Episode 341: The Leaf Sheep and the Mold Pig

Thanks to Murilo and an anonymous listener for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

The ‘sheep’ that can photosynthesize

Meet the ‘mold pigs,’ a new group of invertebrates from 30 million years ago

A leaf sheep:

Shaun the sheep:

A mold pig:

Show transcript:

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

This week let’s learn about two animals that sound like you’d find them on a farm, but they’re much different than their names imply. Thanks to Murilo for suggesting the leaf sheep, which is where we’ll start.

The leaf sheep isn’t a sheep or a leaf. It’s actually a type of sea slug that lives in tropical waters near Japan and throughout much of coastal south Asia. The reason it’s called a leaf sheep is because it actually looks a lot like a tiny cartoon sheep covered with green leaves instead of wool.

Back in episode 215 we talked about the sea bunny, which is another type of sea slug although it’s not closely related to the leaf sheep. The leaf sheep is even smaller than the sea bunny, which can grow up to an inch long, or about 25 mm. The leaf sheep only grows about 10 mm long at most, which explains why it wasn’t discovered until 1993. No one noticed it.

The leaf sheep’s face is white or pale yellow with two tiny black dots for eyes set close together, which kind of makes it look like Shaun the Sheep. It also has two black-tipped protuberances that look like ears, although they’re actually chemoreceptors called rhinophores. The rest of its body is covered with leaf-shaped spines called cerata, which are green and often tipped with pink, white, or black. This helps disguise it as a plant, but there’s another reason why it’s green.

The leaf sheep eats a particular kind of algae called Avrainvillea, which looks like moss or fuzzy carpet. While algae aren’t exactly plants or animals, many do photosynthesize like plants. In other words, they transform sunlight into energy to keep them alive. In order to photosynthesize, a plant or algae uses a special pigment called chlorophyll that makes up part of a chloroplast in its cells, which happens to be green.

The leaf sheep eats the algae, but it doesn’t digest the chloroplasts. Instead, it absorbs them into its own body and uses them for photosynthesis. That way it gets nutrients from eating and digesting algae and it gets extra energy from sunlight. This is a trait shared by other sea slugs in the superorder Sacoglossa. Because they need sunlight for photosynthesis, they live in shallow water, often near coral reefs.

When the leaf sheep’s eggs hatch, the larvae have shells, but as they mature they shed their shells.

This is a good place to talk about cyanobacteria, which was requested ages ago by an anonymous listener. Cyanobacteria mostly live in water and are also called blue-green algae, even though they’re not actually classified as algae. They’re considered bacteria, although not every scientist agrees. Some are unicellular, meaning they just consist of one cell, while others are multicellular like plants and animals, which means they have multiple cells specialized for different functions. Some other cyanobacteria group together in colonies. So basically, cyanobacteria looked at the chart of possible life forms and said, “yes, thanks, we’ll take some of everything.” That’s why it’s so hard to classify them.

Cyanobacteria photosynthesize, and they’ve been doing so for far longer than plants–possibly as much as 2.7 billion years, although scientists think cyanobacteria originally evolved around 3.5 billion years ago. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old and plants didn’t evolve until about 700 million years ago.

Like most plants also do, cyanobacteria produce oxygen as part of the photosynthetic process, and when they started doing so around 2.7 billion years ago, they changed the entire world. Before then, earth’s atmosphere hardly contained any oxygen. If you had a time machine and went back to more than two billion years ago, and you forgot to bring an oxygen tank, you’d instantly suffocate trying to breathe the air. But back then, even though animals and plants didn’t yet exist, the world contained a whole lot of microbial life, and none of it wanted anything to do with oxygen. Oxygen was toxic to the lifeforms that lived then, but cyanobacteria just kept producing it.

Cyanobacteria are tiny, but there were a lot of them. Over the course of about 700 million years, the oxygen added up until other lifeforms started to go extinct, poisoned by all that oxygen in the oceans and air. By two billion years ago, pretty much every lifeform that couldn’t evolve to use or at least tolerate oxygen had gone extinct. So take a deep breath of life-giving oxygen and thank cyanobacteria, which by the way are still around and still producing oxygen. However, they’re still up to their old tricks because they also produce what are called cyanotoxins, which can be deadly.

That brings us to another animal in our imaginary farm, the mold pig. It’s not a pig or a mold, and unlike the leaf sheep and cyanobacteria, it’s extinct. At least, we think it’s extinct.

The mold pig is a microinvertebrate only discovered in 2019. The only reason we know about it at all is because of amber found in the Dominican Republic, on an island in the Caribbean Sea. As we’ve discussed in past episodes, especially episode 108, amber is the fossilized resin of certain types of tree, and sometimes the remains of small animals are found inside. Often these animals are insects, but sometimes even tinier creatures are preserved that we would otherwise probably never know about.

The mold pig was about 100 micrometers long, or .1 millimeter. You’ve probably heard of the tardigrade, or water bear, which we talked about in episode 234, and if so you might think the mold pig was a type of tardigrade just from looking at it, since it looks similar. It had four pairs of legs like tardigrades do, but while scientists think they were related, and that the mold pig was probably also related to mites, it was different enough that it’s been classified in its own genus and may need to belong to its own phylum. Its official name is Sialomorpha.

The mold pig probably ate mold, fungus, and microscopic invertebrates. It lived around 30 million years ago, and right now that’s about all we know about it. There’s a good chance that it still survives somewhere in the world, but it’s so tiny that it’s even easier to overlook than the leaf sheep. Maybe you will be the person who rediscovers its living descendants.

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 259: Indestructible Animals

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Thanks to Nicholas and Emma for their suggestions this week as we learn about some (nearly) indestructible animals!

Further listening:

Patreon episode about Metal Animals (unlocked, no login required)

Further reading:

Even a car can’t kill this beetle. Here’s why

The scaly-foot snail’s shell is made of actual iron – and it’s magnetic

The scaly-foot gastropod (pictures from article linked above):

The diabolical ironclad beetle is virtually unsquishable:

Limpet shells:

The business side of a limpet:

Highly magnified limpet teeth:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some indestructible animals, or at least animals that are incredibly tough. You may be surprised to learn that they’re all invertebrates. It’s a suggestion by Nicholas, and one of the animals Nicholas suggested was also suggested by Emma.

We’ll start with that one, the scaly-foot gastropod, a deep-sea snail. We actually covered this one a few years ago but only in a Patreon episode. I went ahead and unlocked that episode so that anyone can listen to it, since I haven’t done that in a while, so the first part of this episode will sound familiar if you just listened to that one.

The scaly-foot gastropod lives around three hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, about 1 ¾ miles below the surface, or about 2,800 meters. The water around these vents, referred to as black smokers, can be more than 350 degrees Celsius. That’s 660 degrees F, if you even need to know that that’s too hot to live.

The scaly-foot gastropod was discovered in 2001 but not formally described until 2015. The color of its shell varies from almost black to golden to white, depending on which population it’s from, and it grows to almost 2 inches long, or nearly 5 cm. It doesn’t have eyes, and while it does have a small mouth, it doesn’t use it for eating. Instead, the snail contains symbiotic bacteria in a gland in its esophagus. The bacteria convert toxic hydrogen sulfide from the water around the hydrothermal vents into energy the snail uses to live. It’s a process called chemosynthesis. In return, the bacteria get a safe place to live.

The snail’s shell contains an outer layer made of iron sulfides. Not only that, the bottom of the snail’s foot is covered with sclerites, or spiky scales, that are also mineralized with iron sulfides. While the snail can’t pull itself entirely into its shell, if something attacks it, the bottom of its foot is heavily armored and its shell is similarly tough.

Researchers are studying the scaly-foot gastropod’s shell to possibly make a similar composite material for protective gear and other items. The inner layer of the shell is made of a type of calcium carbonate, common in mollusk shells and some corals. The middle layer of the shell is regular snail shell material, organic periostracum, [perry-OSS-trickum] which helps dissipate heat as well as pressure from squeezing attacks, like from crab claws. And the outer layer, of course, is iron sulfides like pyrite and greigite. Oh, and since greigite is magnetic, the snails stick to magnets.

Unfortunately, the scaly-foot gastropod is endangered due to deep-sea mining around its small, fragile habitat. Hopefully conservationists can get laws passed to protect the thermal vents and all the animals that live around them.

The scaly-foot gastropod is the only animal known that incorporates iron sulfide into its skeleton or exoskeleton, although our next indestructible animal, the diabolical ironclad beetle, has iron in its name.

The diabolical ironclad beetle lives in western North America, especially in dry areas. It grows up to an inch long, or 25 mm, and is a dull black or dark gray in color with bumps and ridges that make it look like a piece of tree bark. Since it lives on trees, that’s not a coincidence. It spends most of its time eating fungus that grows on and under tree bark.

Like a lot of beetles, it’s flattened in shape. This helps it slide under tree bark and helps it keep a low profile to avoid predators like birds and lizards. But if a predator does grab it and try to crunch it up to eat, the diabolical ironclad beetle is un-crunchable. Its exoskeleton is so tough that it can withstand being run over by a car. When researchers want to mount a dead beetle to display, they can’t just stick a pin through the exoskeleton. It bends pins, even strong steel ones. They have to get a tiny drill to make a hole in the exoskeleton first.

The beetle’s exoskeleton is so strong because of the way it’s constructed. In a late 2020 article in Nature, a team studying the beetle discovered that the exoskeleton is made up of multiple layers that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Each layer contains twisted fibers made of proteins that help distribute weight evenly across the beetle’s body and stop potential cracking. At the same time, the arrangement of the exoskeleton’s sections allows for enough give to make it just flexible enough to keep from cracking under extreme pressure. Of course, this means the beetle can’t fly because its wing covers can’t move, but if it falls from a tree it doesn’t need to worry about hurting itself.

Engineers are studying the beetle to see if they can adapt the same type of structures to make airplanes and cars safer.

Nicholas also suggested the limpet, another mollusk. It’s a type of snail but it doesn’t look like the scaly-foot gastropod or like most other snails. Its shell is shaped like a little cone with ridges that run from the cone’s tip to the bottom, sort of like a tiny ice-cream cone that you don’t want to eat. There are lots of species and while a few live in fresh water, most live in the ocean. The limpets we’re talking about today are those in the family Patellidae.

If you think about a typical snail, whose body is mostly protected by a shell and who moves around on a wide flat part of its body called a foot, you’ll understand how the limpet is a snail even though it looks so different superficially. The conical shell protects the body, and the limpet does indeed move around on a so-called foot, gliding along very slowly on a thin layer of mucus.

The limpet lives on rocks in the intertidal zone and is famous for being able to stick to a rock incredibly tightly. It has to be able to do so because otherwise it would get washed off its rock by waves, plus it needs to be safe when the tide is out and its rock is above water. The limpet makes a little dimple in the rock that exactly matches its shell, called a home scar, and as the tide goes out the limpet returns to its home scar, seals the edges of its shell tight to the rock, and waits for the water to return. It traps water inside its shell so its gills won’t dry out while it waits. If the rock is too hard for it to grind down to match its shell, it grinds the edges of its shell to match the rock. It makes its home scar by rubbing its shell against one spot in the rock until both are perfectly matched.

The limpet mostly eats algae. It has a tiny mouth above its foot and in the mouth is a teensy tongue-like structure called a radula, which is studded with very hard teeth. It uses the radula to rasp algae off of the rocks. Other snails do this too, but the limpet has much harder teeth than other snails. Much, much harder teeth. In fact, the teeth of some limpet species may be the hardest natural material ever studied.

The teeth are mostly chitin, a hard material that’s common in invertebrates, but the surface is coated with goethite [GO-thite] nanofibers. Goethite is a type of of iron, so while the limpet does have iron teeth, it still doesn’t topple the scaly-foot gastropod as the only animal known with iron in its skeleton. Not only does the goethite help make the teeth incredibly strong, which is good for an animal that is scraping those teeth over rocks constantly, the dense chitin fibers in the teeth make them resistant to cracking.

The limpet replaces its teeth all the time. They grow on a sort of conveyer belt and move forward until the teeth in front, at the business end of the radula, are ready to use. It takes about two days for a new tooth to fully form and move to the end of the radula, where it’s quickly worn down and drops off.

Meanwhile, even though the limpet’s shell doesn’t contain any iron, its shape and the limpet’s strong foot muscles mean that once a limpet is stuck to its rock, it’s incredibly hard to remove it. It just sits there being more or less impervious to predation. Humans eat them, although they have to be cooked thoroughly because they’re tough otherwise, naturally.

Finally, one animal that Nicholas suggested is probably the royalty of indestructible animals, the water bear or tardigrade. Because we talked about it recently, in episode 234, I won’t go over it again. I’ll just leave you with an interesting note that I missed when researching that episode.

In April of 2019, an Israeli spacecraft was launched that had dormant tardigrades onboard as part of an experiment about tardigrades in space. There were no people onboard, fortunately, because the craft actually crashed on the moon instead of landing properly. The ship was destroyed but the case where the tardigrades were stored appears to be intact.

It’s not exactly easy to run up to the moon and check on the tardigrades, so we don’t know if they survived the crash landing. Studies since then suggest they probably didn’t, but until we can actually land on the moon and send a rover or an astronaut out to check, we don’t know for sure. Tardigrades can survive incredibly cold, dry conditions while dormant. It’s not exactly the experiment researchers intended, but it’s definitely an interesting one.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 234: Sun Bears, Water Bears

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Thanks to Enzo and Lux for their suggestions! Let’s learn about the sun bear and the water bear this week!

Sun bear just chillin:

Sun bears got long tongues:

The water bear, AKA tardigrade, is not actually a bear. For one thing, it has twice the number of legs as bears have:

Show transcript:

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

It’s summer in the northern hemisphere, which means hot weather and sunshine and, if you’re lucky, a trip to the lake or ocean. To celebrate summertime, let’s talk about two animals suggested by Enzo and his sister Lux. They wanted to hear about the sun bear and the water bear. Get it? Sun and water?

Enzo’s suggestion is the sun bear, which we talked about a little bit way back in episode 76, but which is a fascinating animal that deserves a lot more attention.

The sun bear lives in southeast Asia in tropical forests and is most closely related to the black bear. It has silky black fur, although some are gray or reddish, and a roughly U-shaped patch of fur on its chest that varies in color from gold to almost white to reddish-orange. Its muzzle is short and is lighter in color than the rest of its face, usually gray. It has small ears too. It’s the world’s smallest bear, only around three feet long from head to tail, or 150 cm, and four feet tall when standing on its hind legs, or 1.2 meters. Researchers think its chest spot acts as a threat display. When a sun bear stands on its hind legs, the chest spot is really obvious, which may warn potential predators away. Even so, tigers and leopards will attack and eat sun bears.

The sun bear spends a lot of time in trees, more than any other bear. It has long claws that it uses for climbing and to tear open logs to get at insect larvae. It eats a lot of termites and especially loves honey, which it licks from the hive with its long tongue–up to 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It also eats a lot of plant material, especially fruit and acorns. It will catch and eat birds and small animals, or sometimes larger animals like deer, but it mostly eats insects and fruit.

The female sun bear makes her den in a hollow tree to give birth. She has one or two cubs at a time, and like other bear cubs they’re born extremely small and with their eyes and ears sealed shut. This is the case with animals like dogs and cats too, but newborn bears are tiny compared to how big the mother bear is. The eyes and ears continue developing after the cub is born, but it’s a few months before it can see and hear properly. A cub remains with its mother for almost three years.

Other than mothers and babies, the sun bear is solitary. Adults don’t typically interact except to mate, although adult sun bears kept in captivity will play together. A 2019 study of sun bears came to a surprising conclusion that they communicate with each other by mimicking facial expressions. This is something humans do all the time, of course, and apes do too. Dogs also mimic facial expressions. Humans, apes, and dogs are all intensely social animals, so researchers have always assumed that the mimicking of facial expressions is important because of that sociability. I mean, that just makes sense. If you see a friend approaching and they have a big smile on their face, naturally you’re going to smile too. But here are these solitary bears with facial communication just as well-developed as in apes. Researchers think it may be a trait that’s so important to mammals as a whole that it develops even in species that don’t spend a lot of time interacting.

The sun bear is threatened by habitat loss and hunting, but it does well in captivity and is popular in zoos. Conservation efforts are in place to protect the sun bear in the wild as well as continue a healthy captive breeding program around the world.

Lux wanted to hear about the water bear, which is also called the tardigrade or the moss piglet. I can’t believe we haven’t covered the tardigrade before—we even have one in our new logo! Patrons may remember parts of this section from a Patreon bonus episode from 2017, but I’ve updated it a lot.

The water bear isn’t a bear at all but a tiny eight-legged animal that barely ever grows larger than 1.5 millimeters. Some species are microscopic. Pictures of the water bear are taken with an electron microscope because otherwise they just look like a teensy little dot.

There are about 1,300 known species of water bear and they all look pretty similar. It looks for all the world like a plump eight-legged stuffed animal made out of couch upholstery. It uses six of its fat little legs for walking and the hind two to cling to the moss and other plant material where it lives. Each leg has four to eight long hooked claws. It has a tubular mouth that looks a little like a pig’s snout or a bear’s snout.

An extremophile is an organism adapted to live in a particular environment that’s considered extreme, like undersea volcanic vents or inside rocks deep below the ocean floor. Tardigrades aren’t technically extremophiles, but they are incredibly tough. Researchers have found tardigrades in environments such as the gloppy ooze at the bottom of the ocean to the icy peaks of the Himalayas. It can survive massive amounts of radiation, dehydration for up to five years, pressures even more intense than at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, temperatures as low as -450 Fahrenheit, or -270 Celsius, heat up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, or 150 Celsius, and even outer space. It’s survived on Earth for at least half a billion years. Mostly, though, it just lives in moss.

One thing to remember is that different species of tardigrade are good at withstanding different extreme environments. Not every tardigrade is able to do everything we just talked about. They’re tough, but they’re not invulnerable. Many species can withstand incredible heat, but only for half an hour or less. Long-term temperature increases, even if only a little warmer than it’s used to, can cause the tardigrade to die.

Most species of tardigrade eat plant material or bacteria, but a few eat smaller species of tardigrade. It has no lungs since it just absorbs air directly into its body by gas exchange. It has a teeny brain, teeny eyes, and teeny sensory bristles on its body. Its legs have no joints. Its tubular mouth contains tube-like structures called stylets that are secreted from glands on either side of the mouth. Every time the tardigrade molts its cuticle, or body covering, it loses the stylets too and has to regrow them. In some species, the only time the tardigrade poops is when it molts. The poop is left behind in the molted cuticle.

The tardigrade’s success is largely due to its ability to suspend its metabolism, during which time the water in its body is replaced with a type of protein that protects its cells from damage. It retracts its legs and rearranges its internal organs so it can curl up into a teeny barrel shape, at which point it’s called a tun. It needs a moist environment, and if its environment dries out too much, the water bear will automatically go into this suspended state, called cryptobiosis.

The tardigrade’s DNA gets fractured during dehydration but it’s incredibly successful at repairing its DNA upon rehydration, which explains a big part of its success. In 2016, Japanese researchers sequenced the genome of the species of tardigrade that best resists radiation. In the process, they discovered a new protein in the tardigrade’s genome, which they named DSUP, short for damage suppressor. Even more interesting, when cultured human cells were given the ability to create DSUP, after exposure to X-rays, they showed half the DNA damage that non-DSUP cells showed.

Tests in 2007 and 2011 that exposed tardigrades to outer space led to some speculation that tardigrades might actually be from outer space, and that they, or organisms that gave rise to them, might have hitched a ride on a comet or some other heavenly body and ended up on earth. But this isn’t actually the case, since genetic studies show that tardigrades fit neatly into what we know of animal development and evolution.

The tardigrade is probably most closely related to arthropods, like insects and spiders. Their closest relatives were probably lobopodians, extinct wormlike organisms with stubby legs. The famous Hallucigenia creature is a lobopodian, which we talked about in episode 69 about the Cambrian explosion. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the tardigrade’s ancestry, since we have so few fossilized water bears, but many researchers think their oldest ancestors were probably much bigger than the microscopic or nearly microscopic living animals. In other words, maybe once there were water bears you could pick up and hug. Well, they probably weren’t that big, but I like to imagine it. I think that if you hugged a water bear too hard, it would make this noise: [little prrrt sound]

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 that way, and don’t forget to join our mailing list. There’s a link in the show notes.

Thanks for listening!