Strange Animals Podcast

Sign up for our mailing list! This week let’s look at a scientific mystery: what caused the golden toad to go extinct, and is it still alive after all? Further reading: A deadly fungus is killing frogs, but the bacteria on their skin could protect them The male golden toad: The female golden toad (photo by Mary Crump): Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve is gorgeous and hopefully still hides some golden toads: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This is our 250th episode, not counting the various bonus episodes, and I should have prepared a special show as a result but I didn’t notice until just now. But let’s pretend this is a special episode 250 show. It’s all about the golden toad. The golden toad is from a tiny area of Costa Rica in Central America. I really do mean a tiny area. North of the city of Monteverde is the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, and the toad was only known from one small part of the reserve that was less than two square miles in size, or about four square kilometers. Specifically, it’s from a single ridge in the nature reserve. A cloud forest is a type of high altitude rainforest. Because temperatures tend to be much cooler than in an ordinary rainforest, a cloud forest can look very different and sometimes wonderfully strange. Cloud forests are foggy a lot of the time and the trees are often covered in thick mosses. In some cloud forests the trees are quite small while ferns and other plants can grow extremely large. The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve is home to thousands of plant and animal species, many of them found nowhere else in the world. That includes the golden toad. The golden toad gets its name from the male’s coloring. The males are a beautiful golden orange while the females are mostly gray or black with yellow, red, or green markings. As in many frogs and toads, females are larger than males, with a big female growing over two inches long from nose to butt, or about 5.5 centimeters. The golden toad was only discovered by scientists in 1964 and described in 1966. The last golden toad was a male observed in May of 1989 during what should have been the mating season, but he was all alone. The golden toad was declared extinct in 2004 after repeated searches turned up no toads at all. It’s easy to think that because the golden toad was restricted to such a small area, it was inevitable that it would go extinct, but the toads were actually common throughout their range until suddenly they weren’t. We’re not sure what happened. Here’s the story. When the toad was first discovered, researchers estimated that there were around 1,500 adult toads living on the ridge. Most of the time the toads were hard to find, since during the dry season, or when they weren’t actively hunting the insects they ate, they’d stay in underground burrows where it was always nice and damp. But when the spring rains started, the males would hop out and gather around shallow puddles at the base of trees. Females would join the males, and because there were always more males than females, they’d all try to be the one to fertilize her eggs. During this time researchers were able to observe and count the toads, which they described as looking like living jewels. The female golden toad laid her eggs in the pools of rainwater. The eggs hatched quickly but the tadpoles needed to live in their pool for at least four more weeks until they metamorphosed into toadlets that lived on land. If there was too much rain, the pools would overflow and the tadpoles were in danger of being washed out to die. If there wasn’t enough rain, the pools would dry out and the tadpoles would also die. But most years conditions were pretty good and lots of tadpoles lived to grow up. Until 1987. A behavioral ecologist who specializes in amphibians, Martha Crump, was studying the golden toads in 1987. In April things seemed normal. The females laid their eggs in the shallow pools as usual, but then the rains stopped. The pools dried out and the eggs and tadpoles all died. When it rained again in May, the females laid more eggs and Dr. Crump counted them, because scientists do a lot of counting. She counted about 43,500 toad eggs. But the pools dried up again, and it was sadly easy for Dr. Crump to count how many tadpoles survived. It was only 29. The next year, in 1988, there were only ten adult golden toads found. In 1989, one golden toad. In 1990 and beyond, zero golden toads. The unusually dry spring of 1987 was a devastating blow to the golden toad population, but the adults weren’t affected. They had their nice damp burrows to live in and lots of insects to eat. Dry conditions happen every so often but not every year. Obviously something else happened between 1987 and 1988 to kill off almost all the adult toads too. Researchers couldn’t figure out what might have happened. One hypothesis was that drought caused by the El Niño weather pattern was unusually severe in 1987 and killed of

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Thanks to Richard from NC for his suggestion that leads us to learn about some interesting seals! Further reading: Mystery of Siberian freshwater seal food choice solved Under Antarctica’s ice, Weddell seals produce ultrasonic vocalizations Further listening/watching: Rarely-heard Weddell Seal Sounds in Antarctica The bearded seal Wikipedia page with audio so you can listen over and over and over The Baikal seal, the world’s only fully fresh water seal species: Baikal seal, round boi: The Baikal seal’s teeth have teeth: A Weddell seal mama with her pup who seems to be practicing singing: Look ma, no ears! The bearded seal. Can you tell where its name comes from? (Moustachioed seal might be more accurate.) (Also, note the ear opening with no external ear flap.) Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week let’s learn about some interesting seals. Thanks to Richard from NC who suggested freshwater seals, which is where we’ll start. Most seals live on the coast and spend most of the time in the ocean. But there’s one species of seal that lives exclusively in fresh water. That’s the Baikal [bay-CALL] seal, and the only place it lives is a big lake in Siberia called Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal formed where two sections of the earth’s crust are being pulled apart by continental drift. That’s called a rift lake or rift valley lake. The lake gets bigger every year, but only by a tiny amount—just under an inch, or 2 cm. Since this has been going on for an estimated 25 to 30 million years, though, it’s an extremely big, deep lake. It is, in fact, the deepest lake on earth, and is also the oldest lake on earth. It’s more than twice as old as Lake Tanganyika in East Africa, which is also a large, deep rift lake but only about 12 million years old at the most. Lake Baikal is almost 400 miles long, or 636 km, and nearly 50 miles wide, or 80 km. At its deepest point, it’s 3,893 feet deep, or 1,186.5 meters. That’s from the surface of the water to the muddy bottom. But that mud and sediment on the bottom has been building up for a very long time and there’s a lot of it—4.3 miles of it, in fact, or 7 km. The water is very clear and very oxygenated, but the surface freezes for several months out of the year. Then again, there are some hydrothermal vents, especially in the deepest areas, that heat the water around them to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 Celsius. Because Lake Baikal is so deep, so big, so oxygenated, and so old, lots of species of animal live in and around it that live nowhere else in the world. That includes the Baikal seal. The Baikal seal is related to the Arctic ringed seal but has lived in the lake exclusively for probably two million years. It only grows five and a half feet long at most, or 1.65 meters, and is usually closer to four feet long, or 1.2 meters. It’s gray in color and has no external ears, so that its head appears smooth. It can still hear, but because it doesn’t have ears sticking out of its head, it’s more streamlined than seals with external ears. It has large eyes, a pair of front flippers that it uses to maneuver in the water and on land, and a pair of hind flippers that act like a tail instead of legs. That’s actually the main difference between earless and eared seals. Earless seals are more streamlined in general and more adapted for life in the water and for deep diving, but they’re awkward on land because they can’t use their hind limbs for walking. Eared seals have little flaps of external ears and while their hind flippers act as a tail in the water, the seal can turn its hind flippers over to walk on them on land. The Baikal seal is quite small for a seal, which keeps it from needing as much food as a bigger animal. For a long time people thought the Baikal seal mostly ate fish, but a study published in late 2020 determined that it eats a whole lot of amphipods. Lake Baikal is home to a species of amphipod that grows up to about 10 millimeters long. Amphipods are a type of crustacean and all other freshwater amphipods known are bottom-dwellers. Only the Lake Baikal amphipod is free-floating. The seal catches these tiny amphipods by sucking them up in a big mouthful of water, closing its teeth tightly, and using its tongue to force the water out through its teeth. The amphipods get caught against the teeth and the seal swallows them, yum. This is a type of filter feeding used by some other species of seal too, including the crabeater seal. Like the crabeater seal, it’s so well adapted to filter feeding that it has specialized teeth with curved projections all around their edges. These projections interlock closely when the seal closes its mouth. Because it doesn’t have to depend on eating fish, the Baikal seal isn’t threatened by commercial fishing. As long as it has plenty of amphipods to eat, it’s happy. While the Baikal seal is the only truly fr

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! We’re down to the last few days to back our Kickstarter! We’ve got a slightly different type of episode this week. Follow along as I try to find out more about the giant jellyfish that nearly sank a ship! Further reading: Kraken: Monster of the Deep A lion’s mane jellyfish: A giant squid: The first photo ever taken of a giant squid: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Halloween is behind us and we’re all now ready to head into winter, if we live in the northern hemisphere, or summer, if we live in the southern hemisphere. This week’s episode is a little different, but hopefully you’ll like it. Before we get into this week’s topic, let me give you the very last Kickstarter update, I promise! From here on out you’ll only get updates through the Kickstarter page if you backed the project. If you’re listening to this episode within a day or two of its release on November 1, 2021, you still have time to back the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book! The campaign ends on Nov. 5, but at 12:03 am eastern time, and one of the many things I’ve learned about running a Kickstarter is maybe don’t launch the project at midnight because then it ends at midnight. Remember that if we reach 100 backers before the end, I’ll release a second bonus episode from the audiobook. I’m really late getting this episode done so it’s actually Halloween as I record this, and we currently have 67 backers, which is amazing! Remember, we have a $1 tier if you just want to pitch a dollar in. That reminds me, after the campaign is over I’m going to update the first bonus episode and take out the ten minutes of Kickstarter talk that starts it. Thanks again to everyone who’s backed the project. I’m blown away by everyone’s support! If you want a copy of the book but not right now, it’ll be available to buy from your regular book-buying places but only after all the Kickstarter backer rewards are sent. As it happens, this week’s episode is connected with the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book. Specifically, I decided to add a chapter about the giant jellyfish we talked about in episode 16, but to do that I needed to do a lot more research. That story has actually bothered me for a long time. When I first started the podcast, I wasn’t always as diligent in my research as I am now. If a story came from a source I trusted or had enough realistic-sounding details, I’d assume it was accurate. This story met both criteria but whenever I thought about it, something felt off. So I was glad to dig in and find out more. This episode is about the research process I went through, which will give you a little bit of a behind-the-scenes look at how I approach each episode. We’ll also learn about a couple of other weird events where a ship or boat was seemingly attacked by a sea monster. Let’s start with the story as I reported it in episode 16. I think you will appreciate how much better our audio quality is these days. Here it is: “In 1973, the Australian ship Kuranda collided with a huge jelly in the South Pacific while traveling through a storm on her way to the Fiji Islands. The jelly was so enormous that the deck was covered in jellyfish goo and tentacles up to two feet deep [61 cm]. One crew member died after getting stung. The weight of the jelly was so great, an estimated 20 tons [18 metric tons] that it started to push the ship nose-down and the captain, Langley Smith, sent out an SOS. The salvage tug Hercules arrived and sprayed the Kuranda’s deck with a high-pressure hose, dislodging the jelly. Samples were sent to Sydney and tentatively identified as a lion’s mane jelly.” My first step was to find where I got that story. I was pretty sure it was from Karl Shuker’s blog but when I looked, it wasn’t there. I checked his books that I own and it wasn’t there either. A quick internet search turned up the story in a lot of places with more or less identical wording, but no one said where they’d found the story—except one site, which referenced a book called Mysteries and Monsters of the Sea. I looked it up and discovered it was a 1998 book, also published as Mysteries of the Deep, made up of articles from FATE Magazine. One of those articles is titled “Giant Jellyfish” and is by Karl Shuker. The story appeared in the March 1994 issue of FATE, so my next step was to find the article. Karl Shuker is a zoologist who writes a lot about mystery animals, and he’s very good about sharing his sources. FATE Magazine is still around and isn’t giving its old issues away for free. Then, in one of those amazing, wonderful coincidences, I found an ebay auction for that very issue that had nice clear photographs of several pages to show how good a condition it was in. One of those pages just happened to be the one I needed. I grabbed a screenshot and enlarged it so I could read the text. Shuker writes, “One of the most dramatic cases on re

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Happy Halloween! Let’s learn about some shapeshifters of folklore, including the werewolf and kitsune (thanks to Joel, Pranav, and Emma!), and a real-life shapeshifter. Don’t forget the Kickstarter, as if I’d let you forget it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie Further reading: Folklore and Mythology Breeding Butterflies Further listening: MonsterTalk (note: sometimes there’s adult language or really scary themes) Sandman Stories Presents podcast A death’s head hawkmoth, looking spooky: A death’s head hawkmoth caterpillar, not looking spooky at all: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s Halloween week and that means we need to talk about a truly spooky monster! Both Joel and Pranav suggested the werewolf a while back and Emily suggested the kitsune [kee-tsoo-neh], so let’s learn about shapeshifters and were-animals of all kinds. “Wer” is an Old English word that just means “man,” and just to get confusing, the word “man” used to refer to any person. The word “wif” referred to a woman, with wifman actually meaning woman. From those words we get the modern uses of wife, woman, and man, while “wer” is obsolete except in werewolf. Let me derail myself from talking about language by reminding you about our Kickstarter! It ends pretty soon, on November 5, 2021, so if you’ve been thinking about backing the project this would be a great time. It’s to help me publish a book all about mystery animals, called Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World. The book has a foreword by Blake Smith of MonsterTalk, the science show about monsters, and if you don’t already listen to that podcast, it’s a whole lot of fun and informative too. Thanks to everyone who has already backed the project! Now, Happy Halloween and on to the spookiness! The important first question we need to answer is if werewolves really exist. No. They do not exist outside of folklore and fiction, and I’ll explain why later so you don’t ever have to worry about werewolves or any other shapeshifters. But first, let’s learn what werewolves and kitsunes are. Werewolves are supposed to be people who can turn into wolves. Depending on the story, this can happen when the person wants to turn into a wolf or it can happen during the full moon whether the person wants to be a wolf or not. Sometimes the person has a magical wolfskin or some other item that they put on in order to transform. Sometimes they have to cast a magic spell, but sometimes it’s a curse that someone else has inflicted on them. Some stories say that the only way to kill a werewolf is by shooting it through the heart with a silver bullet, especially one that’s been blessed by a priest. The werewolf is mainly from European folklore, where for many centuries all werewolves were also supposed to be witches. Until about the 18th century in some areas, if someone accused you of being a werewolf, you could be put on trial as a witch. Lots of people were convicted of witchcraft and killed during waves of witch-hunts in various parts of Europe. Most of the people accused were women, especially elderly women, especially women who were widowed or single, especially women who owned land that someone else wanted. Hmm. The kitsune is a creature of Asian folklore, especially from Japan, that’s basically a fox that can work magic. It’s sometimes said that all foxes can turn into humans if they want, especially older foxes. The older and more powerful a kitsune is, the more tails it’s supposed to have, up to nine. Kitsunes sometimes play tricks on people but they can also act as guardians and friends. About the same time that old ladies were being accused of being werewolves in Europe, though, around the 15th to the 18th centuries, something similar happened in Japan. People were much more superstitious during this time and thought the kitsune was a dangerous goblin-like creature that could possess people and make them act like animals. These days the kitsune is back to being considered mostly a friendly trickster. Werewolves weren’t the only shapeshifters in the folklore of Europe, although they were the most common. A German story collected in 1879 is about someone who could transform into a fox using an item called a strap. “In the village of Dodow near Wittenburg there lived an old woman who possessed a fox strap. With its help she could transform herself into a fox, and thus her table never lacked for geese, ducks, and all kinds of poultry. “Her grandchild knew about it, and one day when the schoolmaster was talking about magic in the school, the child told about the fox strap, and the next day brought it to school. “The schoolmaster took it into his hand and unintentionally approached his head with it. Suddenly he was standing before the children, transformed into a fox. They

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Don’t forget our Kickstarter! I can’t believe it reached its funding goal THE FIRST DAY! We’re getting so close to Halloween! This week we’ll learn about Mothman! Is it a moth? Is it a ghostly entity from another world? Is it a bird? (hint: it’s probably a bird) Sandhill cranes (not mothmen): A Canada goose (not mothman): A great bustard (not mothman): A green heron (definitely not mothman but look at those big cute feets and that telescoping neck): A barn owl’s eyes reflecting red (photo taken from Frank’s Barn Owls and Mourning Doves, which has lots of lovely pictures): Barn owls look like strange little people while standing up straight: Barn owls got legs: All owls got legs: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week for monster month, let’s cover a spooky monster with a silly name, mothman! We’ll go over the facts as clearly as possible and see if we can figure out what kind of creature mothman might be. First, though, a quick reminder that our Kickstarter is still going on if you’re listening to this before Nov. 5, 2021! There’s a link in the show notes if you want to go look at it. We actually reached our funding goal on the very first day, so thank you all so much for backing the project, sharing the project on social media, or just putting up with me spamming you about it all month. Now, on to mothman. As far as anyone can tell, it all started in 1966, specifically November 12, outside of Clendenin, West Virginia, in the eastern United States. Five men were digging a grave in a cemetery outside of town when one of them saw something big fly low across the trees and right over their heads. The witness thought it looked like a man with wings, but with red eyes and an estimated wingspan of 10 feet, or 3 meters. This definitely happened, even though it sounds like the opening scene of a scary movie. That story didn’t come to light until after the next sighting hit the newspapers and caused a lot of excitement. The second sighting took place only three days later near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the McClintic Wildlife Area. Locals call it the TNT area, since explosives were stored there during WWII. The TNT area is about 70 miles, or over 110 km, away from Clendenin, which has led to a lot of people discounting the gravedigger’s sighting. We’ll come back to that later, though. On Nov. 15, 1966, two young couples decided to go out driving. They were bored and it was a cold, clear Tuesday night. Remember, this was the olden days when there weren’t as many things to do as there are today. You could watch TV, but only if there was something you wanted to watch on one of the three TV stations available in the United States. If you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go to a movie theater, and so on. Anyway, Steve Mallette and his wife Mary and their friends Roger Scarberry and his wife Linda went out driving that Tuesday night. Toward midnight, as they drove through the TNT area, their car came over a hill and they saw a huge creature in front of them. Some 35 years later, in July 2001, Linda gave an interview to the author of the book I used as my main reference for this episode, called Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend. She mentioned details that aren’t in any of the newspaper articles from 1966, or that give a better explanation of what happened than the articles did. There’s always a possibility that after 35 years, her memory wasn’t accurate, so I’m mostly going by the newspaper articles for my information, but she does mention something interesting in that interview. She says this about the very first sighting of the creature: “We had just topped a hill in the TNT area, and when the headlights of our car hit it, it looked directly at us, as if it was scared. It had one of its wings caught in a guide wire near a section of road close to the power plant, and was pulling on its wings with its hands, trying to free itself. Its hands were really big. It was really scared. We stopped the car and sat still while it was trying to free itself from the wire. We didn’t sit there long, just long enough to scare it, I think. It seemed to think we were going to hurt it. We were all screaming, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ But, we couldn’t perform the actual action of leaving the scene. It was like we were hypnotized. It finally got its wing loose from the wire and ran into the power plant. I felt sorry for it.” In the original reports from 1966, the couples said the creature was 6 or 7 feet tall, or 1.8 to 2.1 meters, with a wingspan of 10 feet, or 3 meters. Its eyes were big and glowed red in the car’s headlights and its wings were white and angel-like. Its body was gray. While it was a clumsy runner, it could fly at an estimated 100 mph, or 161 km/hour. Let’s stop right here before we talk about what else happened that spooky night. A ten-foot wingspan is big

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Don’t forget the Kickstarter, as if I’d let you forget it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie Our next monster for monster month is the devil-pig! It’s probably not a devil although it might be a pig. The Asian tapir and its remarkable snoot: The New Guinea carving: The “gazeka” as imagined in the early 20th century: Domestic and feral hogs are common in New Guinea: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Don’t forget that our Kickstarter is still going on to fund the mystery animals book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie! There’s a link in the show notes so you can click through and look at the different tiers available. We’re doing really well so far, so thanks to those of you who have already backed the project or just shared it with your friends! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie Our next monster month episode is about a mystery animal from New Guinea. We’ve learned a lot about New Guinea’s birds this year, and it comes up repeatedly in other episodes too because it’s such a huge island with varied ecosystems. It also has steep mountains that have hardly been explored by scientists or even locals. If you want to learn more about New Guinea itself, I recommend episode 206, which is the first of our episodes this year about strange birds of New Guinea. But this week, let’s learn about the devil-pig! It’s also sometimes called the gazeka, but we’ll come back to that later. The story starts in 1875, when a man named Alfred O. Walker sent a letter to the journal Nature about a discovery on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. It wasn’t the discovery of an animal itself but a big pile of dung from an unknown animal. The dung pile was so big that the people who found it thought it must be from some kind of rhinoceros. The problem is that New Guinea doesn’t have any rhinos. The dung pile was discovered by a British expedition led by Lt. Sidney Smith and Captain Moresby from the ship H.M.S. Basilisk. After the report was published in Nature, a German zoologist wrote to say he’d been to New Guinea too and that the people living there had told him about a big animal with a long snout, which they referred to as a giant pig. It supposedly stood 6 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters, and was very rare. If you do a search for the devil-pig online, you’ll see it called the gazeka in a lot of places. Let’s discuss the word gazeka, because it doesn’t have anything to do with New Guinea. In fact, it comes from an adaptation of a French musical called The Little Michus. I bet you didn’t expect that. The musical is about two girls with the last name of Michu. One girl was given to the Michu family as a baby by her father, a general, who had to leave the country. The Michus had a baby daughter of the same age, and one day without thinking the father decided to give both babies a bath at the same time—and mixed them up. So no one knew which girl was which, but they grew up as sisters who think they’re twins and are devoted to each other. The play takes place when they’re both seventeen and the general suddenly shows up demanding his daughter back. It’s a funny musical and was popular in the original French in 1897, but in 1905 an English translation was performed in London and was a huge hit. It ran for 400 performances and became part of the pop culture of the day. So where does the gazeka come in? George Graves was a famous English comic actor, and he added an extra line or two to the play to get a laugh. He tells about a drunken explorer who thought he had seen a strange animal called the gazeka while under the influence of whiskey. The play was so popular, and the gazeka was considered so funny, that the idea just took off. The theater manager ran a competition for people to make drawings of the gazeka, and the winning drawing was made into a design that appeared on little charms, toys, and even in some advertisements for Perrier. The gazeka was even spun off into its own little song and dance in another play. That was in 1905. In spring of 1906 an explorer called Captain Charles A.W. Monckton led an expedition to Papua New Guinea, and on May 10 two members of the team were sent to investigate some tracks the expedition had found the previous day. The team members included an army private named Ogi and a village constable called Oina who acted as Ogi’s guide. The two became separated at some point, and while he was looking for Oina, Ogi stumbled across two weird animals grazing in a grassy clearing. The devil-pigs! The animals were only sort of piglike. Later Ogi reported that they were dark in color with a patterned coat, cloven hooves, horse-like tail, and a long snout. They stood about 3.5 feet tall, or 106 centimeters, and were 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters. He shot at one but missed, probably because he w

THE KICKSTARTER IS LIVE AND I’M SO EXCITED! The Kickstarter campaign is HERE! If you’re not sure how Kickstarter works, that’s what we talk about at the beginning of this episode. I then go over the different rewards available and finally we have a very short chapter from the audiobook. Kickstarter FAQ I talk about the Kickstarter for way too long, so if you don’t care you can jump ahead to 9:56 to listen to the actual chapter. Also, I am definitely going to re-record that chapter for the actual audiobook because I recorded it before I made adjustments to my mic. One of the pictures of a ningen you’ll find online. It’s art, not a photograph: Show transcript: Welcome to a special bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The Kickstarter funded successfully so there’s no need to have a ten-minute explanation of the Kickstarter tiers. I’ve cut all that out so anyone who wants to listen to this little bonus episode about the Ningen can do so without fast-forwarding a lot first. This is one of the new chapters from the book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World, although I will be re-recording it for the audiobook version now that I’ve learned a little more about making the audio sound good. The Ningen The seas around Antarctica are cold and stormy. To humans it seems unhospitable, a deadly ocean surrounding an icy landmass. But the Antarctic Ocean is home to many animals, from orcas and penguins to blue whales and colossal squid, not to mention the migratory birds, cold-adapted fish, and many small animals that live in the depths. New animals are constantly being discovered, but it’s also not very well explored. Stories from Japanese whalers who visit the area supposedly tell of a strange creature called the ningen, which is occasionally seen in the freezing ocean. It’s usually white and can be the size of a big person or the size of a baleen whale. It’s long and relatively slender, and while details vary, it’s generally said to have a human-like face, or at least large eyes and a slit-like mouth. It also has arms instead of flippers and either a whale-like tail or human-like legs. These stories don’t come from long ago, though. The first post about the ningen appeared in 2002 in a Japanese forum thread about giant fish. Interest in the topic died down within a few months, until 2007 when the ningen was the subject of both a manga and a magazine article. The ningen didn’t start appearing in English language sites until 2010. While it’s never been as well-known as many so-called cryptids, it has been the subject of short stories and books, creepy art, a J-pop song, and lots of speculation. The question, of course, is whether the ningen is a real animal or a hoax. The initial post was made by an anonymous woman who claimed to be repeating something an unnamed whaler friend told her he’d experienced, and her friend also said that the Japanese government was baffled, and that the government was engaged in a cover-up so no one else would learn about the mystery animal. This has all the hallmarks of a modern urban legend. I don’t think the ningen is a real animal. Just for fun, though, if it was a real animal, what might it be? The beluga whale is the first thing I thought of, since it’s white, grows around 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and has a small rounded head with features that look sort of human-like. But the beluga whale only lives in the Arctic, not the Antarctic. That’s the opposite side of the world. Of the whales that do live around the Antarctic for at least part of the year, none are white all over and most are dark gray or black. Very rarely, though, a whale is born with albinism, which means its skin lacks pigment. As a result, it looks white or very pale gray. An albino humpback whale called Migaloo has been spotted off the coast of Australia repeatedly since 1991, for instance. An albinistic bowhead or right whale living in the Antarctic might be seen occasionally by whalers who don’t realize they’re all seeing the same individual. Both the bowhead and right whales have deep, rounded rostrums that could potentially look like a human-like face—slightly, if you were looking at it through fog or darkness, and were already aware of the story of the ningen. Then again, if the ningen is a real animal, it might be a whale that’s completely unknown to science. There are still a lot of beaked whales we know almost nothing about, and new species of beaked whale are occasionally discovered. The ningen might not even be a whale at all but something else entirely. Still, while it’s a fun story, it’s probably not real. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet. Thanks for supporting the podcast and the Kickstarter! When we reach 100 backers on the Kickstarter, we’ll have a second bonus episode with another of the new chapters from the audiobook, even if all 100 pledges are just for a dollar. Thanks f

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! It’s the beginning of MONSTER MONTH! This episode’s not very spooky unless you’re outside at night and hear a terrifying scream! To be fair, that would be spooky even if you don’t know anything about the wampus cat. THE KICKSTARTER GOES LIVE IN JUST TWO DAYS!! Further watching: The Growling, Ferocious, Diurnal Kitty Cat: The Jaguarundi Further reading: My original article about the wampus cat will appear in Flying Snake #21. You can order it and back issues here and here. The cougar: A jaguar with her black jaguar cub (picture by Alma Leaper): The jaguarundi looks kind of like an otter: Jaguarundis come in different solid colors, including black or nearly black: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s October at last! Yes, that best of all months, MONSTER MONTH! This episode started out as an article I wrote for the magazine Flying Snake, which is an awesome little magazine that you might like. I’ll put a link in the show notes if you want to order a copy. Also, in only TWO DAYS we’re kicking off our Kickstarter to fund the Strange Animals Podcast book! It’s done and now I just need to pay the people who are going to make the cover and do the interior design to make it look great! The Kickstarter will go live on Wednesday, October 6, 2021 and will run through Friday, November 5, 2021, which gives you lots of time to decide if you want to back the project. On Wednesday I’ll be releasing a bonus episode to remind you that the Kickstarter has begun, explain exactly how Kickstarter works in case you’re not sure, and share a chapter from the audio version of the book about a mystery animal we’ve never covered before. If you want to look at the Kickstarter page now, though, there’s a link in the show notes so you can look at it and even set it so that Kickstarter will send you an email when the campaign starts. There’s an early-bird special that will only be available on the first day of the campaign, just saying. But right now, let’s kickstart monster month with an episode about the wampus cat! The wampus cat, or just wampus, has appeared in folklore throughout North America for over a hundred years and probably much longer, especially in mountainous areas in the eastern portion of the continent. The term actually comes from the word catawampus, probably related to the phrase catty corner. Both words mean “something that’s askew or turned diagonally,” but catawampus was also once used in the southeastern United States to describe any strange creature lurking in the forest. It was a short step from catawampus to wampus cat, possibly also influenced by the word catamount, used for the cougar and other large cats native to North America. Whatever the origins of the word, the wampus cat was usually considered to be a real animal. Some people probably used the term as a synonym for catamount, but many people firmly believed the wampus was a different animal from the cougar, bobcat, or lynx. It was usually supposed to be a type of big cat, although not necessarily. The word wampus also once referred to a dress-like garment resembling a knee-length smock worn over leggings, also called a wampus coat. The first newspaper use of wampus referring to an animal doesn’t appear until the very end of the 19th century. A Missouri paper wrote in May 1899: They knew immediately the source of the hair-raising scream. The “wampus” was after them. They could see it; it was a big black thing with long hair and large feet. What may be a follow-up to that story, from a different Missouri newspaper, appeared in November 1899 and was headlined “THE WAMPUS IS DEAD.” Many described it as gray wolf, but others refused to believe such an animal was here and lightly spoke of the wampus. It frequented the dark woods at day time, coming forth at night and roaming around, uttering a strange cry. Woe unto the traveler overtaken by darkness, for the night was made hideous by the shrill cry. […] On last Sunday night George Jolliff secreted himself in a tree south of his house and about 7 o’clock saw the long-sought monster, accompanied by several dogs, approaching; on seeing his dog, which was tied beneath the tree, they come under the tree and Mr. Jolliff fired, severely wounding the animal. Hastily climbing down, he fired again and this stopped the monster in his tracks. […] It measured 6 feet 7 inches in length and 2 feet 4 inches in height; some say it is a female wolf, others a cross between the dog and wolf species. It is dark brown tinged with red and black. This sounds like a coyote or red wolf, especially considering that it was accompanied by dogs. The size of the animal in metric is 2 meters long, presumably including the tail, and 73 cm tall. The height is accurate for a coyote or red wolf but is much longer than even a gray wolf. It’s possible the animal had an unusually long tail or there was

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Don’t forget the Kickstarter, as if I’d let you forget it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie Let’s pre-game Halloween and monster month with an episode about some Halloween-y bats and rats! Thanks to Connor for the suggestion! Further reading: Meet Myotis nimaensis Hyorhinomys stuempkei: New Genus, Species of Shrew Rat Discovered in Indonesia Fish-eating Myotis The orange-furred bat is Halloween colored! The hog-nosed rat has a little piggy nose and VAMPIRE FANGS: The fish-eating bat has humongous clawed feet: The crested rat does not look poisonous but it is: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re getting ready for October by talking about a bat suggested by Connor, along with another type of bat and two rats. It’s the bats and rats episode ushering us into Monster Month with style! Don’t forget that our Kickstarter for the Strange Animals Podcast book goes live in just over a week! I know, it hasn’t even started yet and I’m already shouting all about it, but I’m excited! There’s a link in the show notes if you want to click through and bookmark that page. Also, I have a correction from our recent squirrel episode. Nicholas wrote to let me know that vitiligo isn’t actually a genetic condition, although some people are genetically slightly more likely to develop it. I think that’s what caused my confusion. Vitiligo can be caused by a number of things, but it’s still true that you can’t catch it from someone. I’ll include a more in-depth correction in next year’s updates episode. Okay, let’s start this episode off with Connor’s suggestion. Connor told me about a newly discovered bat called Myotis nimbaensis, and it’s not just any old bat. It’s a Halloween bat! Its body is orange and its wing membranes are black. It’s called the orange-furred bat and it lives in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea in West Africa. The orange-furred bat was only discovered in 2018, when a team of scientists was exploring abandoned mine shafts in the mountains, looking for the critically endangered Lamotte’s roundleaf bat. The team was surveying the bats in cooperation with a mining company and conservation groups, because they needed to know where the bats were so the old mine shafts could be repaired before they fell in and squished all the bats. Then one of the team saw a bat no one recognized. It was orange and fluffy with big ears and tiny black dot eyes, and its wings were black. They sent a picture of the bat to an expert named Nancy Simmons, and Dr. Simmons knew immediately that it was something out of the ordinary. Sure enough, it’s a species unknown to science. The team described the bat in 2021. Next, let’s talk about a rat. It was also discovered recently, in this case in 2013 and described in 2015. It’s usually called the hog-nosed rat. It lives in a single part of a single small island in South Asia, specifically in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. This is one of the same places where the babirusa lives, if you remember episode 218. The hog-nosed rat is a rodent but it’s not actually that closely related to other rats and mice. It’s even been assigned to its own genus. It’s a soft brown-gray on its back and white underneath, with big ears, a very long tail, and a pink nose that does actually look a lot like a little piggy nose. Its eyes are small but its incisors are extremely long and sharp. In fact, they look like vampire fangs! In 2013, a team of scientists was studying rodents living in the area. To do this they would put special traps out at night and check them in the morning. This isn’t a regular rat trap that kills rats, of course, but a box that keeps the rodent safe inside so it can be examined before being released again. One day they checked a trap and inside was a rodent no one recognized. Surprise rat! So, what does the hog-nosed rat eat with those vicious fangs? Earthworms and beetle grubs! Terrifying, I know. Next, let’s learn about another bat, Myotis vivesi. It’s called the fish-eating bat or the Mexican fishing bat. It lives around the Gulf of California on the west coast of North America, mostly on small islands. It’s brown on top, white or cream-colored underneath, and it has big ears because it’s a bat. Almost all bats have big ears. Fish eating is unusual in bats, and marine fish eating is even more unusual. Only one other species of bat, the fisherman bat of Central and South America, catches marine fish regularly, but the two species belong to completely different families. The Mexican fishing bat’s closest relatives don’t eat fish at all. Because it lives exclusively around the ocean and feeds mostly on fish and crustaceans, although it will occasionally eat insects and algae, the Mexican fishing bat has other unusual adaptations. It drinks seawater instead of fresh water, for one thing. During the day it hides in cr

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Check out our Kickstarter pre-launch page!! Thanks to Max for suggesting the rhinoceros viper! We’ll learn about that one and several other snakes with nose horns this week. The rhino viper, AKA the butterfly viper because of its beautiful colors and pattern: The rhino viper has nose horns (photo by Balázs Buzás): The West African Gaboon viper (Bitis rhinoceros), AKA the other rhino viper: The rhinoceros snake, AKA the Vietnamese longnose snake (photo taken by me! That’s why it’s kind of blurry!): The nose-horned viper is a beautiful snake: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Just a reminder about our Kickstarter for the Strange Animals Podcast book! Check the show notes for a link if you want to look at the preliminary cover and maybe bookmark the page for when we go live in just two weeks!! This week we’ll learn about the rhino viper, which was suggested by Max, who at the time was almost eight years old but that was so long ago I bet Max is eight now or maybe nine or ten. Maybe thirty. The rhinoceros viper lives in forests in parts of western and central Africa, and can grow three and a half feet long, or 107 cm. It’s a heavy chonk of a snake but it’s beautifully colored, with big triangular blotches and smaller markings of red, yellow, black, and blue or green. If you look at one on a white background it stands out, but on the forest floor where it lives, with dead leaves and plants all around, it blends right in. It has rough scales that make it look bristly, called keeled scales. The rhino viper’s scales are so strongly keeled that they can cut your hand if you pet it. It’s not a good idea to pet wild snakes anyway. The rhino viper’s scientific name is Bitis nasicornis. At first I thought it was pronounced like “bite us,” which I thought was hilarious, and I was disappointed to find that it’s pronounced “bit-us,” although that’s actually funny too. Actually it’s pronounced “bit-is.” It’s spelled B-I-T-I-S. Nasicornis means nose horn, and it definitely has horns on its nose. It has a pair of horns, in fact, side by side, and they stick up and slightly forward. Some rhino vipers even have three nose horns. They’re not true horns, though. Instead they’re made of modified scales. They’re bendy like scales too. The rhino viper mostly eats rodents but will also eat frogs, birds, and other small animals if it can catch them. It’s an ambush hunter, meaning it hides among fallen leaves and waits for an animal to come too close. Most of the time it moves slowly, but when it strikes, it does so very quickly, in less than a quarter of a second. It has relatively mild venom, although some other Bitis species have venom that’s deadly to humans. The rhino viper spends most of its time on the ground, but it can climb trees if it wants to. The end of its blunt tail is even partially prehensile, meaning it can curl around branches to help it hang on. This is the closest thing to a hand that snakes have. It can also swim well. Sometimes the rhino viper is called the butterfly viper because of its colorful markings, and to stop people from confusing it with another closely related snake called Bitis rhinoceros. Rhinoceros also means nose-horn, by the way. B. rhinoceros is also called the West African Gaboon viper because it lives in West Africa. It looks similar to the other rhino viper with a similar pattern but in more neutral tones of brown and tan. It’s sort of a more sophisticated-looking rhino viper. It also has a pair of nose horns but they’re smaller and generally point up and slightly back. All snakes in the genus Bitis have a threat display that has earned them the name puff adder, although that’s also the name of a specific species, Bitis arietans, that’s extremely venomous. Some people call the various species of hognose snake found in North America puff adders too because of its behavior when it feels threatened. The hognose snake flattens its neck and raises its head so that it looks like a cobra, all the while hissing in a way that sounds like it’s puffing air in and out. Snakes in the genus Bitis have a similarly impressive display. It appears to inflate and deflate as it hisses loudly, as though you’re being warned away by a bicycle tire innertube with keeled scales and nose horns. This is what it sounds like when a puff adder puffs and hisses: [snake hissing sounds] Vipers of all kinds are members of the family Viperidae, which includes a whole lot of venomous snakes from many parts of the world. Vipers have fangs that are so long, they’re actually hinged so they can fit in the mouth. Each fang is attached to a small bone that can rotate forward and back to extend and refold the fangs. Most of the time the viper’s fangs are folded down along the sides of the mouth, protected by a sheath of skin. When it’s ready to bite, either in defense or to kill pr

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Our pre-launch Kickstarter page! You can see what the book cover will look like! Thanks to Liesbet and Enzo for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about squirrels! Further reading: Project Squirrel Interspecies Breeding Is Responsible for Some Squirrels’ Black Coloring The Indian giant squirrel, without filter (left) and with filter (right): Some variable squirrels (see lots more at iNaturalist): The Eastern gray squirrel: The Eurasian red squirrel: The fox squirrel: White Eastern gray squirrels (photos taken from the White and Albino Squirrel Research Initiative): A white variable squirrel spotted in Thailand (picture found here): The African pygmy squirrel: The least pygmy squirrel of Asia: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s finally the squirrel episode! Both Liesbet and Enzo have suggested squirrels as a topic, and Enzo specifically asked about white squirrels, hybrid squirrels, and squirrels in danger. We’re going to cover all those, and also a few squirrel mysteries! First, though, a quick note to say that the Kickstarter campaign for the Strange Animals Podcast book is definitely going to happen NEXT MONTH! It’ll go live in early October 2021. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when so you can go pre-order a copy of the book if you want, and in fact I think I’ll do a bonus episode the first day of the Kickstarter. If you want to get an email to remind you when the campaign launches, there’s a link in the show notes to the pre-launch page where you can request an email notification on launch. You can also see what the book cover will look like! Now, on to the squirrels. The animal we generally just call a squirrel is specifically a tree squirrel, as opposed to ground squirrels. Tree squirrels are arboreal, which means they live in trees, although they spend plenty of time on the ground too. Squirrels mostly eat nuts and seeds, including acorns and the seeds inside pine cones, but will also eat berries, flowers and buds, tree bark and sap, fungus, and sometimes insects, bird eggs, and even baby birds. Squirrels are rodents and are active in the daytime. Squirrels can be helpful to trees even though they eat tree nuts, because most species bury nuts to dig up and eat later. The squirrel doesn’t always remember where it hid all its nuts, and in spring the buried nuts sprout and grow into new trees. Some species also hide nuts in caches, often in holes in trees. A squirrel sleeps in a nest made of dead leaves and sticks it builds in the branches of a tree. The nest is called a drey and it’s lined on the inside with moss, grass, and other soft, warm material. A mother squirrel will line the nest with some of her fur right before her babies are born, so the nest is especially soft and warm. Some species also nest in old woodpecker holes. In winter when it’s cold, several squirrels may share the same drey to stay warm, but squirrels are usually solitary. They don’t hibernate, but like most of us, they sleep more in winter and are less active. Most people know what a squirrel looks like, because it’s such a common animal throughout most of the world. Some squirrel species get used to humans and often live in people’s yards and in city parks. A tree squirrel has a long, fluffy tail, a long, slender body, relatively short legs, small ears, and large eyes. It’s usually gray or brown and sometimes has spots or stripes. Some tree squirrels look different from the squirrels you may be used to, depending on where you live. Squirrels of the genus Ratufa are called giant squirrels and they’re the size of domestic cats. They live in parts of Asia, especially southeast Asia. The Indian giant squirrel lives in India, and not only is it especially big, up to 20 inches long, or 50 cm, not counting its long tail, it’s brightly colored. Different individuals and subspecies can have different shades of fur, although the belly and front legs are usually cream-colored. The rest of the body can be tan, dark brown, black, cream-colored, rusty-red, or even a dark maroon color. You may have seen pictures online of brightly colored giant squirrels, and while those are real pictures of real animals, the photographer used a filter that enhances the colors to make them look even brighter than they really are. The Indian giant squirrel and its close relations eat fruit, nuts, flowers, and other plant material, and hardly ever come down from the tall trees where they live. Another colorful squirrel is the variable squirrel, which also lives in southeast Asia. It’s on the small side for a tree squirrel, less than 9 inches long at most, or 22 cm, not counting the tail. There are over a dozen subspecies that vary in color and pattern, and some researchers think there may be enough differences that it’s actually more than one species of closely related squirrel. It’s a member of a genus called “beautiful s

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Here we go. It’s the big one, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event! Further reading: How Birds Survived the Asteroid Impact That Wiped Out the Dinosaurs How an asteroid ended the age of dinosaurs Extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs cleared way for frogs How life blossomed after the dinosaurs died 66-million-year-old deathbed linked to dinosaur-killing meteor Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Here it is, the extinction event episode that everyone’s been waiting for, or at least that everyone knows about. It’s the one that killed off the dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals. It’s probably the one we know most about and it’s certainly the one we have the most paintings of, usually of a T. rex staring into the sky at an approaching comet. In episode 227 we talked about the end-Permian extinction event, which took place about 250 million years ago. The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, or end-Cretaceous, took place just over 66 million years ago, which means that for almost 200 million years there was more or less smooth sailing in the world. Dinosaurs evolved during that time, and I think we can all agree that dinosaurs are fascinating animals. The largest terrestrial animals ever to live were dinosaurs, specifically the sauropods. Sauropods were just unimaginably huge. They were like walking buildings that ate plants, and even that doesn’t give a good idea of their size. Some sauropods had extremely long tails as well as very long necks, which increased their length. Right now the largest sauropod known was probably Argentinosaurus that might have grown as long as 118 feet, or 36 meters, but paleontologists keep finding bigger and bigger sauropods. Some sauropods had extremely long necks that they held up like a giraffe. The tallest was probably Barosaurus, estimated as being 72 feet tall, or 22 meters. And we won’t even get into estimates of how much these massive animals weighed. They make the biggest elephant that ever lived look like a toy elephant. Sauropods ate plants, with the low-necked species eating low-growing plants and the high-necked species eating tree leaves, although even saying that much is controversial. There’s a lot we don’t know about sauropods in general, since most sauropod fossils are incomplete and many species are only known from one or a few bones. But we do know some surprising things about sauropods. We have a lot of sauropod tracks, which helps us understand how their feet looked and whether they had claws, but it also tells us that some species of sauropod traveled in herds. Paleontologists do generally agree that many sauropods migrated, since animals that big would soon exhaust all the food in one area if they didn’t. Sauropods were extremely successful and lived all over the world. There were plenty of sauropods alive 66 ½ million years ago, and then…there were no sauropods alive ever again. These days, there’s so much evidence that a massive asteroid killed off the dinosaurs that pretty much everyone agrees, but when the idea was first proposed in 1980, it was extremely controversial. When I was a kid I remember reading dinosaur books that still said the extinction of the dinosaurs was a mystery but that many scientists thought it was due to disease or volcanoes. The asteroid strike hypothesis was proposed by the physicist Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter. They worked with a small team of other scientists, including two chemists, Helen Michel and Frank Asaro, to investigate a strange anomaly in rock strata. Rocks dating to the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Paleogene period are separated by a thin layer of clay that’s visible throughout the world, or at least wherever the rocks remain and can be examined. It’s called the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, or K-Pg boundary, although in older books and websites it’s called the K-T boundary. It occurred just over 66 million years ago. The Alvarezes were curious about this layer, and during their investigations they found out that the clay is full of an element called iridium. Iridium is a silvery-white metal chemically related to platinum, and it’s rare. At least, it’s rare on Earth. It’s a common component of asteroids, which was one of the main reasons why the Alvarezes came to their hypothesis that the K-Pg boundary was the result of a massive asteroid impact. Other scientists had made similar suggestions in the decade or so leading up to the Alvarezes’ theory, but the iridium discovery provided the proof everyone wanted. Iridium wasn’t the only thing found in the K-Pg boundary layer, either. There were other platinum-group metals present in high concentrations—much higher than found on Earth, and in fact these elements are referred to as rare-earth metals for that reason. In some places, the K-Pg boundary contains grains of shocked quartz and microtektites.

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Thanks to Pranav and Max for their suggestions. Let’s learn about some mystery crocodiles (and crocodile mysteries) this week! Further reading: Huge prehistoric croc ‘river boss’ prowled waterways Extinct “horned” crocodile’s ancestry revealed New species of crocodile discovered in museum collections Rediscovery of “Lost” Caiman Leads to New Crocodilian Mystery The Orange Cave-Dwelling Crocodiles The horned crocodile’s fossil skull: A baby Apaporis River caiman, looking fierce but cute (picture from link above): An orange crocodile (later released, picture from link above): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’ve got a crocodile episode this week you can really sink your teeth into. Thanks to Pranav and Max for their suggestions! (Yes, I do have a cold but hopefully I don’t sound too bad. I got a covid test today to make sure it’s just a cold, and it’s just a cold.) We talked about crododilians in episode 85, so if you want to learn more about the saltwater crocodile or how to tell the American crocodile from the American alligator and so forth, that’s the episode to listen to. This episode is going to talk about mystery crocodiles! The partial skull of a massive extinct crocodilian discovered in Queensland, Australia over a century ago was finally described in June of 2021. All we have is the partial skull from an animal that lived between 2 and 5 million years ago, but researchers can estimate the size of the whole animal by comparing the dimensions of its skull with its closest living relation. That happens to be an animal called the false gharial that lives on a few islands in South Asia, including Java and Sumatra. It’s the only living member of the subfamily Tomistominae, which used to be common worldwide. The false gharial can grow as long as 16 feet, or 5 meters, but its extinct Australian cousin was much bigger. The new species, Gunggamarandu maunala, may have grown up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters. A smaller extinct crocodile, called the horned crocodile, lived in Madagascar until only about 1,400 years ago. It grew a little over 16 feet long, or 5 meters. It had two projections at the back of its head that look like horns, although they weren’t actually horns and probably weren’t all that big or noticeable when the crocodile was alive. Like Gunggamarandu, the horned crocodile’s fossils were discovered almost 150 years ago but only definitively described in 2021. In this case, though, the delay was because no one could decide where the horned crocodile belonged in the crocodilian family tree. The Nile crocodile lives on Madagascar now, and some researchers assumed that the horned crocodile was either a close relation of the Nile croc or its ancestor. Since new evidence points to the Nile crocodile being a fairly recent arrival to the island, that’s not likely, so researchers analyzed the fossil remains and reclassified the horned croc as a member of the dwarf crocodiles in 2007. Finally, though, a research team analyzed the horned croc’s DNA and determined that it belongs in its own genus and is most closely related to the ancestral species of all living crocodiles. This suggests that crocodiles evolved in Africa and spread throughout the world from there. Researchers aren’t sure what caused the horned croc to go extinct, but it may have been a combination of factors, including a drying climate on Madagascar, the arrival of humans, and the arrival of the Nile crocodile. Speaking of the Nile crocodile and DNA, a 2011 genetic study of the Nile crocodile resulted in a surprising discovery. The study tested not just DNA samples gathered from 123 living Nile crocodiles but from 57 crocodiles mummified in ancient Egypt. The goal was to see if there were differences between modern crocodiles and ones that lived several thousand years ago, and to determine whether maybe there was a subspecies of Nile crocodile that hadn’t been recognized by science. Instead, they discovered that what was previously known as the Nile crocodile is actually two completely different species! The Nile croc lives in Africa and is a large, aggressive animal that can grow just over 19 feet long, or almost 6 meters. The West African croc also lives in Africa and is a smaller, less aggressive animal that can grow up to 13 feet long, or 4 meters. Since crocodiles of all species show a lot of variation in size and appearance, no one realized until 2011 that there were two species living near each other. They’re not even all that closely related. After the finding was published, zoos across the world tested their crocodiles and discovered that a lot of their Nile crocs are actually West African crocs. Something similar happened more recently, in 2019, when a team of scientists did a genetic study of the New Guinea crocodile. They gathered DNA from 51 museum specim

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! This week we’ve got three adorable little animals to learn about! Thanks to Simon and Thia, Elaine, and Henry for their suggestions! Further reading: Turning the spotlight on the rusty-spotted cat (Wildlife SOS) The cute and fuzzy pink fairy armadillo: The cute and fuzzy rusty spotted cat: The cute and fuzzy baby Arctic tern: Adult Arctic terns: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’ve got three strange and adorable animals for you, all listener suggestions because I’m getting really behind on those. Thanks this week to Simon and Thia, Elaine, and Henry! First, Simon and Thia suggested the pink fairy armadillo. That’s one we covered briefly in a Patreon episode back in 2018, but it deserves to be featured in the main feed because it’s so strange and cute. It lives in deserts and grasslands of central Argentina, South America, but since its range is so restricted and it spends most of its life underground and is rarely seen by humans, we don’t know much about it. The pink fairy armadillo is the smallest armadillo species known. It only grows about 4.5 inches long, or 11.5 cm, small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. It’s protected by a leathery shell that runs from its nose along the top of its head and down its back to its bottom, and the shell is segmented like a regular armadillo’s shell except that it’s a delicate pink. The fluffy fur on the animal’s sides and tummy is white. It has a short spade-shaped tail, but the rear of its body is flattened, and it uses its flat bottom to compress dirt in the tunnels as it digs. It has a small head, short legs, and gigantic front claws. Its hind claws are big too. It spends almost all of its life underground, digging shallow tunnels and eating small animals like worms, insect larvae, snails, and insects like ants, which it probably hunts by scent. It has a good sense of smell but its eyes are tiny and its ears don’t show at all, although it does have good hearing. It can dig extremely quickly. It loosens the soil with its huge front claws, kicks it back with its hind claws, and then does a quick reverse to tamp the new dirt heap into a firm column with its flat bottom. This keeps the floor of its burrow clear so the armadillo can breathe properly and helps keep the burrow from collapsing. Almost the only time the pink fairy armadillo surfaces is when it reaches an obstacle it can’t dig through or around, and then its claws are so big it has trouble walking on hard surfaces. This is bad if it tries to cross a road. Most sightings of pink fairy armadillos are of roadkill animals. Sometimes it surfaces after heavy rain when its burrows are flooded. The reason the pink fairy armadillo’s shell is pink is that blood vessels show through it. Researchers think it can regulate its temperature according to how much blood flows through the vessels beneath the shell. The shell is only attached to the body by a membrane along the spinal column and doesn’t protect it as well as other armadillo shells do, but then it’s almost always underground so the shell probably mostly protects it from rocks and roots. The pink fairy armadillo doesn’t do well in captivity, usually dying from stress within a day or two of capture, and since it’s almost always underground it can be hard to find and study. It’s threatened by habitat loss, climate change, poaching, and the use of pesticides. It’s extremely sensitive to changes in temperature and soil. The pink fairy armadillo has a similar-looking but slightly larger relative, the greater fairy armadillo, which can grow up to 7 inches long, or 17.5 cm. It’s also a burrowing armadillo that lives in South America, which has an additional conservation problem. It’s considered by locals to be the spirit of a dead baby, so if a local sees it they usually kill it. Next, Elaine suggested the rusty spotted cat. It’s a tiny cat that lives in forests and grasslands in South Asia, especially in India and Sri Lanka, and although it resembles a tiny domestic cat, it’s not all that closely related to domestic cats or their wild cousins. The rusty spotted cat is reddish-gray with darker stripes on the face and small rusty-red spots over most of its body. It’s about half the size of a domestic cat and grows up to 19 inches long at most, or 48 cm, not counting its tail, which adds another 12 inches or so to its length, or 30 cm. This is where I tried to measure my cats with the soft plastic tape measure I use for sewing, but they thought it was a toy so I never did figure out how long they are. Also, my tape measure has holes in it now from claws and teeth. The rusty spotted cat only weighs up to about 4 pounds, or 1.8 kg. Keep in mind that these numbers are for the biggest possible rusty spotted cats. Most are much smaller. They’re basically kitten-sized. The rusty spotted cat is mostly nocturnal and eats small animals like

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Thanks to Riley, Richard, and Aiden and Aiden’s unnamed friend for suggestions this week! We’re going to learn about some geckos and other reptiles that live in trees. Thanks also to Llewelly for a small correction about lions. Also, I mispronounced Strophurus–it should be more like Stroff-YOUR-us but I’m too lazy to fix it. Further reading: Cancer Clues Found in Gene behind ‘Lemon Frost’ Gecko Color A chameleon’s feets: A rare healthy lemon frost domestic leopard gecko (photo taken from article linked above): An ordinary leopard gecko: I don’t remember what kind of gecko this is (golden spiny-tailed?) but I love it: A crested gecko looking surprised: The green iguana: A black mamba. Watch out! Flying snake alert! The draco lizard with its “wings” extended (male) and the draco lizard with its “wings” folded (female): A parachute gecko showing how it works: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about some reptiles, specifically reptiles that live in trees. This is a suggestion from Riley, who wanted to hear about arboreal reptiles in general and the crested gecko in particular. Thanks also to my brother Richard, who suggested the dragon-tailed gecko. An anonymous reviewer also suggested the leopard gecko so we’ll learn about that one too. Specifically, the anonymous reviewer said “me and my friend Aiden suggest either red foxes or leopard geckos.” We actually covered the red fox in episode 138, about city animals, and in episode 106, about domestication, but we’ve only mentioned the leopard gecko briefly way back in episode 20. Arboreal animals have some traits in common, whether they’re reptiles or mammals or something else. In general, an animal that spends most of its time in trees is small and lightweight, either has long legs or very short legs, may have a long tail to help it balance, and may also have various adaptations to its feet to help it maneuver through branches. This is the case with the chameleon, which is arboreal and has weird feet. Its feet look more like mittens. The feet are called zygodactylous, which means it has two toes pointing forward and two pointing backwards. A lot of birds have feet like this too. Chameleons have other adaptations for arboreal life, like prehensile tails that can twine around a twig to help it keep its balance. The chameleon really deserves its own episode some day, so let’s move on to learn about some geckos. The biggest gecko known grows up to two feet long, or 60 cm, but most are much smaller. There are more than 1,800 species known and they’re all really interesting and honestly, adorable. They’re mostly nocturnal and eat small animals like insects. About 60% of all gecko species have toe pads that allow them to walk up walls and windows and even across ceilings. Like many other lizards, most geckos species can drop their tail if a predator attacks. The tail thrashes around on its own for several minutes, distracting the predator so the gecko can escape. The gecko later regrows a little stumpy tail, but it can’t drop it a second time. Many species of gecko store fat in the tail, so it needs that tail. A genus of gecko called the fish-scaled gecko, which lives on Madagascar and nearby islands, has big scales that come loose easily if an animal tries to bite it or if a scientist tries to capture it. The predator gets a mouthful of scales while the gecko runs off. The scales grow back eventually and can be lost again. Scientists are always interested in animals that can regenerate parts of the body, to learn how that works. A study published in 2017 identified the type of cells that allow the gecko to regrow the part of its spinal cord that’s lost with its tail. In 2018, the same team published their discovery that geckos renew brain cells. This is amazing, since humans and many other animals are born with all the brain cells they’ll ever have, and if something happens to injure the brain, the damage can’t be repaired. Maybe one day people will be able to heal their brains just like the gecko does. Most species of gecko don’t have eyelids. Instead, the gecko has a protective scale over its eyeball. To remove dust and other debris from the scale, the gecko licks its eyes. The leopard gecko grows about 11 inches long, or almost 28 cm, and is one of the species that doesn’t have toe pads. That makes it easier to keep in captivity, since it’s less likely to climb out of its terrarium. It’s a handsome lizard that’s yellowish or orangey in color with black spots, but baby leopard geckos actually have black stripes. It’s native to parts of the Middle East and south Asia where it’s mostly hot and dry, and in the wild it spends its day in a burrow and only comes out at night to hunt. The leopard gecko has been kept as a pet for so long that some people

It’s our bonus question and answer episode, which turned out to be ridiculously long but hopefully interesting! Further listening/watching: The Axolotl Song ~~~Buy my books!~~~ Whiskers used to have two eyes and a nose. In the background, Dracula (left) and Poe (right): Black squirrel! King cobra! Pufferfish, puffed: Dog nose: Show transcript: Welcome to the bonus Q&A episode of Strange Animals Podcast! I’m your host, Kate Shaw, and this is a little extra episode where I answer listener questions. So let’s jump right into it. To start us off, Simon and Thia wanted to know how I first became interested in animals. I really don’t know! When I was little, I didn’t want to play with dolls, I wanted to play with my stuffed animals. I actually have a toy cat named Whiskers who I’ve had since I was four. Whiskers is older than all my teeth! I especially loved horses as a kid and since my family couldn’t afford to buy me a horse, I took riding lessons and read everything I could find about horses, fiction and nonfiction. All that reading about horses led to reading about other animals, and the more I read, the more interested I became in animals of all kinds. Next, Melissa of the awesome podcast Bewilderbeasts asked, “What was the fact or episode that really slapped you out of left field, like, ‘I didn’t see that coming AT ALL’?” OH MY GOSH, how many times has that happened to me? The most astounding fact I can think of isn’t actually about an animal at all but about trees. While I was researching the Temnospondyl episode, which had a related Patreon episode that ran at about the same time, I came across the fact that when trees first developed, nothing could break down the tough compound called lignin that hardens a tree’s cells to make wood and bark. When a tree died, its trunk just stayed where it fell forever, and this happened for at least 50 million years and possibly 100 million years. 100 million years of tree trunks just lying all over the ground! You wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere! You’d have to climb over hundreds of millions of fallen tree trunks, although naturally as the years passed the older ones would get buried deeper and deeper in the earth. But there would always be more! This blew my mind, and later I came back to it, determined to do more research and make sure it was accurate. I did a whole lot of research, because it just didn’t seem possible, and that information ended up in episode 214. As for an animal that blew my mind, I still have trouble believing ice worms are real. They’re worms that live in snow and ice! We covered them last August in episode 185 and I’m still reeling. Next, Llewelly asks what my favorite extinct animal is, or animals. Why would you make me choose? This is so hard. Okay, fine, I’ll narrow it down to hoofed Pleistocene megafauna like the giant deer and elasmotherium and so many other animals with weird horns and ossicones and things like that. What really gets me is that they lived so recently! Many of them only died out 11,000 years ago, and some were probably around much more recently in a few isolated areas. It also really reminds me to appreciate the megafauna that’s still around. We live at the same time as giraffes! Next, Richard E. asked, “Does your job involve the study of animals and/or is the pod something that you really wanted to do?” Tracie also asked what my background is, if I’m a professor or zookeeper or something similar. Helenka also asked my background and how I got interested in strange animals. I’m kind of embarrassed that I never have pointed out that I’m not an animal expert, to steal a phrase from the awesome podcast Varmints! I actually work as a test proctor, AKA invigilator, in a large community college, so my work doesn’t have anything to do with animals. My background is in elementary education although I didn’t teach long. Basically I got my K-8 teaching certification and M.Ed., did some substitute teaching afterwards, and ended up getting my current job instead of taking a teaching position. I still love teaching, so when I decided I wanted to start a podcast, I knew it would be nonfiction. My undergraduate degree is in English literature, and I took so many history courses that I minored in history almost by accident, so I’m really good at research and can write an essay about any topic in the world in very little time. I didn’t know it when I was in college, which was long before podcasts existed anyway, but I have the perfect background for creating a nonfiction podcast. Liesbet has three questions about the podcast: what inspired me to start it, what motivates me to keep going without missing any episodes, and what I enjoy most about it. I’m so pleased that someone noticed I’ve never missed a single episode! Not that it would be the end of the world if I did, of course, but if I did, I’d feel bad thinking about people who were looking forward to listening to the new episode and were disappointed when there wasn’t one.

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! It’s our fourth annual updates and corrections episode! I’ve already had to make a correction to this episode! Further reading: Cassowary, a rare emu-like bird, attacks and kills Florida man, officials say The dog Bunny’s Facebook page 3D printed replicas reveal swimming capabilities of ancient cephalopods Enormous ancient fish discovered by accident A rare observation of a vampire bat adopting an unrelated pup Pandemic paleo: A wayward skull, at-home fossil analyses, a first for Antarctic amphibians Neanderthals and Homo sapiens used identical Nubian technology Entire genome from Pestera Muierii 1 sequenced Animal Species Named from Photos Cryptophidion, named from photos: The sunbeam snake showing off that iridescence: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.   It’s our fourth annual updates and corrections episode, and to keep it especially interesting we’ll also learn about a mystery snake. Make sure to check the show notes for lots of links if you want to learn more about these updates.   First, we have a small correction from episode 222. G emailed with a link about a Florida man who was killed by a cassowary in 2019, so cassowaries continue to be dangerous.   We also have a correction from episode 188, about the hyena. I called hyenas canids at one point, and although they resemble canids like dogs and wolves, they’re not canids at all. In fact, they’re more closely related to cats than dogs. Thanks to Bal for the correction!   In response to the talking animals episode, Merike told about a dog who uses computer buttons to communicate. The dog is called Bunny and she’s completely adorable. I’ll link to her facebook page. I have my doubts that she’s actually communicating the way it looks like she is. She’s obviously a clever dog but I don’t think she understands the English language so well that she can choose verbs like “is” from her list of words. I think she’s probably mostly taking unconscious cues from her owner. But I would be happy to be proven wrong.   Following up from our recent deep-sea squid episode, a team of paleontologists studying ancient cephalopods 3-D printed some replicas of what the animals would have looked like while alive. Then they took the models into a swimming pool and other water sources to study how their shells affected the way they could move through the water. They discovered that a type of cephalopod with a straight shell, called an orthocone, probably mostly moved up and down in the water to find food and could have moved extremely fast in an upward or downward direction. A type of cephalopod with a spiral shaped shell, called a torticone, also spun slightly as it moved around. The same team has previously worked with 3-D models of ammonoids, which we talked about in episode 86. The models don’t just look like the living animals, they have the same center of balance and other details, worked out mathematically.   Speaking of ancient animals, a collector in London bought a fossil found in Morocco thinking it was part of a pterodactyl skull. When the collector asked a palaeontologist to identify it, it turned out to be a fossilized coelacanth lung. The collector donated the fossil for further study, and the palaeontologist, David Martill, worked with a Brazilian coelacanth expert, Paulo Brito, to examine the fossil.   The fossil dates to the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago, and is bigger than any coelacanth lung ever found. Modern coelacanths grow a little over six feet long at most, or 2 meters, but the estimated length of this Coelacanth is some 16 ½ feet, or 5 meters. The fossil is being donated to a university in Morocco.   We talked about vampire bats way back in episode 11, and I love bats and especially vampire bats so I try to keep an eye on new findings about them. Everyone thinks vampire bats are scary and creepy, but they’re actually social, friendly animals who don’t mean to spread rabies and other diseases to the animals they bite. It just happens.   Vampire bats live in colonies and researchers have long known that if a female dies, her close relations will often take care of her surviving baby. Now we have evidence that at least sometimes, the adoptive mother isn’t necessarily related to the birth mother. It’s from a recently published article based on a study done in 2019.   A team researching how unrelated vampire bats form social bonds captured 23 common vampire bats from three different colonies and put them together in a new roost where their interactions could be recorded by surveillance cameras. One particular pair of females, nicknamed Lilith and BD, became good friends. They groomed each other frequently and shared food. If you remember from episode 11, vampire bats share food by regurgitating some of the blood they drank earlier so the other bat can lap it u

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! This week we visit the weirdest squid in the deep sea! I was a guest on Tim Mendees’s After Hours that’s now up on YouTube! It’s mostly about my writing but we talk about all kinds of stuff, including cephalopods! There is some bad language but it’s not all that bad and it’s mostly toward the end. Further reading/watching: Elusive Long-Tailed Squid Captured on Film for First time See Strange Squid Filmed in the Wild for the First Time (ram’s horn squid) Multiple observations of Bigfin Squid (Magnapinna sp.) in the Great Australian Bight reveal distribution patterns, morphological characteristics, and rarely seen behaviour Untangling the Long-Armed Mystery of the Bigfin Squid Drawing of a long-arm squid and an actual long-arm squid: Asperoteuthis mangoldae, which really should be called the long-tailed squid: Verany’s long-armed squid, with its tentacles mostly retracted (so not looking very long-armed): Verany’s long-armed squid with tentacles extended: Drawing of a paralarval Verany’s long-armed squid: The ram’s horn squid, floating along doop doop doop: Drawing of the coiled internal shell of the ram’s horn squid: A clawed armhook squid mama with her egg cluster: Bigfin squid! Another bigfin squid! Good grief look at that! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Before we get started, a quick announcement that I was a guest on a YouTube show called After Hours recently! I was there mostly to talk about my writing, but naturally animals came up too, especially cephalopods. There’s a link in the show notes if you want to watch the show. There is a little bad language, but not too bad and it’s more toward the end. Anyway, in a not-exactly coincidence, this week we’re going to look at some of the weirdest deep-sea squids known. Yes, weirder than the flying squid we talked about in episode 101. We don’t know much about any of them, but they’re definitely not what you expect when you think about squid. Let’s talk first about Asperoteuthis acanthoderma, the long-arm squid. It’s also sometimes called the thorny whiplash squid because it has little pointy tubercules in its skin and long, whiplike feeding tentacles. It lives in the deep sea and has been found in both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, although very rarely. Despite its name, its feeding tentacles are much longer than its arms, although its arms are pretty long too. A squid’s body is generally more or less torpedo-shaped and is called a mantle. It has eight arms and two feeding tentacles that are usually longer than the arms. Many squid species have relatively short arms compared to mantle length. The feeding tentacles in long-arm squid are very slender and delicate, and they’re easily broken off after the animal dies and has washed around in the water for a while. One intact specimen has been found and measured, though. It had a mantle length of almost a foot and a half long, or 45 cm, but its total length, including the tentacles, was 18 feet, or 5.5 meters. The tentacles were 12 times the mantle length. Using that ratio, one large specimen found in 2007, which was 6 1/2 feet long, or 2 meters, including both mantle and arms, is estimated to have measured up to 24 feet long when it was alive, or over 7 meters. Most of its length is due to its incredibly long, thin feeding tentacles. So what does the long-arm squid eat with those long, delicate tentacles? We don’t know. We don’t know most things about the long-arm squid. Another species of Asperoteuthis is Asperoteuthis mangoldae. So little is known about it that it doesn’t even have an informal name. It was only described in 2007 and has only been found around the Hawaiian islands in the Pacific Ocean. It looks similar to the closely-related long-arm squid but without the incredibly long feeding tentacles. Instead, it has a sort of tail, so I nominate it to be called the long-tailed squid. It was caught on video for the first time in 2019 by a deep-sea rover. You’re going to hear a lot about deep-sea rovers in this episode. There are lots of links in the show notes to articles with embedded video of various squids, which is really interesting to watch. Asperoteuthis mangoldae is a long, slender squid. I couldn’t find any measurements so it could be that’s just not known right now. The species in this genus have an extension of the mantle, on the side opposite of the arms, that looks like an extra fin but that doesn’t seem to be used as a fin. In the long-tailed squid, this extra fin is as long as its mantle and arms and feeding tentacles all measured together. Most of the time the thin flaps of skin on either side of the so-called tail are extended, making it look like a really long fin, but when the squid feels threatened and needs to flee, it collapses the fin part around the middle section so that it reduces drag in

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! 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

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have merchandise! Thanks to Elaine, Molly, and Oliver for suggesting the aye-aye! I guess it’s an idea whose time has finally come. Further reading: Gimme six! Researchers discover aye-aye’s extra finger Ah yes, I have many many many fingers: S p i d e r h a n d s: A baby aye-aye (blep): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I can safely say that this week’s episode is brought to you by popular demand. It was suggested by not one, not two, but three different listeners, two of them very recently. Elaine wanted to know about the aye-aye, and then Molly wanted to know about the aye-aye, and then Oliver wanted to know about the aye-aye. I think it’s high time we all learned about the aye-aye, because it’s a weird and amazing animal. The aye-aye is a primate, specifically a type of lemur, but it doesn’t look like other lemurs. It kind of looks like a weird possum at first glance. Its shaggy fur is brown or yellowish but the hairs are tipped with white, which gives it a frosty appearance. Its face is white or pale gray. Its eyes are large, very round, and orange or yellow, and it has really big ears sort of like a bat’s ears. It grows up to three feet long, or 90 cm, including its really long tail. To picture what an aye-aye looks like, imagine a little monkey with brownish fur tipped with white, with a tail longer than its body that’s thickly furred like a squirrel’s tail. Its head looks like a squirrel or possum, but with big orangey staring eyes and big bat ears that are sort of stuck out to the sides of its head instead of on top. Its hind feet look like monkey feet with an opposing digit to help it grab onto branches, because it lives in trees. But its hands look like SPIDERS. The fingers of its hands are extremely long and thin like spider legs. That’s what it looks like. The aye aye’s fingers are long for an interesting reason, and if you don’t already know, I bet you would never be able to guess. Go on, guess. Just shout it out. I won’t hear it but everyone around you will hear you shout, “THE AYE-AYE’S FINGERS LOOK LIKE SPIDER LEGS BECAUSE IT WANTS TO SCARE PREDATORS INTO THINKING IT’S TWO SPIDERS WITH A MONKEY FRIEND.” You would be wrong, sorry, but that’s a good guess. No, the aye aye uses its fingers to find grubs and other insects hidden in rotting wood or under bark, just like a woodpecker. Here’s how that works, and you’re not going to believe it, but it’s true. The aye aye is a primate, which means it has five fingers just like monkeys and apes and humans, but again, they’re extremely long and thin. The middle finger is even thinner than the others. It looks like a jointed twig. If it really was a spider, other spiders would ask what happened to that leg because it’s so much thinner than the other legs. The aye aye uses the thin finger to tap-tap-tap on tree branches and trunks at night, and it listens with its huge ears to the echoes of its tapping. That’s echolocation, just like bats and a few other animals use to navigate, but the aye aye uses it to listen for hollow places in the tree where insects are hiding. It can also hear the tiny movements of insects. Its ears are just that sensitive. When the aye aye locates an insect, it chews a hole into the wood and then uses its long fingers to fish the insects out. It has claws at the end of its fingers that help it catch the insects, although the claws are actually just claw-like fingernails. Primates don’t have claws, we have nails, and that includes the aye-aye. It doesn’t just eat insects, though. It eats fruit, seeds, various kinds of fungus, honey, flowers, and flower nectar. It actually eats more plant material than insects. It may also eat frogs, since some frogs in Madagascar lay their eggs in small holes in trees that are filled with rainwater, but it’s also possible that the aye-aye doesn’t care about frogs or frog eggs or tadpoles. Frogs definitely use the little holes the aye-aye chews as perfect little nurseries for their eggs. The aye-aye is native to the forests of Madagascar and mostly lives along the east coast. It spends the day sleeping in trees, in a nest it makes out of twigs and dead leaves. Since it may travel more than a mile at night while it forages, it doesn’t always sleep in the same nest. It can make a new one in less than an hour, and then it crawls inside and wraps its long tail around it and falls asleep, cozy and warm. The aye-aye hardly ever comes down to the ground. It’s mostly solitary except during mating season, although sometimes a few aye ayes will forage together. When aye-ayes do forage together, it’s usually a male and female, or one female and more than one male, or just two or more males. Female aye-ayes are more aggressive than males and they don’t want anything to do with other females. The aye aye has so many non-primate characteristics that I hardly know where to start. For one thing, it’s nocturnal. Very few

Sign up for our mailing list! Buy our merch! Thanks to “dog freak Ruby,” we’re going to learn about some animals that aren’t exactly domesticated but aren’t really wild either. Further reading: Memories of Ángela Loij Mongolian horse and its person: Mongolian horses: OH MY GOSH HEART HEART HEART (photo from this website): Dingos! An artist’s rendition of the Fuejian dog (left) and a picture of the cuelpo (right): The cuelpo, happy fox-like canid: A very fancy rat: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Before we get started, and before I forget again to tell you about this, I’m planning a bonus Q&A episode for August. If you have any questions about the podcast, podcasting in general, me, or anything else, feel free to email me at [email protected], or otherwise contact me through social media! A few episodes ago I mentioned in passing that the Australian dingo is a type of feral dog. It’s a more complicated situation than it sounds, so while I didn’t want to confuse the issue at the time, I kept thinking about it. Then I remembered that a listener emailed me a while back wanting to know more about how dogs were domesticated. We covered the topic pretty thoroughly back in episode 106, but I realized that there’s an aspect of domestication we didn’t cover in that episode. So thanks to “dog freak Ruby,” here’s an episode about a few animals that are only semi-domesticated. Domestication, after all, isn’t a switch you can flip. It’s a process, and depending on the animal species and the circumstances, it can take a really long time. It’s not the same thing as taming an animal, either. An individual animal might become tame with the right treatment, but that doesn’t mean any individual of that species would react the same way. Domesticated animals show genetic changes that their wild counterparts don’t, changes that make them more likely to treat humans as friends instead of potential predators. Generally, a fully domesticated animal requires some level of care from a human to survive, even if it’s just feral cats living near humans so they can find and kill rodents and avoid most predators. Feral domesticated cats don’t live the same way as their wild ancestors do. But sometimes it’s not as cut and dried as it sounds. While mustangs and other feral horse populations are considered domesticated animals, they live like wild animals and don’t need humans to survive. They mostly just need humans to leave them alone so they can thrive on their own. But if you capture a mustang that’s lived its whole life in the wild, with the right treatment it will eventually become tame, because its ancestors were bred for thousands of years to trust and depend on humans. That brings us to our first semi-domesticated animal, the Mongolian horse. Yes, I’m still really into Mongolia and the Hu, and I’m excited to say I have tickets to see the Hu twice in concert this fall, if everything goes well. I’ve been listening to a program called the Voice of Mongolia in English, which is primarily a shortwave radio program but it’s also released as a podcast, and it talks about various aspects of Mongolian culture. Recently they had an episode about horses, so some of my information comes directly from that show. Mongolia is a country in central Asia that’s mostly open steppes, which is a type of grassland. The soil isn’t right for most crops, but it’s great for horses. The people of Mongolia are traditionally nomadic, moving around from place to place to find grazing for their horses and other livestock, and about half of the current population still lives this way. The Mongolian horse is a small, tough breed that probably hasn’t changed much in the last thousand years, possibly longer. It’s one of the oldest breeds of horse in the world and the ancestor of many other horse breeds. For a long time people assumed it was the domesticated descendant of the wild Przewalski’s horse, but genetic testing has determined that domestic horses developed from a different wild horse species that’s extinct now. Genetic testing also showed that the Mongolian horse has the highest genetic diversity of any horse breed tested. It’s incredibly strong for its size, can gallop for miles without tiring, has strong hooves that never need trimming or shoeing, and seldom needs or receives veterinary care. The main reason for all these traits is that Mongolian horses live like wild horses in most ways. They live loose, grazing as they like, and if they get too far away from their humans, the owners will go out to find them. But they’re still domesticated. Mare’s milk is an important part of the Mongolian diet, so the mares are used to being milked, and people use their horses to ride, carry packs, and pull carts. The stallions are frequently raced. At the same time, though, they’re not really pets. Mongols don’t give their horses names, but instead refer to them with a det

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have merch! Let’s learn about some strange fish of the mesopelagic, or the twilight zone deep in the ocean! Thanks to Page, Joel, Anonymous Animal Lover, Brigham, and Fireburster for suggestions this week! Further reading: In Defense of the Blobfish Further viewing: Pacific viperfish (video embedded) The Pacific viperfish, head-on (or rather teeth-on), still from video linked above: Sloane’s viperfish, rocking those teeth: The blobfish as it’s usually seen on the internet: The blobfish as it looks when it’s cozy in its deep-sea environment: The barreleye, which I have helpfully labeled for you: Look at the bristlemouth’s sharp thin teeth! Good thing it’s only a few inches long: An indignant bristlemouth (someone should take MS Paint away from me): The bristlemouth is the most abundant vertebrate in the WORLD (photo by Paul Caiger): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Where on earth does the time go? Suddenly we’re halfway through 2021 and I’m still vaguely thinking we’re only a few months in. I’m getting seriously behind on listener suggestions, so let’s have an episode about some weird fish that’s all listener suggestions. Thanks to Page, Joel, an animal lover who wants to remain anonymous, Brigham (whose name I hope I’m pronouncing correctly), and someone who calls themself Fireburster. Fireburster and Anonymous Animal Lover also both left us really nice reviews, so thank you! I picked all these suggestions at random, just grabbing fish suggestions that sounded interesting, but the great thing is they all turned out to live in a specific part of the deep sea. Brigham and Fireburster both suggested the same fish, so let’s start with that one: the dragon fish. Neither of them specified which kind of dragon fish they’re talking about, though. It’s a popular name for weird fish of various kinds. We’ve even talked about a few before, the Pacific blackdragon of episode 193, which was coincidentally suggested by Page, and the barbeled dragonfish in that same episode. That’s the episode about William Beebe’s mystery fish, which happens to be my current favorite. We only talked about the barbeled dragonfish briefly before, so let’s learn more about them now. The barbeled dragonfish gets its name from the filament that hangs down from its chin, called a barbel. If you’ve ever wondered what the proper name for a catfish’s whiskers is, they’re also barbels. The dragonfish’s barbel has a photophore at the end that produces blue-green bioluminescent light, and the fish flashes the light to attract prey. Its head is large and its jaws are full of sharp teeth, so when an animal comes close, CHOMP! The barbeled dragonfish grabs it. The dragonfish isn’t very big, with the blackdragon that we talked about in episode 193 being the largest at only 16 inches long, or 40 cm. Most species are about half that. So what happens when an animal the same size as or even bigger than the dragonfish happens along? The dragonfish eats it, that’s what happens. It has large jaws that it can unhinge to swallow prey that’s bigger than it is, and its stomach can expand considerably to hold whatever it swallows. Mostly it just eats tiny animals like krill and amphipods, though. We don’t know a whole lot about dragonfish. Various species live throughout most of the world’s oceans, especially in tropical and subtropical areas, and they don’t live in the deepest parts of the ocean. Instead, they’re found in what’s called the twilight zone, or more properly the mesopelagic. Only 1% of all light shining down from the surface makes it down this far, which is why so many animals produce their own bioluminescent light. The dragonfish also has photophores along its sides that it can flash to help attract prey or attract mates. On nights when the moon isn’t too bright, the dragonfish will migrate closer to the surface to find more food, but it makes sure to go back to the twilight zone before the sun rises. [twilight zone music] One genus of dragonfish is called the viperfish, and they’re a little different from other dragonfish. Instead of a barbel on the chin, viperfish have a light at the end of a long spine that’s a modified dorsal fin. This is similar to the anglerfish we’ve talked about many times before, even though dragonfish and anglerfish aren’t related. Convergent evolution, at it again! The viperfish has teeth so long they don’t fit in its mouth. Instead, they stick out, which gives it its other name of fangfish. Sloane’s viperfish has the largest teeth of all the viperfish species, so long that they form a cage across its mouth to stop prey from escaping before the fish can swallow it. Unlike most dragonfish, Sloane’s viperfish sometimes swims toward its prey very quickly, slamming into it and wounding it with its fangs. It even has a sort of built-in shock absorber in its spine right behind its head. The Pacific viperfish can

Sign up for our mailing list! Let’s learn about some strange dog breeds (including a mystery dog!) and what may be the cutest frog ever. Thanks to Brad and Dan for their suggestions this week, and a special thanks to Richard from NC for suggesting the Carolina dog at just the right time. Check out Dan’s podcast, “Sure, Jan!” Further viewing: World’s Cutest Frog – Desert Rain Frog A talbot dog from the olden days: The Xoloitzcuintli dog: Norwegian lundehund hard at work: The Norwegian lundehund has lots of toes: DOUBLE NOSE DOGGO (Pachón Navarro): ANOTHER DOUBLE NOSE DOGGO (Tarsus Catalburun): The Carolina dog: The desert rain frog, round boi: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. A few weeks ago I got to meet two listeners, Brad and Dan. We met for coffee and had a great time talking about animals and podcasting and lots of other things. Dan is a podcaster too, cohost of a great show called “Sure, Jan!” which discusses musical theater in detail with a lot of insight and humor. There’s some language not appropriate for kids, but honestly, any kid who’s so into musical theater that they’re listening to a three-part deep dive into “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” they can handle a few bad words. There’s a link in the show notes if you want to check it out. Brad and Dan both gave me topic suggestions, so this is their episode! We’ll start with Brad’s suggestion about strange dog breeds. We actually covered this topic a few years ago in a Patreon episode, so Patreon subscribers may recognize a lot of this information, but I’ve done some additional research and added to it. There are a lot more dog breeds out there than most people know, many of them very rare and restricted to particular regions of the world. Often they were bred for specific purposes, sometimes purposes that no longer exist. This is the case for the turnspit dog. It was a short-legged dog that was bred to run on what was called a dog wheel. The dog wheel looked like a big hamster wheel and turned the spit, a metal rod suspended over the fire that a big piece of meat was stuck onto. The dog ran in the wheel, which turned it, which turned the cord attached to the spit, which turned the spit, which meant the meat cooked evenly instead of staying raw on one side and burning on the other. Usually a household had two turnspit dogs so one could rest while the other took a turn running in the wheel. Once better technology was invented to cook meat, the turnspit dogs were out of a job and eventually stopped being bred. They’re now an extinct breed. Another extinct dog breed is the Talbot hound. It was a large, relatively slow and heavy hound with white or pale-colored fur, popular in Europe for hundreds of years as a hunting dog. It appears on many coats of arms. It was less of a breed than a type of dog, with many large hounds being referred to as talbots as far back as the 15th century and Talbot being a common name for a hound in the 14th century and possibly earlier. By the 17th century it was more of a standardized breed, resembling a white or light-colored bloodhound in appearance with a tail that curled upward. But by the 19th century it had gone extinct. It might have been the ancestor of the modern beagle. Many dog breeds aren’t all that old, only dating back to roughly the early 19th century. In the Victorian era in Britain, people got really interested in recreating dog breeds from antiquity, so some breeds that people think date back to antiquity were actually developed just a few hundred years ago. But there are some breeds that genuinely have been around and more or less unchanged for a really long time. The Xoloitzcuintli (sho-lo-eets-quint-lee) or Xolo is a rare breed of dog that was originally bred by the Aztecs and dates back more than 3,500 years. It’s a hairless dog, although many actually do have a full coat. The hairless variety has black or gray-blue skin that is susceptible to sunburn, while the coated variety has short, dense hair. Because hairlessness is genetically related to a condition where not all the teeth form, hairless Xolos usually have fewer teeth than coated Xolos. Hairless dogs need sunscreen and skin care to keep their skin healthy just like people do. Another old dog breed is the Norwegian Lundehund. It’s a small, active dog bred specifically for hunting puffins. The breed nearly went extinct after a dog tax made it hard for people to afford keeping numerous dogs, and instead they started using nets to hunt puffins. After the puffin was declared a protected species, even the people who still kept lundehunds for hunting stopped breeding them. By 1963 there were only six purebred lundehunds alive, five of them related to each other. As a result, despite careful breeding guidelines, modern lundehunds are extremely inbred and prone to genetic diseases. Currently a group of breeders and geneticists are working on crossbreeding the Lundehund

Sign up for our mailing list! I got to meet some listeners this week to see the synchronous fireflies, so thanks to Shannon, Diana, Derek, and Autumn for hanging out with me! This week we’ll learn about a different kind of lightning bug as well as a shark mystery! Derek’s photography, Enchanting Ectotherms Further reading: A shark mystery millions of years in the making I suspect this is a doctored image but it’s gorgeous so here it is anyway, supposedly some blue ghost fireflies: This is a real photo, no photoshop, taken by Derek Wheaton during our trip. The long line of light in the middle is a blue ghost moving with its light on during a long exposure: A synchronous firefly on Derek’s hand (photo by Derek Wheaton): A tiny blue ghost firefly on Derek’s hand (photo by Derek Wheaton): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s been an amazing week for me because I got to take some people to see our local synchronous fireflies! The fireflies put on a brilliant show for us and the weather was perfect, and it was so much fun to meet Shannon and Diana! Then, two nights later, I also took Derek and Autumn out to see the fireflies. In between, I started research on the blue ghost firefly, since I had originally thought it was just another name for the synchronous firefly, but it’s not. So this week we’re going to learn about the blue ghost firefly, along with some interesting breaking news about a shark mystery. The blue ghost firefly only lives in parts of the eastern and central United States. In most places it’s rare, but like the synchronous fireflies that all flash together, the blue ghost fireflies are actually pretty common in the southern Appalachian Mountains. The reason why people don’t see them more often is that these days, most people don’t spend much time in the woods at night. Like other fireflies, the blue ghost lives in forests with deep leaf litter where there’s a lot of moisture in the ground. The female lays her eggs in the leaf litter and when the eggs hatch, the larval fireflies eat tiny insects and other invertebrates like snails. The blue ghost firefly is different from other firefly species in several ways. First, it doesn’t flash. The male stays lighted up for around a minute at a time while he flies low over the ground watching for a female to light up too. Its glow also appears bluish-white to human eyes, at least in the distance and when it’s really dark out. Up close, it looks yellow-green like other firefly lights. Researchers think it only looks blue because of the way human eyes perceive color in low light. In the daytime, blue ghost fireflies don’t look like much. They’re small, around 7 mm long, and males are all brown. The females don’t have wings, and in fact they never metamorphose into the adult form and still look like larvae as adults. The female crawls to the end of a twig or blade of grass and glows to attract a mate. When I was doing my research to learn about blue ghost fireflies, I kept seeing articles comparing its size to a grain of rice. I looked up the average size of a grain of rice, and that’s where I got 7 mm. I didn’t think too much about it. When Shannon, Diana, and I were watching the synchronous fireflies, we noticed some fireflies that didn’t flash, just stayed glowing while they drifted along low over the forest floor. After I started researching blue ghost fireflies, I realized that was what had seen! So I was especially excited to go back out with Derek and Autumn and confirm it. Derek works for a nonprofit that breeds endangered fish for conservation projects, which is awesome, but he’s also a photographer, so he brought his camera to try and get pictures and video of the fireflies. His photographs are amazing so if you want to see them I’ve linked to his Facebook page, EnchantingEctotherms, in the show notes. He does a lot of snorkeling so a lot of the animals he photographs are fish or other water animals like turtles and snakes, and he gives information about them in his posts. Anyway, he wanted to get close-up pictures of a synchronous firefly and a blue ghost firefly, so we all spent some time trying to catch one of each—gently, of course, and without leaving the trail. We didn’t want to hurt ourselves in the dark or disturb the fireflies’ habitat. Derek caught a synchronous firefly first, and it looks like an ordinary firefly that I’m used to, the common eastern firefly, which grows to about 14 mm long. That’s half an inch long. Then, eventually, he also caught a blue ghost. It was so small that at first we thought he might have caught some other beetle by accident, until we looked more closely and saw the telltale head shape of a lightning bug. I took a photo myself and put it in the show notes so you can see just how small it is. From my own observation, the blue ghosts are much dimmer than other fireflies, which makes sense since they’re so much smaller. The light does look

Sign up for our mailing list! We have a merch store now too! Thanks to Ethan for this week’s topic, two weird animals that developed after the Great Dying we talked about last week! Further reading: Monkey Lizards of the Triassic Placodonts: The Bizarre ‘Walrus-Turtles’ of the Triassic Drepanosaurus (without a head since we haven’t found a skull yet, but with that massive front claw): Drepanosaurus’s tail claw: Hypuronector had a leaf-like tail: Placodus was a big round-bodied swimmer: Some placodonts [art by Darren Naish, found at the second article linked above]: Henodus was the oddball placodont that probably ate plant material: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.   Last week we talked about the end-Permian mass extinction, also called the Great Dying. This week let’s follow up with a couple of weird and interesting animals that evolved once things got back to normal on Earth. Thanks to Ethan who suggested both animals.   The great dying marks the end of the Permian and the beginning of the Triassic period, which lasted from about 251 million years ago to 201 million years ago. In those 50 million years, life rebounded rapidly and many animals evolved that we’re familiar with today. But some animals from the Triassic are ones you’ve probably never heard of.   We’ll start with a reptile called the drepanosaur. Drepranosaurs are also sometimes called monkey lizards for reasons that will soon become clear. Paleontologists only discovered the first drepanosaur in 1980, Drepanosaurus, and within a few years they recognized a whole new family, Drepanosauridae, to fit that first discovery and subsequent closely related specimens. Drepanosaurs were weird little reptiles that probably looked like lizards in many ways, although they weren’t lizards.   How weird was Drepanosaurus? Very weird. Very, very weird.   It was obviously a climbing animal that probably spent all of its life in the treetops. It had lots of adaptations to life in trees, such as hind feet where all the toes pointed in the same direction and were somewhat curved, sort of like a spider monkey’s hand. That would help it get a good grip on branches. But those hind feet aren’t why it’s called the monkey lizard.   Drepanosaurus and its relatives are called monkey lizards because of their tails. Many monkeys have prehensile tails, which act as a fifth limb and help keep the monkey stable in a tree by curling around branches and hanging on. Drepanosaurus had something similar. Instead of being mobile from side to side like most reptile tails, Drepanosaurus’s tail could mostly only curve downward. Modern chameleons have an even more pronounced downward-curving tail that helps them climb. But the chameleon’s tail is still just a tail. The end of Drepanosaurus’s tail had several modified caudal bones that were probably exposed through the skin. Those modified bones acted as a claw to help the animal grab onto tree trunks and branches. So Drepanosaurus had claws on its front feet, claws on its hind feet, and a claw on its tail. It’s sort of like having five feet.   As if that wasn’t weird enough, let’s talk about those claws on the front feet. It had five toes on each foot, and four of them had ordinary claws. They were sharp but fairly small, about what you’d expect from an animal that grew about 19 inches long at most, or 50 cm. But the second toe on each foot, which corresponds to the pointer finger on a human hand, had a much bigger claw. MUCH BIGGER CLAW. It was as big as its whole hand! Most researchers think it used the claw to dig into rotting wood, insect nests, and bark to find insects and other small animals to eat.   But that’s not all. Drepanosaurus also had a structure called a supraneural bone at the base of its neck, made up of fused vertebrae, that would have made it look like it had a little hunch on its shoulders. While we don’t have a skull of Drepanosaurus, since we only have three specimens so far, this structure is also present in other drepanosaur species where we do have the neck and head, and they all have fairly long, slender necks and birdlike skulls with large eyes. It’s possible that the supraneural bone was the attachment site for special muscles that helped Drepanosaurus extend its neck very quickly to grab insects and other small animals.   Drepanosaurs in general shared many of the traits seen in Drepanosaurus, although with some differences. Many drepanosaurs had opposing toes on the feet that would help them grasp branches and twigs more securely. Most don’t have the giant claw on the front feet although most do have the tail claw. But one monkey lizard doesn’t live up to its name at all.   A little drepanosaur called Hypuronector limnaios, which only grew about five inches long, or 12 cm, had a much different tail from its relations. Its tail didn’t curve downward at all—in fact, it stuck up behind

Sign up for our mailing list! It’s another extinction event episode! This one’s about the end-Permian AKA the Permian-Triassic AKA the GREAT DYING. Further Reading: Ancient mini-sharks lived longer than thought Lystrosaurus’s fossilized skeleton: Lystrosaurus may have looked something like this but I hope not: This artist’s rendition of lystrosaurus looks a little less horrific but it might not be any more accurate: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s time for our next extinction event episode, and this week it’s the big one. Not the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, but one you may not have heard of, one that almost destroyed all life on earth. I mean, obviously it didn’t and things are fine now, but it was touch and go there for a while. It’s the Permian-Triassic extinction event, or end-Permian, which took place just over 250 million years ago. It was so bad that scientists who aren’t given to hyperbole refer to it as the Great Dying. Don’t worry, we won’t talk about extinction the whole time. We’ll also learn about some interesting animals that survived the extinction event and did just fine afterwards. We have a better idea of what happened at the end of the Permian than we have about the earlier extinction events we talked about in episodes 205 and 214. Right about 252 million years ago, something caused a massive volcanic eruptive event in what is now Siberia. Some researchers speculate that the cause of the volcanic eruptions may have been a huge asteroid impact on the other side of the Earth, which was so powerful that it caused magma to move away from the impact like water sloshing in a jostled glass. The magma rose up toward the earth’s crust and eventually through it onto the surface. The result was probably the largest volcanic event in the last half-billion years and it continued for an estimated two million years. Most of the eruptions were probably pretty low-key, just runny lava pouring out of vents in the ground, but there was just so much of it. Lava covered almost a million square miles of land, or 2.6 million square km. Ash and toxic gases from some eruptions also ended up high in the atmosphere, but one big problem was that the lava poured through sediments full of organic material in the process of turning into coal. Lava, of course, is molten rock and it’s incredibly hot. It’s certainly hot enough to burn a bunch of young coal beds, which added more ash and toxic gases to the air—so much ash that shallow water throughout the entire world became choked with ash. The carbon dioxide released by all that burning coal caused severe ocean acidification and ocean anoxia—a lack of oxygen in the water. But it gets worse! A lot of lava erupted into the ocean right at the continental shelf, where the shallow coastal water becomes much deeper. This is exactly the place where you find methane deposits in the sediments on the ocean floor. When those deposits were suddenly disturbed by lava flowing into them, all the methane in the formerly tranquil depths was released and bubbled to the surface. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, meaning that if a whole lot of it ends up in the atmosphere in a short amount of time, it can cause rapid global warming—much faster than that caused by carbon dioxide. This global warming would have happened after a period of global cooling due to reduced sunlight reaching the earth through ash clouds, which lasted long enough and was severe enough that sea levels dropped as glaciers formed. Then everything heated way, way up. The ice caps melted, which may have led to a stagnation of ocean currents. This in turn would have contributed to the water’s anoxicity and toxicity. The average temperature of the ocean would have increased by almost 15 degrees Fahrenheit, or 8 degrees Celsius. Atmospheric warming may have been as much as 68 degrees Fahrenheit in places, or 20 degrees Celsius. That’s not the average temperature of the world, that’s the temperature increase. So, basically, everything was terrible and it happened very quickly in geologic terms. A 2018 study found that everything looked pretty much fine for the 30,000 years leading up to the great dying. Some researchers even think the initial extinction event might have taken place over just a few centuries. Marine animals were affected the most, especially marine invertebrates. Trilobites and placoderms went extinct, eurypterids went extinct, and corals went extinct until about 14 million years later when modern corals developed. Some researchers estimate that 95% of all marine species went extinct. Things were better on land, but not that much better. At the end of the Permian, life was good on land and it was especially good for insects because of the high percentage of oxygen in the air and the variety of plant life in huge swamps around the supercontinent Pangaea. The largest insects that ever lived were buzzing around in the P

Sign up for our mailing list! It’s the 2021 brood of 17-year cicadas! Thanks to Enzo (and several others) who suggested it! Further listening: Varmints! Podcast – “Cicadas” Our local Brood X cicada (photo by me!): The holes that cicadas emerged from (photo also by me): Discarded cicada shells. My work keys and Homestar Runner keychain for scale: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to talk about cicadas, specifically the 17-year cicadas that you may have heard about in the news or in your own back yard, depending on where you live. Thanks to the several people who suggested the topic on Twitter, with special thanks to Enzo who emailed me about it. I actually wasn’t going to do a cicadas episode because we already talked about cicadas way back in episode 28. We didn’t go into too much detail in that one, but Varmints! podcast did a great in-depth show about cicadas recently so I’ve been referring people to them, and check the show notes for a link if you don’t already listen to Varmints. Besides, I hadn’t heard any of the cicadas myself so I didn’t see what the big deal was. Then I returned to work after taking some time off to take care of my cat Poe, who by the way is doing really well now and thanks for all the well wishes! The second I got out of my car, I heard them. The cicadas. Now, we get cicadas every year where I live in East Tennessee, so the sound is familiar to me and I actually like it. I find it soothing and the quintessential sound of summer. But this was something else. At only 8am the trees along the edge of campus were filled with what I can only describe as a high-pitched roar. I went out at lunch and the sound was even louder. I got some audio, so here’s what a whole bunch of cicadas sound like when they’re calling at once. [cicada sounds] I also got pictures, which you can see in the show notes. The cicadas emerging in such numbers this year are 17-year cicadas. They spend almost all of those 17 years as nymphs underground, where they eat sap from the roots of trees and other plants. At the end of the 17 years, when the soil is warm enough, they emerge from the ground and molt into their final form, the full-grown adult cicada! The adult cicadas have wings but aren’t very good fliers. I can definitely attest to that because when I was taking pictures of them, I kept having to dodge as cicadas flew from bush to tree and either didn’t see me standing there or thought I was a weird tree or maybe just couldn’t maneuver well enough to avoid me. They’re pretty big insects, up to two inches long, or five cm, with gray or black bodies and orangey-red legs and eyes. The wings have pale orange veins. The first cicadas to emerge are mostly males, in such numbers that predators get too full to care when the females emerge a few days later. That way more females survive to lay eggs. At first the cicadas that emerge still look like nymphs, but within about an hour they molt their exoskeleton and emerge as full adults with wings. They’re pale in color until the new exoskeleton hardens and the wings expand to full size, which takes a few days. This, of course, leaves behind a cicada shell, which is the shed exoskeleton. When I was very small, I was terrified of cicada shells even though they’re just empty and perfectly harmless. They look scary because of those big pointy legs and big round eyes. You can frequently find cicada shells still stuck to tree bark, and it’s okay to pick them up and collect them if you like. The cicada doesn’t need it anymore. You can see the slit along the back of the shell where the cicada climbed out. The emerged cicadas climb or fly into trees where the males start singing. Males produce their loud songs with a structure called a tymbal organ in their abdomen. The abdomen is mostly hollow, which helps amplify the rapid clicking of a pair of circular membranes. The clicking is so fast, up to 480 times a second, that humans hear it as a continuous buzzing noise and not individual clicks. Some cicada songs are louder than 120 decibels, which is the same decibel level as a chainsaw. A reminder: this is what they sound like: [more cicada sounds] A female finds a male by listening to his song. After a pair mates, the female makes little cuts in twigs at the end of a tree branch, usually new-growth twigs because they’re softer. She lays her eggs in the cuts, then soon dies and falls to the ground. Within a few weeks, all the adult cicadas have died. But around eight weeks later, the eggs hatch. The new nymphs are teensy, only a few millimeters long. They drop to the ground and burrow into the soil up to a foot deep, or 30 cm. There they stay for the next 17 years, growing larger very slowly until it’s time to emerge. The current big group of cicadas consists of three species that look very similar. It’s called brood ten although I agree with Varmints who think it should be brood X because the

Talking animals! It’s not what you’re thinking about. No parrots here, just mammals. Our new logo is by Susanna King of Flourish Media! If you’d like to JOIN OUR MAILING LIST!, I’ll be sending out a discount code soon for merch with our logo on it–but only for people on the mailing list (and patrons). Further listening: The MonsterTalk episode about Gef the Talking Mongoose (this episode has no swearing that I recall but some other episodes may have a little bit of salty language) Mongolian Throat Singing Further reading: ‘Talking’ seals mimic sounds from human speech, and validate a Boston legend How do marine mammals produce sounds? Elephant communication Hoover the talking seal: Janice, a gray seal who learned to mimic human speech and song: Wikie, the orca who mimics human speech: Kosik, an elephant who mimics human speech: Gef the “talking mongoose”: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Before we get started, I have some announcements! First, you may have noticed we have a new logo! It’s by Susanna King of Flourish Media, who did a fantastic job! Susanna is also a listener, which is awesome. I’ve put a link to Flourish Media in the show notes if you have a company or something that needs professional graphic design. If you’re interested in getting a shirt or mug with the new Strange Animals Podcast logo on it, I’m figuring out the best company to use for merch. If you sign up to our mailing list, as soon as merch is available I’ll be sending an email out about it, and I’ll include a discount code you can use to save some money! I’ve linked to the mailing list in the show notes, and it’s also linked on the website and my social media, but if you can’t find it, just send me a message and I’ll reply with the link. The final announcement is that my cat Poe is finally home and recovering from a scary illness. He developed what’s called pyothorax, which is an infection in the chest, and in Poe’s case we still don’t know what caused it. After a week in the veterinary intensive care unit, he’s finally home and getting better all the time. That’s why last week’s episode was so short, and if you messaged me this week about something and I seemed impatient when I replied, that’s why. I just haven’t had any mental energy to concentrate on anything but Poe. Thank you to everyone at the Animal Emergency and Specialty Center of Knoxville for taking such good care of him. We’ve got something fun and a little different this time, inspired by two things. First, I saw a tweet about a captive beluga whale who had apparently learned to mimic human speech and one night told a diver in his pool to get out. Then the awesome podcast BewilderBeasts had a segment about a harbor seal in Maine who was rescued by a fisherman as a pup, which reminded me of a similar situation with another harbor seal in Maine, Hoover the Talking Seal. That’s right, it’s an episode about mammals that can talk, including one of my favorite cryptozoological mysteries ever. Before we learn about talking animals, we need to learn a little bit about how humans talk. Humans produce most vocal sounds using our larynx, which is sometimes called a voicebox. The human larynx is situated at the top of the throat, and it helps us breathe, helps keep food from going down the wrong tube and into the lungs, and enables us to make sounds. It consists of cartilage, small muscles, and flaps of tissue called vocal folds or vocal cords. There are two kinds of vocal folds: the true vocal folds that are connected to muscles and actually produce sound, and the false vocal folds that don’t have any connected muscles and just help with resonance. Usually resonance just makes the sound louder, but humans have learned to do amazing things with our voices. Some cultures use the false vocal folds to create a secondary tone. It’s called overtone singing, throat singing, or harmonic singing. I’m still completely in love with the Mongolian folk metal band the Hu and am now delighted that I can mention them again, because they use throat singing in their music. Throat singing produces overtones with various different sounds, depending on the technique used, but it can be hard to pick them out of a song if you’re not sure what you’re hearing. So instead of playing a clip of a Hu song, here’s a clip of a musician demonstrating various kinds of throat singing while also playing along on the morin khuur, or horsehead fiddle. The morin khuur only has two strings so the drone and whistle sounds you’re hearing are not from that instrument, they’re made by the musician’s voice. [Musician is Zagd Ochir AKA Sumiyabazar.] [clip of throat singing] When you think of animals that could potentially talk in human language, naturally you’d assume our closest relatives, the great apes, could learn to talk. But while apes have larynxes that are similar to ours, they don’t have the fine control over their vo

Thanks to Ruby and Tex for their suggestions this week! Diprotodon was big and had a big nose: Koala! The bush thick-knee looks like it has regular knees, actually: Show Transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week let’s head to Australia for a short episode about three interesting animals. Thanks to Ruby and Tex for their suggestions! Recently, we had an episode about the wombat—episode 208, to be exact. Ruby suggested we talk about an extinct giant wombat called Diprotodon too, because while we touched on it in the wombat episode, an animal that awesome deserves more attention. Also, Ruby had just gone to the Australian Museum and learned about it, and naturally wanted to share that knowledge. So let’s find out more about Diprotodon! Diprotodon was the largest marsupial ever known. It stood around 6 ½ feet tall at the shoulder, or two meters, and up to 12 feet long, or 4 meters. It was related to the wombat but probably didn’t look much like one, although I bet it was pretty cute. It was heavily built and its legs were pillar-like, similar to a rhinoceros’s legs, but its feet were actually kind of small in comparison. It had massive flat front teeth and long claws. So did those big teeth and claws mean it ate meat? Nope, it was a plant-eater, just like the wombat. It ate plants of all kinds in the savannas and plains where it lived, and its teeth were adapted to shear through branches and roots like chisels and grind up plant material at the same time. It also did a lot of digging, which is what it used its long claws for. The female had a rear-facing pouch so dirt wouldn’t get on her joey while she was digging. Diprotodon had a larger nasal aperture in its skull than would be expected for an animal its size. It probably just had a really big nose, but some researchers think it might actually have had a short trunk sort of like a tapir’s. Diprotodon probably lived in small groups made up of related females and their babies, while males probably spent most of their time either solitary or in small bachelor groups. It may have been migratory too. It went extinct somewhere between 42,000 and 25,000 years ago, along with many other species of Australian megafauna. Researchers think climate change was probably the main cause of its extinction, as the climate where it lived became drier. Diprotodon was also related to the modern koala. We talked about the koala in episode 94, but Tex wanted to know more about it. In episode 94 we learned that the koala smells like a cough drop because of all the eucalyptus leaves it eats. Eucalyptus oil is a common ingredient in cough drops. Here’s some other basic information about the koala from that episode, and then we’ll go on to learn something new about it. The koala is a marsupial that lives near the coasts of eastern and southern Australia in eucalyptus trees, also called gum trees. It’s gray, gray-brown, or brown in color, with no tail, short floofy ears, a flat face with a big black nose, and long claws that help it cling to tree trunks. Almost its entire diet is made up of eucalyptus leaves, which are toxic, but the koala’s liver produces a type of protein that breaks down the toxins so it doesn’t get sick. It spends almost its whole life in trees except when it needs to move from one tree to another one. In a study published in May 2020, researchers finally figured out how the koala gets water. Until this study, everyone assumed that the koala usually got enough moisture from the leaves it eats that it didn’t need to drink water most of the time. Now, though, researchers have observed koalas licking water from tree trunks during rain. This makes sense, because koalas prefer to stay in a tree whenever possible. The study determined that the koala gets about three-quarters of the moisture it needs from leaves, and during droughts it will come down from its tree to drink from streams. But in ordinary circumstances, it licks water from the tree trunks during and just after rain, and will do so even when other water sources are available. I bet if you called someone a tree-licker, they would think it’s an insult, but really it’s adorable. You can say, “You’re such a tree-licker” to someone, and if they get mad at you, you can explain about koalas, hopefully before they hit you. Let’s finish this short episode with a type of bird. It’s called the bush thick-knee. It’s nocturnal and while it can fly, it spends most of its time walking along the ground looking for small animals to eat. It’s a large, slender bird with a wingspan over three feet across, or one meter, and long legs. The bush thick-knee eats frogs, lizard, small snakes, small mammals, crustaceans and mollusks, and insects and spiders. It will sometimes eat seeds or other plant material too. During the day it hides in long grass where it’s hidden from predators and has some shade, and at night it comes out and walks around. It’s especially active on moonlit nights. And dur

Sign up for our mailing list! This week let’s learn about an amazing little fish and an awesome tortoise! All the pictures here were taken by ME at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga! Further Reading: Star tortoise makes meteoric comeback The astonishing elephantnose fish: Burmese star tortoises: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I’m fully vaccinated now so I’m able to go out and about cautiously, still wearing a mask of course, and this weekend I went to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. I had a fantastic time and saw lots and lots of amazing fish and other animals! If you ever get a chance to visit, it’s definitely worth it. When I got home, I kept thinking about one particular fish. I wanted to learn more about it. So I decided to make an episode about that fish and another animal I saw at the aquarium. The fish that captivated me so much is called the elephantnose fish. I’d never seen anything like it. The one I saw was about the length of my hand, dark gray or black in color, and looked like a pretty ordinary fish except for the proboscis that gives it its name. The fish has a flexible projection from its nose that it was using to probe around in the gravel at the bottom of its river habitat. I should mention that the Tennessee Aquarium has enormous displays, beautifully designed to mimic the animals’ natural habitat and give them plenty of room to move around. There’s one tidal animals display in the ocean side of the aquarium where the water sloshes through and around rocks to mimic the tide. It’s fascinating to watch the fish in that exhibit stay pretty much motionless despite the water’s movement, because that’s what they’re adapted for. So there’s plenty of opportunities to see an animal’s behavior. Anyway, I took lots of pictures of the elephantnose fish and when I got home, I started researching it. It turns out that it’s way more interesting even than I thought! It lives in rivers and other freshwater in central Africa and grows up to 9 inches long, or 23 cm. That’s according to the info display next to the exhibit. The display also said the fish was a species called Peter’s elephantnose fish, although it’s possible they have more than one species on display. There are a lot of elephantnose fish, more properly called mormyrids or freshwater elephantfish, and many of them have this interesting proboscis. The proboscis isn’t actually a nose like an elephant’s trunk. It’s technically a modified chin and mouth, called the Schnauzenorgan. The elephantnose fish mostly eats small worms and insect larvae, and it especially loves mosquito larvae. The elephantnose fish uses electroreception to navigate the muddy waters where it lives and find food. Its whole body, and especially its Schnauzenorgan, is covered with electrocyte cells that can detect tiny electrical pulses. If you remember way back in episode ten, about electric animals, many animals can sense the weak bioelectrical fields that other animals generate in their nerves and muscles. It’s especially common in fish since water conducts electricity much better than air does. But the elephantnose fish also generates a stronger electric field of its own, which it uses as a sort of sonar. It generates the field in special electric organs in its tail, and as it moves around in the water, the electric field comes in contact with other things—plants, rocks, other fish, and so on. It’s not strong enough to give an animal a shock, but it’s strong enough for the elephantnose fish to easily sense changes in its environment. The fish can tell what it’s near because its electrical field interacts differently with different things. A rock, for instance, doesn’t conduct electricity so the fish probably senses it as a blank spot in its electrical field, while a plant may conduct electricity even better than water and therefore changes the shape of the fish’s electrical field in a particular way. But it doesn’t generate its bioelectric field all the time. It can control when it discharges pulses of electricity the same way a dolphin can control when it sends out pulses of sound. If the fish feels threatened, maybe by another elephantnose fish nosing in on its territory, it will pulse much faster so it can keep tabs on what the other fish is doing—plus, of course, the other elephantnose fish can sense its pulses and can interpret how aggressive the first fish is. Female elephantnose fish generate a slightly different electrical field than males, which allows males and females to find each other to spawn. You may be thinking about all this and wondering how the elephantnose fish can sense the tiny bioelectric charges of its tiny prey over its own electric field. Its electric field is much stronger than that of a teensy worm hiding in the mud, after all. It would be like trying to hear a bird chirping outside through a closed window while someone is playing music really loudly in the room you’re in. It turns

This week let’s learn about a couple of dangerous birds of New Guinea! They’re not what you might think. Join our mailing list! Further Reading/Watching: How Dangerous Are Cassowaries, Really? Inside the Cassowary’s Casque Breakfast Club Ep. 34: Jack Dumbacher on Poisonous Birds (a long video but a really great deep dive into the pitohui) The mighty cassowary with a mighty casque on its head, looking like a modern dinosaur, which it is: A cassowary and babies: A hooded pitohui, looking surprised to learn it’s toxic: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s time to revisit New Guinea and its weird and amazing birds! This week we’re going to look at two dangerous birds of New Guinea. Thanks again to M Is for Awesome for the suggestion. Lots of birds are pretty or cute, and that’s great. But some birds…are dangerous. For instance, the cassowary. There are three species alive today, all of which live in New Guinea along with some other nearby islands. The southern cassowary lives in northeastern Australia too. It’s a big, shy, flightless bird that lives deep in the rainforest. The biggest species is the southern cassowary, which can grow up to six and a half feet tall, or 2 meters. Its wings are small but it can run extremely fast, up to 30 mph, or 50 km/h. It can also jump and even swim extremely well. This is surprising not just because it’s such a big bird but because it looks ungainly. It’s shaped sort of like its relation, the emu, although its neck is shorter, with a big chunky body, long strong legs, and a little head in comparison. Females are larger than males on average with more brightly colored necks. The cassowary’s body is covered with black feathers while the legs are bare, as is the neck and head. The neck is bright blue in females, paler blue in males, with red wattles that hang down as decoration. The face is a lighter blue with a black bill. It has spine-like feathers that grow from its small wings, which appear to be for decoration too, or at least the cassowary doesn’t seem to use those spiny feathers for anything. But the most unusual thing about the cassowary is the casque on its head. The casque is a sort of plate that grows on the top of the bird’s head. Different species of cassowary have different shaped casques, and there’s some variation in size and shape of casques from individual to individual. The dwarf cassowary is the smallest, naturally, and has a relatively low casque. The northern cassowary has a larger, taller casque and the southern cassowary has the largest, tallest casque, shaped sort of like your hand if you keep it flat with all your fingers together, only instead of flat it’s sticking up from the top of the bird’s head. Looking at a cassowary is like looking at a dinosaur with a beak. The casque consists of a bony core made up of two layers around an open space, and it’s covered with a keratin sheath. This is similar in structure to the kind of horns many hoofed animals have, like cattle and sheep, but there are plenty of differences. The sheath isn’t as hard as the keratin sheath on a mammal’s horn, for one thing. It’s actually a little bit leathery. It also contains a pocket inside the skull beneath the casque that’s full of delicate tissue made up mostly of tiny blood vessels. No one except the cassowary knows for sure what the casque is for. Over the years, researchers have suggested it might be used as a weapon, it might act as a shield to keep falling fruit from injuring its head when it’s under a fruit tree, it might knock the casque against a tree to make fruit fall, it might use it to dig with, it might use the empty space inside as a resonant chamber to make noise with, or it might use the empty space inside to help it hear faint sounds. Most likely, the casque is primarily for display. Since the cassowary does communicate with low-frequency booming sounds to attract mates, it might also help with resonance or amplification of its calls. The cassowary mostly eats fruit, which it swallows whole, even large fruit like apples. This is good for the plants, since it poops out seeds which are then ready to sprout in their own little pile of fresh fertilizer. It will also eat flowers and other plant material, but if it can catch a frog or mouse, or other small animal, including insects and snails, it will eat them too. It even sometimes eats carrion. A female’s territory overlaps that of several males, and she seems to form a bond with all of them. In breeding season she makes deep, booming calls, which a male answers with a running dance. The female often chases the male into water and follows him in, where he then chases her out of the water before they mate. Then the male builds a nest on the ground, basically just a pile of grass and leaves, and the female lays her eggs in the nest. The male takes care of the eggs and the chicks when they hatch. Meanwhile, the female leaves and finds one of the

Thanks to Ella for this week’s suggestion. There may not technically be spiders in the Antarctic, but there are mites. A nunatak (note the size of the research vehicles at the bottom left): I don’t have any pictures of the Antarctic mites, so here are some red velvet mites, although they’re giants compared to their Antarctic cousins: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to have a short episode, because I get my second Covid-19 vaccine on the Thursday before this episode goes live and I want to have the episode all finished before then. That way if I feel bad afterwards I can rest. Thanks to Ella for this week’s suggestion! Back in episode 90, about some mystery spiders, I mentioned that spiders live everywhere in the world except Antarctica. Well, guess what. Ella sent me some links about spiders that live in…Antarctica! Antarctica is a landmass at the South Pole, specifically a continent about twice the size of Australia. It looks bigger than it really is because ice projects out from the land and is only supported by water, called an ice shelf. It’s not a little bit of ice, either. It’s over a mile thick, or nearly 2 km. The ice is called the Antarctic ice sheet and it covers 98% of the continent. The only places not covered in ice are some rock outcroppings and a few valleys, called dry valleys because they basically get no precipitation, not even snow and certainly not rain. Researchers estimate that it hasn’t rained in these dry valleys in almost two million years. There are no plants, just gravel. There are no animals but some bacterial life that live inside rocks and under at least one glacier. Scientists have used these dry valleys to test equipment designed for Mars. This is not a hospitable land. Everything that lives in Antarctica is considered an extremophile. That doesn’t mean there’s no life in Antarctica, though, just that it’s only found in a few places, mostly along the coast or on nearby islands. Emperor penguins and Adelie penguins, several species of seal, and some sea birds live at least part of their lives in and around Antarctica, as do some whales. There are lichens, algae, and a few low-growing plants like liverwort and moss. And there are some invertebrates, although not very many and not large at all. The largest is a flightless midge that only grows 6 mm long. But what we’re interested in today are mites found only in Antarctica. We talked about mites in episode 186 when we learned about the red velvet mite. Mites are arachnids, although they’re not technically spiders, but frankly we’re just quibbling at this point. It has eight legs and is in the class Arachnida, so I say there are spiders in Antarctica. Or close enough. There are 30 species of mite in Antarctica. They mostly live on islands throughout the Antarctic peninsula, which sticks out from one side of the continent like a tail pointing at the very tip of South America. All the mites eat moss, algae, and decomposing lichens. They’re also teeny-tiny, less than a millimeter long. One type of mite is found on the mainland of East Antarctica instead of just on islands. It’s called Maudheimia and it only lives on big rock outcroppings that stick up through the ice. These rocks are called nunataks and are covered with lichens. But nunataks are far apart, sometimes hundreds of miles apart, and the mites are so tiny they’re just about microscopic. How did they get from one nunatak to the next? To find out, we have to learn some history about Antarctica. It hasn’t always been at the South Pole. It was once part of the supercontinent Gondwana, and 500 million years ago it was right smack on the equator. You know, tropical. As the centuries passed and the continents continued their slow, constant dance around the Earth, Gondwana drifted southward and broke apart. Antarctica was still connected to Australia on one side and South America on the other, and was still subtropical. Then it broke off from Australia around 40 million years ago, drifted farther southward, and ultimately, about 25 million years ago, separated from South America. Ever since it’s been isolated at the South Pole, and by 15 million years ago it was ice-covered. Fossils of dinosaurs and other ancient animals have been discovered in Antarctica, but it’s hard to find fossils and excavate them when the ground is under a mile of ice. The animals and plants that once lived in Antarctica went extinct gradually as its climate became less and less hospitable, and most of the remaining holdouts went extinct when the ice age began and the continent’s climate was even colder and harsher than it is now. But one animal remains, toughing it out on rock outcroppings where the temperature can drop to -31 degrees Fahrenheit, or -35 Celsius. Maudheimia, the brave little mite. Maudheimia was probably common throughout Antarctica’s mountains before the big freeze happened, and would have already been

This week let’s learn about a mystery panda and a few small panda mysteries! Join our mailing list! Further Reading: Mystery of the brown giant panda deepens The Qinling panda is not like other pandas: The giant panda is subtly different from the Qinling panda. Can you spot the difference? Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I usually like to shake things up from week to week, but April has turned into mammal month. We’ve got another interesting mammal this week, a panda that until recently was a mystery. But first! A quick correction from last week. Pranav emailed to let me know that I got infrasound and ultrasound mixed up. Tarsiers communicate and hear in ultrasound. Infrasound is below human hearing while ultrasound is above. We’ve talked about the giant panda before in episodes 42 and 109. Pretty much everyone is familiar with the panda because it looks so cuddly. It’s a bear, but unlike every other bear it eats plants. Specifically, it eats bamboo, although it will also sometimes eat bird eggs and small animals. It’s mostly white but its ears are black, it has black patches around and just under its eyes, and its legs are black. It also has a strip of black around its body at about its shoulders. But what if I told you there was another kind of panda that wasn’t black and white? I’m not talking about the red panda, which is not actually very closely related to bears. I’m talking about the Qinling panda. Qinling refers to the Qinling Mountains in central China, which is where the pandas live. There aren’t many of them, although to be fair there aren’t many pandas in the wild at all. Estimates vary from around 200 to 300 Qinling pandas in the wild. They live in two big nature reserves, and there’s only one in captivity. The reason you’ve probably never heard of the Qinling panda is because until 2005, no one realized it wasn’t a regular panda with slightly different color fur. In 2005 a genetic study determined that the Qinling panda has been isolated from other pandas for at least 12,000 years and is different enough that it’s considered a subspecies of panda. The Qinling panda is sometimes called the brown panda or sepia panda, because instead of being black and white, it’s brown and brownish-white. Where an ordinary panda has white fur, the Qinling panda has light tan or light brown fur. Where an ordinary panda has black fur, the Qinling panda has brown fur. It’s not dark brownish-black, just a medium brown. It also has a smaller, rounder head than other pandas. In 1989, before anyone realized the Qinling panda was a different subspecies, a female was captured as a mate for a captive giant panda. The pair had a baby who looked like an ordinary black and white panda cub, at least for the first four months of his life. At four months old his fur started to look more and more brown, until he was a brown and pale brown panda instead of a black and white panda. Unfortunately, the baby didn’t survive to grow up, and the mother panda died in 2000. The Qinling panda lives in high elevations and eats bamboo, just like other pandas. Because there are so few of them, and because they’re hard to keep in captivity and hard to find in the wild, we still don’t know a whole lot about them. We do know that the Qinling panda tends to have more tooth problems than regular pandas, sometimes losing its teeth or just fracturing them. This may be due to inbreeding, but it may be genetic. The Qinling panda’s genetic profile indicates that it has more traits in common with the ancestor it shares with giant pandas than the giant panda does. In the time that the populations have been separate, the giant panda has evolved more quickly than the Qinling panda. The giant panda’s teeth may be better adapted to its diet than the Qinling panda’s teeth are. Now that I’ve told you that the Qinling panda has a different color coat than giant pandas, let me back that up a little. Not all Qinling pandas have brown fur. Most are black and white, although they may have a brown tinge to the coat. The brown pandas were first noticed in the 1960s and researchers worry that it’s a sign of inbreeding. Then again, the genetic studies done on Qinling pandas show a healthy amount of genetic diversity with little sign of inbreeding. The brown coloration might be due to other factors. While we’re talking about panda coloration, why does the giant panda have such unusual markings? Even animals that are black and white aren’t patterned like the panda. I’m happy to report that the researcher who led the study that determined that zebras have black and white stripes to confuse biting flies, which we talked about in episode 149, seems to have solved the panda markings mystery too. Because the panda’s diet is so low in calories and nutrition, it can never build up the kind of fat stores that other bears do. As a result, it doesn’t have fat reserves that would allow it to go dormant during the winter and slee

Thanks to Phoebe for suggesting the tarsier, this week’s strange and interesting primate! Further Reading: Decoding of tarsier genome reveals ties to humans Long-lost ‘Furby-like’ Primate Discovered in Indonesia Tarsiers look like weird alien babies: A tarsier nomming on a lizard: A tarsier nomming on an insect: The pygmy tarsier and someone’s thumb: There’s probably not much going on in that little brain: Show Transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re looking at a weird and amazing little primate, but it’s not a monkey or ape. It’s the tarsier, with thanks to Phoebe who suggested it. It’s pronounced tarsiAY or tarsiER and both are correct. The tarsier is such a little mess that until relatively recently scientists weren’t even completely certain it was a primate. A 2016 genetic study determined for sure that it is indeed a primate even though it differs in many ways from all other primates alive. For instance, it’s a carnivore. Most primates are herbivores and some are omnivores, including humans and chimpanzees, but only the tarsier is an obligate carnivore. That means it has to eat meat and only meat, whether it’s invertebrates, birds, reptiles, or small mammals like rodents. Scientists divide primates into two groups informally, into wet-noses and dry-noses. Wet-nose doesn’t refer to a nose that’s runny but to a nose that stays moist, like a dog’s nose. This splits along the same lines as simians and prosimians, another way to group primates. Humans and other apes, along with monkeys, are simians, and also dry-noses. If you’re not sure if that’s accurate, just touch the end of your nose. Make sure you’re not standing in the rain or just got out of the bathtub, though. All other primates are wet-noses, and also prosimians, except for the tarsier. The tarsier is sort of in between. It’s grouped with the wet-nose primates, but it turns out to be more closely related to the dry-nose primates than the wet-noses. Also, its nose is actually dry. One interesting difference between prosimians and simians concerns vitamin C. Vitamin C is found in a lot of foods, but especially in fruit and vegetables. If you don’t have any vitamin C in your diet, you will eventually die of scurvy like an old pirate, so make sure to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. But most animals don’t need to eat foods containing vitamin C because their bodies already produce the vitamin C they need. Humans, apes, and monkeys have to worry about scurvy but prosimians don’t. But the tarsier does need vitamin C even though it’s a prosimian. A lot of researchers think the tarsier should be grouped with the simians, not prosimians. The tarsier currently lives only in southeast Asia, mostly on forested islands, although tarsier fossils have been found throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. Genetic studies also indicate it probably started evolving separately from other primates around 55 million years ago in what is now China. As it happens, we have a fossil that appears to be an early ancestor of the tarsier. Archicebus achilles was discovered in 2003 and studied for an entire decade before it was described in 2013, and it lived about 55 million years ago in what is now central China. It looks a lot like a tiny tarsier, but with smaller eyes that suggest it was active during the day. Its feet were shaped like a monkey’s, though, not like a tarsier’s feet. It probably only weighed about an ounce, or 28 grams. That’s about the same weight as a pencil. It had sharp little teeth and probably ate insects. So far the 2003 specimen is the only one found, but it’s remarkably complete so researchers have been able to learn a lot about it. If I’d been one of the scientists studying it, there is no way I could have waited ten whole years to tell people about it. I’d have studied it for like six months and then thought, “Okay, good enough, HEY EVERYONE LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS COOL ANIMAL.” The tarsier is nocturnal and has enormous eyes to help it see better in the dark. Its eyes are so big and round, and frankly the tarsier is not the brainiest animal, that its eyes are actually bigger than its brain. The tarsier also has mouse-like ears, long fingers and toes with sucker-like discs at the end to help it grip branches, and an extremely long tail that’s scaly on the underside. It spends almost its whole life in trees, where it climbs and jumps from branch to branch. When it climbs up a tree, it presses its long tail against the trunk to help it balance. It’s not a big animal, though. A typical tarsier measures about six inches long, or 15 cm, from the top of its little round head to the bottom of its bottom, not counting its tail. Its tail can be almost a foot long, or 25 cm, though, and its hind legs are also extremely long, about as long as the tail. Its body is rounded with short plush fur, usually brown, gray, or dark gold in color. With its big eyes and chonky body, if

So many interesting hoofed animals in this episode, so many awesome suggestions! Thanks to Page, Elaine, Pranav, Richard E., Richard from NC, and Llewelly! Further Reading: Meet the Takin: The Largest Mammal You’ve Never Heard Of New hope for the elusive okapi, the Congo’s mini giraffe The Resurrection of the Arabian Oryx Eucladoceros was not messing around with those antlers: Megaloceros and Thranduil’s elk in the Hobbit movies. COINCIDENCE? The stag-moose. What can I say? This thing is AWESOME: Hoplitomeryx. Can you have too many horns? No, no you cannot: The gerenuk, still beautiful but freaky-looking: The golden takin looking beautiful [pic from the article linked above]: The elusive okapi: Okapi bums [pic from the article linked above]: The giraffe being really tall and a baby giraffe being somewhat less tall: A giraffe exhibiting dwarfism but honestly, he is still plenty tall: The Arabian oryx is just extra: The weird, weird tusks of the babirusa. Look closely: Show Transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in episode 116, we talked about some amazing hoofed animals. This week we’re going to look at some more amazing hoofed animals that you may have never heard about. Some are extinct but some are running around out there looking awesome even as we speak! Thanks to Page, Elaine, Pranav, Richard E., Richard from NC, and Llewelly for their suggestions! If you’re a Patreon subscriber you may recognize part of the end of the episode as largely from a Patreon episode, by the way. Let’s start with an extinct deer with amazing antlers. Llewelly suggested it, or more accurately replied to a Twitter conversation mentioning it. That counts as a suggestion. It’s been a while but I think the conversation was about the Hobbit movies. Eucladoceros was a deer the size of a moose but with much weirder antlers. We’re not talking about the Megaloceros, often called the Irish elk, although it was distantly related. Eucladoceros’s antlers were much different. They branched up and out but were spiky like an ordinary deer’s antlers instead of palmate like a moose’s or Megaloceros’s antlers. But they were seriously big, with up to twelve points each and over five and a half feet across, or 1.7 meters. The deer itself stood just under 6 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters. It’s often called the bush-antlered deer because the antler’s many points look like the branches of a bush. Eucladoceros lived in Eurasia but we’re not completely sure when it went extinct or why. We don’t really know that much about it at all, in fact, which is surprising because it was such a big animal. It was one of the earliest deer with branching antlers and it probably went extinct before humans encountered it, but we don’t know that for sure either. Another deer relation is a gigantic animal called the stag moose that lived at the very end of the Pleistocene, or ice age, until around 13,000 years ago. It probably looked a lot like a huge, muscular deer more than a moose, but had moose-like antlers that grew up to 6 1/2 feet across, or 2 meters. The animal itself stood almost six feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.8 m, which is about the size of the modern moose. It lived in northern North America until melting glaciers allowed other animals to migrate into the area, and the modern moose outcompeted its cousin. Early deer and deer relations looked a lot different from the deer we’re familiar with today. For instance, Hoplitomeryx. It was a ruminant and therefore related to modern deer, but while it probably looked a lot like a deer, it didn’t have antlers. It had horns. Antlers grow every year from the skull and the animal sheds them later, usually after breeding season. Horns are permanent, usually made of a bony core with a keratin sheath over it. Hoplitomeryx lived around 11 to 5 million years ago in one small area of Europe. Specifically, it lived on a large island near what is now Italy, although the island is now part of a little peninsula. It probably also lived on other, smaller islands nearby. While some specimens found are quite small, probably due to island dwarfism, some grew as big as the bush-antlered deer, over 5 ½ feet tall, or 1.7 meters. It had a pair of horns that were shaped like a modern goat’s, that grew from the top of its head and curved backwards. And it had a smaller pair of horns underneath those horns that grew outward. And it had a single horn that was about the same size or bigger and shaped the same as the goat-like horns, but which grew in the middle of the forehead like a really weird unicorn. Also, it had fangs. I am not making this up. It’s sometimes called the five-horned deer for obvious reasons. We also don’t know much about Hoplitomeryx except that it was really awesome, so let’s move on to our next strange hoofed animal. This one is a suggestion by Page, who wanted to know more about the gerenuk. We talked about it in episode 167 but it’s such an interes

This week we’re going to look at three small mystery animals! Well, the mysteries are small. The animals are not particularly small. Further Reading: Long-Extinct Gibbon Found Inside Tomb of Chinese Emperor’s Grandmother Ancient Egypt’s Mona Lisa? An elaborately drawn extinct goose, of course A case of mistaken identity for Australia’s extinct big bird Bones of a mystery gibbon found in a noblewoman’s tomb: Gibbons painted about a thousand years ago by artist Yi Yuanji: A couple of gibbons at MAX FLUFF: The mystery goose painting (left) compared with a modern version of the painting (middle) and a red-breasted goose (right): All the geese from the painting: A red-breasted goose, not historically known from Egypt: The mystery bird rock art: An emu (with babies): Genyornis compared to a human: Genyornis leg bones compared to emu leg bones (right), but on left is a comparison of a so-called Genyornis (actually not) egg and an emu egg: A couple of megapodes in their egg field: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’re long overdue for an episode about a mystery animal, so this week let’s look at not one, not two, but three mysteries! They’re all small scientific mysteries, not big spooky ones, but I think you’ll find them interesting. We’ll start at an archaeological dig in China. In 2004, archaeologists excavated a noblewoman’s tomb in northwestern China, which they dated to about 2,200 to 2,300 years old. The tomb might have been for a woman called Lady Xia, who was the grandmother of the first emperor of China. So, kind of a big deal. The archaeologists discovered twelve pits in the tomb, and each pit contained the skeletons of various animals, some of them domesticated animals but some of them wild. Having a private menagerie was a status symbol back then, as it sometimes has been in other cultures around the world. In pit #12, they found remains of a leopard, a black bear, a crane, a lynx, and a type of small ape called a gibbon. The gibbon remains were a surprise, because today all species of gibbon in China live only in the very southern areas and are critically endangered by habitat loss and hunting. Either a gibbon had been transported hundreds of miles over difficult terrain 2,300 years ago, or gibbons lived in the area. Gibbons are small apes and there are 16 species alive today. They all live in southern Asia. We talked about the siamang in episode 76, and the siamang is a type of gibbon. Many gibbons, including the siamang, have inflatable resonant chambers in the throat to amplify their calls, but all gibbons make loud, often musical sounds to communicate with each other. They spend most of the time in treetops and mostly eat fruit, along with other plant material. Because this part of northwestern China is subtropical, and because it’s been so long since the animals died, the skeletons aren’t complete. The only gibbon bones left were part of a cranium and mandible. Obviously, scientists had to be careful with the bones and couldn’t run any tests that might damage them. They made a 3D scan of the bones and used the scan to compare the gibbon’s skull and jaw with those of living species of gibbon, to determine what species it was. It turned out that not only was it a species unknown to science, it was different enough from other gibbons that it belonged in its own genus. According to experts in Chinese history and literature, gibbons were considered noble animals that often appeared in paintings and poetry. Various species of gibbon lived throughout much of China until around the 14th century. After the 14th century, though, habitat loss and hunting drove the gibbons farther south until now there are almost no gibbons left in China. Lady Xia’s pet gibbon is the first species known that definitely went extinct in the modern era, which makes it even more important that the gibbons still alive today are protected along with their habitats. Speaking of ancient paintings of animals, 4,600 years ago, an artist made a painting of some geese for a tomb in Egypt. The painting is five feet long, or 1.5 meters, and is a fragment of a larger wall decoration that has been lost. It’s called the “Meidum Geese.” It’s a lovely painting and the geese are incredibly lifelike—so lifelike, in fact, that it should be easy to identify them. But maybe not quite so easy after all. There are three species of geese in the painting. Two are probably the graylag goose and the greater white-fronted goose. The third looks similar to the red-breasted goose, but there are enough differences that researchers aren’t sure. No red-breasted goose remains have ever been found in Egypt; it only lives in Europe and Asia. It’s quite likely that the mystery goose is an extinct species. Other animal species depicted in Egyptian art are extinct now, even though they were common when the art was made. Egypt’s climate is much dryer than it was thousands of years ago, so na

Let’s learn about some of the biggest sharks in the sea–but not sharks that want to eat you! Further reading: ‘Winged’ eagle shark soared through oceans 93 million years ago Manta-like planktivorous sharks in Late Cretaceous oceans Before giant plankton-eating sharks, there were giant plankton-eating sharks An artist’s impression of the eagle shark (Aquilolamna milarcae): Manta rays: A manta ray with its mouth closed and cephalic fins rolled up: Pseudomegachasma’s tooth sitting on someone’s thumbnail (left, photo by E.V. Popov) and a Megachasma (megamouth) tooth on someone’s fingers (right): The megamouth shark. I wonder where its name came from? The basking shark, also with a mega mouth: The whale shark: Leedsichthys problematicus (not a shark): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to look at some huge, weird sharks, but they’re not what you may expect when you hear the word shark. Welcome to the strange world of giant filter feeders! This episode is inspired by an article in the brand new issue of Science, which you may have heard about online. A new species of shark is described in that issue, called the eagle shark because of the shape of its pectoral fins. They’re long and slender like wings. The fossil was discovered in 2012 in northeastern Mexico, but not by paleontologists. It came to light in a limestone quarry, where apparently a quarry worker found it. What happened to it at that point isn’t clear, but it was put up for sale. The problem is that Mexico naturally wants fossils found in Mexico to stay in Mexico, and the authors of the study are not Mexican. One of the authors has a history of shady dealings with fossil smugglers too. On the other hand, the fossil has made its way back to Mexico at last and will soon be on display at a new museum in Nuevo León. Fossils from this quarry are often extremely well preserved, and the eagle shark is no exception. Sharks don’t fossilize well since a shark’s skeleton is made of cartilage except for its teeth, but not only is the eagle shark’s skeleton well preserved, we even have an impression of its soft tissue. The eagle shark was just slightly shorter than 5 ½ feet long, or 1.65 meters. Its tail looks like an ordinary shark tail but that’s the only ordinary thing about it. The head is short and wide, without the long snout that most sharks have, it doesn’t appear to have dorsal or pelvic fins, and its pectoral fins, as I mentioned a minute ago, are really long. How long? From the tip of one pectoral fin to the other measures 6.2 feet, or 1.9 meters. That’s longer than the whole body. Researchers think the eagle shark was a filter feeder. Its mouth would have been wide to engulf more water, which it then filtered through gill rakers or some other structure that separated tiny animals from the water. It expelled the water through its gills and swallowed the food. The eagle shark would have been a relatively slow swimmer. It glided through the water, possibly flapping its long fins slowly in a method called suspension feeding, sometimes called underwater flight. If this makes you think of manta rays, you are exactly correct. The eagle shark occupied the same ecological niche that manta rays do today, and the similarities in body form are due to convergent evolution. Rays and sharks are closely related, but the eagle shark and the manta ray evolved suspension feeding separately. In fact, the eagle shark lived 93 million years ago, 30 million years before the first manta remains appear in the fossil record. The eagle shark lived in the Western Interior Seaway, a shallow sea that stretched from what is now the Gulf of Mexico straight up through the middle of North America. Because it’s the only specimen found so far, we don’t know when it went extinct, but researchers suspect it died out 65 million years ago at the same time as the non-avian dinosaurs. We also don’t have any preserved teeth, which makes it hard to determine what sharks it was most closely related to. Hopefully more specimens will turn up soon. Now that we’ve mentioned the manta ray, let’s talk about it briefly even though it’s not a shark. It is big, though, and it’s a filter feeder. If you’ve never seen one before, they’re hard to describe. If it had gone extinct before humans started looking at fossils scientifically, we’d be as astounded by it as we are about the eagle shark—maybe even moreso because it’s so much bigger. Its body is sort of diamond-shaped, with a blunt head and short tail, but elongated fins that are broad at the base but end in drawn-out points. Manta rays are measured in width, sometimes called a wingspan since their long fins resemble wings that allow it to fly underwater. There are two species of manta ray, and even the smaller one has a wingspan of 18 feet, or 5.5 meters. The larger species can grow 23 feet across, or 7 meters. Some other rays are filter feed

Thanks to Lorenzo and Page for suggestions used in this week’s episode, and a belated thanks to Ethan for last week’s episode! Let’s learn about some of the cutest invertebrates out there! Further reading: Photosynthesis-like process found in insects Mystery of the Venezuelan Poodle Moth Further viewing: Dr. Arthur Anker’s photos from his Venezuela trip, including the poodle moth The pea aphid, red morph and regular green So many ladybugs: The sea bunny is a real animal, but it’s not a real bunny: A larval sea bunny is SO TINY that fingertip looks like it’s the size of a BUILDING: The bobtail squid not hiding (left) and hiding (right): The bobtail squid is SO CUTE I MIGHT DIE: The Venezuelan poodle moth: Not a Venezuelan poodle moth–it’s a female muslin moth from Eurasia: Not a Venezuelan poodle moth–it’s a silkworm moth from Asia: The dot-lined white moth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week I promised we’d cover a cute, happy animal to make up for last week’s extinction event episode, but instead of mammals let’s look at some cute invertebrates! One of them is even a mystery animal. Thanks to Page and Lorenzo for suggesting two of the animals we’re going to cover today! We’ll start with Lorenzo’s suggestion, the pea aphid. Years and years ago I spent a slow day at work making a list of cute foods with a coworker, and peas were at the top of the list. Blueberries were second and I don’t remember the rest of the list. Generally, cuteness depended on how small the food was and how round. Aphids are really small and peas are round, so the pea aphid has to be adorable. The pea aphid, however, is not round. It’s shaped sort of like a tiny pale-green teardrop with long legs, long antennae, and teeny black dots for eyes. It’s actually kind of big for an aphid, not that that’s saying much since it only grows 4 mm long at most. It’s called the pea aphid because it likes to live on pea plants, although it’s also happy on plants related to peas, such as beans, clover, and alfalfa. Cute as it is, farmers and gardeners do not like the pea aphid because it eats the sap of the plants it lives on, which can weaken the plant and can spread plant diseases. During most of the year, all pea aphids are females. Each adult produces eggs that don’t need to be fertilized to hatch, but instead of laying her eggs like most insects, they develop inside her and she gives birth to live babies, all of them female. An aphid can have up to 12 babies a day, called nymphs, and the nymphs grow up in about a week or a little longer. Then they too start having babies. Even though lots of other insects and other animals eat aphids, as you can see, they will always be numerous. As the summer turns to fall and the days become shorter, some of the baby aphids are born with wings. Some are also born male, and sometimes the males also have wings, although they might not have mouths. These males and winged females mate and the females fly off to lay their eggs on clover and alfalfa plants, assuming they aren’t already on clover or alfalfa plants. The eggs don’t hatch until spring, and all the resulting nymphs are female. Sometimes winged females are born if the plants where the aphids live get too crowded. The winged females can fly away and find new plants. If you’ve ever had a garden, you’re probably familiar with aphids. They spend most of the time on the undersides of leaves, drinking sap through specialized mouthparts called stylets. You may also have noticed that when you try to smush the aphids, all of them immediately drop to the ground. This protects them not just from being smooshed by a gardener’s thumb, but from being eaten along with the leaves when a deer or other animal browses on the plants where they live. Sometimes, instead of being leaf green, pea aphids are a pale reddish color. This is called the red morph. Red morph pea aphids are more likely to live on certain plants while the ordinary green pea aphids are more likely to live on others, although many times you can find both varieties on a single plant. The red coloration of red morph pea aphids is due to larger quantities of a chemical called carotenoid [kerOTenoid] in its body. All pea aphids contain carotenoids, though, and it’s not just used for coloration. Research suggests that the carotenoids absorb sunlight and produce energy that the aphid can use. It’s a limited form of photosynthesis—you know, that thing that only plants do. Not only that, the pea aphid produces the carotenoids in its body. Every other animal that needs carotenoids absorbs them from plants it eats, with the possible exception of a type of mite. The genetic sequence that allows the pea aphid to make its own carotenoids originally came from fungi. Somehow the aphid captured the genetic material from fungi, probably after eating it, and passed those genes down to its descendants. This is call

It’s the next in our short series of episodes about mass extinctions! Don’t worry, it won’t be boring, because we’re going to learn about a lot of weird ancient fish too. Further reading: Titanichthys: Devonian-Period Armored Fish was Suspension Feeder Behind the Scenes: How Fungi Make Nutrients Available to the World Dunkleosteus was a beeg feesh with sharp jaw plates that acted as teeth: Titanichthys was also a beeg feesh, but it wouldn’t have eaten you (picture from the Sci-News article linked above): Pteraspis: NOSE HORN FISH: Cephalaspis had no jaws so it couldn’t chomp you: Bothriolepis kind of looked like a fish in a mech suit: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Here’s the second in our small series of episodes about extinction events, this one the Late Devonian extinction. We’ll also learn about some weird and amazing fish that lived during this time, and a surprising fact about ancient trees. The Devonian period is often called the Age of Fish because of the diversity of fish lineages that arose during that time. It lasted from roughly 420 million years ago to 359 million years ago. During the Devonian, much of the earth’s landmasses were smushed together into the supercontinent Gondwana, which was mostly in the southern hemisphere, and the smaller continents of Siberia and Laurussia in the northern hemisphere. The world was tropically warm, ocean levels were high, and almost all animal life lived in the oceans. Some animals had adapted to living on land at least part of the time, though, and plants had spread across the continents. The first insects had just evolved too. Shallow areas of the ocean were home to animals that had survived the late Ordovician extinctions. There were lots of brachiopods, bivalves, crinoids, trilobites, and corals. Eurypterids were still thriving and ammonites lived in deeper water. But while all these animals are interesting, we’re mainly here for the fish. The fish of the Devonian were very different from modern fish. Most had armor. Way back in episode 33 we talked about the enormous and terrifying dunkleosteus, which lived in the late Devonian. It might have grown up to 33 feet long, or 10 meters. Since we still don’t have any complete specimens, just head plates and jaws, that’s an estimate of its full size. However long it grew, it was definitely big and could have chomped a human in half without any trouble at all. It’s probably a good thing mammals hadn’t evolved yet. Instead of teeth, dunkleosteus had jaw plates with sharp edges and fanglike projections that acted as teeth. Another huge fish from the Devonian is called titanichthys, which might have grown as long as dunkleosteus or even bigger, but which was probably not an apex predator. Its jaw plates were small and blunt instead of sharp, which suggests it wasn’t biting big things. It might not have been biting anything. Some researchers think titanichthys might have been the earliest known filter feeder, filtering small animals from the water by some mechanism we don’t know about yet. Filter feeders use all sorts of adaptations to separate tiny food from water, from gill rakers to baleen plates to teeth that fit together closely, and many others. A study published in 2020 compared the jaw mechanisms of modern giant filter feeders (baleen whales, manta rays, whale sharks, and basking sharks) to the jaw plates of titanichthys, as well as the jaw plates of other placoderms that were probably predators. Titanichthys’s jaws are much more similar to those of modern filter feeders, which it isn’t related to at all, than to fish that lived at the same time as it did and which it was related to. Titanichthys and dunkleosteus were both placoderms, a class of armored fish. That wasn’t unusual, actually. In the Devonian, most fish ended up evolving armored plates or thick scales. What was unusual in placoderms were their jaws. Specifically, the fact that they had jaws at all. Placoderms were probably the first fish to evolve jaws. Pteraspis, for instance, was an armored fish that wasn’t a placoderm. It had no fins at all but it was a good swimmer, streamlined and possibly a predator, although it might have been a plankton feeder at the surface of the ocean. It grew about 8 inches long, or 20 cm. It used its tail to propel itself through the water, and instead of fins it had spines growing from its armor that helped keep it stable. A spine on its back, near the rear of the body armor, acted as a dorsal fin, while spines on the sides of its armor, just over its gills, acted like pectoral fins. It also had some smaller spines along its back and a big spike on its nose. Probably not a good fish to swallow whole. Cephalaspis lived in the early Devonian, around 400 million years ago in fresh water. It wasn’t very big, maybe a foot long, or 30 cm. Basically, it would have fit nicely on a dinner plate, but it wouldn’t have looked much like a trout

Thanks to Nicholas for this week’s suggestion! Let’s learn about the Australian stingless bee and its relatives! Listen to BewilderBeasts if you want more fun, family-friendly animal facts! Further reading/watching: Australian Stingless Bees Women Work to Save Native Bees of Mexico (I really recommend the short video embedded on this page! It’s utterly charming!) House of the Royal Lady Bee: Maya revive native bees and ancient beekeeping A Maya beekeeper’s hut and some Central/South American stingless bees (pictures from the last link, above): Stingless bees build their combs in a spiral shape: An Australian stingless bee collecting nectar and pollen: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Last year Nicholas emailed me with a correction to episode 183 and a suggestion. In that episode I said that only honeybees make honey, but Nicholas pointed out that the Australian stingless bee also makes honey. In fact, he keeps some of these bees himself! So let’s learn about Tetragonula carbonaria and its close relations, as well as some other interesting bee information! Stingless bees don’t just live in Australia. Different species live in parts of Australia, Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. Most produce honey, although not very much of it compared to the European honeybee. They don’t sting but some species will bite. Stingless bees are much smaller than European honeybees. Some look more like a flying ant than a bee unless you look closely. A stingless bee worker only grows around 4 mm long, while a European honeybee worker grows about 15 mm long. Different species have different markings, but Tetragonula carbonaria, which is sometimes called the sugarbag bee, is black all over. Stingless bees have a lot in common with honeybees, which makes sense because they’re closely related. The stingless bee lives in a social colony with a caste structure of the queen who stays home and lays eggs, male drones that mate with new queens, and infertile female workers. Young worker bees keep the hive clean and take care of the brood, or developing larvae, while older worker bees are the ones who fly out and forage for pollen and nectar. While stingless bees only have one queen laying eggs at any given time, some species will have a few backup queens in case of an emergency. These backup queens don’t produce eggs because they only mate with the drones if the reigning queen dies. In a few species of stingless bee, there’s actually another caste in addition to the ordinary queen, drone, and worker. It’s the soldier caste. Soldier bee larvae get extra food, and they grow to be larger and stronger than other bees to help them guard the colony, especially the hive entrance. Before the stingless bee soldier castes were discovered, no one realized that any bees ever had soldiers, although some ant and termite species have them. The stingless bee builds a nest in tree cavities, preferably in the tops of large trees because that keeps the hive warm and protected. It’s a tropical bee so it needs to stay warm. If any insect or other small animal gets into the hive, the bees can’t sting it because as their name implies, they don’t have working stingers. Instead, they swarm the intruder and attempt to smother it with anything they can find, including wax, resin, and mud. The stingless bee builds honeycombs, but they’re spiral shaped. They’re made from beeswax mixed with resin that the worker bees collect from certain plants. The combs can be yellow like ordinary honeycombs, or they can be black, brown, or reddish. The word honeycomb isn’t actually accurate because it’s not where the bees store honey. The honey is stored in large chambers in the nest called honeypots. The combs are properly called brood combs because they’re used for baby bees. Worker bees fill the cells about three-quarters full of honey and pollen and the queen lays one egg in each cell. The workers then cap the cell. When the egg hatches, the bee larva has plenty of nutritious honey and pollen to eat. Once the larva has metamorphosed into an adult bee, it chews a hole through the cell’s cap and emerges. If you’re wondering whether you can eat the honey of the sugarbag bee, yes! It’s runnier than ordinary honey but it smells wonderful and according to Nicholas, it has a tangy citrusy flavor. It sounds really good. Stingless bees don’t produce nearly as much honey as European honeybees, though, which makes sense since honeybees have been selectively bred over centuries to produce more honey than the hive could possibly need. The beekeeper takes the extra to eat, but naturally leaves plenty for the hive to live on. People in Australia only started keeping stingless bees around the early 1980s, but it’s growing more and more popular. Since the bees are native to Australia, they’re much better for the environment than the European honeybee. They’re also incredibly good at pollinating crops, and if the wea

Thanks to Pranav for his suggestion! Let’s find out what the river of giants was and what lived there! Further reading: King of the River of Giants Spinosaurus was a swimming dinosaur and it swam in the River of Giants: A modern bichir, distant relation to the extinct giants that lived in the River of Giants: Not actually a pancake crocodile: A model of Aegisuchus and some modern humans: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. A while back, Pranav suggested we do an episode about the river of giants in the Sahara. I had no idea what that was, but it sounded interesting and I put it on the list. I noticed it recently and looked it up, and oh my gosh. It’s amazing! It’s also from a part of the world where it’s really hot, as a break for those of us in the northern hemisphere who are sick of all this cold weather. I hope everyone affected by the recent winter storms is warm and safe or can get that way soon. The Sahara is a desert in northern Africa, famous for its harsh climate. Pictures of the Sahara show its huge sand dunes that stretch to the horizon. This wasn’t always the case, though. Only about 5,500 years ago, it was a savanna with at least one lake. Lots of animals lived there and some people too. Before that, around 11,000 years ago, it was full of forests, rivers, lakes, and grasslands. Before that, it was desert again. Before that, it was forests and grasslands again. Before that, desert. The Sahara goes through periodic changes that last around 20,000 years where it’s sometimes wet, sometimes dry, caused by small differences in the Earth’s tilt which changes the direction of the yearly monsoon rains. When the rains reach the Sahara, it becomes green and welcoming. When it doesn’t, it’s a desert. Don’t worry, we only have 15,000 more years to wait until it’s nice to live in again. This wet-dry-wet pattern has been repeated for somewhere between 7 and 11 million years, possibly longer. Some 100 million years ago, though, the continents were still in the process of breaking up from the supercontinent Gondwana. Africa and South America were still close together, having only separated around 150 million years ago. The northern part of Africa was only a little north of the equator and still mostly attached to what is now Eurasia. Near the border of what is now Morocco and Algeria, a huge river flowed through lush countryside. The river was home to giant animals, including some dinosaurs. Their fossilized remains are preserved in a rock formation called the Kem Kem beds, which run for at least 155 miles, or 250 km. A team of paleontologists led by Nizar Ibrahim have been working for years to recover fossils there despite the intense heat. The temperature can reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit there, or 52 Celsius, and it’s remote and difficult to navigate. For a long time researchers were confused that there were so many fossils of large carnivores associated with the river, more than would be present in an ordinary ecosystem. Now they’ve determined that while it looks like the fossils were deposited at roughly the same time from the same parts of the river, they’re actually from animals that lived sometimes millions of years apart and in much different habitats. Bones or even fossils from one area were sometimes exposed and washed into the river along with newly dead river animals. This gives the impression that the river was swarming with every kind of huge predator, but it was probably not quite so dramatic most of the time. Then again, there were some really fearsome animals living in and around the river in the late Cretaceous. One of the biggest was spinosaurus, which we talked about in episode 170. Spinosaurus could grow more than 50 feet long, or 15 m, and possibly almost 60 feet long, or 18 m. It’s the only dinosaur known that was aquatic, and we only know it was aquatic because of the fossils found in the Kem Kem beds in the last few years. Another dinosaur that lived around the river is Deltadromeus, with one incomplete specimen found so far. We don’t have its skull, but we know it had long, slender hind legs that suggests it could run fast. It grew an estimated 26 feet long, or 8 meters, including a really long tail. At the moment, scientists aren’t sure what kind of dinosaur Deltadromeus was and what it was related to. Some paleontologists think it was closely related to a theropod dinosaur called Gualicho, which lived in what is now northern Patagonia in South America. Remember that when these dinosaurs were still alive, the land masses we now call Africa and South America had been right in the middle of a supercontinent for hundreds of millions of years, and only started separating around 150 million years ago. Gualicho looked a lot like a pocket-sized Tyrannosaurus rex. It grew up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters, and had teeny arms. Deltadromeus’s arms are more in proportion to the rest of its body, though. Some of the biggest dinosaurs found in the Ke

This week let’s venture into the ocean and learn about the fin whale! Further reading: The songs of fin whales offer new avenue for seismic studies of the oceanic crust Fin whales’ big gulp The fin whale can hold a whole lot of water in its mouth (illustration from the second article linked above): A fin whale underwater. Look at that massive tail. That’s pure muscle: A fin whale above water. It’s like a torpedo: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s been too long since we had an episode about whales. Yes, okay, two weeks ago we talked about a couple of newly discovered whales, but I want to really learn about a particular whale. So this week, let’s look at the fin whale. The fin whale is a baleen whale that’s only a little less enormous than the blue whale. The longest fin whale ever reliably measured was 85 feet long, or just a hair shy of 26 meters, but there are reports of fin whales that are almost 90 feet long, or a bit over 27 meters. An average American school bus is half that length, so a fin whale is as long as two school buses. Even a newborn fin whale calf is enormous, as much as 21 feet long, or 6.5 meters. Females are on average larger than males. It’s a long, slender whale that’s sometimes called “the greyhound of the sea,” because it’s also really fast. It can swim up to 29 mph, or 46 km/hour, and possibly faster. If that doesn’t sound too fast, consider that the Olympic gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps topped out at about 4.7 miles per hour, or 7.6 km/h. Like other baleen whales, the fin whale has a pair of blowholes instead of just one. On its underside, it has up to 100 grooves that extend from its chin down to its belly button. Yes, whales have belly buttons. They’re placental mammals, and all mammals have belly buttons because that’s where the umbilical cord is attached when a developing baby is in its mother’s womb. I don’t know what a whale’s belly button looks like. Also, the proper term for belly button is navel, and if you’re wondering, that’s where navel oranges get their name, because they have that weird thing on one end that looks like a belly button. It’s not, though. I don’t know what it is. You’ll have to find a podcast called Strange Plants to explain it. Anyway, the grooves on the fin whale’s underside act as pleats, or accordion folds. Other baleen whales have these pleats too. A baleen whale eats tiny animals that it filters out of the water through its baleen plates, which are keratin structures in its mouth that take the place of teeth. The baleen is tough but thin and hangs down from the upper jaw. It’s white and looks sort of like a bunch of bristles at the end of a broom. The whale opens its mouth wide while lunging forward or downward, which fills its huge mouth with astounding amounts of water. As water enters the mouth, the skin stretches to hold even more, until the grooves completely flatten out. The water it can hold in its mouth is about equal to the size of a school bus. Technically, though, a lot of that water isn’t in the whale’s mouth. It’s in a big pocket between the body wall and the blubber underneath the skin. The ballooning out of the pocket stretches the nerves in the mouth and tongue to more than twice their length, and then the nerves have to fold back up tightly after the water is pushed out. The nerves fold in a complicated double layer to minimize damage during all this stretching. After the whale fills its mouth with water, it closes its jaws, pushing its enormous tongue up, and forces all that water out through the baleen. Any tiny animals like krill, copepods, small squid, small fish, and so on, get trapped in the baleen. It can then swallow all that food and open its mouth for another big bite. Even more amazing, this whole operation, from opening its mouth to swallowing the food, only takes six to ten seconds. Because it only eats small animals, the fin whale’s esophagus (which is the inside part of the throat) is actually quite narrow considering what a huge animal it is. In other words, it could not possibly swallow a human, in case you were worried. I was worried. If you did end up in a fin whale’s mouth, it would just spit you back out. Baleen whales have a sensory organ on the chin that’s found in no other animal. It’s about the size of a grapefruit and situated between the tips of the jaws. It probably helps the whale determine how much potential food is in the water, which saves it from wasting time and energy gulping in water and filtering it out when there’s nothing much to eat. The fin whale looks a lot like the blue whale and the two species are closely related, so much so that they sometimes interbreed and produce hybrid babies. It usually lives in small groups of up to around 10 individuals and a female fin whale has one baby every two or three years. It probably migrates seasonally to new feeding grounds, but we don’t actually know a whole lot about where

Does the Shreve’s lightbulb lizard really emit light? (Hint: sort of.) Let’s find out! Further reading: The Lightbulb Lizard of Benjamin Shreve Shreve’s lightbulb lizard, looking pretty ordinary really: A web-footed gecko in moonlight: A Jamaican gray anole showing off his dewlap: Show Transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week let’s learn about an interesting reptile with a mystery that’s mostly solved, but still really weird. It’s called Shreve’s lightbulb lizard. The story of this little lizard starts in 1937, when zoologist Ivan Sanderson was collecting freshwater crabs on a mountaintop in Trinidad. They were probably mountain crabs, also called the manicou crab, which is actually a pretty astonishing animal on its own. It’s a freshwater crab that doesn’t need to migrate to the ocean to release its eggs into the water. Instead, the female carries her eggs in a pouch in her abdomen. The eggs hatch into miniature crabs instead of larvae, and they stay in her pouch until they’re old enough to strike out on their own. The mountains of Trinidad are made of limestone, which means they’re full of caves, and Sanderson was reportedly catching crabs in an underground pool or stream. He noticed a flash of light in the darkness and naturally went to find what had made it. All he found was a little lizard hiding under a ledge. It looked kind of like a brown skink and was pretty boring, but when the lizard turned its head, Sanderson saw a flash of dotted light down both its sides. When he caught the lizard and examined it while it was sitting in his hand, it flashed its lights again. Sanderson knew he’d found something extraordinary, because lizards don’t bioluminesce. We still don’t know of any terrestrial vertebrate that emits light. Lots and lots of marine animals do, and some terrestrial invertebrates like lightning bugs and glow-worms, but no terrestrial vertebrates. Sanderson took the lizard back to his camp, where he and his team observed it in different situations to see if it would light up again. They moved it to warmer areas and colder ones, made loud noises nearby, even tickled it, and they did indeed see it light up a few times. The light came from a row of tiny eyespots along its sides, from its neck to its hips. It had one row of these spots on each side, and each spot looked like a tiny white bead. The greenish-yellow flashes of light seemed to shine through the spots, as Sanderson said, like “the portals on a ship.” Sanderson sent the lizard to The British Museum in London where another zoologist studied it and discovered that it was actually a known species, but apparently very rare. Only two specimens had ever been caught, one a juvenile and one an adult female. The lizard Sanderson caught was male, and it turns out that only adult males have these little eyespots. Sanderson later caught seven more of the lizards. Let’s jump forward a bit and get a better idea of what these lizards look like. Shreve’s lightbulb lizard grows around 5 inches long at most, or 13 cm, not counting its long tail. It has short legs, a pointy nose, and broad, flat scales on its back and sides. It’s mostly brown in color. It lives in high elevations in the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago, which is just off the coast of Venezuela in South America. It prefers cool climates, unlike most reptiles, and while it turns out that it’s not actually very rare, it’s also hard to study because it lives in such remote areas, so we don’t know much about it. It may be nocturnal and it may be semi-aquatic. It certainly lives along mountain streams, where it eats insects and other small animals. Now, we have mentioned Ivan Sanderson a number of times in past episodes, and you may remember me sounding pretty skeptical about some of his cryptozoological claims. But Sanderson was a zoologist with a good reputation as a field scientist, and more importantly, he wasn’t the only one who saw the lizard light up. The British Museum zoologist, H.W. Parker, who studied the first lizard Sanderson found, was actually the scientist who had originally discovered the lizard a few years before. He was very interested in the little portholes along the male lizard’s sides and studied them carefully. But he couldn’t find anything about them that indicated how they lit up. Each tiny eyespot consisted of a transparent center spot with a ring of black skin around it. The eyespots did not contain glowing bacteria, specialized nerve endings, ducts, reflecting structures, or anything else that he could think of that might cause a flash of light. Other zoologists examined the so-called lightbulb lizard over the next few decades and none of them saw it emit light either. By 1960 no one believed it was bioluminescent. I’m taking most of my information from a blog post by Dr Karl Shuker, a zoologist who writes a lot about cryptozoological mysteries. If you want to read his article, there’s a link in the

Here’s a 2020 retrospective episode that looks at the bright side of the year! Thanks to Page for the suggestion! Let’s learn about some animals discovered in 2020 (mostly). Further reading: Watch This Giant, Eerie, String-Like Sea Creature Hunt for Food in the Indian Ocean Rare Iridescent Snake Discovered in Vietnam An intrusive killer scorpion points the way to six new species in Sri Lanka What may be the longest (colony) animal in the world, a newly discovered siphonophore: New whale(s) just dropped: A newly discovered pygmy seahorse: A newly discovered pipefish is extremely red: So tiny, so newly discovered, Jonah’s mouse lemur: The Popa langur looks surprised to learn that it’s now considered a new species of monkey: The newly rediscovered devil eyed frog. I love him: The newly discovered Lilliputian frog looks big in this picture but is about the size of one of your fingernails: This newly discovered snake from Vietnam is iridescent and shiny: A new giant scorpion was discovered in Sri Lanka and now lives in our nightmares: The Gollum snakehead was technically discovered in 2019 but we’re going to let that slide: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Very recently, Page suggested the topic “animals discovered in 2020.” Since I was already thinking of doing something like this, I went ahead and bumped his suggestion to the top of the list and here we go! You’d think that with so many people in the world, there wouldn’t be too many more new animals to discover, especially not big ones. But new scientific discoveries happen all the time! Many are for small organisms, of course, like frogs and insects, but there are still unknown large animals out there. In fact, 503 new animals were officially discovered in 2020. Every single one is so amazing that I had a hard time deciding which ones to highlight. In most cases we don’t know much about these new animals since studying an animal in the wild takes time, but finding the animal in the first place is a good start. Many of the newly discovered species live in the ocean, especially the deep sea. In April of 2020, a deep-sea expedition off the coast of western Australia spotted several dozen animals new to science, including what may be the longest organism ever recorded. It’s a type of siphonophore, which isn’t precisely a single animal the way that, say, a blue whale is. It’s a colony of tiny animals, called zooids, all clones although they perform different functions so the whole colony can thrive. Some zooids help the colony swim, while others have tiny tentacles that grab prey, and others digest the food and disperse the nutrients to the zooids around it. Many siphonophores emit bioluminescent light to attract prey. Some siphonophores are small but some can grow quite large. The Portuguese man o’ war, which looks like a floating jellyfish, and which we talked about way back in episode 16, is actually a type of siphonophore. Its stinging tentacles can be 100 feet long, or 30 m. Other siphonophores are long, transparent, gelatinous strings that float through the depths of the sea, snagging tiny animals with their tiny tentacles, and that’s the kind this newly discovered siphonophore is. The new siphonophore was spotted at a depth of about 2,000 feet, or 625 meters, and was floating in a spiral shape. The scientists estimated that the spiral was about 49 feet in diameter, or 15 meters, and that the outer ring alone was probably 154 feet long, or 47 meters. The entire organism might have measured 390 feet long, or almost 119 meters. It’s been placed into the genus Apolemia although it hasn’t been formally described yet. Another 2020 discovery off the coast of Australia was an entire coral reef a third of a mile tall, or 500 meters, and almost a mile across, or 1.5 km. It’s part of the Great Barrier Reef but isn’t near the other reefs. A scientific team mapping the seafloor in the area discovered the reef and undoubtedly did a lot of celebrating. I mean, it’s not every day that you find an entirely new coral reef. They were able to 3D map the reef for study and take video too. Best of all, it’s a healthy reef with lots of other animal life living around it. Another big animal discovered in 2020 is one Patreon subscribers already know about, because we started out the year with an episode all about it. It’s a new whale! In 2018 scientists recording audio of animal life around Mexico’s San Benito Islands in the Pacific Ocean heard a whale call they didn’t recognize. They thought it probably belonged to a type of beaked whale, probably a little-known species called Perrin’s beaked whale. In late 2020 a team went back to the area specifically to look for Perrin’s beaked whales. They did see three beaked whales and got audio, video, and photographs of them, but they weren’t Perrin’s beaked whales. The whale specialists on the expedition didn’t know what these whales were. They don’t match any sp

Thanks to Phoebe for suggesting the quokka and the wombat, two of the cutest, happiest-looking animals in Australia! Further Reading: Viral stories of wombats sheltering other animals from the bushfires aren’t entirely true Satellites reveal the underground lifestyle of wombats Giant Wombat-Like Marsupials Roamed Australia 25 Million Years Ago Further Listening: Animals and Ultraviolet Light (unlocked Patreon episode) The adorable quokka with a nummy leaf and a joey in her pouch: Quokka (left) and my chonky cat Dracula (right) Some quokka selfies showing quokka smiles. That second picture really shows how small the quokka actually is: Wombats! A wombat and its burrow entrance: A wombat mom with her joey peeking out of the rear-facing pouch: Golden wombats. All they need is some Doublemint Gum: Two (dead, stuffed) wombats glowing under ultraviolet light: Show Transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to look at two super-cute animals from Australia, both of them suggestions by Phoebe. Thank you, Phoebe! Let’s start with the quokka. It’s a marsupial, which as you may recall means that it’s a mammal that gives birth to babies that aren’t fully formed yet, and the babies then finish developing in the mother’s pouch. It’s related to kangaroos and wallabies but is quite small, around the size of an ordinary domestic cat. It’s kind of a chonk, though, which means it’s probably closer in size to my big chonk cat Dracula. It’s shaped roughly like a little wallaby or kangaroo but with a smaller tail and with rounded ears, and it’s grey-brown in color. You may have seen pictures of the quokka online, because the reason it’s considered so incredibly cute is because it looks like it’s smiling all the time. If you take a picture of a quokka’s face, it looks like it has a happy smile and that, of course, makes the people who look at it happy too. Those are real pictures, by the way. Because of the way its muzzle and mouth are shaped, the quokka really does look like it’s smiling. This has caused some problems, unfortunately. People who want to take selfies with a quokka sometimes forget that they’re wild animals. While quokkas aren’t very aggressive and are curious animals who aren’t usually afraid of people, they can and will bite when frightened. The Nature Conservancy of Australia recommends that people who want to take a selfie with a quokka arrive early in the morning or late in the evening, since quokkas are mostly nocturnal, and that they let the quokkas approach them instead of following one around. Touching a quokka or giving it food or drink is strictly prohibited, since it’s a protected animal. The quokka lives on a few small islands off the coast of western Australia and a few small forested areas on the mainland. The largest population lives on Rottnest Island, and in fact the island was named by a Dutch explorer who thought the quokkas were rats. It means rat’s nest. The island’s actual name was Wadjemup and it was a ceremonial area for the local Whadjuk Noongar people. Only an estimated 14,000 quokkas live in the wild today, with most of those on Rottnest Island. It used to be much more widespread, but once white settlers arrived and introduced predators like dogs, cats, and foxes, its numbers started to decline. It’s also threatened by habitat loss. It reproduces slowly, since a female only raises one baby a year. A baby quokka is born after only a month, but like other marsupial babies, called joeys, it’s just a little pink squidge when it’s born. It climbs into its mother’s pouch where it stays for the next six months. Once it’s old enough to leave her pouch, it still depends on her milk for a few more months. While she’s raising one baby, though, the mother has other babies still in her womb ready to be born but held in suspended animation. This means that if something happens to her joey and it dies, the mother can give birth to another baby very quickly. The quokka is most active at night. It sleeps during most of the day, usually hidden in a type of prickly plant that helps keep predators from bothering it. It gets most of its water needs from the plants it eats, and while it mostly hops around like a teensy kangaroo, it can also climb trees. The wombat is another adorable Australian marsupial. For some reason, I’ve talked about the wombat several times in Patreon episodes but have barely mentioned it in the main feed–but that’s about to change. Mostly because I am going to recycle a lot of the information from the Patreon episodes, but I’ve also added a lot of interesting new details. The wombat mainly lives in southern and eastern Australia, including Tasmania. It looks a little like a cartoon bear, a little like a cartoon badger, and a little like a cartoon giant hamster. Perhaps you notice a theme here. It has short legs, no tail to speak of, and is about the size of a medium-sized dog but stockier, with a broad face and rounded ea

This week we’re on the cutting edge of science, learning about the brand new genetic study of dire wolves that rearranges everything we know about the dire wolf and other canids! Also, a bonus turtle update. Further reading: Dire Wolves Were Not Really Wolves, Genetic Clues Reveal An artist’s rendition of dire wolves and grey wolves fighting over a bison carcass (art by Mauricio Anton): The pig-nosed face of the Hoan Kiem turtle, AKA Yangtze giant softshell turtle, AKA Swinhoe’s softshell turtle: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. You may have heard the news this past week about the new study about dire wolves. I thought it would make a great topic for an episode, and we’ll also have a quick update about a rare turtle that’s been in the news lately too. Dire wolves show up pretty often in movies and TV shows and video games and books, because as far as anyone knew until very recently, the dire wolf was an extra big wolf that lived in North America during the Pleistocene until it went extinct around 13,000 years ago. Researchers assumed it was a close cousin of the modern grey wolf. Well, in a brand new study published in Nature literally less than a week ago as this episode goes live, we now have results of a genetic study of dire wolf remains. The results give us surprising new information not just about the dire wolf, but about many other canids. The study started in 2016, when an archaeologist, Angela Perri, who specializes in the history of human and animal interactions, wanted to learn more about the dire wolf. She went around the United States to visit university collections and museums with dire wolf remains, and took the samples she collected to geneticist Kieren Mitchell. Perri, Mitchell, and their team managed to sequence DNA from five dire wolves that lived between 50,000 and 13,000 years ago. Then the team compared the dire wolf genome to those of other canids, including the grey wolf and coyote, two species of African wolf, two species of jackal, and the dhole, among others. To their surprise, the dire wolf’s closest relation wasn’t the grey wolf. It was the jackals, both from Africa, but even they weren’t very closely related. It turns out that 5.7 million years ago, the shared ancestor of dire wolves and many other canids lived in Eurasia. At this point sea levels were low enough that the Bering land bridge, also called Beringia, connected the very eastern part of Asia to the very western part of North America. One population of this canid migrated into North America while the rest of the population stayed in Asia. The two populations evolved separately until the North America population developed into what we now call dire wolves. Meanwhile, the Eurasian population developed into many of the modern species we know today, and eventually migrated into North America too. By the time the gray wolf populated North America, the dire wolf was so distantly related to it that even when their territories overlapped, they avoided each other and didn’t interbreed. We’ve talked about canids in many previous episodes, including how readily they interbreed with each other, so for the dire wolf to remain genetically isolated, it was obviously not closely related at all to other canids at this point. The dire wolf looked a lot like a grey wolf, but researchers now think that was due more to convergent evolution than to its relationship with wolves. Both lived in the same habitats: plains, grasslands, and forests. The dire wolf was slightly taller on average than the modern grey wolf, which can grow a little over three feet tall at the shoulder, or 97 cm, but it was much heavier and more solidly built. It wouldn’t have been able to run nearly as fast, but it could attack and kill larger animals. Its head was larger in proportion than the grey wolf’s and it had massive teeth that were adapted to crush bigger bones. The dire wolf lived throughout North America and even migrated into South America and back into east Asia. It preferred open lowlands and its most important prey animal was probably the horse, although it also ate ground sloths, camels, bison, and many others. It probably also scavenged dead animals and probably hunted as a pack. Researchers think the dire wolf went extinct due to a combination of factors, including increased competition with grey wolves and maybe with humans, climate change, and the extinction of the megaherbivores that made up its diet. It will probably be reclassified into a different genus, Aenocyon, instead of staying in its current genus, Canis. Before this study, most researchers thought that the ancestor of North American canids evolved in Eurasia, but had already migrated into North America before developing into dire wolves, grey wolves, coyotes, and other canid species. But now the history of canids has changed a lot. From what we now know, pending further study, the dire wolf was the only canid in North Americ

This week let’s learn about two birds of New Guinea, bowerbirds and the Victoria crowned pigeon! Both are beautiful and the bowerbird is kind of weird. Thanks to M Is for Awesome for the suggestion! Further Reading: The Women Who Removed Birds from People’s Hats Various bowers made by various species of bowerbird: The golden-fronted bowerbird: Not a bowerbird but a close relation, a dead bird of paradise from New Guinea, decorating an old-timey lady’s fancy hat. I would not want to put this on my head: A Victoria crowned pigeon, wearing a built-in fancy hat: A Victoria crowned pigeon baby. Such miniature floof: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we are finally going to look at some birds of New Guinea, a topic suggested ages ago by M Is for Awesome! There are so many weird and amazing birds in New Guinea that instead of trying to talk about a bunch of them very briefly in one episode, I’m going to make this another ongoing series throughout the year. Every so often we’ll revisit New Guinea (in our minds, anyway) and learn about a few more birds. In this episode we’ll learn some basic information about New Guinea and then learn about two really interesting birds that live there. New Guinea comes up in lots of episodes because so many animals live there. It’s almost the world’s largest island, second only to Greenland. Australia is considered a continent, not an island. New Guinea is actually pretty close to Australia so there’s a lot of overlap between animals that live in Australia and animals that live in New Guinea. A big reason New Guinea has so many animals is its geography. It has everything from ridiculously high mountains with glaciers to lowland rainforests, savannas, wetlands, mangrove forests, rivers, lakes, alpine tundra, and coral reefs off the coast. About the only thing it doesn’t have is a desert. Most of the island is warm and humid with lots of rain. Of course people live in New Guinea too, and have for at least 40,000 years, possibly as long as 60,000 years. Back then, New Guinea was connected to Australia by a land bridge similar to the one that has connected North America with Asia when sea levels were low. Some of the earliest humans to migrate out of Africa settled in New Guinea, and the people there developed agriculture independently of the people who settled in the Middle East. More people arrived much later, only around 3,500 years ago, from parts of Asia. But because the land is so hard to navigate due to the mountains and rivers and so forth, people who moved to a new part of the island were largely isolated from the people in other parts. Some 7,000 languages are spoken on the island right up to the present day, with several hundred more languages once spoken. Unfortunately, as happens so often, after European explorers discovered the island in the 16th century, they decided they would like to have it for themselves. So they took it, which is just rude. The eastern half of the island is now independent as of 1975, called Papua New Guinea, while the western half, usually just called Papua, is now part of Indonesia. Indonesia is an Asian country and unfortunately, they’re being just as bad to the indigenous people of the area as Europeans were. There are still lots of places in New Guinea that scientists haven’t explored, mostly in the mountains, and undoubtedly lots and lots of animals and birds that are completely unknown to science. Some of the animals and birds of the mountains may never have been seen by any person at all. M specifically wanted us to cover bowerbirds, so let’s start with them. Bowerbirds live in Australia and New Guinea along with a few smaller islands, with twenty species known. You may have heard about them before, because a male bowerbird builds what’s called a bower and decorates it with items he selects to attract a female. A bower is a nice little shady area where you’d like to have a picnic, unless you’re a female bowerbird in which case you’d like to examine all the things a male has collected and evaluate his elaborate courtship dance. Because the female builds a nest and takes care of her eggs and chicks by herself, she’s really picky about who she mates with. She wants the strongest, healthiest male she can find so her babies will be healthy too. She looks for a male who has the energy to build a bower, collect pretty items to decorate it, and then perform an elaborate courtship dance when the female shows up. She will visit numerous bowers before she makes a decision, narrowing them down over the course of several days or even weeks until she chooses between the best candidates. Researchers think the bowerbird is most closely related to corvids, which as you may remember includes birds like crows, magpies, and jays, but they’re also closely related to birds of paradise. Some bowerbirds are plain black or brown, some are mostly black or brown with green or other colored marking

Happy new year! This week we’ll learn about the oldest mass extinction event, some 450 million years ago, and also sea scorpions. Further reading: Coming up for air: Extinct sea scorpions could breathe out of water, fossil detective unveils Sea scorpions could get really, really big: A fossil Eurypterus: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Hello, 2021, please be better than 2020 was. I’ve got lots of fun, interesting episodes planned for this year, but let’s start the year off right with an episode about, uh, a major extinction event. Specifically it’s the Late Ordovician mass extinction, which occurred around 450 million years ago. This is the first of a series of episodes about extinction events I have planned for this year, which I hope you’ll find interesting. We’ll also learn about an animal called the sea scorpion. If you’ve listened to episode 69, about the Cambrian explosion, you may remember that the fossil record shows that around 540 million years ago life on earth evolved from simple organisms into much more complicated ones. This happened relatively quickly in geologic terms, about 15 to 25 million years for life to go from microbial mats, simple worms, and single-celled animals to fantastical creatures with shells and spikes and novel ways of feeding as animals adapted to fit new ecological niches. But what happened after that? A series of extinction events, that’s what. The first extinction event researchers can identify from the fossil record is called the End-Botomian extinction event, which happened around 510 million years ago in two phases. We’re not sure what caused the extinctions, but the main theory is that a series of massive volcanic eruptions caused climate changes that led to acidification of the oceans and a resulting loss of oxygen from the water. This was followed by another extinction event around 500 million years ago. All told, during these ten million years or so, about 40% of all species of animal went extinct. But remember, all we have to work with is the fossil record. Researchers know how old particular rock strata are, strata being the term for layers, so when they find a fossil embedded in a rock they know roughly how long ago it lived. Only a small percentage of animals that ever live end up fossilized, and only a small percentage of fossils are ever found by humans, and only a small percentage of fossils found by humans get studied by experts. So while scientists do their best, they’re working with a limited amount of data to determine what happened half a billion years ago. It’s like trying to determine the rise and fall of empires from a series of random photographs. But when older rocks show a whole lot of fossils of various kinds, and then slightly younger rocks show way fewer or no fossils, researchers can be pretty sure that something catastrophic happened to kill off a lot of animal life in a relatively short amount of time. If they find the same changes in rocks of the same age in different parts of the world, the catastrophe was probably worldwide and serious enough to impact life on Earth for thousands or even millions of years. That’s what happened in the late Ordovician. Around 460 million years ago, about the time that life was getting back to normal after the last extinction event, glaciers started to form across the land. Most of the continents at this time were smushed together into a supercontinent called Gondwana, which was mostly in the southern hemisphere. Much of the rest of the Earth was one big ocean, and it was hot and tropical just about everywhere. But that changed when temperatures dropped drastically. Glaciers formed, sea levels fell, and some 60% of all life on Earth went extinct, all possibly within about one million years. We don’t know why, but we do have some clues and some theories. We know there was a major meteor event around 467 million years ago, which can be pinpointed because of the craters and specific minerals and bits of meteorites found that can only come from meteors hitting the earth. The impacts kicked dust into the atmosphere that then reflected sunlight back into space, causing less light to reach the earth. Another cause might have just been a cyclical movement of the Earth in space. As you hopefully know, Earth rotates on its axis in a 24 hour period, giving us day and night, and at the same time it’s moving in an elliptical orbit around the sun in a 12-month period, which of course is a year. The sun and the other planets and everything else in our solar system are also moving in space in a larger orbit, and there are other even larger orbits that our solar system is part of within our galaxy, which is moving too. With all this movement all the time, it’s not surprising that Earth’s climate is affected in very long cycles, together with the effects of the moon’s gravitational pull making the Earth’s orbit just slightly wobbly. A combination of events, including wher

Let’s finish off a very weird year and welcome in the new year with a basket of colorful frogs! The northern leopard frog comes in many color morphs, all of them pretty: The starry dwarf frog is also pretty and has an orange tummy: The astonishing turtle frog: Poison dart frogs are colorful and deadly (blue poison dart frog, golden poison dart frog): The tomato frog looks like a tomato that is also a frog: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s the very last week of 2020, and good riddance. Let’s kick the old year out the back door and welcome in the new year with a basket of pretty frogs. That’s right, we’ve got a frog episode this week! Let’s start with the northern leopard frog, with thanks to an anonymous reviewer who gave the podcast a really nice five-star review and only signed the review “norhern lepord frong.” I looked that frog up online to see what it looked like, and it’s so pretty, honestly, it’s just the prettiest frog! If you had a basket of northern leopard frogs, they might just look like friendly flowers, because while most are green or brown with darker spots, some are much brighter green with yellow markings, some are dark brown, and some are even pinkish white because of a rare albino trait. Its spots are outlined with yellow or light green and it has two folds of skin that run the length of the body and are sometimes yellow. These folds of skin are called dorsolateral folds and many frogs have them, although they’re not always as easy to spot as in the northern leopard frog. The northern leopard frog is native to the northern part of North America, especially southern Canada and the northern and western United States. It grows up to 4.5 inches long, or 11.5 cm, measured from snout to vent. As you may recall from previous frog episodes, that’s how frogs are always measured. It basically just means nose to butt. Females are larger than males, which is also the case for most frogs. It lives anywhere that it can find fresh water, including rivers, streams, creeks, ponds, marshes, even drainage ditches, but it prefers slow-moving or quiet water. As a result, it’s threatened by loss of habitat, pollution, and climate change, all of which affect the water it needs to live, and it’s also threatened by non-native animals and diseases. But while it doesn’t live in as many places as it used to, right now it’s doing fine overall and isn’t considered endangered. Like most frogs, the northern leopard frog eats insects and any other small animal it can swallow. It has a long sticky tongue that it can shoot out so quickly that even an insect can’t outfly it, but it doesn’t just eat insects. It’s a big frog with a big mouth, and it’s been recorded eating other species of frog, small snakes, small birds, and even a bat. But mostly it eats insects, slugs, snails, and worms. Probably the frog that was documented as catching and eating a bat is famous in the northern leopard frog world, or at least it would be if real life was like the inside of my head and frogs had their own tiny newspapers. The northern leopard frog was once considered a delicacy, with most frogs’ legs coming from this particular species. It’s also sometimes kept as a pet. It’s mostly nocturnal and semi-aquatic, sometimes called the meadow frog because it will leave the water to hunt for food in grassy areas. It hibernates in winter but is better adapted to cold weather than a lot of frogs are. There’s also a southern leopard frog that looks very similar to the northern leopard frog but lives farther south, which you probably guessed from the name. It’s also slightly larger than the northern leopard frog, up to five inches long, or 13 cm. Male leopard frogs, like many other frogs, have special vocal sacs in the throat that allow a male to make a loud call in spring to attract females. Different species of frog have different calls, naturally, and the vocal sacs are shaped differently in every species. The male leopard frog, northern and southern, has two vocal sacs that he fills with air like balloons, which amplifies the sound of his voice and makes it much louder. This is what a northern leopard frog sounds like: [frog sound] Another colorful frog is from India and was only discovered in 2010. A team of scientists surveying the mountains for reptiles and amphibians noticed a teensy frog in the leaf litter one night. Its back was brown with light blue dots that looked like stars in a night sky, but its belly was orange like a sunset. It’s a very pretty frog. The researchers caught several of the frogs and thought they were pretty but not especially unusual. There are at least 400 known frogs in India and new species are found pretty frequently. The team named it the starry dwarf frog because of the blue dots and its size, less than 20 mm long, or around half an inch. That’s about the size of an adult’s thumbnail. After the expedition, though, when the team examined the frogs more close

Thanks to Nicholas and Juergen for their suggestions! Let’s learn about some insects that migrate and swarm! Further listening: The Animal Migrations Patreon episode (it’s unlocked so anyone can listen) Further reading: Ladybugs Are Everywhere! Monarch butterflies gathered in winter: The painted lady butterfly: The bogong moth: The globe skimmer dragonfly: Ladybugs spend the winter in bunches, sometimes in your house: A stink bug, one of many potentially in your house: This person is not afraid of locusts even though I would be freaking out: A field in Australia being eaten by locusts (the brown part): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s learn about some insects this week, but not just any old insects. Let’s learn about insects that swarm. Thanks to Nicholas and Juergen for suggestions that led to this episode! Nicholas suggested long-distance migrators ages ago, and I did do an episode about migration for a Patreon episode. I’ve unlocked that episode so anyone can listen to it, with a link in the show notes. I’ve also used some of the information in that episode for this one, specifically the part about monarch butterflies. In fact, let’s start with the monarch butterfly. The monarch is a good-sized butterfly, with orange and black wings with white spots along the edges and a wingspan of up to four inches, or 10 cm. It lives in many parts of the world, but only the North American subspecies of monarch migrates. Every autumn, monarch butterflies living in North America, where they breed, head south to winter in the mountains of central Mexico, a trip that can be as long as 3,000 miles, or 4,800 km. They spend the winter in oyamel fir trees, millions of butterflies in the branches. When spring arrives, the butterflies head north again, but they don’t get all the way back to their original range. If they’re lucky, they reach Texas, where they mate and lay eggs on milkweed plants before dying. The caterpillars hatch, eat up the milkweed, spin cocoons, and emerge transformed into new butterflies that continue the flight north, deeper into North America. But those butterflies don’t make it all the way to their parents’ home range either. They too stop to mate, lay eggs, and die. It can take four or five generations for monarch butterflies to reach Canada and other distant parts of North America, and by that time it’s autumn again. The butterflies fly back to Mexico. Butterflies heading north live out their entire life cycle in only five or six weeks, but the butterflies that return to Mexico live up to eight months. Researchers think the northward migration follows the blooming of milkweed plants. Milkweed contains toxins that make the monarchs poisonous to a lot of animals, but some birds and a lot of insects will eat the caterpillars. Some populations of North American monarchs overwinter in California, Arizona, or Florida instead of Mexico. The North American monarch is declining in numbers, probably mostly due to the decline of milkweed. The best way to help the butterfly is to plant milkweed in any area you don’t want to mow very often. While the monarch migration is astounding, it’s not the only butterfly that migrates. A small, pretty butterfly called the painted lady lives throughout much of the world, even the Arctic, but not South America for some reason. Some populations stay put year-round, but some migrate long distances. One population winters in tropical Africa and travels as far as the Arctic Circle during summer, a distance of 4,500 miles, or 7,200 km, which takes six generations. The butterflies who travel back to Africa fly at high altitude, unlike monarch butterflies that fly quite low to the ground most of the time. Unlike the monarch, painted ladies like many kinds of flowers, not just one plant, and they don’t always migrate every year. In Australia, some populations of the bogong moth migrate some 600 miles, or 965 km. It’s a dark brown moth with a wingspan of up to two inches across, or 5 cm, and naturally enough, it migrates at night. Unlike the butterflies we’ve talked about, the migration doesn’t take successive generations. In spring the moths fly from the lowlands into the mountains, where they spend the summer mostly hiding in caves and other dark places. The bogong moth actually breeds and lays eggs in winter, because it doesn’t like hot weather. Birds and some other animals depend on the moth migration for food, when they can eat a lot of big fat moths and get lots of protein. Some Aboriginal tribes of southeastern Australia also used to follow the migration into the mountains, where they would gather lots of moths from caves and roast them. Apparently they taste like nuts. But the insect that migrates farthest is a species of dragonfly. The globe skimmer, also called the wandering glider or winged wanderer, lives in much of the world, but not in Europe. Researchers think it can’t cross the Sahara to reach Europe, but i