Tag Archives: rodents

Episode 437: Updates 8 and the Nutria

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Thanks to Nicholas, Måns, Warblrwatchr, Llewelly, and Emerson this week, in our yearly updates episode!

Further reading:

An Early Cretaceous Tribosphenic Mammal and Metatherian Evolution

Guam’s invasive tree snakes loop themselves into lassos to reach their feathered prey

Rhythmically trained sea lion returns for an encore — and performs as well as humans

Scientists Solve Mystery of Brown Giant Pandas

Elephant turns a hose into a sophisticated showering tool

New name for one of the world’s rarest rhinoceroses

Antarctica’s only native insect’s unique survival mechanism

Komodo dragons have iron-coated teeth to rip apart their prey

The nutria has really orange teeth:

Show transcript:

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

This week is our annual updates episode, and we’ll also learn about an animal suggested by Emerson. But first, we have some corrections!

Nicholas shared a paper with me that indicates that marsupials actually evolved in what is now Asia, with marsupial ancestors discovered in China. They spread into North America later. So I’ve been getting that wrong over many episodes, over several years.

Måns shared a correction from an older episode where I mentioned that humans can’t get pregnant while breastfeeding a baby. I’ve heard this all my life but it turns out it’s not true. It is true that a woman’s fertility cycle is suppressed after giving birth, but it’s not related to breastfeeding. Some women can become pregnant again only a few months after giving birth, while others can’t get pregnant again for a few years. It depends on the individual. That’s important, since the myth is so widespread that many women get pregnant by accident thinking they can’t since they’re still feeding a baby.

Warblrwatchr commented on the ultraviolet episode and mentioned that cats can see ultraviolet, which is useful to them because mouse urine glows in UV light.

Finally, Llewelly pointed out that in episode 416, I didn’t mention that fire ant venom isn’t delivered when the ant bites someone. The ant bites with its mandibles to hold on, then uses the stinger on its back end to sting repeatedly.

Now, let’s dive into some updates about animals we’ve talked about in past episodes. As usual, I don’t try to give an update on every single animal, because we’d be here all week if I did. I just chose interesting studies that caught my eye.

In episode 402, we talked about snakes that travel in unusual ways, like sidewinders. Even though I had a note to myself to talk about the brown tree snake in that episode, I completely forgot. The brown tree snake is native to parts of coastal Australia and many islands around Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. It’s not native to Guam, which is an island in the western Pacific, way far away from the brown tree snake’s home. But in the late 1940s, some brown tree snakes made their way to Guam in cargo ships and have become invasive since then.

The brown tree snake can grow up to six and a half feet long, or 2 meters, and is nocturnal, aggressive, and venomous. It’s not typically a danger to adults, but its venom can be dangerous to children and pets. The government employs trained dogs to find the snakes so they can be removed, and this has worked so well that brown tree snake population is declining rapidly on the island. But that hasn’t stopped the snake from driving many native animals to extinction in the last 75 years, especially birds.

One of the things scientists did in Guam to try and protect the native birds was to place smooth poles around the island so birds could nest on top but snakes couldn’t climb up to eat the eggs and chicks. But before long, the snakes had figured out a way to climb the poles, a method never before documented in any snake.

To climb a pole, the snake wraps its body around it, with the head overlapping the tail. Then it sort of scoots itself up the pole with tiny motions of its spine, a slow, difficult process that takes a lot of energy. Tests of captured brown tree snakes afterwards showed that not all snakes are willing or able to climb poles this way. Scientists think the brown tree snake evolved this method of movement to climb smooth-trunked trees in its native habitat. They also suspect some other species of snake can do the same.

Way back in episode 23 we talked about musical animals, including how some species can recognize and react to a rhythmic beat while most can’t. Sea lions are really good at it, especially a sea lion named Ronan.

Ronan was rescued in 2009 when she was a young sea lion suffering from malnutrition, wandering down a highway in California. She was determined to be non-releasable after she recovered, so she’s been a member of the Pinniped Lab in the University of California – Santa Cruz ever since, where she participates in activities that help scientists study sea lions. The rhythm studies are only one of the things she does, and only occasionally. The scientists put on a metronome and she bobs her head to the beat while they film her in ultra-slow motion.

The latest study was published in May of 2025. Ronan is 16 years old now and in her prime, so it’s not surprising that she performed even better than her last tests when she was still quite young. The study determined that not only does Ronan hit the beat right on time, she’s actually better at it than a human a lot of the time. She hits the beat within 15 milliseconds. When you blink your eye, it takes 150 milliseconds. If only she had hands, she’d be the best drummer ever!

The greatest thing about this process is that Ronan enjoys it. She’s rewarded with fish after a training session, and if she doesn’t feel like doing an activity, she doesn’t have to.

Back in episode 220, we talked about the giant panda, especially the mysterious Qinling panda that’s brown and tan instead of black and white. A study published in March of 2024 looked into the genetics of this unusual coat color and determined that it was a natural genetic mutation that doesn’t make the animals unhealthy, meaning it probably isn’t a result of inbreeding.

We talk occasionally about tool use in animals, especially in birds like crows and parrots, and in primates like chimpanzees. But a study published in November of 2024 detailed an elephant in the Berlin Zoo that uses a water hose to shower.

You may not think that’s a big deal, but the elephant in question, named Mary, uses the hose the way a human would to shower off. She holds the hose with her trunk just behind the nozzle, then moves it around and shifts her body to make sure she gets water everywhere she wants. She has to sling the hose backwards to clean her back, and when researchers gave her a heavier hose that she couldn’t move around as easily, she didn’t bother with it but just used her own trunk to spray water on herself.

Even more interesting, another elephant, named Anchali, who doesn’t get along with Mary, will interfere with the hose while Mary is using it. She lifts part of the hose to kink it and stop the water from flowing. Sometimes she even steps on the hose to stop the water, something the elephants have been trained not to do since zookeepers use hoses to clean out the enclosures. Anchali only steps on a hose if Mary is using it.

This is the first time researchers have studied a water hose as tool use, but it makes sense for elephants to understand how to use a hose, since they have a built-in hose on their faces.

We talked about the rhinoceros in episode 346, and more recently in the narwhals and unicorns episode. A study published in March of 2025 suggested that the Javan rhino should be classified as a new species of rhino in its own genus. The Javan rhino is incredibly rare, with only about 60 individuals alive in the world, all of them living in the wild in one part of Java. The Javan rhino is also called the Sundaic rhinoceros, and it’s been considered a close relation of the Indian rhinoceros. It’s smaller than the Indian rhino and most Javan rhino females either don’t have a horn at all or only have a big bump on the nose instead of a real horn.

The Javan rhino is so rare that we don’t really know much about it. The new study determined that there are big enough differences between the Javan rhino and the Indian rhino, in their skeletons, skin, diet, behavior, and fossil remains, that they should be placed in separate genera. The proposed new name for the Javan rhino is Eurhinoceros sondaicus instead of Rhinoceros sondaicus.

The only insect native to Antarctica is the Antarctic midge, which we mentioned in episode 221 but haven’t really talked about. It’s a flightless insect that can grow up to 6 mm long, and it’s the only insect that lives year-round in Antarctica. It’s only been found on the peninsula on the northwestern side of the continent.

Every animal that lives in Antarctica is considered an extremophile, and this little midge has some remarkable adaptations to its harsh environment. Its body contains compounds that minimize the amount of ice that forms in its body when the temperature plunges. It’s so well adapted to cold weather that it actually can’t survive if the temperature gets much above freezing. It eats decaying vegetation, algae, microorganisms, and other tiny food in its larval stages, but doesn’t eat at all as an adult.

The midge spends most of its life as a larva, only metamorphosing into its adult form after two winters. During its first winter it enters a dormant phase called quiescence, but as soon as the weather warms, it can resume development. It enters another dormant phase called obligate diapause for its second winter, where it pupates as soon as the weather gets cold. When summer arrives, all the midges emerge as adults at the same time, which allows them to find mates and lay eggs before dying a few days later.

The female midge lays her eggs and deposits a jelly-like protein on top of them. The jelly acts as antifreeze and keeps the eggs from drying out, and when the eggs hatch, the babies can eat the jelly.

In episode 384, we talked about the Komodo dragon, and only a month or so after that, and right after the 2024 updates episode, a new study was released about Komodo dragon teeth. It turns out that the Komodo dragon has teeth that are tipped with iron, which helps keep them incredibly sharp but also strong. As if Komodo dragons weren’t already scary enough, now we know they have metal teeth!

Many animals incorporate iron in their teeth, especially rodents, which causes some animals to have orange or partially orange teeth. In the Komodo dragon, the iron is incorporated into the tooth’s enamel coating, but only on the tips of the teeth. Since Komodo dragons have serrated teeth, that’s a lot of very sharp points.

There’s no way currently to test fossilized teeth to see if they once contained iron, especially since the iron would most likely be deposited in the tooth coating, the way it is for animals living today, not in the tooth itself. But because the Komodo dragon has teeth that are very similar in many ways to the teeth of meat-eating dinosaurs, scientists think some dinosaurs may have had iron in their teeth too.

And that brings us to the nutria, an animal suggested by Emerson. Emerson likes the nutria because of its orange teeth, and hopefully you can guess why its teeth are orange.

The nutria is also called the coypu, and it’s a rodent native to South America. In Spanish the word nutria means otter, so in South America it’s almost exclusively called the coypu, and the name coypu is becoming more popular in other languages too. It’s been introduced to other parts of the world as a fur animal, and it has become invasive in parts of Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States.

The nutria is a semi-aquatic rodent that looks like a muskrat but is much bigger, up to two feet long, or 64 cm, not counting its tail. It also kind of looks like a beaver but is smaller. If you’re not sure which of these three animals you’re looking at, since they’re so similar, the easiest way to tell them apart is to look at their tails. The beaver has a famously flattened paddle-like tail, the muskrat’s tail is flattened side to side to act as a rudder, and the nutria’s tail is just plain old round. The nutria also has a white muzzle and chin, and magnificent white whiskers.

The nutria mostly eats water plants and is mostly active in the twilight. While it usually lives around slow-moving streams and shallow lakes, it will also tolerate saltwater wetlands. Wild nutrias are generally dark brown, but ones bred for their fur are often blond or even white.

The nutria digs large dens with the entrance usually underwater, but the nesting chamber inside is dry. It also digs for roots. This can cause a lot of damage to levees and riverbanks, which is why the nutria is so destructive as an invasive animal. It will also eat people’s gardens and commercial crops like rice and alfalfa.

One interesting thing about the nutria is that the female has teats that are high up on her sides, which allows her babies to nurse even when they’re all in the water.

The nutria’s big incisor teeth are bright orange, as we mentioned before. This is indeed because of the iron in the enamel that strengthens the teeth. Like other rodents, the nutria’s incisors grow throughout its life and are continually worn down as it chews tough plants. A nutria eats about 25% of its weight in plants every single day. That’s almost as much as me and pizza.

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 432: The Fossa and Other Animals of Madagascar

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This week we learn about the fossa and a few other animals of Madagascar, a suggestion by Pranav!

Further reading:

The stories people tell, and how they can contribute to our understanding of megafaunal decline and extinction in Madagascar

The fossa!

The votsotsa is a rodent, not a rabbit! [photo by Andrey Giljov – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113271739]:

The golden mantella frog is sometimes golden, but sometimes red:

The nano-chameleon may be the smallest reptile in the world:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a very old Pranav suggestion, animals of Madagascar!

The island country of Madagascar is off the southeastern coast of Africa. About 88 million years ago, it broke off from every other landmass in the world, specifically the supercontinent Gondwana. The continent we now call Africa separated from Gondwana even earlier, around 165 million years ago. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world and even though it’s relatively close to Africa these days, many of its animals and plants are much different from those in Africa and other parts of the world because they’ve been evolving separately for 88 million years.

But at various times in the past, some animals from Africa were able to reach Madagascar. We’re still not completely sure how this happened. Madagascar is 250 miles away from Africa, or 400 kilometers, and these days the prevailing ocean currents push floating debris away from the island. In the past, though, the currents might have been different and some animals could have arrived on floating debris washed out to sea during storms. During times when the ocean levels were overall lower, islands that are underwater now might have been above the surface and allowed animals to travel from island to island until they reached Madagascar.

We’re not sure when the first humans visited Madagascar, but it was at least 2,500 years ago and possibly as much as 9,500 years ago or even earlier. It’s likely that hunting parties would travel to Madagascar and stay there for a while, then return home with lots of food, but eventually people decided it would be a nice place to live. By 1,500 years ago people were definitely living on the island.

Let’s start with the fossa, an animal we’ve only talked about on the podcast once before, and then only in passing. It resembles a type of cat about the size of a cougar, although its legs are short in comparison to a similarly-sized cat. Its tail is almost as long as its body, and if you include its tail, it can grow around five feet long, or 1.5 meters. It’s reddish-brown with a paler belly. Its head is small with a short muzzle, rounded ears, and big eyes.

But the fossa isn’t a felid. It resembles a really big mustelid in many ways, especially a mongoose, and some studies suggest it’s most closely related to the mongoose. Really, though, it’s not closely related to anything living today. It spends a lot of time in trees, where it uses its long tail to help it balance. It even has semi-retractable claws. It eats lemurs and other mammals, birds, insects, crabs, lizards, and even fruit.

There used to be an even bigger fossa called the giant fossa, although we don’t know much about it. We only know about it from some subfossil remains found in caves. We’re not sure how big it was compared to the fossa living today, but it was definitely bigger and stronger and might have grown 7 feet long including its tail, or a little over 2 meters. There used to be much bigger lemurs living on Madagascar that have also gone extinct, so the giant fossa probably evolved to prey on them.

Most scientists estimate that the giant fossa went extinct at least 700 years ago, but some think it might have survived in remote areas of Madagascar until much more recently. There are even modern sightings of unusually large fossas, sometimes reported as twice the size of a regular fossa.

One interesting thing about the fossa is that its anus is hidden most of the time by a little fold of skin called an anal pouch, sort of like built-in underwear.

One animal most people outside of Madagascar have never heard of is the votsotsa, also called the Malagascar giant rat or the giant jumping rat since it’s a rodent that is especially known for its ability to jump. It actually looks a lot like a rabbit in size and shape, including its long ears, but it has a long tail. It’s gray or brown in color and grows about a foot long, or 30 cm, with a tail that can be up to 10 inches long, or 25 cm.

The votsotsa mates for life and both parents raise the single baby the mother gives birth to once or twice a year. It’s a nocturnal animal that spends the day in its burrow, which can be as much as 16 feet long, or 5 meters, with multiple exits. It eats nuts and seeds, fruit, leaves, and other plant material, along with insects and other small animals.

Lots of bats live on Madagascar, including the Madagascar flying fox. It’s a fruit-eating bat that’s brown or golden-brown in color with gray or black wings, and it’s the biggest bat native to the island. It has a wingspan of more than four feet across, or 125 cm. Like other species of flying fox, it lives in colonies of up to a thousand individuals that roost together in trees during the day. It mostly forages in the evenings, searching for fruit like figs. It eats flowers and sometimes leaves as well as fruit, and it may even be a pollinator for the kapok tree’s flowers.

Naturally, Madagascar also has a lot of reptiles, amphibians, and other non-mammalian animals. For instance, the golden mantella frog. It’s a little frog that’s only found in a few small areas, and measures around 20 millimeters long snout to vent. Some individuals are golden yellow while others are bright orange or red. As you may remember from our many previous episodes about frogs, such bright colors act as a warning to potential predators, to let them know that the frog is toxic. It absorbs toxins from some of the insects it eats. It’s active during the day in summertime, and in winter it spends most of the time hiding and doing nothing, which is the best way to spend the winter.

There are also lots of chameleons on Madagascar, including one called the nano-chameleon. It gets its name from its size, which is extremely small. It’s the smallest chameleon in the world, only 29 mm long at the very most, which is barely more than an inch long. Males are smaller than females, usually around 22 mm. It was described in 2021 and is brownish-grey with pale yellow or yellow-brown markings. Chameleons are famous for changing color, but the nano-chameleon doesn’t. It also mostly lives on the ground, where it hunts tiny insects and other invertebrates. Some scientists think it may be the smallest reptile in the world.

The female Darwin’s bark spider is about the same size as the female nano-chameleon, if you don’t count the spider’s legs. Males are much smaller. Darwin’s bark spider is a type of orb-weaver, which is the kind of spider that spins large webs that look like Halloween decorations. It was described in 2010 after first being discovered by scientists in 2009, which is surprising because it builds the largest orb webs known. Some webs can be over 30 square feet in size, or 2.8 square meters.

The silk is the strongest biological material ever studied, twice as strong as any other spider silk studied. The spider builds its web over water, because it eats a lot of mayflies and other insects that are attracted to water. It also eats a lot of dragonflies, and dragonflies are quite large and strong insects that don’t usually get caught in spiderwebs.

The people of Madagascar are considered very poor compared to other countries, after almost a century of French colonization and the resulting instability after it regained independence in 1960. A lot of animals that were once considered to be forbidden to bother, for religious and cultural reasons, now end up killed so people can eat them instead of starving. Mining and slash-and-burn agriculture has also contributed to pollution, habitat loss, and other factors that aren’t good for the animals of Madagascar or its people. Luckily, eco-tourism, where people visit the island to experience its beauty and see animals and plants found nowhere else on earth, is becoming more common. Hopefully that will help improve conditions for the people who live there and for the animals too.

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 423: Pack Rats and Busy Mice

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Further reading:

Mouse filmed moving items in man’s shed in Bristol

The pack rat:

Show transcript:

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

This week I’m sharing a Patreon episode from last year because I have surgery scheduled. Don’t worry, it’s minor thyroid surgery and I’ll be fine, but my doctor said that a side effect might be hoarseness while I recover. Rather than risk sounding like an old frog, and to allow myself lots of time to rest afterwards, I’ve scheduled Patreon episodes for this week and next week.

At the beginning of this year, in early January 2024, you may have heard about a man in Wales who had an interesting visitor to his work shed. Rodney Holbrook is 75 years old and a retired postal worker, and at the end of 2023 he started noticing something weird. Things in his work shed kept being moved, and not in a way that suggested another person was getting in.

Initially Rodney noticed that some bird food had been moved into an old pair of shoes. This wasn’t just a one-time thing that would suggest an accident, like maybe Rodney had absent-mindedly decided to store the bird food in his shoes, or maybe it just fell there. The bird food kept ending up in the shoes.

Other things kept getting moved too. Small items that Rodney had left out while making and repairing things at his work bench kept getting put into a box, like tools and nuts and bolts. It happened almost every night.

Fortunately, Rodney is also a wildlife photographer, and he just happened to have a night vision camera. He set it up in the shed to find out what on earth was going on.

A mouse was going on, that’s what was going on. This actually wasn’t a huge surprise to Rodney, because years before, in 2019, a friend of his had had the same thing happen.

His friend was Steve Mckears who lived near Bristol, England. Steve kept crushed peanuts in a tub to use as bird food, but he started to notice other things mixed in with the peanuts. First it was just one screw, then it was lots more things that he’d left around his shed. He couldn’t figure out a solution, because he always locked his shed at night.

As Steve said at the time, “I was worried. I’m 72 and you hear of things going wrong with 72-year-old gentlemen in the mind.” Fortunately, Steve’s friend Rodney set up a camera and proved that there was nothing wrong with Steve’s mind or with the shed’s lock. It was just a mouse who was tidying up.

The question is why are these mice tidying up someone else’s shed? Don’t the mice have sheds of their own to clean up? It’s probable that the mice are actually living in the sheds and are wondering why some humans keep barging in every day and making a mess.

Rodents of all kinds do tend to tidy up as part of the foraging and nesting process. Sometimes that means moving debris so the animal can find important items more easily, sometimes it means bringing items back to its nest. House mice and rats will steal small items from humans to make nests, like socks and facecloths. Some rodents are attracted to shiny things and will stash them away or even bury them.

One animal, the pack rat, is so famous for storing items that we call a person who likes to collect things a pack rat. The pack rat lives throughout much of North and Central America and is related to mice and rats. It’s bigger than a mouse but smaller than most rats, and some species have furry tails like ground squirrels. It builds a den out of whatever materials are available where it lives, and its den is complex and usually well hidden. Desert species like to build under a cactus, while others live in cliffs or among rocks, in abandoned buildings or sometimes non-abandoned buildings, under bushes, in the tops of trees, or even in the entrances to caves. The den can be quite large and contains numerous rooms used for food storage, sleeping, and storing all the interesting things the pack rat finds while foraging.

A pack rat constructs a debris pile to hide its den, referred to as a midden. “Midden” is an old-fashioned word used to describe a place where household waste used to be thrown. Archaeologists love middens because you can learn a lot about people by the things they throw away, and other scientists love pack rat middens for the same reason. Some pack rat middens have been discovered preserved for 50,000 years, which has allowed scientists to learn a lot about what plants were growing in the area at the time. Since the middens also contain the pack rat’s fecal pellets, the scientists can also learn a lot about what the rat was eating, how big it was, and so forth.

Pack rats especially like shiny objects and will steal from people. In 2017 when historians were restoring an old home in Charleston, South Carolina dating back to 1808, they discovered several old pack rat middens in the walls of the kitchen. The middens contained buttons, marbles, sewing pins, and even some scraps of paper, including bits of newspaper with a readable date from November 1833. But some of the other bits of paper were torn from a writing primer, a book for people learning how to read or write. That’s not much of a surprise until you remember that this was the early 19th century, that the house was owned by a slave trader, and that the kitchen in particular would have been staffed by enslaved people, who were not supposed to learn how to read. Thanks to the pack rats, we know that at least one person was secretly learning how to read and write. I just hope the rats didn’t do too much damage to their book.

The pack rat is also sometimes called a trader rat, because it can only carry one thing at a time. If it’s carrying an acorn home and it chances upon a shiny gold ring, it will drop the acorn and carry the ring home. But you wanted an acorn, didn’t you, instead of that ring?

As for mice tidying up, we don’t really know why they do it, but it’s probably actually quite common. It just happens at night when people aren’t around, and in the morning they don’t know why all the nails have been moved into the box of nails, but hey, isn’t that handy? It reminds me of the stories of little house spirits called brownies, which were supposed to work at night cleaning and tidying. When the family woke up the next morning, the house or workshop was, ahem, squeaky clean, and all the family had to do was leave out a little cake or cream every night for the brownie.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 418: Animals Discovered in 2024

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This week we take a look at some of the many animals that were discovered last year!

Further reading:

‘Blob-Headed’ Catfish among New Species Discovered in Peru

New Species of Dwarf Deer Discovered in Peru

Hylomys macarong, the vampire hedgehog

Hairy giant tarantula: The monster among mini tarantulas with ‘feather duster’ legs

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and partners discover new ocean predator in the Atacama Trench

Never-before-seen vampire squid species discovered in twilight zone of South China

The blob headed catfish [photo by Robinson Olivera/Conservation International]:

A new mini tarantula [photo by David Ortiz]:

Show transcript:

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

This week is the 8th year anniversary of this podcast, so thanks for listening! It’s also our annual discoveries episode, where we’ll learn about a few animals that were discovered last year–in this case, in 2024.

Let’s start in Peru, a country in western South America. A 2022 survey of organisms living in the Alto Mayo region was published at the very end of 2024, revealing at least 27 new species and potentially more that are still being studied. One of those new species is a fish called the blob headed catfish.

The new fish has been placed in the bristlemouth armored catfish genus, but as you can probably guess from its name, it has a big blobby head and face. Scientists have no idea why it has a blob head. It lives in mountain streams and that’s about all we know about it right now.

Another animal found in the same survey is a new mouse. It lives in swampy forests and is semi-aquatic, including having webbed toes. It’s dark gray in color and is probably closely related to the Peruvian fish-eating rat, which is mostly brown in color and was only described in 2020.

Another new species from Peru is a type of small deer, called a pudu, that has been named Pudella carlae. It’s one of those “hidden in plain sight” discoveries, because until 2024 it was thought to be the same as the northern pudu that also lives in Ecuador and Colombia. The new deer is only 15 inches tall, or 38 cm, and is dark brownish-orange in color with black legs and face. It only lives in Peru, mostly in high elevations. It’s also the first deer species discovered in the 21st century, although hopefully not the last.

While we’re talking about mammal discoveries, we have to talk about the vampire hedgehog just because of its name. It was actually described at the very end of 2023, but it’s such an interesting animal that we’ll say it’s a 2024 discovery.

The vampire hedgehog was actually discovered a whole lot earlier than 2023, but no one noticed it was new to science for a long time. A small team of researchers studying soft-furred hedgehogs decided to collect DNA samples from all the museum specimens they could find. One of the specimens was in the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, collected in 1961 but never studied. When the scientists compared its DNA to the other specimens they’d found, it didn’t match up. Not only that, a closer look showed that it had fangs. Naturally, they named it the vampire hedgehog and went searching for living ones.

The vampire hedgehog lives in parts of Vietnam and is a member of the soft-furred hedgehogs, also called gymnures, hairy hedgehogs, or moonrats. Instead of spines, moonrats have bristly fur and long noses that make them look like shrews, but hairless tails that make them look like rats. They’re not rodents but are closely related to other hedgehogs. They eat pretty much anything but especially like to eat meat. This includes mice and frogs, along with various invertebrates.

As for the vampire hedgehog’s fangs, both males and females have them, but males have bigger fangs. Scientists don’t know yet what the hedgehogs use their fangs for. It could be they help the animals keep a better hold on wiggly prey, but it could be the hedgehogs just think big fangs look good on other hedgehogs so they’re one way the animals decide on a mate.

Just a few weeks ago we talked about the biggest tarantula in the world, the goliath birdeater, but did you know that there are tiny tarantulas too? The genus Trichopelma contains miniature tarantulas with body lengths measured in millimeters, and a new one was described in 2024 from western Cuba. But the great thing is, this tiny tarantula is the largest of the two dozen species known. Of the four specimens found so far, the largest body length is 11.2 millimeters—a veritable giant among miniature tarantulas!

The new species has been named Trichopelma grande, and the males, at least, have been discovered in trap-door burrows in the ground. No female specimens have been observed yet. Ground-dwelling tarantulas usually have a lot less hair on their legs, while tarantulas that live in trees are the ones with especially hairy legs, but T. grande is ground-dwelling but has very hairy legs. Or at least the males do. We don’t know about females yet.

Now let’s talk about some ocean animals, and we have to go back to Peru for our first one. The Atacama Trench is also called the Peru-Chile Trench because it’s about 100 miles, or 160 km, off the coast of both countries. At this spot a continental plate in the ocean is pushing underneath the South American plate, and it’s incredibly deep as a result. It’s been measured as 26,460 feet below the ocean’s surface, or 8,065 meters. That’s five miles deep!

Not a lot of animals live near the bottom, where the water pressure is intense and there’s not much to eat, but little crustaceans called amphipods are fairly common in the trench. Amphipods are common animals throughout the world’s oceans and freshwater, with almost 10,000 species discovered so far. There’s even a terrestrial amphipod called the sandhopper. Amphipods look a little bit like tiny shrimp, although there are some giant species. Giant in this case means 13 inches long, or 34 cm, but most are like the miniature tarantulas and are measured in millimeters.

In 2023 a new amphipod was discovered near the bottom of the Atacama Trench, and it was described in 2024 as a new species in its own genus. It grows just over an inch and a half long, or almost 4 cm, and appears white because of its lack of pigment. And most interesting of all, it’s a predator that catches and eats other species of amphipod.

Our last 2024 discovery is one that I find extremely exciting. We talked about the vampire squid way way way back in episode 11, before some of my listeners were even born, and while it has the word squid in its name, it’s not exactly a squid. It’s also not exactly an octopus. It’s the last surviving member of its own order, Vampyromorphida, which shares similarities with both squids and octopuses. And as of 2024, the vampire squid is not the only member of its own order, because they’ve found a second vampire squid!

The vampire squid is a deep-sea animal that grows about a foot long, or 30 cm, and eats whatever organic material floats down from far above. That could mean part of a dead amphipod or it could mean fish poop, the vampire squid is not picky. The new species of vampire squid was found around 3,000 feet below the surface, or a little over 900 meters, in the South China Sea. A genetic study determined that it does seem to be a new species, and the scientific name Vampyroteuthis pseudoinfernalis has been proposed. The official description hasn’t yet been published, but that just means we’ll probably get to talk more about it in a future episode.

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 409: Guinea Pigs and Capybaras

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Thanks to Mary, Mila, and Riley for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Comfortable and dermatological effects of hot spring bathing provide demonstrative insight into improvement in the rough skin of Capybaras

Comfort of capybaras determined by SCIENCE:

An especially attractive guinea pig:

Guinea pigs come in lots of colors, patterns, and fur types [picture taken from this excellent site]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about two rodents, one small and one big. Thanks to Mary and Mila who both suggested the guinea pig, and thanks to Riley who suggested the capybara.

This episode is a bit unusual because part of it comes from a Patreon episode from 2023. Like, literally a big chunk of this episode is the original audio from that one, and you’ll be able to tell the difference in audio and know just how lazy I was this week. The episode actually came together in an unusual way too. Riley’s parent emailed me last week with some new suggestions, including capybaras, but wasn’t sure if we had already covered the topic. I thought we had, but of course there’s always more to learn about an animal. Well, since this is the beginning of a new month I was on the Patreon page to upload the December episode, and while I was there I did a quick search for capybaras and discovered the episode I was thinking of. I decided to add some more information about guinea pigs to it since I already mention guinea pigs a lot in that episode, and here is the result!

The capybara is a rodent, and a very big one. It is, in fact, the biggest rodent alive today. To figure out just how big the capybara is, picture a guinea pig. The guinea pig is also a rodent, native to the Andes Mountains in South America. No one’s sure why the guinea pig is called that in English, since it doesn’t come from Guinea and doesn’t have anything to do with anything else called guinea, but as someone who had two pet guinea pigs when I was a kid, I know exactly why they’re called guinea pigs. This is what an actual pig sounds like:

[pig squealing]

And this is what a guinea pig sounds like:

[guinea pig squealing]

Also, it’s sort of shaped like a pig. The guinea pig is a chonky little animal with short legs, only a little stub of a tail, and little round ears. Its face is sort of blocky in shape and it has a big rounded rump, similar to that of a capybara. The guinea pig is actually closely related to the capybara, and is a pretty good-sized rodent in its own right. It grows about 10 inches long, or 25 cm, on average, and roughly half that size tall.

The guinea pig has been domesticated for at least 7000 years, but it wasn’t domesticated for people to keep it as a pet. In South America and many other places now, it’s a very small farm animal raised for its meat. Guinea pig has been an important source of protein for all that time, so important that it was considered sacred in many cultures.

In the early 16th century when Europeans started arriving in South America, sailors took guinea pigs with them on ships so they’d have fresh meat on the voyage. But when the cute little animals arrived in Europe, people started buying them as pets.

Guinea pigs eat plants, mostly grass, and are social animals. If you want a pet guinea pig, make sure to get at least two. Like rabbits and some other animals, including the capybara, the guinea pig excretes special pellets that aren’t poop, but are semi-digested pellets of food. The guinea pig eats the pellets so they can pass through the digestive system again and the body can extract as many nutrients as possible from it. What’s left is then excreted as a regular poop pellet.

Even in places where the guinea pig is routinely kept as livestock and eaten, people breed guinea pigs as pets too. The pet variety is smaller than the meat variety and has different markings and different colors. Guinea pigs naturally have short, smooth hair and are usually reddish-brown in color, but different colors, fur length and texture, and white markings have been bred into different varieties. There are even mostly hairless varieties.

Most people these days are familiar with what a guinea pig looks like, but most people are not familiar with what a capybara looks like.

So, picture a guinea pig. Now, imagine it growing and growing and growing until it’s the size of a large dog. Instead of orange and white, or black and white, or any of the other colors and patterns of a pet guinea pig, imagine its fur as being a solid rusty-brown color. The capybara can grow almost 4.5 feet long, or 134 cm, and can stand up to two feet tall, or 62 cm. That is a big rodent!

The capybara lives throughout most of South America, although it doesn’t live in the Andes or in Patagonia. It’s semi-aquatic and spends a lot of time in the water, sometimes even sleeping in the water with just its nose poking up so it can breathe. It can hold its breath for up to five minutes, and of course it swims extremely well. It even has webbed toes. It eats a lot of water plants and also eats grass, fruit, and other plants and plant parts.

The capybara has some features that are typical of rodents, like its teeth. Rodent teeth grow continuously since they’re easily worn down by chewing, especially chewing tough plants like grass. It also has some features that are uncommon in rodents. For instance, it can’t synthesize vitamin C, a trait it shares with the guinea pig and with humans. If a capybara kept in captivity isn’t given fruit and other foods that contain vitamin C, eventually it will develop scurvy.

But the capybara doesn’t otherwise have any resemblance to a pirate. It’s a sociable animal and famously chill. In the wild it lives in groups that can number up to 100 individuals, although up to 20 is more common.

The capybara has a scent gland on its nose called a morillo. The female has a morillo but the male’s is bigger since he scent marks more often by rubbing the gland on plants, trees, rocks, other capybaras, and so on. During mating season, the female capybara attracts a male by whistling through her nose, because who doesn’t like a lady who can whistle through her nose? The capybara will only mate in water, so if a female decides she doesn’t like a male, she just gets out of the water and walks away from him.

The female usually gives birth to four or five babies in one litter. Females with babies, called pups, help care for the babies of their friends. Most often, the pups who are too young to wander around without someone to watch them carefully, stay in a group. One or two females remain close to the pups to watch them while the other mothers find food, and the babysitters trade out every so often. When a capybara pup gets hungry, if its mother isn’t nearby, another lactating female will allow the pup to drink some of her milk. This is rare in most animals, since producing milk takes a lot of energy and a mother animal naturally wants to expend her energy on her own babies. But it’s beneficial for the whole group for capybara pups to be cared for by all the mothers.

Capybaras are big enough that adults have a certain amount of protection from predators, but they do have to worry about animals like jaguars, caimans, and anacondas. Smaller predators like eagles will eat capybara pups if they can catch them. Fortunately the capybara can swim fast and run fast, and with everyone in its group watching out for danger, it’s a lot safer than it is by itself.

The capybara does well in captivity and is a popular animal in zoos, and in some zoos you might even be able to pet one. You’ve probably seen pictures of capybaras relaxing in what looks like a big outdoor tub with tangerines floating in it, or if you’re from Japan or just familiar with Japanese customs, relaxing in a yuzu bath. Hot springs baths, called onsen, are popular in Japan, and in winter when the days are short and chilly, adding a citrus fruit called yuzu to the bath is supposed to help prevent colds and help moisturize the skin. Some zoos in Japan now extend this custom to capybaras, because it’s adorable.

As an added bonus, it turns out that the yuzu bath is really good for the capybara. The capybara is a warm-weather animal, and winters in Japan can be very cold and dry. As a result, the capybara’s skin becomes dry too. Soaking in natural hot springs, with or without yuzu, restores the capybara’s skin to its normal condition, which is a lot more comfortable for the capybara and helps it stay healthy. We know this is the case because of a study published in December 2021 in the journal Nature.

Before we go, here’s one last interesting fact about the guinea pig, to bring us back to the beginning of this episode. The guinea pig is a fully domesticated animal and its wild ancestor appears to have gone extinct. There are related species that resemble a guinea pig, but there are no wild guinea pigs in the world today.

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 327: The Humble Marmot

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Thanks to Dean for suggesting this week’s topic, the marmot!

Thanks also to Al-Ka-Lines Studio for the beautiful bat pin! You should definitely visit their online shop, because all their jewelry is hand-made by the two of them.

Further reading:

The secret to longevity? Ask a yellow-bellied marmot

The yellow-bellied marmot doing a sit [By Inklein, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2675916]:

A groundhog keeping an eye out for danger:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to have a short little episode about a short little animal suggested by Dean, although I don’t know if Dean is short and/or little. Probably not. The name Dean makes me think of a tall person, probably someone who plays sports and can run really fast, so basically completely unlike a marmot. Dean suggested the marmot, specifically the yellow-bellied marmot.

Before we get started, two quick notes. First, thanks so much to Kathi and Alex of Al-Ka-Lines Studio for the gorgeous bat pin! They make hand-crafted leather jewelry and while they usually sell wholesale to shops, I checked with Kathi to see if it was okay to link to their shop and they said that yes, they sometimes sell to individuals too. I’ve put a link in the show notes in case you’re interested in seeing what they have for sale. They recently started listening to the podcast in order from the first episode and so far they’re not sick of my voice yet.

Second, I’ll be at Furry Weekend Atlanta this coming weekend, assuming you’re listening to this episode when it comes out on May 8, 2023. If you’re going to be there too, let me know and we can meet up. I went to way too many conventions last year so this one and Dragon Con at the end of August are the only ones I have planned this year, and I’m not on any programming on either. I just plan to look at people’s amazing costumes and attend interesting panels and have fun dancing in the evenings. Also, I’ll probably eat a lot of pizza.

Now, on to the marmots!

If you live in North America, you may have seen a marmot without realizing it. I didn’t realize that the groundhogs that are pretty common where I live in the eastern United States are a type of marmot. Similarly, if you live in the western part of North America, especially in mountainous areas, you may have seen the yellow-bellied marmot. Other species of marmot live in Asia, Europe, and other parts of North America. One interesting thing is that the groundhog of eastern North America is actually more closely related to the marmots of Europe and Asia than it is to the other North American marmot species.

Marmots are big rodents related to squirrels, and in fact they’re considered a type of ground squirrel along with the closely related chipmunks and prairie dogs. They dig burrows and mostly eat plant material, and can grow quite large. The largest species is probably the Olympic marmot that only lives in the state of Washington in the Pacific Northwest of North America, which can weigh up to 18 lbs, or 8 kg. That’s its summer weight, though, when it’s had time to eat lots of food. All marmots hibernate and during that time they survive on the fat reserves they build up in warm weather. Basically all marmots are about the size of a cat, but they’re big chonks with short legs, short tails, little round ears, and a blunt muzzle. Its thick fur makes it look even larger than it really is.

The yellow-bellied marmot mostly lives in higher elevations and, like all marmots, it’s well adapted to cold weather. It’s a social animal that lives in small colonies and spends most of its time underground when it’s not out finding food. It’s mostly brown with yellowish markings underneath and a spot of white between its eyes. It usually digs its burrow among rocks and can have multiple burrows in its territory, so if it spots a predator it doesn’t have far to run to get safely underground. It digs an especially deep burrow to hibernate in, sometimes as much as 23 feet deep, or 7 meters. Since it spends as much as eight months hibernating every year, it needs to stay comfortable. It lines its sleeping chamber with dried leaves and even digs a little side burrow that acts as a latrine.

In a study released in March of 2022, a team of scientists studying yellow-bellied marmots discovered that when it hibernates, an adult marmot’s body basically stops aging. The marmot exhibits true hibernation where its body temperature drops almost to the air temperature and its breathing and heart rate slow dramatically. It will hibernate for a week or two, wake up slightly for about a day so it can stretch and rearrange itself more comfortably, and then will go back into hibernation for another few weeks. This goes on for almost three-quarters of the year and during that time, the yellow-bellied marmot doesn’t eat or drink anything. It just lives off its fat reserves, and because its metabolic rate is so low it hardly uses any energy on any given day, only burning about a gram of fat. A small paperclip weighs about a gram, to give you a comparison. As a side effect, the marmot basically only ages during the summer when it’s active. The scientists think this may be the case for all animals that hibernate.

Like other marmots, the yellow-bellied marmot starts its mating season as soon as it emerges from hibernation around May. Males may have several mates and they all live together with him. Females give birth to around four babies during the summer, which like kittens and puppies are born without fur and with their eyes still sealed shut. They stay in the mother’s nesting burrow for the next six weeks, at which point they can see and have grown fur, so they can go outside with their mother. The babies stay with their mother for up to two years.

Most marmot species are social like the yellow-bellied marmot, but the groundhog is different. It’s mostly solitary, although it’s still part of a complex social network of all the groundhogs in a particular area, and sometimes it will share a burrow with other groundhogs. It also prefers lower elevations while most marmots prefer high elevations. It lives throughout most of the eastern United States and throughout much of Canada.

Because the marmot is a relatively big, common animal, it’s an important food source for many animals. Bears will sniff out marmot burrows and dig them open, and badgers, foxes, coyotes, and mountain lions eat lots of marmots in North America. In Europe and Asia, marmots are frequently eaten by foxes, wolves, snow leopards, and hawks. People will eat them too. In parts of Mongolia where marmots are common, it’s been a food source for thousands of years, traditionally prepared on special occasions by putting hot stones into the dead animal’s body cavity and letting the heat cook the meat slowly. But the marmot can carry diseases that humans can catch, including the plague, so these days a dead goat is often used instead of a marmot.

After I learned this, I naturally got distracted and started reading about other traditional Mongolian foods, and now I suddenly remember that I haven’t eaten anything today but trail mix and toast. So I’ll leave you with a final marmot fact. When a marmot sees a predator, it will whistle to warn other marmots, and the whistle sounds like this:

[marmot whistle]

Now I’m going to go make myself dinner. But it won’t be marmot.

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 312: Little Bouncy Animals

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Thanks to Zachary and Oran for this week’s topic, some little animals that bounce around like tiny kangaroos!

Further reading:

Evolution of Kangaroo-Like Jerboas Sheds Light on Limb Development

Supposedly extinct kangaroo rat resurfaces after 30 years

High-Speed Videos Show Kangaroo Rats Using Ninja-Style Kicks to Escape Snakes

Williams’s jerboa [picture by Mohammad Amin Ghaffari – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/177950563, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115769436]:

A drawing of a jerboa skeleton. LEGS FOR DAYS:

The San Quintin kangaroo rat lives! [photo from article linked above]

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about two cute little animals suggested by Zachary and Oran! Both of these animals are rodents but although they look remarkably alike in some unusual ways, they’re not actually all that closely related.

First, Zachary suggested the jerboa. We talked about the pygmy jerboa in episode 136, but we haven’t talked about jerboas in general. It’s a small rodent that’s native to the deserts of Asia, north Africa, and the Middle East. It’s usually brown or tan with some darker shading on the back and tail. It looks sort of like a gerbil with long ears, long hind legs, and a tuft at the end of the tail. Its front legs are short and it has an adorable whiskery nose.

The reason the jerboa’s hind legs are so long while its front legs are really short is that it jumps around on its hind legs like a kangaroo. Not only can it jump really fast, up to 15 mph, or 24 km/h, it can change directions incredibly fast too. This helps it evade predators, because most animals are fastest when running in a straight line. The jerboa bounces in all sorts of directions, hopping or just running on its long hind legs, with its long tail held out for balance. It can also run on all fours with its short front legs helping it maneuver, but for the most part it’s a bipedal animal. It has tufts of stiff hairs under its toes that help it run through loose sand.

The jerboa eats plants, although sometimes if it finds a nice juicy insect it will eat it too. Mostly it just eats leaves, bulbs, roots, and some seeds. It gets all of the moisture it needs from its diet, which is good because it lives in the desert where there’s not much water available.

Some species of jerboa mainly eat insects and spiders, and some have short ears instead of long ears. This is the case for the thick-tailed pygmy jerboa that lives in parts of China, Mongolia, and Russia. Its head and body only measures about two inches long, or almost 5 cm, but its tail is twice that length. The reason it’s called a thick-tailed jerboa is because it stores fat at the base of its tail, which makes the tail look thick compared to many rodent tails.

The jerboa is mostly active at dawn and dusk, although some species are fully nocturnal. It spends the day in a burrow it digs in sand or dirt. A jerboa will usually have more than one burrow in its territory, with the entrances usually hidden under a bush or some other plant. Different burrows have different purposes. Some have numerous entrances and lots of side tunnels but are relatively shallow, which is useful if the jerboa lives in an area with a rainy season. A shallow burrow won’t flood if it rains a lot. Some burrows are temporary, which the jerboa may dig if it’s out and about during the day looking for food. A mother jerboa will dig a burrow with a roomy nesting chamber to raise her babies, and a jerboa’s winter burrow has a nesting chamber that’s deep underground to help it stay warm. Some species of jerboa construct unusual burrows, like the lesser Egyptian jerboa that has spiral-shaped burrows with storage chambers. Most jerboas are solitary animals, although sometimes a group will hibernate together in winter to help everyone stay warmer.

Scientists have been studying the jerboa to learn how different animals have evolved radically different leg lengths. The jerboa’s incredibly long hind legs are very different from its very short front legs, but it evolved from animals that had four short legs. But jerboas are born with four short legs, and as the babies grow up their hind legs grow longer and longer.

The jerboa is an incredibly efficient runner. Some species can jump as far as six feet in a single bound, or 1.8 meters, and up to three feet, or 90 cm, straight up.

The jerboa isn’t the only rodent that hops on its hind legs like a kangaroo. The kangaroo rat does too, and it’s Oran’s suggestion. Oran pointed out that a long time ago, I think in the humans episode, I said that humans are the only fully bipedal mammal, meaning we only ever walk on our hind legs. (Crawling when you’re a baby or trying to find something under the couch don’t count.) I was wrong about that for sure, because the kangaroo rat, the jerboa, and a few other mammals are also bipedal.

The kangaroo rat is native to parts of western North America. It looks a lot like a jerboa, with long hind legs and a long tail, although its ears are smaller. But the kangaroo rat and the jerboa aren’t closely related, although both are rodents. Their similarities are due to convergent evolution, since both animals live in very similar environments with the same selective pressures.

The largest species of kangaroo rat, the giant kangaroo rat, grows around 6 inches long, or 15 cm, with a tail about 8 inches long, or 20 cm. It can jump even longer than the jerboa although it doesn’t move as fast on average.

Like the jerboa, the kangaroo rat can change directions quickly, and it’s also mostly nocturnal and spends the day in a burrow. Some species spend almost all the time in burrows, only emerging for about an hour a night to gather seeds. Since owls like to eat kangaroo rats, you can’t blame them for wanting to stay underground as much as possible.

Snakes also like to eat kangaroo rats, especially the sidewinder rattlesnake. It’s a fast predator with venom that can easily kill a little kangaroo rat, but the kangaroo rat isn’t helpless. A study published in 2019 filmed interactions in the wild between the desert kangaroo rat and the sidewinder, using high-speed cameras. They had to use high-speed cameras because the snakes can go from completely unmoving to a strike in under 100 milliseconds. That’s less time than it takes you to blink. But the kangaroo rat can react in even less time, as little as 38 milliseconds after the snake starts to move. A lot of time the kangaroo rat will completely leap out of range of the snake, but if it can’t manage that, it will kick the snake with its long hind legs, which are strong enough to knock the snake away. Little fuzzy ninjas.

Unlike the jerboa, the kangaroo rat mostly eats seeds. The jerboa’s teeth aren’t very strong so it can’t bite through hard seeds, but the kangaroo rat’s teeth are just fine with seeds. The kangaroo rat also has cheek pouches, and it will carry lots of seeds home to its burrow. It keeps extra seeds in special burrow chambers called larders.

The kangaroo rat sometimes lives in colonies that can number in the hundreds, but it’s still a mostly solitary animal. It has its own burrow that’s separate from the burrows of other members of its colony, and it doesn’t share food or interact very much with its neighbors. It will communicate with other kangaroo rats by drumming its hind feet on the ground, including warning its neighbors to stay away and alerting them to predators in the area.

The kangaroo rat is vulnerable to habitat loss, since it mostly lives in desert grassland and humans tend to view that kind of land as useless and in need of development. An example of this is the San Quintin kangaroo rat, which is only found in western Baja California in Mexico. Only two large colonies were known when it was discovered by science in 1925, although it used to be much more widespread. But in the decades since 1925, the land was developed for agriculture until by 1986 the two colonies were completely wiped out. Scientists worried the species had gone extinct. Then, in 2017, a colony was discovered in a nature preserve and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Other colonies have been discovered on farmland that has been abandoned due to drought. Still, the San Quintin kangaroo rat is critically endangered.

The kangaroo rat is actually helpful for the environment. Because it stores seeds underground, and sometimes forgets where it put them, it helps native plants spread. Its burrows help increase soil fertility and the spread of water through the soil. This is similar to the jerboa, which also eats enough insects to help reduce the number of agricultural pests in some areas.

There are also two species of kangaroo mouse, which are closely related to kangaroo rats. They mostly live in the state of Nevada in North America. There are also jumping mice that look like ordinary mice but with long hind legs. It also has cheek pouches. While some jumping mice live in western North America, some live in northeastern North America and Canada and are adapted to cold weather and long winters. One species of jumping mouse lives in the mountains in parts of China. There’s also a larger jumping rodent called the springhare that lives in parts of Africa, and which is about the size of a squirrel or a small rabbit. Like all these other rodents, it’s bipedal and hops on its hind legs like a little kangaroo, using its long tail for balance and to prop itself up when it’s standing. It mostly eats plants but will sometimes eat insects, and it spends most of the day in burrows. There’s also a hopping mouse native to Australia, which is a rodent with long hind legs and a long tail and long ears. It’s not closely related to the jerboa or the kangaroo rat, but it looks a lot like both because of convergent evolution. It mostly eats seeds.

All these animals are rodents, but Australia also has another animal called the kultarr that looks a lot like the kangaroo rat and the jerboa. It’s not a rodent, though. It’s actually a marsupial that’s completely unrelated to rodents although it looks like a rodent. That’s definitely what you call convergent evolution.

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 301: Hairless Mammals

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Thanks to Liesbet for this week’s suggestion, about two mammals that have evolved to be hairless!

Happy birthday this week to Declan and Shannon!

The hairless bat has a doglike face and a doglike tail but (and this is important) it is not a dog [photos from this site]:

The naked mole-rat’s mouth is behind its teeth instead of the usual “my teeth are in my mouth” kind of thing:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a suggestion from Liesbet, who asked about furless animals. We’re going to learn about two mammals that don’t have fur, and they’re not ones you may be thinking of.

But first, we have two birthday shout-outs! Happy birthday to Declan and Shannon! I hope both your birthdays are so amazing that whatever town you live in finishes off the day by giving you the key to the city. What do you do with the key? I don’t know, but it sounds like something to brag about.

Mammals are famous for having hair, but not all mammals actually have hair. Cetaceans like whales and dolphins have lost all their hair during their evolution into marine animals, although before a baby whale is born it has a little bit of fuzzy hair on its head. Other mammals, like humans, pigs, walruses, and elephants, have evolved to only have a little hair. There are also domesticated mammals that have been bred to have no hair, like sphynx cats and Chinese crested dogs.

There are other domesticated hairless mammals, though, including two types of guinea pig. The skinny pig only has a little bit of fuzzy hair on its face and ears, while the baldwin pig only has a tuft of hair on its nose. But the animals we’re going to talk about today are hairless animals you may not have heard of.

For instance, the hairless bat, which lives in parts of Southeast Asia. Its dark gray body is almost completely hairless, although it does sometimes have little patches of fuzz on the head and tail, and longer bristles around the neck. It’s nocturnal and eats insects, but since it’s a fairly large bat, around 6 inches long, or 15 cm, it can eat fairly large insects. It especially likes grasshoppers, termites, and moths.

The hairless bat roosts in colonies of up to a thousand individuals, and it lives in caves, hollow trees, or rock crevices. Although it uses echolocation, it doesn’t have a nose leaf like many microbats have, but instead has a little doglike snout. Its tail is skinny like a little dog’s tail instead of being connected to the hind legs or body by patagia. It has a little throat pouch that secretes strong-smelling oil.

It also has a sort of pocket on either side of the body. Originally people thought that mother bats used these pouches to carry their babies, since hairless bats usually have two babies at a time. Instead, it turns out that mother bats leave their babies at home when they go out to hunt, and the pockets are used for something else. The pockets are formed by a fold of skin and the end of the wing fingers and membranes fit into them. The bat uses its hind feet to push the wings into the pockets, sort of like stuffing an umbrella into the little cover that it comes in when you first buy it. This allows the bat to run around on all fours without its wings getting in the way. Since most bats can’t walk on all fours at all, this is pretty amazing.

Our other hairless animal today is the naked mole-rat, which is not a mole or a rat. It is a type of rodent but it’s more closely related to porcupines than to rats. It lives in tropical grasslands in parts of East Africa and spends almost its entire life underground. It lives in colonies of up to 300 individuals, and the colony’s tunnels and nesting burrows are extensive, often covering up to 3 miles, or 5 km. It eats roots of plants and the colony carefully only eats part of each root so that they don’t kill the plant. The roots continue to grow, providing the colony with lots of food.

The naked mole-rat grows about 4 inches long, or 10 cm, although dominant females are larger. It has tiny eyes and doesn’t see very well, since most of the time it doesn’t need to see, and it has a chonky body but short, spindly legs. It pretty much has no hair except for whiskers and some tiny hairs between the toes, and its skin is so pale it’s almost translucent. It digs with its protruding front teeth, and these teeth are not in its mouth. They grow out through the skin and the animal’s mouth is actually behind the teeth. This way the mole-rat can dig without getting dirt in its mouth, but it sure looks weird to us.

But that’s not even close to the weirdest thing about the naked mole-rat. We haven’t even scratched the surface of weirdness!

The naked mole-rat lives underground in a part of the world where it’s always warm, and its tunnel system has no exits to the surface except for temporary exits when new tunnels are being excavated, because the dirt has to go somewhere. Its environment is so consistent in temperature that it doesn’t need to regulate its body temperature like every other mammal known. It’s ectothermic, which is sometimes called cold-blooded. Reptiles and amphibians are ectothermic but all other mammals known are endothermic. It’s kind of our thing. But the naked mole-rat is different. Its metabolism is extremely low, and as a result it can live for more than 30 years when most rodents the same size are lucky to live 2 or 3 years.

The naked mole-rat’s skin isn’t just hairless, it also lacks neurotransmitters. This means its skin doesn’t feel pain. The animal also lives in an environment that’s remarkably low in oxygen, and scientists think this contributes to the fact that the mole-rat never shows evidence of cancer except in captivity where its environment is higher in oxygen.

The naked mole-rat’s colony is led by a dominant female, called a queen, and she’s the only female in the colony that has babies. When a female achieves dominance, either by founding a new colony, taking over after the current queen dies, or defeating the current queen in a fight, she then grows larger and becomes able to reproduce. Only a few males in the colony mate with her. All the other members of the colony are unable to reproduce. They’re considered workers and help take care of the queen’s babies, maintain tunnels, forage for food, or act as soldiers to keep snakes and other predators out. If this sounds like the way some insect colonies are structured, especially bees and ants, you’re right. It’s called eusociality and the mole-rat is the only type of mammal known with this sort of social structure. There’s another type of mole-rat from southern Africa that’s also eusocial, but it has fur.

All that is so weird that I almost forgot the mole-rat is hairless. That now seems like the most normal thing about it.

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 268: Rediscovered Animals!

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My little cat Gracie got lost but she’s home! Let’s learn about some other rediscovered animals this week!

A very happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have the best birthday ever!

Further listening:

The Casual Birder Podcast (where you can hear me talk about birding in Belize!)

Further reading:

Bornean Rajah Scops Owl Rediscovered After 125 Years

Shock find brings extinct mouse back from the dead

Rediscovery of the ‘extinct’ Pinatubo volcano mouse

Gracie, home at last! She’s so SKINNY after a whole week being lost but she’s eating lots now:

The Bornean Rajah scops owl (photo from article linked above):

The djoongari is the same as the supposedly extinct Gould’s mouse (photo from article linked above):

The Pinatubo volcano mouse:

Show transcript:

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

While I was researching animals discovered in 2021, I came across some rediscoveries. I thought that would make a fun episode, so here are three animals that were thought to be extinct but were found again!

A couple of quick things before we get started, though.

First, happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have a brilliant birthday and that it involves family, friends, or at least your favorite kind of cake, but hopefully all three.

Next, a few weeks ago I appeared on the Casual Birder Podcast talking in depth about my trip to Belize and some of the birds I saw there. I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a great podcast that I really recommend if you’re interested in birding at all, and the host has such a lovely calming voice I also recommend it if you just like to have a pleasant voice in the background while you do other stuff.

Finally, thanks for the well wishes from last week, when I let our emergency episode run. I’m actually fine, but my little cat Gracie got frightened while I was bringing her into the house from a vet visit, and she ran away. That was on Friday, March 11 and I spent all night looking for her, but then we had a late-season snowstorm come through and dump six inches of snow on my town, which made me even more frantic. At dawn on Saturday I put on my boots and heavy coat and spent all day searching for Gracie, and on Sunday I was still searching for her. I didn’t have time to work on a new episode. In fact, I searched every day as much as possible all week long, until I was certain she was gone forever. I couldn’t bring myself to work on this episode because rediscovered animals just seemed like a cruel joke when my little cat was gone. I was almost done with a different episode when on Saturday night, March 19, 2022, eight full days after Gracie had disappeared, I got a phone call. Someone had seen a little gray cat under their shed, over half a mile from my house! I rushed over and THERE WAS GRACIE! I found her! She is home!

So I’ve been researching rediscovered animals with Gracie purring in my lap, in between her going to her bowl to eat. She’s lost a lot of weight but other than that she seems healthy, and she’s very happy to be home.

The person who found Gracie first noticed her around their birdfeeder, so we’ll start with a rediscovered bird.

There are two subspecies of Rajah scops owl that are only found on two islands in southeast Asia, Borneo and Sumatra. The subspecies that lives in Sumatra is fairly common throughout the mountains on that island, where it lives in the lower branches of trees in higher elevations. It’s a tiny owl that only weighs about 4 ounces, or 100 grams. As the article I link to in the show notes points out, that’s about the weight of four AA batteries.

The subspecies that lives on Borneo, though, was always much rarer and had a much smaller range. In fact, no one had seen one since 1892 and researchers thought it was probably extinct. There’s another owl that lives in the mountains of Borneo, the mountain scops owl, that’s fairly common.

In May of 2016, a team of scientists started a 10-year study of birds that lived on Mount Kinabalu in the country of Malaysia in northern Borneo. One team member, Keegan Tranquillo, was checking bird nests that very same month and noticed an owl that didn’t look like the mountain scops owl. It was larger and its plumage was different.

Tranquillo contacted ecologist and bird expert Andy Boyce, who came out to take a look. When he saw the owl, Boyce was excited at first but then filled with anxiety. He knew the owl must be incredibly rare and would be in great danger of going extinct if conservation efforts weren’t put into place. Many areas of Borneo are under pressure from logging, mining, and palm oil plantations, which is leading to habitat loss all over the island.

Not only that, the more Boyce looked at the owl, the more he noticed differences from the Sumatran subspecies of Rajah scops owl. He suspected it might not be a subspecies but a completely separate species. That made it even more important to protect the owl and study it.

The owl’s rediscovery was announced in May 2021. Studies of the owl are ongoing but hopefully will soon result in more information about it and its habitat.

Next, let’s talk about a rodent, since Gracie likes to play with toy mice. This rediscovery came from Australia, where a study of extinct Australian rodents and their living relations found something surprising. It’s the opposite of the owl we just talked about, that might end up being a separate species of its own.

The mouse in question was once called Gould’s mouse. It used to be common throughout Australia, where it’s a native mammal, but it was declared extinct in 1990 after no one had seen it since the 1840s. Researchers suspected it had gone extinct after colonizers brought cats to Australia, although diseases and competition from introduced species of mice and rats also had a big impact.

Meanwhile, another native mouse, called the djoongari or Shark Bay mouse, was driven nearly to extinction. Fortunately, the djoongari survived on a few islands off western Australia. Conservation efforts in 2003 introduced it to more islands, where it spread and did well. It’s a social mouse that lives in family groups in a burrow it digs under bushes. It lines the burrow with dry grass to make it warmer and more comfortable.

The djoongari is a large mouse, up to 4.5 inches long not counting the tail, or 11.5 centimeters. The tail is a little longer than the head and body combined. It has long, shaggy fur that’s a mixture of dark and light brown with a paler belly and feet, and it has a tuft of dark fur at the end of its tail like a tiny lion.

In early 2021, the researchers studying native rodent DNA realized that the living djoongari and the extinct Gould’s mouse had the exact same genetic profile! They were the same animal! That means Gould’s mouse didn’t go extinct, although technically it didn’t exist in the first place.

That doesn’t mean the djoongari is perfectly safe, of course. Its range is still extremely restricted and it’s vulnerable to the same factors that nearly drove it to extinction in the first place. But at least it’s still around and can be protected.

We’ll finish with another mouse. In 1991, a volcano in the Philippines erupted. The volcano was called Mount Pinatubo on the island of Luzon, and the eruption was enormous. It was ten times stronger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Lava and ash filled valleys up to 600 feet deep, or 183 meters. More than 800 people died from the eruption itself and the devastation afterwards, during landslides caused by all the ash every time it rained.

In addition to the awful situation for people, animals were affected too. Most of the forests near the volcano were completely destroyed. Scientists thought the Pinatubo volcano mouse had probably gone extinct since it only lived on that one volcanic mountain, which had just blown up. Surveys of the area a few years after the eruption didn’t turn up signs of any of the mice.

The Pinatubo volcano mouse was only described in 1962 from a single specimen collected in 1956. It was a large mouse, almost the size of a rat, with long hind legs for jumping and climbing and a tail much longer than the length of its head and body together. It mostly ate earthworms and other small animals, but not a lot was known about it.

More than 20 years after the eruption, a team of scientists surveyed the animals living on the mountain. The conditions were difficult for the team to navigate, since there was still a lot of ash and erosion in the area that made the steep slopes unstable. The lush forests were gone, replaced by grass and bamboo, shrubs, a few trees, and other plants. They didn’t expect to find a lot of animals, although they thought they’d find introduced species of rats and mice that had moved into the disturbed areas from other parts of the island.

But to their surprise, they found 17 species of mammal on the mountain. Eight were bats, there were wild pigs and deer, and the rest were rodents. And the rodents were mostly native species, not introduced ones—including the Pinatubo volcano mouse!

Researchers theorize that a mouse that lives on an active volcano as its only habitat must have evolved to weather occasional eruptions. The mice were actually most numerous in the places that had been the most destroyed. The term for a species that thrives in environments that have seen widespread natural destruction is “disturbance specialist,” and that’s just what these mice are.

It just goes to show that no matter how bad things may be, there is life. And where there’s life, there’s hope. And probably mice.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go make a chocolate cake to take to the person who found Gracie.

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 157: Rodents of Unusual Size

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Uh, yeah, not the legless lizard episode. But just as interesting! This week let’s learn about the largest rodents in the world! Hint: way bigger than a rat.

Further reading:

Rodents of Uncertain Systematics

The mellow and photogenic capybara:

Oh to be a capybara in an open bath with an orange on its head:

Hey, pacarana:

Oh to be a paca with half an orange:

Oh to be a chevrotain with a piece of orange. (The chevrotain is not a rodent. It has hooves. Episode 116 explains this creature):

Show transcript:

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

Yes, I know, last week I said we might have an episode this week about legless lizards and other snakey things that aren’t snakes, but I got this episode ready first so instead, this week we’re going to learn about some rodents of unusual size!

Rodents are mammals in the order Rodentia, and there are thousands of them throughout the world. Mice and rats are rodents, of course, but so are chipmunks and squirrels, hamsters and gerbils, prairie dogs and guinea pigs, and many others. But you may notice that all the animals I just mentioned are pretty small. That’s because most rodents are on the small side. But not all of them.

The biggest rodent alive today may be one you’ve heard of, the capybara. It’s native to much of South America and lives in forests, rainforests, and other areas, but always near water. It really likes water and eats a lot of aquatic plants, although it also eats grass, fruit, tree bark, and other plants. Like other rodents, its teeth grow throughout its life but constantly wear down as it eats tough plants.

So how big is the capybara? It grows to about two feet tall, or 62 cm, and four feet long, or 1.3 meters. Females are usually a little larger than males. Basically they’re the size of a big dog, but a big dog with webbed toes, small ears, big blunt muzzle, basically no tail, and a calm outlook on life. Because unlike many rodents who tend to be nervous and quick-moving, the capybara is pretty chill.

The capybara is semiaquatic and likes to hang out in the water, often in social groups. It can hold its breath underwater for up to five minutes, and can even sleep while submerged with just its nose above water. That’s why its nose, eyes, and ears are close to the top of its head, so it can be alert to predators while remaining safely underwater.

The capybara has a scent gland on its nose called a morillo. The female has a morillo but the male’s is bigger since he scent marks more often by rubbing the gland on plants, trees, rocks, other capybaras, and so on. During mating season, the female capybara attracts a male by whistling through her nose, because who doesn’t like a lady who can whistle through her nose? The capybara will only mate in water, so if a female decides she doesn’t like a male, she just gets out of the water and walks away from him.

The female usually gives birth to four or five babies in one litter. If the female is a member of a group of capybaras, all the babies stay together in the middle of the group and all the females care for them. In most mammals, the female will only let her own babies drink her milk, but a female capybara will suckle any babies in the group who are hungry. Like I said, they’re pretty chill.

There are actually two species of capybara, but some people consider the lesser capybara to be a subspecies of capybara and anyway, we don’t know much about it. Other than that, though, the capybara is most closely related to the guinea pig. Like the guinea pig and like humans, the capybara can’t synthesize vitamin C in its body and has to get it through its diet. That means if a capybara in captivity doesn’t receive fruit and other plant material containing vitamin C, eventually it will show symptoms of scurvy.

The capybara is killed for its meat and hide, but it’s also sometimes kept as a pet. It’s not a domesticated animal and it’s as heavy as a full-grown human, so while the capybara isn’t specifically dangerous it’s not really a good pet. Also, it will eat your garden and wallow in mud and if you don’t have a pool it’s going to wander around until it finds one. It’s probably better to get a dog.

While the capybara is a strong swimmer, it can move fast on land when it wants to. It can run up to 22 miles per hour, or 35 km/hour. This is what a capybara sounds like.

[capybara sounds]

Big as the capybara is, even bigger rodents used to live in South America. Around 8 million years ago a rodent called Phoberomys pattersoni [foe-barommis] lived in what is now Venezuela and nearby areas, especially around the Orinoco River. It was discovered in 2000 when an almost complete skeleton was found, and it was really big. We’re talking nine feet long, or 2.75 meters, and that doesn’t even include its tail. It stood over four feet tall, or 1.3 meters. It was described in 2003 and is a relative of guinea pig and the capybara.

But since then, paleontologists have found fossils of rodents that are estimated to be even bigger. Around 3 million years ago an animal called the giant pacarana grew to an estimated five feet tall, or 1.5 meters, with a body ten feet long, or 3 m. But we don’t know for sure if it was bigger or smaller than that estimate, since so far all we have is a fossilized skull discovered in 1987 and described in 2008. Another closely related rodent is only known from some teeth. Some researchers think it used its massive teeth like elephants use their tusks, to fend off predators and fight each other.

So if there was once a giant pacarana, what’s a regular pacarana? It’s another South American rodent, and while it’s not exactly capybara size it’s much larger than a mouse. It grows more than 3 ½ feet long, or 100 cm, and is shaped sort of like a capybara with a tail, although its head is more rodent-like. It’s dark brown-gray with rows of white spots down its sides and a thick tail covered with fur. It’s the only living member of the family Dinomyidae and it has many unusual features compared to other rodents. I’d tell you what they are but they’re all things like “it has a flatter sternum,” which wouldn’t mean a whole lot to most of us. Shout-out to any rodent experts listening, though.

The pacarana was discovered by scientists in 1873 when a Polish nobleman traveling in Peru shot one and sent its skin and skeleton home, where it was studied by the director of the Berlin Zoo. But after that one specimen was killed, the pacarana seemed to vanish. Then in 1904 someone sent two pacaranas to a museum in Brazil. The museum’s director gave them to the local zoo where they could be taken care of, although the female died after giving birth shortly afterwards.

It turns out that the pacarana isn’t all that rare, but it’s shy and hard to spot in its habitat, forested mountains in South America. But because it’s seldom seen, not very many zoos have them, but zookeepers all report that pacaranas are docile and friendly. I can confirm that they are very, very cute although I haven’t seen one in person.

The pacarana is named after another rodent called the paca, which looks similar but has a shorter tail and is smaller than the pacarana, although still a pretty big rodent. The paca grows up to about two and a half feet long, or 77 cm, not counting its 9-inch tail, or 23 cm, and is dark brown with rows of white spots on each side. It looks kind of like a chevrotain, which as you may remember from episode 116 is also called the mouse deer even though it’s not a mouse or a deer. The paca lives in a burrow that can be ten feet long, or 3 meters, usually with two entrances that it covers with leaves to hide it. It likes fruit, leaves, flowers, fungi, and other plant material, but it will also eat insects.

The paca likes to swim and can stay underwater even longer than the capybara, as much as 15 minutes. It usually mates in the water too. It’s mostly nocturnal, although some populations may be crepuscular, and it lives in much of Central and South America, although it’s also present in southern Mexico.

After her babies are born, the mother paca tucks her babies in a hole she digs that’s too small for predators to enter. But the hole is also too small for her to enter. To let the babies know it’s safe to come out, she calls to them in a low trill. The paca, in fact, makes a lot of sounds, and its voice is way louder than you’d think. It has resonating chambers in its cheeks to make its voice even louder.

Here are some sounds that a paca makes:

[paca calls]

Ages ago, Llewelly sent me a link to an article about some interesting rodents of South America. I’ve included a link to it in the show notes in case you want to learn more about South American rodents that aren’t quite as big as the ones we’ve covered today, but which are just as interesting.

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

Thanks for listening! Oh, and this is what a baby capybara sounds like.