Strange Animals Podcast

Further reading: Beavers Have Metal Teeth Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s find out about some animals that incorporate metal into their bodies in more than just trace amounts. We’ll start with the scaly-foot gastropod, a deep-sea snail. It lives around hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, about 1 and ¾ miles below the surface, or about 2800 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, 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, 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. The scaly-foot gastropod is the only animal known that incorporates iron sulfide into its skeleton, but other animals use metals in their teeth. Some spiders have tiny amounts of zinc in the tips of their fangs. Some mollusks have small amounts of iron in the teeth of their radulas—you know, the tongue-like structure used to scrape food off rocks. The teeth of the limpet, a type of mollusk, may be one of the strongest structures in the world. It contains goethite nanofibers, and goethite is a type of iron. The teeth of beavers and some other rodents contain iron in the enamel coating. This makes the teeth much harder, although the amount of iron is quite small and unstructured. Most other mammals, including humans, have magnesium in tooth enamel instead of iron. The iron content makes the teeth look orange because of rust. Bloodworms are disgusting horrible worms that my uncle used to fish with when we visited the beach when I was a kid. I was scared of the bloodworms, which irritated my uncle, because I was very vocal about hating the worms and he wasn’t catching any fish with them. Bloodworms live in the sand or silt of shallow water, usually in the ocean but since they can tolerate low salt levels, they may also live farther inland in canals and inlets. Some species can grow nearly 15 inches long, or 37 cm. They’re usually pink or reddish in color with bristles along the body and four little antennae on the head. But the reason I’m talking about them here is that their teeth are reinforced with copper that makes them nearly as hard as teeth coated with enamel. Its jaw also contains copper ions. Copper is toxic to most animals, which may be the source of the bloodworm’s venom. That’s right: horrible worms are also venomous. Another invertebrate that incorporates metal in its body is the parasitic fig wasp. Fig wasps are interesting and there are a lot of them. Figs are pollinated by fig wasps that are not parasitic. The fig flower has a bulb at its base containing a tiny hole. The pollinating fig wasp crawls into the hole, pollinating the flower at the same time, and lays her eggs inside the bulb. She then dies. As the fig developes, the wasp eggs hatch into larvae and then develop into adult wasps. Males mate with females, then chew a hole out of the fig, but only the female wasps have wings, so the males remain and die. As the fig ripens, it actually digests the dead wasps, and—and this is important to those of us who really like figs—leaves no bits of dead wasp inside the fig. So that’s how the pollinating fig wasps work. It’s a symbiotic relationship between the fig tree and the wasp. But the parasitic fig wasp is different. The female has a long ovipositor, which it uses to drill into developing figs and into the pollinating fig wasp larvae. When its eggs hatch, they eat the larva alive. This is yet another re

Is there life on Europa? We take a look at Greenland and Antarctica to find out more about life on Jupiter’s icy moon. Further reading: Life on Venus claim faces strongest challenge yet Stanford researchers’ explanation for formation of abundant features on Europa bodes well for search for extraterrestrial life Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Today we’re going to learn about the potential of life on Europa, a moon of Jupiter! To do that we’ll need to look at some extreme life on Earth too. Back in September 2020, we talked about potential signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus, which excited me a whole lot. As a follow-up to that episode, further studies suggest that signs of phosphine detected in Venus’s atmosphere, which might be produced by life, may actually just be sulfur dioxide (not a sign of life). But while it’s not looking likely that phosphine is actually found in Venus’s atmosphere, so far no studies can completely rule it out. So, maybe. Venus isn’t the only part of our solar system where life might exist outside of Earth, though. Astronomers have been speculating about Europa for a long time. The planet Jupiter is a gas giant that has at least 80 moons, but Europa is the one that’s closest to the planet. It’s only a little bit smaller than our own moon. Europa has an atmosphere, mostly made up of oxygen but so thin that if you could magically appear on the moon, you wouldn’t be able to breathe. Also, you would freeze to death almost immediately. It’s a dense moon, so astronomers think it’s probably mostly made up of silicate rock, which is what Earth is mostly made up of, along with Mars, Venus, Mercury, and a lot of moons. If you’ve ever looked at our moon through a telescope or binoculars, you know it has lots of impact craters on its surface caused by asteroid strikes in the past. Europa doesn’t have very many craters—in fact, its surface is incredibly smooth except for what look like cracks all over it. It’s mostly pale in color, but the cracks are reddish-orange or brown. The cause of the cracks has been a mystery ever since astronomers got the first good look at Europa. Many astronomers think these cracks are where warm material from below the surface erupted through the crust, sort of like what happens where lava oozes up on Earth and forms oceanic ridges. But on Europa, the material breaking through the crust isn’t lava, it’s ice—but ice that isn’t as cold as the surface ice. You know you’re on a cold, cold moon when ice that’s close to freezing instead of way below freezing can act like lava. The surface of Europa is about 110 kelvin at the equator and even colder at the poles. That’s -260 F or -160 C. The exciting thing is that researchers are pretty sure the surface of Europa is icy but that the crust lies over a deep saltwater ocean that covers the entire moon. Yes, an ocean! As Europa orbits Jupiter, the planet’s gravity pulls at the moon, while the smaller gravity fields of the other nearest moons also pull on Europa in other directions. This push and pull causes tides that help warm the ocean and keep it from freezing solid. The brown coloration in the moon’s cracks may be due to mineral salts from the water that get leached up through the cracks after warm ice breaks through, assuming that’s what is actually happening to cause the cracks. Astronomers even have images of Europa taken by space probes that show what look like water plumes erupting through the surface and shooting up an estimated 120 miles high, or 200 km. But new studies suggest that the water plumes might not be from the ocean. They might be from pockets of water that form within the crust itself, which grow larger until they burst out through the crust. This is even more exciting when it comes to potential life on the moon, because it suggests that the crust isn’t just a big block of ice. It’s a dynamic system that might harbor life instead of all potential life on Europa being restricted to the ocean. But to learn more about Europa, we have to come back to Earth and examine the island of Greenland. Most of Greenland is covered with a permanent ice sheet like the ones found in Antarctica, but it’s a lot easier to study than Antarctica. One feature seen in the ice sheet is something called a double ridge, shaped sort of like a capital letter M. It’s caused when the ice fractures around pressurized water that forms inside the ice sheet and refreezes. This is caused when water from streams and lakes on the surface finds its way into the ice. The double ridge can look like a crack. New pictures of the cracks on Europa’s surface look just like Greenland’s double ridges, but much bigger. My explanation of all this is extremely clumsy, because this is a really complex mechanism. Researchers only figured it out because some of the team had been studying Greenland’s double ridges for a completely different project, and noticed the similarities. There’s a link i

It’s Albert the Albanerpetontid! Further reading: Earliest example of a rapid-fire tongue found in ‘weird and wonderful’ extinct amphibians Amphibian skullllll: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s learn about a long-extinct amphibian that looked a lot like a reptile. It’s a family of animals called Albanerpetontidae. That’s a mouthful, so instead of talking about Albanerpetontids, I’ll talk about all the various species as though they were not only a single species, but a single individual named Albert. Albert first appears in the middle Jurassic, around 165 million years ago, and disappears from the fossil record around 2 million years ago. That means it survived the extinction event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and many other animals, which is also true for many other amphibians. But Albert wasn’t like the amphibians we have around today. It belonged to its own order, Allocaudata. There’s a lot of confusion in general as to how amphibians are related to each other and how closely related, for instance, the frogs and the salamanders actually are. The same is true for Albert. What we do know is that Albert was definitely an amphibian, but it was also really different in many respects from modern amphibians. That’s weird, because only two million years ago Albert was still around and seems to have been fairly common. Albert fossils have been found in Europe, North America, northern Africa, and parts of Asia. Two million years isn’t all that long when you’re talking about big differences between related animal groups. But although Albert appears in the fossil record at about the same time as other amphibians, it seems to have evolved very differently in many ways. Albert looked like a salamander and was originally classified as a salamander. It was small, its body was slender and elongated, its legs were short, and it had a long tail. It had tiny teeth and seemed to prefer wet environments, which makes sense when you’re talking about an amphibian. But Albert had a lot of traits not found in other amphibians, such as scales. The scales were more fish-like than reptilian and were embedded in Albert’s skin like osteoderms, especially concentrated on the head. These scales have caused confusion for a whole lot of scientists. In 2016, for instance, scientists identified an unusual lizard found fossilized in amber as a 99-million-year-old chameleon. That’s because it had a weird bone in its jaw shaped like a little rod, which looked like a bone found in the modern chameleon’s tongue. It turns out that the lizard was no lizard at all but our friend Albert, an amphibian. The chameleon is a reptile and not related to Albert, but they share the same type of elongated tongue bone. When the skull of a second amber specimen was discovered that was even better preserved, including a tongue pad and other soft tissue, scientists were able to evaluate whether Albert used its tongue the same way that a chameleon does. One trait found in Albert skulls that scientists had long been confused about was how robust and large its skull was. Some scientists suggested that it used its big head to dig burrows, ramming its head into soft mud until it created a hole big enough to hide in. But it also had big eyes, which isn’t typical in an animal that burrows. Scientists now think that Albert’s head was so strong because it needed to withstand the forces of its own tongue. It could probably shoot its tongue out incredibly fast like a chameleon, much faster even than a frog. It’s referred to as a projectile tongue, ballistic tongue, rapid-fire tongue, or boomerang tongue. The muscles that power a chameleon’s tongue are specialized to store energy when it contracts, then launch the tongue out like someone releasing a stretched-out rubber band. Albert’s similar ability evolved separately from the chameleon’s, and much earlier. It’s also possible that Albert didn’t undergo a larval stage the way most other amphibians do. Juvenile specimens look like miniature adults, which is unusual in amphibians but ordinary in reptiles. Albert also had lizard-like claws. But we know Albert wasn’t a reptile, and in fact it may have demonstrated one of the most amphibian traits known, breathing through its skin. Many modern salamanders don’t have lungs or gills at all as adults, and instead absorb oxygen directly through the skin, called cutaneous respiration. The specialized bone in Albert’s jaw would have made it hard to breathe in the ordinary way, and we know it didn’t have gills. The big question is why Albert went extinct when other amphibians are doing just fine. We don’t have an answer for that, or not yet. While Albert did seem to be quite successful, fossils of tiny, delicate animals like two-centimeter-long amphibians are rare, and that means we don’t have the full picture of what happened two million years ago that drove Albert to extinction. For that matter, some scien

Further reading: Identifying the beasts in Caesar’s forest Reindeer: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. After the glaciers retreated from Europe at the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, forests grew wherever there was enough soil to support a tree. As these new forests spread, they joined forests that had survived the glaciations. By the time ancient Romans were writing about the things they encountered while exploring western Europe, around 2,000 years ago, the forest stretched across much of the continent and was considered a wild, dangerous place. They called it the Hercynian [her-SIN-ian] forest and it was supposed to be full of peculiar animals. An account of the forest appears in the book Commentarii del Bello Gallico, the first edition of which was published just over 2,000 years ago in 49 BCE. It was written by Julius Caesar, or at least he was involved in it even if he didn’t actually write it personally, since it was about his military campaigns. In one section of the book he discusses the Hercynian forest and three remarkable animals that lived in it. The first was called the uri, which were supposed to look like bulls but were almost the size of elephants, and were incredibly aggressive. This is probably the same animal often called the aurochs, which we talked about in episode 58. The aurochs was probably the wild ancestor of the domesticated cow and could stand almost six feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters. It had already gone extinct in most places 500 years before Caesar wrote his book, but it still lived in parts of Europe. The second animal is a lot harder to identify. The alces looked like a big goat that either didn’t have horns or had very short ones, but its legs didn’t have joints. If an alces fell over, it couldn’t get up again. Caesar explained that hunters used this to their advantage. Because the alces couldn’t lie down at night, it would sleep by propping itself against a tree. The hunters would note which tree an alces preferred, and during the day they’d cut a notch in the trunk. When the alces leaned against it at night to sleep, the tree would topple over, taking the animal with it. The waiting hunters would then be able to just stroll up and kill the alces. Naturally, this story doesn’t make any sense. All tetrapods have jointed legs. But the story of an animal without joints in its legs crops up in various stories from around this time, including the part where hunters cut a notch in a tree trunk to knock the animal over. It’s a story once told about the elephant and the Eurasian elk, among others, and the alces was probably based on the Eurasian elk. That’s the Eurasian population of the animal called the moose in North America. Because the story specifies that the alces either didn’t have horns or had very small ones, it’s possible that Caesar based his story on the female elk, which doesn’t have antlers. Incidentally, we’re so certain that the alces was the same animal as the Eurasian elk that its scientific name is actually Alces alces. Finally, the Hercynian deer was likewise large and had a single horn. A translation of the passage states: “There is an ox with the shape of a deer; projecting out of its forehead, in the middle, between the ears, is a single horn, which is both longer and more upright than those horns we are used to seeing.” Other sources that talk about this animal also say that the horn branched at the end, and Caesar notes that both males and females had these horns. This gives us a big clue as to what animal might have inspired the account. Unlike most deer, both male and female reindeer have antlers. Unlike caribou, the North American reindeer species, the European reindeer often has relatively long and straight main shafts on its antlers that then enlarge at the end in what’s called a palmate structure. That basically means it’s shaped like a hand. But reindeer have two antlers, not one. It’s possible that the story of the Hercynian deer was inspired by the unicorn legend, which was based on the rhinoceros. It might also have been inspired by Caesar sighting a reindeer that had dropped one antler but hadn’t yet lost the other one, since like other deer, reindeer shed their antlers and regrow them every year. The reason Caesar wrote about the animals of the Hercynian forest in the first place was to underline how strange and uncivilized the people living in the area were. The people in question are what today we would call Germans. Caesar stresses that all these animals are ones never seen anywhere else, and he might easily have added exotic details from other fabulous animals to make these animals seem extra weird. These days most of the Hercynian forest is long gone, chopped down for people to turn into farmland and towns. While the Eurasian elk and the reindeer are still around, they no longer live as far south as Germany. The last aurochs went extinct in 1627 in Poland. But the G

This week let’s look at the work of a really astonishing number of spiders! Further reading: Megaweb! Some of the webs: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Baltimore, Maryland is a city in the northeastern United States, in North America, with a population of 2.8 million people. In 1993 a new wastewater treatment plant was built called the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant, which filters water through big sand beds to trap any particles remaining in it after it’s been filtered and treated in other facilities. The plant consists of 48 big sand beds with a corridor down the middle, and in order to keep the sand beds as clean as possible, the whole area has a big metal roof over it held up with steel columns. It doesn’t have walls, though, just a roof. The whole thing covers four acres, or 1.6 hectares, which I think is a metric term. It’s just over 16,000 square meters. It’s big, in other words, and the roof is pretty tall, up to 24 feet high over the walkway, or 7.5 meters. Obviously, I’m telling you about this place in detail because of an animal that got into the water treatment plant and caused a lot of alarm. It wasn’t a big animal like a bear, though. It wasn’t even a dangerous animal. It was, in fact, a really small animal that’s mostly harmless to humans, various species of orbweaver spider. The problem wasn’t the spider itself but just how many spiders were in the water treatment plant. The plant had always had problems with lots of orbweavers, but in 2009 there were so many spiders that the workers were worried for their safety. In late October 2009, the managers called for help about “an extreme spider situation.” The problem was way beyond anything that an ordinary pest control business could deal with, so the city put together a team of arachnologists, entomologists, and experts in urban pest control to figure out the best course of action. The team didn’t just charge in, say, “Wow, that’s a lot of spiders, let’s hose the whole place down.” They were scientists and studied the situation methodically. They consulted the architectural plans of the plant to determine just how much volume was available under the roof, they took samples of the webs and stored them for study, they took over 300 photos, and basically they got as much data as they could. There were so many spiders that their webs blended together into thick mats that filled almost every space the spiders could reach. These cobweb mats were attached to the rafters, the walkways, everywhere, with the older mats starting to detach and fray. Light fixtures hung down from the tallest point of the roof that were 8 feet long, or 2.44 meters, and there were so many webs attached to them that they were pulled out of alignment. And all the webs were filled with spiders. The spiders in the web samples were removed and preserved, then examined to see what species they belonged to. The team identified specimens from nine genera in six families, but most of the spiders caught were the species Tetragnatha guatemalensis. This is a type of long-jawed orbweaver native to North and Central America. Females are much larger than males, with a legspan up to 2 inches across, or about 5 cm. Long-jawed orbweavers have long, thin bodies, and one of the ways it hides is by stretching out on a blade of grass or a twig with its legs out straight. It especially likes marshy areas, such as in the rafters above 48 giant sand beds full of water. A conservative estimate of the number of spiders in the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in the first week of November, 2009 was 107 million. 107 million spiders! Since a big percentage of the spiders were newly hatched, there were probably a lot more in the facility than the scientists estimated from the samples they took, so there might easily have been several hundred million spiders total. The sheets of webbing in the ceiling covered an estimated 2 acres total, or about 8,000 square meters, while the cloud-like masses of webbing in other areas was about half that size and would have filled 23 railroad boxcars. The really interesting thing is that orbweaver spiders are usually solitary. Spiders may build webs near each other, but not usually like this. But these orbweavers lived in a place protected from wind and weather, and close to water, which attracted lots of midges and other small insects, and the presence of humans probably kept a lot of potential spider predators away, like birds. Life was good for these spiders and the scientists observed that they weren’t acting aggressively to each other, even when they were of different species. After studying the water treatment plant and its spiders, the team came to several conclusions. Since the spiders are harmless to humans, and are doing a really good job controlling the midge population, the scientists decided that pest control was not necessary and would even be a bad idea since the pesticides would inevitably get

DRAMA! Bird drama! Here are some further-reading links if you want to verify that I’m not vilifying anyone: Buff-breasted Buttonquail: An image claimed to be of this species revealed Buff-breasted Buttonquail: Smoke & Mirrors A review of specimens of Buff-breasted Button-quail Turnix olivii suggests serious concern for its conservation outlook A painted button quail: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in episode 136 we talked about the button quail, because that episode was about tiny animals and the button quail is really tiny. But let’s revisit the button quail this month, because we have a mystery associated with a particular species of button quail. Button quails generally live in grasslands and are actually more closely related to shore and ocean birds like sandpipers and gulls than to actual quails, but it’s not very closely related to any other living birds. It can fly but it mostly doesn’t. Instead it depends on its coloring to hide it in the grass where it lives. It’s mostly brown with darker and lighter speckled markings, relatively large feet, and a short little tail. It eats seeds and insects along with other small invertebrates. The button quail is especially interesting because the female is more brightly colored than the male, although not by much. In some species the female may have bright white markings, while in others her speckled markings are crisper than the males. The female is the one who calls to attract a male and who defends her territory from other females. The female even has a special bulb in her throat that she can inflate to make a loud booming call. The male incubates the eggs and takes care of the chicks when they hatch. Baby button quails are fuzzy and active like domestic chicken babies but they’re only about the size of a bumblebee. In many species, as soon as the female has laid her eggs, she leaves them and the male and goes on to attract another male for her next clutch of eggs. The various species of button quail live in different areas, including Africa, Asia, and Australia. The species we’re talking about today is the buff-breasted button quail, which is native to one small area of Queensland, Australia. It grows about 9 inches long, or 23 cm, which is big for a button quail, most of which are closer to the size of sparrows, and it’s reddish-brown with darker and lighter speckles. It’s critically endangered due to habitat loss and introduced animals like cats and cattle. There are only an estimated 50 individuals alive today. But that’s only an estimate, because no one has actually for sure seen a buff-breasted button quail since 1922. Also, I’m going to call it the BBBQ from now on because that name is hard to say. The 1922 specimen was shot by a naturalist who was collecting specimens for a museum, which was regrettably common at the time and led to a lot of endangered species being driven to extinction. The bird was already rare in 1922 and that was the last anyone saw of it until 1985, when someone reported seeing one. People flocked to the area in hopes of spotting it, but while there were lots of sightings, no one got a good picture of a BBBQ. All the pictures, and all the recordings of its calls, turned out to be of another species of button quail, a very similar bird called the painted button quail. It’s been 100 years since the bird was last seen, so while we have lots of museum specimens, we don’t have any modern sightings. That means two things. Either the buff-breasted button quail is probably extinct…or it never actually existed in the first place. There are two other species of button quail that live in the same areas where the BBBQ is found, the painted button quail and the brown quail. They’re smaller but otherwise look very similar, especially the painted button quail. Maybe people were mistaking larger individuals of painted button quails as a different species. In 2018, a team of scientists from the University of Queensland conducted a search for the BBBQ. All they found were painted button quails. But they discovered something surprising that had never been documented before. During the breeding season, the female painted button quail’s feathers are much more reddish-brown, while the rest of the year the feathers on her back are more gray-brown. The team also studied as many BBBQ skins as they could track down from museums, where they learned something else surprising. It turns out that it’s not any larger than the painted button quail, which grows up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm. So the birds are the same size and during part of the year, they have almost identical plumage. Hmm. That doesn’t mean the buff-breasted button quail never existed. One very distinctive difference between the painted and the buff-breasted species is eye color, with the former having red eyes and the latter having yellow. As far as I know a genetic study hasn’t been carried out on the museum specimens, but it’s lik

This week let’s learn about some blue frogs! Further reading: Scientists make chance discovery of rare blue skin mutation in Kimberley magnificent tree frog White’s True-Blue Green Tree Frog Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. When most of us draw a frog, we reach for the green markers, because most frogs are green. That’s true of the magnificent tree frog, also called the splendid tree frog, which is fairly common in the Kimberley region of western Australia. It grows just over 4 inches long, snout to vent, or about 10 and a half cm, and lives in rocky areas. It spends the day hiding in rock crevices, holes in trees, or sometimes in people’s houses, and it comes out at night to hunt for insects and other small invertebrates. From the name, you might imagine that this is an especially pretty frog, and it is. It’s mostly bright green on top and yellow to white underneath, and it has tiny yellow spots on its head and back. It looks like it has an olive green cap on its head, but that’s actually a large parotoid gland, a skin gland common in frogs and toads that secretes neurotoxins. Most frogs don’t have a parotoid gland at all, and in ones that do you typically will barely notice it, but the magnificent tree frog’s covers the entire top of its head almost to its nostrils and down onto its back. The skin color of a frog depends on its chemical makeup. Melanophores make black and brown colors, xanthophores make yellow. Blue is different, since it’s not a color that’s actually found in skin pigments. Instead, a green frog’s skin contains iridophores that reflect blue light waves, the same way a bird’s feathers show blue. The combination of yellow and blue makes green, and the addition of melanophore pigments determine how dark or bright the green is. In July of 2024, two land managers were working in the Charnley River-Artesian Range Wildlife Sanctuary. They were in a workshop when one of them noticed a magnificent tree frog sitting on a bench, not that unusual of an occurrence–except that this frog wasn’t green. It was blue! The condition is called axanthism, where the yellow pigments in the frog’s skin don’t show up the way they should. Most of them time axanthism in frogs means the animal has little patches of blue or bluish coloration, but this specific frog was blue just about everywhere it should have been green. Its parotoid gland was still olive green and it had yellow on its feet, but mainly it was a very attractive dark blue. The land managers were stunned. They took photos and sent them to pretty much everyone, and frog experts and ecologists hurried to examine the blue frog. But they decided not to keep the frog in captivity. It was released back into the wild to live out its blue froggy life normally. Some frogs are naturally blue, like some poison dart frogs of South America. The blue poison dart frog’s legs are dark blue and its body a lighter blue with black spots. It grows less than two inches long, or about 4.5 cm. Poison dart frogs collect toxins in their bodies from some of the toxic insects they eat, and the bright coloration signals to predators that this frog will make you really sick if you eat it. Axanthism is rare but not all that uncommon in frogs. About the same time that the blue magnificent tree frog was hopping into the workshop in Australia, two little girls playing around a pond in Nova Scotia, Canada found a teal-blue frog. Ironically, the frog is actually called the green frog and it’s ordinarily a dark olive-green all over. The girls named the frog Bluey and released it back into the pond. Another blue green frog was found in New Hampshire, in the United States, also in July 2024. In June 2024 a forest ranger spotted a northern leopard frog in Washington state that had splotches of light blue on its head and back. In May of 2024 a light blue Japanese tree frog was found by a couple on a walk. The Australian green tree frog is closely related to the magnificent tree frog, although it doesn’t have a parotoid gland hat. It’s mostly green with a white or pale gray belly. It’s sometimes called the dumpy tree frog because it’s a little chonk. Actually, for a frog it’s a pretty big chonk, up to 4 and a half inches long, or over 11 cm. It’s also sometimes called White’s tree frog after John White, who described it in 1790. It was the first Australian frog that was ever scientifically described. But that leads us to a little mystery. John White named the frog Rana caerulea. Its current scientific name is Ranoidea caerulea. But “caerulea” refers to the color blue, not green, as in cerulean blue. John White collected the frog in 1788, preserved it in alcohol, and finally described it two years later. He refers to it in his writing as a blue frog and the illustration accompanying it shows frogs that are actually blue. But this frog is supposed to be green! The main suggestion for why a famously green frog was initially described as b

Further reading: Parallels for cetacean trap feeding and tread-water feeding in the historical record across two millennia Haggling over the Hafgufa Many renditions of the hafgufa/aspidochelone: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in the olden days, as much as 1700 years ago and probably more, up through the 14th century or so, various manuscripts about the natural world talked about a sea monster most people today have never heard of. In ancient Greek it was called aspidochelone, contracted to aspido in some translations, while in Old Norse it was called the hafgufa. But it seemed to be the same type of monster no matter who was writing about it. The animal was a fish, but it was enormous, big enough that it was sometimes mistaken for an island. When its jaws were open they were said to be as wide as the entrance to a fjord. A fjord is an inlet from the sea originally formed by glaciers scraping away at rocks, and then when the glaciers melted the sea filled the bottom of what was then a steep valley. I’m pretty sure the old stories were exaggerating about the sea monster’s mouth size. The sea monster ate little fish, but it caught them in a strange way. It would open its mouth very wide at the surface of the water and exude a smell that attracted fish, or in one account it would regurgitate a little food to attract the fish. Once there were lots of little fish within its huge mouth, it would close it jaws quickly and swallow them all. Generally, any sea monster that’s said to be mistaken for an island was inspired by whales, or sometimes by sea turtles. The hafgufa is actually included in an Old Norse poem that lists types of whales, and the aspidochelone was considered to be a type of whale even though the second part of its name refers to a sea turtle. So whatever this sea monster was, we can safely agree that it wasn’t a fish, it was a whale. Up until just a few centuries ago people thought whales were fish because of their shape, but we know now that they’re mammals adapted to marine life. But the hafgufa’s behavior is really weird and doesn’t seem like something a whale would do. We’ve talked about skim feeding before, where a baleen whale cruises along at the surface with its mouth held open, until it’s gathered enough food in its mouth and can swallow it all at once. But whales aren’t known to hold their mouths open at the surface of the water and just sit there while fish swim in. At least, they weren’t known to do this until 2011. In 2011, marine biologists studying humpback whales off Canada’s Vancouver Island in North America observed some of the whales catching herring and other small fish in an unusual way. The whales would remain stationary in the water, tails straight down with the head sticking up partly out of the water. A whale opened its mouth very wide and didn’t move until there were a lot of fish in its mouth, which it then swallowed. Soon after, another team of marine biologists studying Bryde’s whales in the Gulf of Thailand in South Asia observed the same activity when the whales were feeding on anchovies at the surface of the water. The term for this activity is called trap feeding or tread-water feeding, and at first the scientists thought it was a response to polluted water that had caused the fish to stay closer to the surface. But once the two teams of scientists compared notes, they realized that it didn’t appear to have anything to do with pollution. Instead, it’s probably a way to gather food in a low-energy way, especially when there isn’t a big concentration of fish in any particular spot, and when researchers remembered the story of the hafgufa, they realized they’d found the solution to that mystery sea monster. The only question was whether the accounts were accurate that the hafgufa emitted a smell or regurgitated food to attract fish. Further observation answered that question too, and it turns out that yes, the old stories were at least partially right. The smell has been compared to rotten cabbage, but it isn’t emitted by the whale on purpose. It’s a smell released when phytoplankton is eaten in large numbers, whether by fish or whales or something else, and it does attract other animals. As for the regurgitation, this is always something that happens to some degree when a baleen whale feeds. The whale fills its mouth with water that contains the fish and other small animals it eats, and it presses its huge tongue upwards to force the water through its baleen, which acts as a sieve. Whatever’s left in its mouth after the water is expelled, it swallows. But baleen is tough and fish are small and delicate in comparison. Often, fish and other small animals get squished to death against the baleen, and parts of them are expelled with the water. This creates a sort of yucky slurry that could be interpreted as a whale regurgitating food to attract more fish. The scientists think that fish are mainly attracted not to any sm

Further reading: I Can Has Mutant Larvae? 200-Year-Old ‘Monster Larva’ Mystery Solved ‘Snakeworm’ mystery yields species new to science Hearkening back to the hazelworm Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. A few weeks ago when I was researching big eels, I remembered the mystery eel larva we talked about back in episode 49, and that led me down a fun rabbit hole about other mystery larvae. Let’s start with that eel larva. Eel larvae can be extremely hard to tell apart, so as a catchall term every eel larva is called a leptocephalus. They’re flattened side to side, which is properly referred to as laterally compressed, and transparent, shaped roughly like a slender leaf, with a tiny head at the front. Depending on the species, an eel may remain in its larval form for more than a year, much longer than most other fish, and when it does metamorphose into its next life stage, it usually grows much longer than its larval form. For instance, the larvae of conger eels are only about 4 inches long, or 10 cm, while an adult conger can grow up to 10 feet long, or 3 meters. On January 31, 1930, a Danish research ship caught an eel larva 900 feet deep, or about 275 meters, off the coast of South Africa. But the larva was over 6 feet long, or 1.85 meters! Scientists boggled at the thought that this larva might grow into an eel more than 50 feet long, or 15 meters, raising the possibility that this unknown eel might be the basis of many sea serpent sightings. The larva was preserved and has been studied extensively. In 1958, a similar eel larva was caught off of New Zealand. It and the 1930 specimen were determined to belong to the same species, which was named Leptocephalus giganteus. In 1966, two more of the larvae were discovered in the stomach of a western Atlantic lancet fish. They were much smaller than the others, though—only four inches and eleven inches long, or 10 cm and 28 cm respectively. Other than size, they were pretty much identical to Leptocephalus giganteus. The ichthyologist who examined them determined that the larvae were probably not true eels at all, but larvae of a fish called the spiny eel. Deep-sea spiny eels look superficially like eels but aren’t closely related, and while they do have a larval form that resembles that of a true eel, they’re much different in one important way. Spiny eel larvae grow larger than the adults, then shrink a little when they develop into their mature form. The six-foot eel larva was actually a spiny eel larva that was close to metamorphosing into its adult form. Not everyone agrees that Leptocephalus giganteus is a spiny eel. Some think it belongs to the genus Coloconger, also called worm eels, which are true eels but which have large larvae that only grow to the same size as adults. But worm eels don’t grow much bigger than about two feet long, or 61 cm. If the mystery larvae does belong to the genus Coloconger, it’s probably a new species. Until scientists identify an adult Leptocephalus giganteus, we can’t know for sure. Another mystery larva is Planctosphaera pelagica, which sits all alone in its own class because the only thing it resembles are acorn worms, but scientists are pretty sure it isn’t the larva of an acorn worm. It’s not much to look at, since the larva is just a little barrel-shaped blob that grows about 25 mm across. This sounds small compared to the eel larva we just discussed, but it’s actually quite large compared to similar larvae. Acorn worm larvae are usually only about a millimeter long. Planctosphaera has been classified as a hemichordate, which are related to echinoderms but which show bilateral symmetry instead of radial symmetry. Hemichordates are also closely related to chordates, which include all vertebrates. They’re marine animals that resemble worms but aren’t worms, so it’s likely that Planctosphaera is also wormlike as an adult. Planctosphaera isn’t encountered very often by scientists. It has limited swimming abilities and mostly floats around near the surface of the open ocean, eating tiny food particles. One suggestion is that it might actually be the larva of a known species, but one where an occasional larva just never metamorphoses into an adult. It just grows and grows until something eats it. So far, attempts to sequence DNA from a Planctosphaera hasn’t succeeded and attempts to raise one to maturity in captivity hasn’t worked either. Some people have estimated that an adult Planctosphaera might be a type of acorn worm that can grow nine feet long, or 2.75 meters, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility. The largest species of acorn worm known is Balanoglossus gigas, which can grow almost six feet long, or 1.8 meters, and not only is it bioluminescent, its body contains a lot of iodine, so it smells like medicine. It lives in mucus-lined burrows on the sea floor. Another mystery larva is Facetotecta, which have been found in shallow areas in many oceans around the world. Unli

It’s the annual discoveries episode! Thanks to Stephen and Aryeh for their corrections and suggestions this week! Further reading: Salinella Salve: The Vanishing Creature That Defied Science for Over a Century Three new species of the genus Scutiger Baeticoniscus carmonaensis sp. nov. a new Isopod found in an underground aqueduct from the Roman period located in Southwest Spain (Crustacea, Isopoda, Trichoniscidae) A new species of supergiant Bathynomus Giant ‘Darth Vader’ sea bug discovered off the coast of Vietnam A New Species of easter egg weevil Bizarre ‘bone collector’ caterpillar discovered by UH scientists Researchers Discover ‘Death Ball’ Sponge and Dozens of Other Bizarre Deep-Sea Creatures in the Southern Ocean 1,500th Bat Species Discovered in Africa’s Equatorial Guinea Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about some animals discovered in 2025! We’ll also make this our corrections episode. This is the last new episode we’ll have until the end of August when we reach our 500th episode, but don’t worry, until then there will be rescheduled Patreon episodes every single week as usual. We’ll start with some corrections. Shortly after episode 452 was published in September, where we talked about the swamp wallaby and some other animals, Stephen emailed to point out that I’d made a major mistake! In that episode I said that not all animals called wallabies were actually members of the family Macropodidae, but that’s actually not the case. All wallabies are macropodids, but they aren’t all members of the same genus in that family. I corrected the episode but I wanted to mention it here too so no one is confused. Stephen also caught another mistake in episode 458, which is embarrassing. I mentioned that marsupials didn’t just live in Australia, they were found all over the world. That’s not actually the case! Marsupials are found in North and South America, Australia, New Guinea and nearby areas, and that’s it. They were once also found in what is now Asia, but that was millions of years ago. So I apologize to everyone in Africa, Asia, and Europe who were excited about finding out what their local marsupials are. You don’t have any, sorry. One update that Aryeh asked about specifically is an animal we talked about in episode 445, salinella. Aryeh emailed asking for more information if I could find any, because it’s such a fascinating mystery! I looked for some more recent findings, unfortunately without luck. I do have an article linked in the show notes that goes into detail about everything we covered in that episode, though, dated to mid-January 2026, and it’s a nice clear account. Now, let’s get into the 2025 discoveries! There are lots more animals that were discovered last year, but I just chose some that I thought were especially interesting. Mostly I chose ones that I thought had funny names. Let’s start with three new species of frog in the genus Scutiger. Species in this genus are called lazy toads and I couldn’t find out why. Maybe they don’t like to move around too much. Lazy toads live in mountains in some parts of Asia, and we don’t know very much about most of the 31 species described so far. Probably the most common lazy toad is the Sikkim lazy toad that lives along high altitude streams in the Himalaya Mountains. It’s mottled greenish-brown and yellowish in color with lots of warts, and while its feet have webbed toes, it doesn’t have webbed fingers on its little froggy hands. This is your reminder that every toad is a frog but not every frog is a toad. The Sikkim lazy toad grows about two and a half inches long, or about 65 mm, from nose to butt. It seems to be pretty average for a lazy toad. The three new species of lazy toad are found in Yunnan Province in China, in a mountainous region where several species of lazy toad were already known. Between 2021 and 2024, a team of scientists collected 27 lazy toads from various places, then carefully examined them to see if they were species already known to science. This included genetic analysis. The team compared their findings with other lazy toad species and discovered that not all of the specimens matched any known species. Further comparison with each other revealed that the team had discovered three new species, which they described in December of 2025. Next, isopods are common crustaceans that live throughout the world. You have undoubtedly seen at least one species of isopod, because an animal with lots of common names, including woodlouse, pill bug, roly-poly, and sowbug, is a terrestrial isopod. That’s right, the roly-poly is not a bug or a centipede but a crustacean. The order Isopoda contains more than 10,000 species, and there are undoubtedly thousands more that haven’t been discovered by scientists yet. About half the species discovered so far live on land and the other half live in water, most in the ocean but some in

Thanks to Aila, Stella, George, Richard from NC, Emilia, Emerson, and Audie for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Creature Feature: Snipe Eel How removing a dam could save North Carolina’s ‘lasagna lizard’ Why Has This North Carolina Town Embraced a Strange Salamander? Scentists search for DNA of an endangered salamander in Mexico City’s canals An X-ray of the slender snipe eel: The head and body of a slender snipe eel. The rest is tail [picture by opencage さん http://ww.opencage.info/pics/ – http://ww.opencage.info/pics/large_17632.asp, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26595467]: The hellbender: A wild axolotl with its natural coloration: A captive bred axolotl exhibiting leucism: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to talk about some amphibians and fish. Thanks to Aila, Stella, George, Richard from NC, Emilia, Emerson, and Audie for their suggestions! We’ll start with Audie’s suggestion, the sandbar shark. It’s an endangered shark that lives in shallow coastal water in the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific Oceans. A big female can grow over 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters, while males are smaller on average. It can be brown or gray in color, and its dorsal fin is especially big for a shark its size. The sandbar shark eats fish, crustaceans like crabs, cephalopods like octopuses, and other small animals. It spends a lot of time near the bottom of the seabed, looking for food, and it will also swim into the mouths of rivers. Since it resembles a bull shark, which can live just fine in rivers for quite a while and which can be dangerous to swimmers, people are sometimes afraid of the sandbar shark, but it hardly ever bites people. It just wants to be left alone to find little fish to eat. Emilia and Emerson both asked to learn more about eels. Eels are fish, but not every animal that’s called an eel is actually an eel. Some are just eel-shaped, meaning they’re long and slender. Electric eels aren’t actually eels, for instance, but are more closely related to catfish. The longest eel ever reliably measured was a slender giant moray. That was in 1927 in Queensland, Australia. The eel measured just shy of 13 feet long, or 3.94 meters. We talked about some giant eels in episode 401, but this week let’s talk about a much smaller eel, one that Emerson suggested. That’s the snipe eel, the name for a family of eels consisting of nine species known so far. They live in every ocean in the world, and some species are deep-sea animals but most live a little nearer the surface. The largest species can grow an estimated 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, but because all species of snipe eel are so incredibly thin, even the longest individual weighs less than a football, either American or regular, take your pick. The snipe eel gets its name from its mouth, which is long and slightly resembles the beak of a bird called the snipe. The snipe is a wading bird that pokes its long, flexible bill into mud to find small animals like insect larvae, worms, and snails. But unlike the bird’s bill, the snipe eel’s jaws have a bend at the tip. The upper jaw bends upward, the lower jaw bends downward so that the tip of the jaws are separated. It doesn’t look like that would be very helpful for catching food, but scientists think it helps because the fish’s mouth is basically always open. Since it mainly eats tiny crustaceans floating in the water, it doesn’t even need to open its mouth to catch food. It has tiny teeth along the jaws that point backwards, so when a crustacean gets caught on the teeth, it can’t escape. The slender snipe eel is especially unusual because it can have as many as 750 vertebrae in its backbone. That’s more than any other animal known. Most of its length is basically just an incredibly long, thin tail, with its organs bunched up right behind its head. Even its anus is basically on its throat. We don’t know a whole lot about the snipe eel, since it lives deep enough that it’s hardly ever seen by humans. Most of the specimens discovered have been found in the stomachs of larger fish. Now, let’s leave the world of fish behind and look at some amphibians. First, George wanted to learn about the hellbender, and points out that it’s also called the snot otter or lasagna lizard. I don’t understand the lasagna part but it’s funny. The hellbender is a giant salamander that lives in parts of the eastern United States, especially in the Appalachian Mountains and the Ozarks. It can grow nearly 30 inches long, or 74 cm, and is the fifth heaviest amphibian alive today in the whole world. It spends almost all its life in shallow, fast-moving streams hiding among rocks. As water rushes over and around rocks, it absorbs more oxygen, which is good for the hellbender because as an adult it breathes through its skin. To increase its surface area and help it absorb that much more oxygen, its skin is loose and has folds along the s

Thanks to Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Extinct Hippo-Like Creature Discovered Hidden in Museum: ‘Sheer Chance’ The golden lion tamarin has very thin fingers and sometimes it’s rude: The golden lion tamarin also has a very long tail: The cotton-top tamarin [picture by Chensiyuan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153317160]: The pangolin is scaly: The pangolin can also be round: The East Siberia lemming [photo by Ansgar Walk – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52651170]: An early painting of a mammoth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to look at some mammals suggested by Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris. Let’s jump right in, because we have a lot of fascinating animals to learn about! We’ll start with suggestions by Cillian and Eilee, who both suggested a monkey called the tamarin. Tamarins live in Central and South America and there are around 20 species, all of them quite small. Cillian specifically suggested the golden lion tamarin, an endangered species that lives in a single small part of Brazil. It has beautiful golden or orange fur that’s longer around the face, like a lion’s mane but extremely stylish. Its face is bare of fur and is gray or grayish-pink in color, with dark eyes and a serious expression like it’s not sure where it left its wallet. It grows about 10 inches long, or 26 cm, not counting its extremely long tail. The golden lion tamarin spends most of its time in trees, where it eats fruit, flowers, and other plant material, along with eggs, tree frogs, insects, and other small animals. It has narrow hands and long fingers to help it reach into little tree hollows and crevices where insects are hiding, but if it can’t reach an insect that way, it will use a twig or other tool to help. The golden lion tamarin lives in small family groups, usually a mated pair and their young children. A mother golden lion tamarin often has twins, sometimes triplets, and the other members of her family help take care of the babies. Because the golden lion tamarin is endangered, mainly due to habitat loss, zoos throughout the world have helped increase the number of babies born in captivity. When it’s safe to release them into the wild, instead of only releasing the young tamarins, the entire family group is released together. Eilee suggested the cotton-top tamarin, which lives in one small part of Colombia. It’s about the same size as the golden lion tamarin, but is more lightly built and has a somewhat shorter tail. It’s mostly various shades of brown and tan with a dark gray face, but it also has long white hair on its head. Its hair sticks up and makes it look a little bit like those pictures of Einstein, if Einstein was a tiny little monkey. Like the golden lion tamarin, the cotton-top tamarin lives in small groups and eats both plant material and insects. It’s also critically endangered due to habitat loss, and it’s strictly protected these days. Next, both Tim and Stella suggested we learn about the pangolin. There are eight species known, which live in parts of Africa and Asia. The pangolin is a mammal, but it’s covered in scales except for its belly and face. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein that makes up fingernails, hair, hooves, and other hard parts in mammals. When it’s threatened, it rolls up into a ball with its tail over its face, and the sharp-edged, overlapping scales protect it from being bitten or clawed. It has a long, thick tail, short, strong legs with claws, a small head, and very small ears. Its muzzle is long with a nose pad at the end, it has a long sticky tongue, and it has no teeth. It’s nocturnal and uses its big front claws to dig into termite mounds and ant colonies. It has poor vision but a good sense of smell. Some species of pangolin live in trees and spend the daytime sleeping in a hollow tree. Other species live on the ground and dig deep burrows to sleep in during the day. It’s a solitary animal and just about the only time adult pangolins spend time together is when a pair comes together to mate. Sometimes two males fight over a female, and they do so by slapping each other with their big tails. Unfortunately for the pangolin, its scales make it sought after by humans for decoration. People also eat pangolins. Habitat loss is also making it tough for the pangolin. All species of pangolin in Asia are endangered or critically endangered, while all species of pangolins in Africa are vulnerable. Pangolins also don’t do well in captivity so it’s hard for zoos to help them. Next, Conner wants to learn about the lemming, a rodent that’s related to muskrats and voles. Lots of people think they know one thing about the lemming, but that thing isn’t true. We’ll talk about it in a minute. The lemming grows up to 7 i

Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions this week! Sorry this episode is late–the site was down. 🙁 Further reading: Bobolinks A frill-neck lizard showing off: A bobolink: The great-eared nightjar [picture by Venkata Shreeram Mallimadugula, taken from this site]: Another great-eared nightjar [Picture by Nigel Voaden from UK – Great Eared-Nightjar, Tangkoko, Sulawesi, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39857392]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have an episode about some birds and reptiles. Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions! If this episode showed up later than usual in the podcast feed, it’s because I’ve been having trouble with the website and couldn’t get it uploaded until it was fixed. We’ll kick off the episode with an animal that can’t kick, because snakes don’t have any legs. Audie suggested we learn about the scaleless rat snake, which means that first we have to learn about the rat snake, the ordinary one with scales. Rat snakes are constrictors and are common throughout many parts of Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East, and they’re called rat snakes because they eat rats and other small animals like lizards, frogs, and baby birds. Rat snakes are popular pets because they’re so pretty and they aren’t dangerous to humans. Different species are different colors and patterns, and the rhinoceros rat snake, also called the Vietnamese longnose snake, even has a little hornlike projection on the tip of its nose that points forward. I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about that particular rat snake before on the podcast, but I can’t look up which episode because the website is down. Most rat snakes don’t grow much bigger than 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, but a few species can get longer than that. The black rat snake, which lives in North America, can grow over 8 feet long, or more than 2.5 meters. It’s black with small white markings on the head, but snakes bred for sale as pets are sometimes white all over or partially white, or even albino, meaning an individual has a mutation where its body doesn’t produce pigment. Pet black rat snakes are also bred that don’t have scales. That brings us to the scaleless rat snake. It’s an ordinary rat snake but it has a mutation that causes it to have very few scales. This is a mutation that happens occasionally in the wild since it’s a recessive trait, and while it can make the snake a little more vulnerable to injury, scaleless snakes can survive just fine in the wild. They do have belly scales like a normal snake, which are the ones that allow them to move around, and they may have a scattering of scales on other parts of the body too. A scaleless snake still sheds its skin once a year like an ordinary snake, since it’s actually the outer layer of skin that sheds along with the scales. Scaleless rat snakes are popular as pets because they’re so soft and because their coloration is usually very bright. A snake’s coloration comes from pigments in its skin. A snake’s scales are actually transparent, so without a layer of scales, a scaleless snake looks even more colorful than a regular snake. Many species of snake have been found in the wild that are scaleless, but it seems to be a little more common in rat snakes. Next, Dylan and Emily wanted to learn about the frill-neck lizard, which is found in northern Australia and the very southern part of New Guinea. It’s a big lizard that can grow almost three feet long, or 90 cm, including its incredibly long tail. Males are larger than females on average, with a bigger frill. The frill is a flap of skin around the head and neck, and most of the time it’s folded back over the neck and shoulders so it’s not that noticeable. The lizard is pretty ordinary-looking that way, just a big gray or brown animal with a big head. But when the lizard feels threatened, or if it comes across another frill-neck lizard, it can extend the frill by moving the small bones and cartilage that act as struts, which also requires the lizard to open its mouth. When extended, the frill is as much as a foot across, or 30 cm, and it’s marked with bright colors. Different individuals have different colored frills, red, orange, yellow, or white, or a mixture of colors and patterns. The size and color of the frill opening up so quickly will often startle a potential predator, allowing the lizard to escape. The frill-neck lizard can even run on two legs if it needs to, although it has to run with its head pointing straight up in the air. The frill-neck lizard mostly eats insects, especially termites. It spends most of its time in trees and some people believe it can use its frill as a parachute, but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case. Let’s move on to a few birds next. Maryjane suggested we learn about the bobolink, a type of blackbird native to the Americas. In s

Here’s the big invertebrate episode I’ve been promising people! Thanks to Sam, warbrlwatchr, Jayson, Richard from NC, Holly, Kabir, Stewie, Thaddeus, and Trech for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Does the Spiral Siphonophore Reign as the Longest Animal in the World? The common nawab butterfly: The common nawab caterpillar: A velvet worm: A giant siphonophore [photo by Catriona Munro, Stefan Siebert, Felipe Zapata, Mark Howison, Alejandro Damian-Serrano, Samuel H. Church, Freya E.Goetz, Philip R. Pugh, Steven H.D.Haddock, Casey W.Dunn – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1055790318300460#f0030]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Hello to 2026! This is usually where I announce that I’m going to do a series of themed episodes throughout the coming year, and usually I forget all about it after a few months. This year I have a different announcement. After our nine-year anniversary next month, which is episode 470, instead of new episodes I’m going to be switching to old Patreon episodes. I closed the Patreon permanently at the end of December but all the best episodes will now run in the main feed until our ten-year anniversary in February 2027. That’s episode 523, when we’ll have a big new episode that will also be the very last one ever. I thought this was the best way to close out the podcast instead of just stopping one day. The only problem is the big list of suggestions. During January I’m going to cover as many suggestions as I possibly can. This week’s episode is about invertebrates, and in the next few weeks we’ll have an episode about mammals, one about reptiles and birds, and one about amphibians and fish, although I don’t know what order they’ll be in yet. Episode 470 will be about animals discovered in 2025, along with some corrections and updates. I hope no one is sad about the podcast ending! You have a whole year to get used to it, and the old episodes will remain forever on the website so you can listen whenever you like. All that out of the way, let’s start 2026 right with a whole lot of invertebrates! Thanks to Sam, warbrlwatchr, Jayson, Richard from NC, Holly, Kabir, Stewie, Thaddeus, and Trech for their suggestions this week! Let’s start with Trech’s suggestion, a humble ant called the weaver ant. It’s also called the green ant even though not all species are green, because a species found in Australia is partially green. Most species are red, brown, or yellowish, and they’re found in parts of northern and western Australia, southern Asia, and on most islands in between the two areas, and in parts of central Africa. The weaver ant lives in trees in tropical areas, and gets the name weaver ant because of the way it makes its nest. The nests are made out of leaves, but the leaves are still growing on the tree. Worker ants grab the edge of a leaf in their mandibles, then pull the leaf toward another leaf or sometimes double the leaf over. Sometimes ants have to make a chain to reach another leaf, with each ant grabbing the next ant around the middle until the ant at the end of the chain can grab the edge of a leaf. While the leaf is being pulled into place alongside the edge of another leaf, or the opposite edge of the same leaf, other workers bring larvae from an established part of the nest. The larvae secrete silk to make cocoons, but a worker ant holds a larva at the edge of the leaf, taps its little head, and the larva secretes silk that the workers use to bind the leaf edges together. A single colony has multiple nests, often in more than one tree, and are constantly constructing new ones as the old leaves are damaged by weather or just die off naturally. The weaver ant mainly eats insects, which is good for the trees because many of the insects the ants kill and eat are ones that can damage trees. This is one reason why farmers in some places like seeing weaver ants, especially fruit farmers, and sometimes farmers will even buy a weaver ant colony starter pack to place in their trees deliberately. The farmer doesn’t have to use pesticides, and the weaver ants even cause some fruit- and leaf-eating animals to stay away, because the ants can give a painful bite. People in many areas also eat the weaver ant larvae, which is considered a delicacy. Our next suggestion is by Holly, the zombie snail. I actually covered this in a Patreon episode, but I didn’t schedule it for next year because I thought I’d used the information already in a regular episode, but now I can’t find it. So let’s talk about it now! In August of 2019, hikers in Taiwan came across a snail that looked like it was on its way to a rave. It had what looked like flashing neon decorations in its head, pulsing in green and orange. Strobing colors are just not something you’d expect to find on an animal, or if you did it would be a deep-sea animal. The situation is not good for the snail, let me tell you. It’s due to a parasitic flatwor

Thanks to Holly for suggesting this week’s topic! Further reading: Mermaids: Myth, Kith and Kin [this article is not for children] Feejee Mermaid A manatee: A female grey seal, looking winsome: A drawing of the “original” Fiji (or Feejee) mermaid: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s close out the year 2025 with a mystery episode! Holly suggested we talk about mermaids! Mermaids are creatures of folklore who are supposed to look like humans, but instead of legs they have fish tails. These days mermaids are usually depicted with a single tail, but it was common in older artwork for a mermaid to be shown with two tails, which replaced both legs. Not all mermaids were girls, either. Mermen were just as common. Cultures from around the world have stories about mermaid-like individuals. Sometimes they’re gods or goddesses, like the Syrian story of a goddess so beautiful that when she transformed into a fish, only her legs changed, because her upper half was too beautiful to alter, or the Greek god Triton, who is usually depicted as a man with two fish tails for legs. Sometimes they’re monsters who cause storms, curse ships, or lure sailors to their doom. Sometimes they can transform into humans, like the story from Madagascar about a fisherman who catches a mermaid in his net. She transforms into a human woman and they get married, but when he breaks a promise to her, she turns back into a mermaid and swims away. In 2012, a TV special aired on Animal Planet that claimed that mermaids were real, and a lot of people believed it. It imitated the kind of real documentaries that Animal Planet often ran, and the only disclaimer was in the credits. I remember how upset a lot of people were about it, especially teachers and scientists. So just to be clear, mermaids aren’t real. Many researchers think at least some mermaid stories might be based on real animals. The explorer Christopher Columbus reported seeing three mermaids in 1493, but said they weren’t as beautiful as he’d heard. Most researchers think he actually saw manatees. A few centuries later, a mermaid was captured and killed off the coast of Brazil by European scientists, and the careful drawings we still have of the mermaid’s hand bones correspond exactly to the bones of a manatee’s flipper. Female manatees are larger than males on average, and a really big female can grow over 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters. Most manatees are between 9 and 10 feet long, or a little less than 3 meters. Its body is elongated like a whale’s, but unlike a whale it’s slow, usually only swimming about as fast as a human can swim. Its skin is gray or brown although often it has algae growing on it that helps camouflage it. The end of the manatee’s tail looks like a rounded paddle, and it has front flippers but no rear limbs. Its face is rounded with a prehensile upper lip covered with bristly whiskers, which it uses to find and gather water plants. The manatee doesn’t look a lot like a person, but it looks more like a person than most water animals. It has a neck and can turn its head like a person, its flippers are fairly long and resemble arms, and females have a pair of teats that are near their armpits, if a manatee had armpits, which it does not. But that’s close enough for Christopher Columbus to decide he was seeing a mermaid. Seals may have also contributed to mermaid stories. In Scottish folklore, the selkie is a seal that can transform into human shape, usually by taking off its skin. There are lots of stories of people who steal the selkie’s skin and hide it so that the selkie will marry the person—because selkies are beautiful in their human form. Eventually the selkie finds the hidden skin and returns to the sea. Similar seal-folk legends are found in other parts of northern Europe, including Sweden, Iceland, Norway, and Ireland. Many of the stories overlap with mermaid stories. Seals do have appealing human-like faces, have clawed front flippers that sort of resemble arms, and have rear flippers that are fused to act like a tail, even if it doesn’t look much like a fish tail. The grey seal is a common animal off the coast of northern Europe, and a big male can grow almost 11 feet long, or 3.3 meters, although 9 feet is more common, or 2.7 meters. It has a large snout and no external ear flaps. Males are dark grey or brown, females are more silvery in color. It mainly eats fish, but will also eat other animals, including crustaceans, octopuses, other seals, and even porpoises. While I don’t think it has anything to do with the mermaid or selkie legends, it is interesting to note that seals are good at imitating human voices. We learned about this in episode 225, about talking mammals. For instance, Hoover the talking seal, a harbor seal from Maine who was raised by a human after his mother died. Imagine if you were walking along the shore and a seal said this to you: [Hoover the talking seal saying “Hey g