we covered briefly in a Patreon episode back in 2018, but it deserves to be featured in the main feed because it’s so strange and cute. It lives in deserts and grasslands of central Argentina, South America, but since its range is so restricted and it spends most of its life underground and is rarely seen by humans, we don’t know much about it.

The pink fairy armadillo is the smallest armadillo species known. It only grows about 4.5 inches long, or 11.5 cm, small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. It’s protected by a leathery shell that runs from its nose along the top of its head and down its back to its bottom, and the shell is segmented like a regular armadillo’s shell except that it’s a delicate pink. The fluffy fur on the animal’s sides and tummy is white. It has a short spade-shaped tail, but the rear of its body is flattened, and it uses its flat bottom to compress dirt in the tunnels as it digs. It has a small head, short legs, and gigantic front claws. Its hind claws are big too.

It spends almost all of its life underground, digging shallow tunnels and eating small animals like worms, insect larvae, snails, and insects like ants, which it probably hunts by scent. It has a good sense of smell but its eyes are tiny and its ears don’t show at all, although it does have good hearing. It can dig extremely quickly. It loosens the soil with its huge front claws, kicks it back with its hind claws, and then does a quick reverse to tamp the new dirt heap into a firm column with its flat bottom. This keeps the floor of its burrow clear so the armadillo can breathe properly and helps keep the burrow from collapsing.

Almost the only time the pink fairy armadillo surfaces is when it reaches an obstacle it can’t dig through or around, and then its claws are so big it has trouble walking on hard surfaces. This is bad if it tries to cross a road. Most sightings of pink fairy armadillos are of roadkill animals. Sometimes it surfaces after heavy rain when its burrows are flooded.

The reason the pink fairy armadillo’s shell is pink is that blood vessels show through it. Researchers think it can regulate its temperature according to how much blood flows through the vessels beneath the shell. The shell is only attached to the body by a membrane along the spinal column and doesn’t protect it as well as other armadillo shells do, but then it’s almost always underground so the shell probably mostly protects it from rocks and roots.

The pink fairy armadillo doesn’t do well in captivity, usually dying from stress within a day or two of capture, and since it’s almost always underground it can be hard to find and study. It’s threatened by habitat loss, climate change, poaching, and the use of pesticides. It’s extremely sensitive to changes in temperature and soil.

The pink fairy armadillo has a similar-looking but slightly larger relative, the greater fairy armadillo, which can grow up to 7 inches long, or 17.5 cm. It’s also a burrowing armadillo that lives in South America, which has an additional conservation problem. It’s considered by locals to be the spirit of a dead baby, so if a local sees it they usually kill it.

Next, Elaine suggested the rusty spotted cat. It’s a tiny cat that lives in forests and grasslands in South Asia, especially in India and Sri Lanka, and although it resembles a tiny domestic cat, it’s not all that closely related to domestic cats or their wild cousins.

The rusty spotted cat is reddish-gray with darker stripes on the face and small rusty-red spots over most of its body. It’s about half the size of a domestic cat and grows up to 19 inches long at most, or 48 cm, not counting its tail, which adds another 12 inches or so to its length, or 30 cm. This is where I tried to measure my cats with the soft plastic tape measure I use for sewing, but they thought it was a toy so I never did figure out how long they are. Also, my tape measure has holes in it now from claws and teeth. The rusty spotted cat only weighs up to about 4 pounds, or 1.8 kg. Keep in mind that these numbers are for the biggest possible rusty spotted cats. Most are much smaller. They’re basically kitten-sized.

The rusty spotted cat is mostly nocturnal and eats small animals like mice and other rodents, birds, lizards, and insects. It mostly hunts on the ground and mostly only climbs trees to escape predators. It’s a fierce hunter and can be very aggressive despite its small size, so even though it’s really cute and some people want to keep it as a pet, it’s very wild and not friendly. You’re way better off adopting a small domestic cat. Besides, the rusty spotted cat is endangered in the wild due to habitat loss and hunting for its fur, so we shouldn’t be keeping it as pets.

Conservationists are working to protect the rusty spotted cat by educating people who live in the area about what the cat is. While a mother rusty spotted cat is out hunting, she leaves her kittens in a little nest in long grass. If she makes her nest in a cultivated field, like a tea plantation, sometimes a worker harvesting or caring for the plants will find the kittens. People are basically good at heart and want to help baby animals, so a lot of times the worker will take the kittens home thinking they’re abandoned. A conservation group called Wildlife SOS is working to teach people to leave the babies alone, and when they hear about someone who’s found a kitten, they send someone out to learn where the kitten was found and when, and will reunite the kittens with their mother. Wildlife SOS also helps other animals in India, including leopards and elephants. There’s a link in the show notes if you want to find out more and maybe donate to the program to help these adorable teeny-tiny wildcats.

Finally, Henry suggested the Arctic tern, a bird that lives…pretty much everywhere, in fact, not just the Arctic. It breeds along the coasts in the northern parts of the northern hemisphere, including parts of Canada, Greenland, northern Europe, and Siberia, but after its babies are grown and the short northern summer comes to an end, it takes off for the southern hemisphere and spends the winter—which is summer in the southern hemisphere—around South Africa and Australia and New Zealand, all the way down to the Antarctic. When that summer ends, it flies back north to breed again. That’s an astoundingly long migration.

The Arctic tern spends most of its life flying above the ocean, hunting for small animals like fish, krill, amphipods, and crabs. It’s not a picky eater, though. It will also eat worms, insects, and berries, although it mostly eats these land foods when it’s nesting. It’s a beautiful bird that looks a little like a seagull, but is more lightly built and slender than most gulls. It’s white and pale gray with a black cap that extends down the back of the neck, a red bill, and short red legs and webbed feet. Its tail is forked like a swallow’s tail and it has long wings, which allow it to catch even the smallest sea breeze and fly extremely fast. Its wingspan is about 2.5 feet across, or 75 cm.

The Arctic tern mates for life. Even though the male and female have traveled literally around the world separately for most of the year, they both return to the same nesting ground, find each other, and start their summer courtship. The pair will fly high together with the female chasing the male, and then they’ll fly lower where the male will catch a little fish and offer it to the female. On land, they’ll do a little courtship dance where they raise and lower their tail and wings while strutting around together. Finally the pair decides where they want to build a nest.

The nest isn’t fancy, just a little scooped out place in the ground with maybe some grass in it. Parents take turns keeping the eggs warm and defending the nest from potential predators. It’s an aggressive bird and will even attack polar bears and drive them away, even though it’s just a delicate little bird. It will dive at the predator’s face and peck with its strong, sharp bill. Once the babies hatch, both parents feed the chicks until they learn how to fly.

An Arctic tern chick is possibly the cutest bird you will ever see, at least today. It’s gray and white with short legs, and it’s super super fluffy. The coloration helps it blend in with the rocks around the nesting site.

The Arctic tern travels over 40,000 miles every single year, or more than 70,000 km, and still manages to find its way back to the same breeding colony. How does it know where it is and where it’s going? Like many birds, it can sense the earth’s magnetic field. It combines this sense with where the sun is in the sky and can pinpoint exactly where it is in the world and where it needs to go. It’s like having built-in Google Maps.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. There are links in the show notes to join our mailing list and to our merch store.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 166: The Domestic Cat

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I just adopted two black cats, named Dracula and Poe, so let’s learn about domestic cats! Thanks to RosyWindFox, Nicholas, Richard E., Kim, and an anonymous listener who all made suggestions and contributed to this episode in one way or another!

Further listening:

Weird Dog Breeds – an unlocked Patreon episode

Two beautiful examples of domestic cats (Dracula on left, Poe on right, and it is really hard to photograph a black cat):

The African wildcat, ancestor of the domestic cat:

The blotched tabby (left) and regular tabby (right):

A cat’s toe pads (Poe’s toes, in fact):

The big friendly Maine Coon cat:

The Norwegian forest cat SO FLUFFY:

The surprised-looking Singapura cat:

The hairless sphynx breed (with sweater):

The Madagascar forest cat:

The European wildcat:

This came across my feed today and it seemed appropriate, or inappropriately funny depending on your point of view:

Show transcript:

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

I had a different episode planned for this week, but then I adopted two cats, so this week’s episode is going to be about the domestic cat! It also happens to be a suggestion from RosyWindFox after we got to talking about podcasts and animals. Rosy also kindly sent me some research she had done about cats for a project of her own, which was a great help!

But Rosy isn’t the only listener who contributed to this episode. Nicholas suggested weird cats a while back, Richard E. suggested unusual cat breeds, and Kim suggested an episode about domestic cats as invasive species. And we have another suggestion by a listener who wants to remain anonymous about keeping exotic animals as pets, which I thought would fit in well after we talk about invasive species. We’ll also learn about some mystery cats while we’re at it. So buckle up for this big episode about little cats, and thanks to everyone who sent suggestions!

We don’t want to leave the dog lovers out so before we start talking about cats, back in June of 2019 patrons got an episode about strange dog breeds, also suggested by Nicholas. I’ve unlocked that episode so that anyone can listen. There’s a link in the show notes and you can just click the link and listen in your browser, no Patreon login required.

So, most people are familiar with the domestic cat, usually just called a cat. It’s different from the similar-sized felid called a wildcat because it’s actually domesticated. Even domestic cats that have never lived with a human are still part of a species shaped by domestication, so instead of wild cats, wild domestic cats are called feral cats.

Researchers estimate that the domestic cat developed from a species of African wildcat about 10,000 years ago, or possibly as long as 12,000 years ago. This was around the time that many cultures in the Middle East were developing farming, and farming means you need to store grain. If you store grain, you attract mice and other rodents. And what animals famously like to catch and eat rodents? Cats! Wildcats started hanging around farms and houses to catch rodents, and since the humans didn’t want the rodents, they were fine with the cats. Farms that didn’t have any cats had more rodents eating their stored grain, so it was just a matter of time before humans made the next logical step and started taming wildcats so they could trade cats to people who needed them. Besides, wildcats are pretty animals with sleek fur, and if you’ve ever stood by the tiger exhibit in a zoo and wished you could pet a tiger, you will understand how your distant ancestors felt about wildcats.

The species of wildcat is Felis silvestris lybica, the African wildcat, which lives in northern Africa and Southwest Asia. It’s still alive today and looks so much like a domestic cat that it can be hard to tell the species apart, although the African wildcat has long legs and specific markings. For a long time people thought some populations of domestic cats developed from the European wildcat, which we talked about in episode 52, but modern genetic and behavioral studies suggest that all domestic cats are descended from the African wildcat. All wildcat species are pretty closely related, though, and domestic cats and wildcats can and do sometimes interbreed and produce fertile kittens.

The main difference between the African wildcat and the domestic cat is the wildcat’s color. It’s usually a yellowish-gray with lighter belly, with darker stripes and spots. It also has small ear tufts at the tips of the ears.

If you remember episode 106, where we talked about domestication, you’ll remember that some of the wolves that hung around human camps probably initiated domestication. They saw that humans had a pretty sweet deal going and if they alerted those humans to danger and acted nice otherwise, they’d get food. Well, wildcats probably did the same thing. Yes, humans were loud and clumsy and scary, but humans also sometimes gave you food and petted you.

Over many, many generations, the wildcats evolved into cats that didn’t just tolerate humans, they liked humans. It was harder for cats than it was for dogs, though, since canids already lived in packs that were structured similarly to human groups. This is why many people think that dogs are friendlier than cats, because dogs and humans have so many similarities. But cats have adapted really well to human culture.

Wildcats are mostly solitary animals, only coming together during mating season. But domestic cats will live together along with their human family. I adopted my two cats because they get along so well even though they’re not related.

In the olden days people brought cats with them when they moved the same way they took their dogs. The cats were useful to hunt and kill mice that tried to get into the family’s food. People on ships brought cats along for the same reason, because if rats and mice ate the ship’s food stores, the sailors might go hungry. This helped spread cats around the world. In medieval times, cats were so important to sailors that some areas passed laws that a cat had to be onboard a ship for it to set sail.

Egyptian cats were especially in demand, probably because they were more friendly than other cats. So many people wanted Egyptian cats that Egypt passed laws to stop the sale or trade of cats to foreigners, with the oldest law dating to 1700 BCE. But for the most part, cats weren’t selectively bred the way dogs were. Cats were allowed to have babies with whatever mate they chose, which were sometimes wildcats.

It probably wasn’t until about a thousand years ago that humans started taking a real interest in what cats looked like. Until then most domestic cats probably looked a lot like their wild ancestors. But medieval cat owners started selectively breeding cats for particular colors and patterns, such as the blotched tabby pattern. This is a recessive form of the ordinary tabby pattern, which is usually just thin stripes. The blotched tabby is big swirls of color against a paler background. People in the olden days apparently liked the blotched tabby pattern and bred for it.

The domestication of canids, as you may remember from episode 106, usually comes along with behavioral and physical changes. Many dog breeds have puppy-like faces, with a rounder head and shorter jaws. The ears may stay floppy, the tail may have a curl, and coat patterns may change from their wild ancestors’. But this hasn’t really happened in cats, and some researchers think it’s because the cat wasn’t fully domesticated until around 1,000 years ago when this selective breeding started taking place. But cats do show one really interesting adaptation to domestication that wildcats never show. They meow.

Wildcats are usually pretty silent. A wildcat is mostly solitary so it doesn’t need to communicate with pack mates, and it needs to stay quiet so it won’t alert its prey or potential predators. But young cats need to communicate with their mother, which they do by crying and chirping and meowing. Domesticated cats retain this impulse and will talk to humans in the same way that kittens talk to mama cats. Yes, our cats are talking baby talk to us.

If you’re not familiar with the sounds cats make, this is a recording of my cat Poe.

[cat meowing]

Cats don’t just meow and chirp, though. They also purr, as do wildcats and some big cats. We still aren’t sure exactly how cats generate the sound calling purring, but researchers think the cat uses its laryngeal muscles to produce the sound as it breathes in and out. Usually purring denotes relaxation, but a cat may also purr if it’s hurt, stressed, or afraid. Some researchers suggest that the specific frequency of purring vibrations actually promotes the growth of bone and tissue, which helps a cat heal faster if it’s hurt. A cat’s purring is good for people too, acting as a stress reliever.

This is what a purring cat sounds like. This is my cat Dracula purring while I petted him:

[cat purring]

The cat has a rough tongue covered with tiny spines that contain keratin. It uses its tongue to clean and arrange its fur. It has keen hearing, good vision, especially at night, and a good sense of smell. While it can see color, it can’t distinguish between red and green, so if you happen to have red-green color blindness, just reassure yourself that you can see like a cat. The cat can hear into the ultrasonic range, which helps it find rodents which communicate in ultrasound. Some of the noises small kittens make are in the ultrasonic range too, which means most predators can’t hear them but the mama cat can.

If you have a pet cat or have looked closely at a friend’s cat, you’ll know that a cat has whiskers on either side of its nose above its mouth, above its eyes, and some short whiskers on the backs of its legs. All these whiskers are extremely sensitive and help the cat navigate its surroundings in darkness, both by touching things and by reacting to small air currents. You’ll also probably know that a cat’s eyes have slit pupils that react to light. In bright light the pupils contract until they’re practically just a narrow black line. In full darkness they enlarge until the pupils are round, which lets in as much light as possible. Like many nocturnal or largely nocturnal animals, the cat also has a reflective lining in the back of the eye called the tapetum lucidum, which reflects light back through the eye and improves night vision even more. This is why a cat’s eyes seem to shine in the dark.

Cats are climbers, with many adaptations that help it climb. Its claws are retractable, especially its front claws. Most of the time the claws remain inside little sheaths in the toe pads, which keeps them from wearing down and means the cat can walk silently without the claws making tapping noises on hard ground. But when the cat needs to climb, or use its claws as weapons, or if it needs extra traction, it basically flexes its toes to extend the claws. The claws grow directly from the toe bones, not out of skin like our own fingernails do. Another adaptation to climbing is the cat’s keen sense of balance. If a cat falls from a height of at least 3 feet, or about a meter, it’s able to twist its body to land right side up, minimizing its chances of getting injured. Researchers used to think that a cat used its tail to twist around as it fell, but it’s something that even cats without tails can do. A tail helps, but it’s not necessary. The cat’s flexible spine and lack of a collarbone are the real reason it works. Not only that, but a cat’s paw pads act as shock absorbers that also help it land safely.

The cat has four toes on the hind feet and five on the front, with the fifth toe acting as a sort of thumb. A cat has a toe pad for each toe, plus a larger pad in the middle that acts as a sort of palm pad. But if you look closely, the cat also has an extra toe pad on its front feet, farther back from the others. Researchers think this extra pad helps give the paws extra traction if the cat needs it, which helps it control how far it skids or doesn’t skid when it jumps. Basically it’s a brake pad.

Let’s look at a few interesting breeds of cat next. The domestic cat doesn’t have big differences between breeds the way dogs do. I mean, think of how different a Chihuahua is compared to a St. Bernard. But there are differences between cat breeds, of course. The Manx cat and a few other breeds have a genetic mutation that results in a short or missing tail, for instance.

The biggest breed of cat is the Maine Coon, which can grow as big as a bobcat or Eurasian lynx, although without being as heavy as those wild felids. The biggest cat ever measured is a Maine Coon named Barivel, who is 3 feet and 11.2 inches long, or 120 cm, from nose to tail. The Maine Coon has a thick, water-repellent coat that helps it survive in cold weather, and it’s well known for being as friendly as a dog. Genetic studies suggest it developed from the Norwegian forest cat, a breed from northern Europe, which itself may have descended from cats carried on Viking ships around a thousand years ago.

The smallest breed that isn’t due to a form of dwarfism is the Singapura, which is a lightly built cat. I can’t find anything definitive about its height, but it only weighs about eight pounds at most, or 3.6 kg, and usually considerably less. It’s beige with brown ticking that makes it look tan and its eyes are large, which makes it look sort of surprised all the time.

There are a few breeds of cat that are hairless, including the Sphynx. Hairlessness is a mutation that crops up in cats very rarely, and the Sphynx breed was only established in the late 1980s after a few decades of breeding for hairlessness, with the initial attempts resulting in cats with a lot of health issues. The current breed is healthier, but because it doesn’t have any hair it gets cold easily. A lot of owners make sure their cats have warm sweaters to wear in cold weather, which is adorable. Sphynx cats can also get sunburned and need to be bathed to remove dirt and oils from their skin. Some people with cat allergies have found that owning a Sphynx cat actually helped them adapt to cats and reduced their allergic reactions, but others have found that they actually react more strongly to Sphynxes than regular cats. This is because people are allergic not to cat hair but to a protein found in cat saliva and skin glands.

Next, let’s look at a mystery cat from Madagascar. Madagascar is a large island off the coast of Africa, home to lemurs and other animals found nowhere else in the world. It doesn’t have any native felids, although people who live on Madagascar do have pet cats. But a scientist named Michelle Sauther, who researches lemurs, kept seeing cats in the forest. They were all tabbies and the locals called them wildcats, but Dr. Sauther wanted to know more about them.

She and her team set up traps for the forest cats. When they trapped a cat, they took photographs, hair and blood samples, and even dental impressions. Then they released the cats back into the wild. Genetic profiles developed from the samples helped solve the mystery of what these cats are. They’re feral cats descended from ship cats that traveled from areas around the Arabian Sea, hundreds and possibly even a thousand years ago. Enough cats jumped ship on Madagascar to develop into a breeding colony that is still around today.

Dr. Sauther is studying the effects of the feral cats on local animals, because cats can cause a lot of damage as introduced predators. Cats are efficient hunters of small animals, especially rodents like mice, but also birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and basically any animal they can catch.

That brings us to the issues caused by feral and pet cats around the world. When people bring cats to parts of the world where cats have never before been, the cats can cause rapid extinctions of small animals. On islands the situation is even worse because an animal’s population may be low to start with and the animal can’t just move to a different area to get away from the cats.

The problem is that people often don’t take care of their cats the way they should. Many people don’t get their cats neutered, which means they have kittens that the owner doesn’t want. Instead of finding good homes for the kittens, the owner will just let the kittens grow up wild outside. Soon there’s a colony of feral cats in the area that have to hunt to survive, and local animals are under much more than ordinary pressure of predation. If the local population of small animals declines because of cats, local predators that also depend on those small animals will decline too, causing a cascade effect that can ruin a local ecosystem.

But it always irritates me when people start acting like cats are horrible animals and people who let their cats outside are horrible people who don’t care about their pets or about wild animals. First of all, cats are cats, and cats are predators. No one can change that. And some cats just cannot be happy inside. My last cat, named Jekyll, had been a stray before I adopted him and he was never happy inside. I tried to make him an inside cat but every time I opened the door to leave he would streak outside, no matter how careful I was. Sometimes I couldn’t get him to come back in. And yes, sometimes he brought me dead or dying birds or animals, including an injured baby bunny once, which always made me feel awful. And after a few years, he was hit by a car and killed.

The safest place for a cat is inside your home, with food and water and a litter box you keep clean. A cat should never be allowed to roam freely, especially at night. Cats are tough animals but they’re also small. Many larger animals see them as prey, not to mention the dangers of cars and contracting diseases from other cats. If your cat isn’t happy being inside all the time, try to limit its outside time to when you can be outside with it, to protect both it and any animals around. Make sure it wears a collar with a bell, too—that’s not a perfect solution, because some cats will learn to walk so carefully that the bell won’t ring, but it will help.

Because of people who don’t neuter their cats and just let them roam around, cats and cat owners have a bad reputation among conservationists. Try to understand that the people who talk about how many birds are killed by cats every year aren’t blaming you specifically, although sometimes it feels that way, I know. They’re blaming the irresponsible cat owners and taking their frustration out on all cat owners.

It’s a complicated issue and as you can tell, I’m ambivalent. On the one hand, I absolutely agree that cats are horrible for local wild animal populations. On the other hand, the people who are loudest and angriest about cats killing birds and other animals don’t think twice about driving a car. One figure I found estimates that a million animals are killed by cars every single day in the United States alone, but then again, cats kill even more animals every day. But most of those animals are killed by feral cats, not pet cats. All we can do is be responsible cat owners and do our best to protect both our pets and the wild animals that live near us.

My newly adopted cats are both definitely inside cats. If a mouse comes into the house they can do their job, but otherwise they’re just going to be pouncing on toy mice.

So that leads us to our final topic suggestion, about the ethics of keeping exotic animals as pets. If this seems a little out there for an episode about domestic cats, remember that it wasn’t all that long ago that domestic cats were wildcats, and that they’re still so closely related to wildcats that wildcats and domestic cats can interbreed. Wildcats and domestic cats still look a whole lot alike too. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to scoop up a wildcat and take it home as a pet. But that’s what some people do.

There’s a TV show out now called Tiger King that people are talking about. I haven’t seen it because I just don’t watch TV, but it sounds pretty horrible. From what I gather, the tigers and other animals aren’t properly taken care of and the people who own the animals aren’t very nice. Generally, the kind of people who want an exotic pet are not the kind of people who bother to learn how to properly take care of it. They figure a tiger is just a big cat and they know how to take care of a cat, but that’s not the case at all.

Even if you get a wild animal as a baby and raise it the same way you would a kitten or puppy, it’s still wild. That means that no matter how sweet it was as a baby, once it’s grown, it considers its own needs first and yours second, if at all. It doesn’t consider itself part of the family group and can be unpredictable and dangerous, no matter how well you think you know its personality. In 2011 a mountain lion kept as a pet in Texas grabbed a four-year-old boy through the bars of its cage and mauled him. Fortunately the boy was okay, but the mountain lion was killed by animal control officers, who had already cited the owner for not providing a bigger cage with smaller gaps between bars. It also turned out that the mountain lion’s owner didn’t have a permit to keep it.

Even smaller felids can be dangerous. Many people keep servals as exotic pets, because they look and act a lot like domestic cats but are exotically spotted. The serval lives in parts of Africa and is a little larger than the domestic cat, with long legs and a small head. We’ve talked about the serval before in episode 52. In late 2019 a man in Ohio apparently let his pet serval out to wander the neighborhood, and it attacked one of his neighbor’s dogs. Again, the serval was killed and the owner fined. In both those examples, the animal wasn’t properly taken care of and ended up being killed, which is sad. It’s always the exotic pet that is miserable, often unhealthy, and usually killed when it does something wrong.

So no, I don’t think anyone should keep a wild animal as a pet. If you just really really love wild animals and want to work with them directly, there are lots of appropriate ways you can do it. You can become a zookeeper or exotic animal veterinarian, a scientist or conservationist who studies wild animals, or a photographer who specializes in photographing animals in the wild. All those suggestions are better for you and for the animals than trying to keep a wild animal as a pet.

This is already a really long episode, but let’s finish up with another mystery so I don’t finish the episode by lecturing everyone. You may remember from episode 52 that we talked about the European wildcat that still lives in Europe and Scotland. The Scottish wildcat is critically endangered, with probably no more than around four hundred animals living in Scotland. But there have been reports going back centuries of a wildcat living in Ireland.

The European wildcat did once live in Ireland, but it died out around 3,000 years ago. It’s also been extinct in England since the 1860s. But reports dating to at least the early 19th century in various parts of Ireland indicate that many people saw and even killed large wildcats—but they didn’t look like the European wildcat. They looked more like the African wildcat.

The most obvious difference between the European and the African wildcat is the tail. The African wildcat’s tail looks like a domestic cat’s tail, relatively thin at the end with a slightly pointed tip. The European wildcat’s tail fluffs out at the end instead of tapering. At least one expert from the 19th century proclaimed that the wildcat sightings in Ireland were actually of hybrids of domestic cats and European wildcats. But remember, the European wildcat had gone extinct in Ireland some 3,000 years before. Besides, these animals were reportedly larger and heavier than domestic cats, and feral cats are usually relatively small.

These large cats are still occasionally spotted in Ireland, with a flurry of sightings as recently as 2002. It’s possible people are just mistaking unusually large feral cats for wildcats, but there’s always the possibility that European wildcats still survive in Ireland, but have hybridized with domestic cats so much that its descendants resemble the African wildcat more than the European wildcat. So if you are a mouse who lives in Ireland, watch out.

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

Thanks for listening!

BONUS! Two more Mongolian animals!

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It’s a bonus episode because some people are too disturbed by the thought of diseases to listen to this week’s regular episode. I’m really sorry about that! To make it up to you, here are two adorable fluffy animals that live in Mongolia and other parts of Asia.

Super floof! Pallas’s cat, AKA the manol or manul (photo by Julie Larsen Maher, looks like):

I would deny you nothing, round boi:

we all died of cute right here:

The handsome corsac fox would break your heart in an instant if it felt like it:

Show transcript:

Hello, it’s a bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast, because it turns out that some people couldn’t listen to this week’s episode because they get too creeped out about diseases. I feel terrible about that so I’ve put together a short bonus episode to make up for it. Let’s learn about two more Mongolian animals, because I am still completely obsessed with the Mongolian band The Hu and in fact I have tickets to see them live in May in Lexington! If you’re going to be there too, let me know so we can hang out.

Our first animal is called the manol or Pallas’s cat, a type of wildcat native to parts of central Asia. It’s about the size of a domestic cat with plush grayish-brown fur that gets very thick in winter. It has black spots and stripes, including a long ringed tail, and ears that are set low on the head. It is magnificently fluffy, especially in winter, with especially long fur on its belly.

In fact, it gets so fluffy that it looks a lot like a longhaired domestic cat. The zoologist Peter Pallas, who first described the manol in 1776, thought it must actually be the ancestor of the Persian breed of domestic cat, especially since the manol has a relatively short nose and flat face like Persian cats, and has a stocky build like Persians. But the manol is actually not very closely related to domestic cats, and is in its own genus instead of the genus Felis. For one thing, its pupils are round instead of vertical like a domestic cat’s pupils.

The manol is solitary and doesn’t get along well with other manols, not even family members. One zoo was concerned about a litter of manol kittens that had just been born, since it sounded like they were making little wheezing noises. But a closer inspection revealed that the kittens were just growling at each other.

The manol eats small animals, especially a small rabbit relative called a pika, but also gerbils, voles, insects, and other animals. It lives in the steppes of central Asia and often lives at high elevations. It mostly lives in dry habitats where there isn’t much snow, especially rocky areas or grassland. Because its rounded ears are set so low on its head, the cat can hide among rocks and among plants without its ears giving away its position by sticking up too far. If it feels threatened, it will flatten itself to the ground and freeze, where it looks kind of like a fluffy gray rock.

Our other Mongolian animal is the corsac fox, which lives in very similar habitats as the manol and which also grows a lovely fluffy coat in winter. In the summer its coat is much shorter. It’s yellowish-gray or pale gold in color, paler underneath and with a dark stripe down the back in winter.

The corsac fox isn’t very big, a little over two feet long, or 65 cm, not counting the tail, which adds another 14 inches, or 35 cm, to its length. Since it lives in areas where it’s usually dry, it doesn’t need to drink water very often. It gets most of its water from its diet, which is very similar to the manol’s diet—mostly small animals like hamsters, gerbils, and pikas, although it also eats insects, carrion, and fruit and other vegetation. Its teeth are small compared to other foxes.

Unlike many fox species, which are mostly solitary, the corsac fox usually lives in small packs. The pack lives in a series of shallow burrows that the foxes either dig themselves or take over from other animals. The burrows are usually connected to each other and have several entrances. The corsac fox is also a good climber because of its claws, which are more hook-shaped than most canid claws.

Both the corsac fox and the manol are threatened by habitat loss and poaching. People hunt both animals for their fur. But they’re both still doing well otherwise, with the corsac fox in particular given a conservation rating of least concern. The manol is considered near threatened, but it’s protected in most countries where it lives with a captive breeding program in place across a number of the world’s zoos.

That’s all for this bonus episode. Again, I apologize to anyone who had trouble with this week’s regular episode. I hope you feel better now thinking about these adorable fluffy animals!

Thanks for listening!

Episode 113: Horned Hares and Winged Cats

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It’s April Fool’s Day, but while these two mystery animals may mostly be associated with hoaxes and tall tales, there’s a really interesting nugget of truth in both.

Unlocked Patreon episode about mammals with nose horns

Further reading: Dr Karl P N Shuker’s blog post about winged cats and his blog post about horned hares

Traditional drawings of horned hares:

You can take classes in taxidermy that specialize in making jackalopes!

A genuine horned hare (with an extreme case of SPV):

A winged cat:

Mitzi/Thomas the winged cat:

Show transcript:

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

This episode releases on April Fool’s Day, April 1. I’m not a fan of April fool jokes, so we’re going to discuss two interesting strange animals that turned out to be hoaxes—but hoaxes with a nugget of truth that’s actually more interesting than the hoax.

The first hoax is akin to the jackalope and it’s pretty obvious to us nowadays. The horned hare was a tradition in European folklore and drawings of it look like a jackalope. There are even stuffed horned hares, just as there are stuffed jackalopes.

Some of you may be wondering what the heck a jackalope is, so I’ll explain that first.

The jackalope legend may have started as a tall tale, but was probably just a taxidermy joke. When someone prepares a dead animal for taxidermy, it’s not a simple process. The taxidermist has to remove the skin from the body, clean it and add preservatives, make a careful armature or mannequin of the body out of wood or other materials, and put the skin on the armature and sew it up. The taxidermist then adds details like glass eyes and artificial tongues. It can take months of painstaking work to finish a specimen, and it requires a lot of artistry and training. Taxidermists who are learning the trade will often mount small, common animals like rabbits and rats as practice. And sometimes they’ll get creative with the process, just to make it more interesting. For instance, a taxidermist may add pronghorn antelope horns to a jackrabbit. Voila, there’s a jackalope!

You can see stuffed jackalopes today in a lot of places, since they’re fun conversation pieces. Some restaurants will have one stuck up on a wall somewhere, for instance. Horned hares are similar, but instead of a jackrabbit with pronghorn horns or white-tailed deer antlers, which are animals from North America, the European horned hare is usually a European hare with horns [I should have said antlers] from a roe deer.

The horned hare was such a common taxidermied animal that people actually believed it was real. Eventually, around the 19th century, as knowledge of the natural world grew more sophisticated, scientists realized rabbits and hares don’t have horns and those stuffed specimens were just hoaxes. The tip-off was probably when taxidermists started getting really fancy and adding bird wings and saber teeth to their mounted hares.

But…

The horned hare goes way back in history. It appeared in medieval bestiaries, sometimes called the unicorn hare. The unicorn hare was supposed to have a single black horn on its head. The hare would act normal, but when someone approached, it would spring at them and stab them with its horn. Then it would eat them. The legend of the horned hare is so widespread and long-lived, in fact, and was believed for so long, that it’s easy to think maybe it was based on something real. I mean, we just talked about rodents with nose horns a few weeks ago, so nothing’s impossible.

Wait, I think that’s a Patreon episode. If it is, I’ll unlock it. I’ll put a link in the show notes.

There is a strange truth behind all the jackalopes and horned hares. A disease called the Shope papilloma virus, or SPV, affects hares and rabbits. There are a lot of papilloma viruses in various animals, even humans, but in most animals, including humans, it only results in tumors in the body. In rabbits and hares, it causes keratinized tumors to grow from the skin, often on the head. Usually these are small and don’t show through the fur, but sometimes an animal has an extreme case of SPV and it genuinely looks like it has horns. The horns are hard and usually dark in color. As if that wasn’t bad enough, rabbits and hares in Europe can also get a disease called Leporipoxvirus that again causes facial horns to grow from the skin.

If you’re feeling totally creeped out right now, don’t worry, humans can’t catch these diseases from rabbits and hares.

Remember how I mentioned taxidermied hares with wings? What about cats with wings—but not taxidermied, real live domestic cats with fur-covered wings. That totally can’t be real, right? It’s not real?

It’s real…but only if you are really generous with what you mean by wings.

Winged cats are a real phenomenon, but the wings in question are furry, not feathered, and winged cats can’t fly. That doesn’t stop people from claiming they’ve seen these winged cats flying around causing mischief. For instance, in Ontario, Canada in 1966 a so-called vampire cat was supposedly flying around attacking other animals. It was a black tomcat with furry wings 7 inches long, or 18 cm. Eventually someone shot the cat, which was examined by veterinarians and found to be rabid. Its wings were nothing but thickly matted fur, so the stories of it flying around weren’t true, although sadly, it was definitely attacking other animals due to having rabies.

In 1959, a case went to court in West Virginia over a winged cat. A 15 year old boy named Douglas Shelton said he’d rescued the cat from a tree and adopted her. But a woman named Mrs. Hicks said that the cat was hers, named Mitzi, but that Mitzi had run away and she wanted her back. This makes sense. I mean, I would want my cat back too. At first the judge awarded the cat to Mrs. Hicks, but when Douglas brought her into the courtroom, she had no wings. Douglas said she’d shed them during the summer but he’d kept the wings, which he showed to the judge. At that point, Mrs. Hicks suddenly decided she didn’t want the cat after all. Frankly, I’m sure Mitzi was better off with Douglas, who didn’t care if she had wings or not, although he did change Mitzi’s name to Thomas.

Stories like these didn’t just happen back in the olden days. There are lots of winged cat reports today, including photos and videos. What’s going on? Why do some cats develop these furry appendages that people call wings?

Sometimes the cats in question just have long fur that has become unusually matted and appears to form winglike flaps along the sides. But in many cases, the wings are due to a rare skin condition called feline cutaneous asthenia, or FCA.

Cats with FCA have unusually elastic skin. All skin stretches at least a little bit but almost immediately snaps back into place. You can try this yourself by gently tugging up the skin on the back of your hand and releasing it. But in cats with FCA, the skin doesn’t snap back properly, especially the skin along the shoulders and back. Since in the ordinary course of living its life, a cat’s skin stretches quite a bit along the back, eventually an FCA cat ends up with long flaps of furry skin that stretched and didn’t snap back repeatedly. The wings aren’t really wings, of course, and can’t allow the cat to fly.

Cats with FCA do usually need special care, especially if the case is severe. The skin is elastic, but it’s also prone to damage because it’s actually very delicate. The so-called wings sometimes tear off naturally, leaving wounds that bleed very little but still need to be treated by a veterinarian. They then reform. The wings tend to be on the sides near the hind legs but are sometimes closer to the shoulders.

Mitzi, AKA Thomas, was definitely a cat with FCA. Her wings were six inches long, or 15 cm, and her tail was described as squirrel-like. She was a white cat described as a Persian, although she may have just had long hair like a Persian cat. A reporter who examined Thomas described her wings as fluffy at the ends but with a gristly feel at the base, as though they contained tendons or other structure. This was probably the extended skin due to FCA.

It sounds like Douglas was a really nice kid who rescued the cat from the tree and took her home, and when his friends made fun of the unusual-looking cat, he was really upset. Once word of the winged cat got around, people started showing up at the family’s house to look at it. At first Douglas charged 10cents to see the cat, and he was even invited to New York where he and Thomas appeared on the Today Show.

But after that, things started to go kind of nuts. Thousands of people kept trying to see the cat, so many that Douglas’s mom spread the story that the cat had died, just so people would leave the family alone. She also took the cat to a friend’s house for a while until the fuss died down, swearing the friend to secrecy that the cat was still alive. Then Mrs. Hicks sued.

I tried to find out what happened to Douglas Shelton and Thomas after all the excitement died down. Douglas and his family were awarded custody of Thomas by the judge, with Mrs. Hicks rewarded a single dollar in damages, but whatever happened after that has vanished into the pre-internet vacuum. I’m sure Thomas lived a good life with the Sheltons, and Douglas is probably still alive today. He would be about the right age to be a granddad by now, so I bet he tells his grandkids stories about the time he had a cat with wings. I bet they don’t even believe him.

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

Thanks for listening!