Strange Animals Podcast

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Episode 237: Geckos and Other Arboreal Reptiles Aug 16, 2021

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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 consider it the first truly domesticated lizard. It’s easy to take care of and is usually comfortable around people. Breeders select for brighter colors than are found in wild geckos, including various color and pattern morphs. One color variety of domestic leopard gecko is called the lemon frost morph, an especially attractive coloration. It’s a pastel yellow with white underneath and brown or black speckles that form broad bands over the lizard’s back. It’s really pretty and when the trait cropped up unexpectedly around 2015, its owner started breeding for the color. Lemon frost babies were rare and incredibly expensive, with people paying up to $2,000 for a single gecko. Unfortunately, people soon learned that lemon frost geckos were prone to a type of rare skin cancer that affects the iridophores, which are pigment-producing cells. Up to 80% of all lemon frost morphs develop the cancer. Geneticists have discovered that the color morph is due to a single mutation in a single gene, but that the change in that gene also makes the gecko susceptible to cancer. Scientists are now trying to figure out more about how it works in hopes of learning how to prevent skin cancer in humans. The dragon-tailed gecko is one name for the golden spiny-tailed gecko, one of twenty species in the genus Strophurus. All Strophurus geckos are from Australia and they all spend most of their lives in trees and shrubs. Unlike other geckos, Strophurus geckos don’t drop their tails when threatened. Instead, they have a unique way of deterring predators. A Strophurus gecko can squirt an incredibly smelly liquid from tiny pores in its tail. If it feels threatened, instead of dropping its tail, it will raise its tail up and wave it back and forth as a warning. It also opens its mouth to reveal a bright yellow or blue lining, which alerts the potential predator that this is not a lizard it wants to mess with. If that doesn’t scare the predator away, it will squirt liquid at its face. The liquid is sticky and smells horrible, and if it gets in an animal’s eyes it can cause eye irritation. Strophurus geckos grow up to 5 inches long, or 13 cm, and species may look very different from each other. Some are drab and spiny, some are smooth and brighter in color. The dragon-tailed gecko has a broad reddish or golden stripe down the top of its tail. The crested gecko is native to a collection of remote Pacific islands called New Caledonia. It can grow more than 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It has tiny spines above its eyes that look like eyelashes and more spines in two rows down its back, like a tiny dragon. It can be brown, reddish, orange, yellow, or gray, with various colored spots, which has made it a popular pet. These days all pet crested geckos were bred in captivity, since it’s now protected in the wild. The crested gecko spends most of its time in trees, and not only does it have adhesive toe pads, it also has tiny claws. Most geckos don’t have claws. It can drop its tail like other geckos, but it doesn’t grow back. This doesn’t seem to bother the gecko, though. The crested gecko was discovered by science in 1866, but wasn’t seen after that in so long that people thought it was extinct. Then it was rediscovered in 1994, so hurrah for the crested gecko! Let’s move on from geckos to some other arboreal reptiles. A lot of reptiles live mostly in trees, and not all of them are small. The green iguana, for instance. It’s native to southern Mexico into parts of South America but has been introduced in many other places in the Americas, where it’s often considered an invasive species. In warm weather it lives in trees, although it will climb down to the ground in cool, rainy weather, and it can grow up to six and a half feet long, or 2m. Although the iguana can be really long, most of its length is tail. It has an incredibly long tail for its size. It’s not that heavy, either, with the biggest green iguana ever weighed only a little more than 20 lbs, or 9.1 kg. Most are much lighter. It has long legs and long toes with claws, which makes it a good climber. It uses its tail to balance. It’s usually a drab olive-green or brown in color, although babies are brighter green with reddish spots and some adults are more orange in color. The tail is patterned with broad stripes. It has spines along its back and down its chin, and males develop a large dewlap that hangs down under the neck. Although the iguana looks like a small dragon, it eats leaves, flowers, fruit, and other plant material, although it will also sometimes eat a grasshopper or snail and even bird eggs every so often. Many people keep green iguanas as pets, but they can be hard to keep healthy in captivity. Another big reptile that lives in trees is the black mamba, a snake that lives in parts of Africa. It’s a slender snake that can be black in color, but that’s actually rare. The name black mamba comes from the inside of the snake’s mouth,...

BONUS Q&A Episode! Aug 13, 2021

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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. Here is the raw, honest truth about why I started Strange Animals Podcast. It was several things combined and the whole story is kind of dumb. First, my friend Kevin makes a great pop culture podcast called The Flopcast, and after I’d listened to it for a while I thought, “Hey, that sounds like fun. I think I’ll start a podcast.” About the same time, I was listening to a back episode of a podcast I will not name, and it gave some misinformation about the Irish elk, specifically the outdated theory that it went extinct because its antlers were too big. I mentioned that in episode 4 and how I kept thinking about it and got kind of angry that a large, influential podcast hadn’t bothered to do enough research about an animal that lots of people are interested in. I decided I could do better and that my podcast would be about animals. Also at the same time, I was trying to find a good podcast about mystery animals that was well researched and didn’t skate off into speculation too much. I couldn’t find one that satisfied me, so I had to make one myself. I wasn’t exactly sure what my focus would be when I first started the podcast. You can kind of tell when you listen to the first six months or so of the podcast that I was trying out new things and figuring out what worked best and what I liked best. I’m still figuring that out, for that matter. It’s hard to decide what I like best about making the podcast. I like the whole process, except maybe not the frustrating parts of recording and editing. I think my favorite part has to be when I uncover information I find really exciting. I get to share that information with everyone who listens! It’s fantastic! Next, let’s get into some questions about animals. Pranav asked if I would explain how poisons work, which is a great question and also just a tiny bit alarming. No one eat anything Pranav cooks for you unless he’s eating some too. Actually, of course, he’s just wanting to learn more about poisonous animals, and I’ll talk about venomous animals too. A poisonous animal contains toxins somewhere in its body, like the hooded pitohui bird that we talked about in episode 222 that has poisonous feathers. The poison stops other animals from trying to eat it. In the case of the hooded pitohui, its poison causes your skin to burn when you touch it, so an animal that tries to bite it will have a burning mouth. If it actually eats any of the poison, the animal can die. Many amphibians secrete toxins through their skin, like the poison dart frog, and many other animals concentrate toxins in their muscles or internal organs. A venomous animal has toxins that it can inject into a wound to hurt or kill another animal. Some snakes can inject venom with special fangs, but some amphibians have pointed ribs that are sharp enough to stab a potential predator. The ribs will project through the amphibian’s sides through tiny spots that are filled with toxins. The toxins coat the points of the ribs, and if the predator tries to bite down, it gets those toxins stabbed right into its mouth. Some fish have spines that are coated in toxins, and of course many insects, arachnids, and other invertebrates have stingers that inject toxins. Generally, a poisonous animal absorbs toxins from a food it eats, often a toxic insect, and instead of getting sick, it uses those toxins to protect it from predators. A venomous animal usually produces its own toxins in its body, especially animals that use venom to kill or disable prey. It costs energy for the animal to make venom, and it doesn’t want to waste it. That’s why snakes will sometimes give what are called dry bites in self-defense, where it bites but doesn’t inject any venom. It’s hoping that the pain of the bite itself will make a potential predator retreat without the snake needing to use venom. Different toxins have different effects, naturally, and animals produce so many different kinds of toxins that we could talk about it all day and not even cover them all. Instead, let’s quickly discuss two animals, one venomous and one poisonous. Our venomous example is the king cobra. It can grow over 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and lives in southern Asia. It mostly eats other snakes and some lizards. Its venom contains numerous toxins that do different horrible things. The neurotoxins in its venom affect the central nervous system, which can cause all sorts of issues like dizziness, pain, blurred vision, sleepiness, and even paralysis. Other toxins in the venom are called cardiotoxic because they affect the heart, making it weak so that circulation of blood slows down. If a king cobra bites you and injects venom, you can die within 30 minutes as the venom basically just shuts your body down, one process at a time. If your heart stops or your diaphragm becomes paralyzed so you can’t breathe, that’s it for you. Fortunately, in ordinary situations the king cobra is shy and avoids people,...

Episode 236: Updates 4 and a Mystery Snake! Aug 09, 2021

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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 up. Since vampire bats can starve to death in only a few nights if they can’t find blood, having friends who will share food is important. During the study, Lilith gave birth to a baby, but shortly afterwards she started getting sick. She had trouble getting enough food and couldn’t groom or take care of her baby as well as a mother bat should. Her friend BD helped out, grooming the baby, sharing food with Lilith, and eventually even nursing the baby when Lilith got too sick to produce milk. After Lilith died, BD adopted the baby as though it was her own. By the time the study ended, BD was still caring for the baby bat. We talked about spiders in the Antarctic in episode 221, and mentioned that Antarctica hasn’t always been a frozen wasteland of ice and snow. In a new study of fossils found in Antarctica, published in May of 2021, the first Antarctic amphibian skull has been identified. It lived in the early Triassic, not long after the end-Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago. It’s been named Micropholis stowi and is a new species of temnospondyl that was previously only known from South Africa. The skull, along with other fossils from four individuals, was discovered in the Transantarctic Mountains in 2017 and 2018, and the research team studied them from home during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. In news about humans and our extinct close relations, a new finding shows that Neanderthals and humans used the same type of tools. Researchers studied a child’s tooth and some stone tools, all found in a cave in the mountains of Palestine, and determined that the tooth was from a Neanderthal child, not a human. The tooth was discovered in 1928 but was in a private collection until recently, so no one had been able to study it before now. The tools are a specific type developed in Africa that have only been found associated with humans before. Not only that, but until this finding, there was no evidence that Neandertals ever lived so far south. The child is estimated to have been about nine or ten years old, which is the age when you’re likely to lose a baby tooth as your adult teeth start growing in. I like to think about the child sitting next to their Mom or Dad, who were either creating new tools or using ones they’d already made to do something like cut up food for that evening’s dinner. Maybe the child was supposed to be helping, and they were, but they had a loose tooth and kept giving it a twist now and then, trying to get it to come out. Then, finally, out it popped and bounced onto the cave floor, where it was lost for the next 60,000 years. Researchers have just announced that they’ve sequenced the genetic profile of a woman who lived in what is now Romania about 35,000 years ago. Judging from her skull shape and what is known about ancient humans in Europe, the team had assumed she would be rather restricted in her genetic diversity but that she would show more Neanderthal ancestry than modern humans have. Instead, they were surprised to find that the woman had much more genetic diversity than modern humans but no more Neanderthal genes than most human populations have these days. This was a surprise because modern humans whose prehistoric ancestors migrated out of Africa show much less genetic diversity than modern humans whose ancestors stayed in Africa until modern times. Researchers have always thought there was a genetic bottleneck at some point during or not long after groups of humans migrated out of Africa around 80,000 years ago. Lots of suggestions have been made about what might have caused the bottleneck, including disease, natural disaster, or just the general hardship of living somewhere where humans had never lived before. A genetic bottleneck happens when a limited number of individuals survive long enough to reproduce—in other words, in this case, if so many people die before they have children that there are hardly any children left to grow up and have children of their own. To show in the general population as it does, the bottleneck has to be widespread. Now researchers think the genetic bottleneck happened much later than 80,000 years ago, probably during the last ice age. Humans living in Europe and Asia, where the ice age was severe, would have had trouble finding food and staying warm. I’m getting close to finishing the Strange Animals Podcast book, which I’ll talk about a little more in our Q&A episode later this week. It’s a collection of the best mystery animals we’ve covered on the podcast, along with some new mystery animals, and I’m working hard to update my research. If you remember back in episode 83, about mystery big cats, we discussed the Barbary lion, which was thought to be an extinct subspecies of lion that might not actually be extinct. Well, when I looked into it to see if any new information had turned up, I found more than I expected....

Episode 235: Deep-Sea Squid Aug 02, 2021

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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 the water. That way the squid can move faster. Researchers speculate that the tail section may make the squid look much larger to potential predators, and possibly may imitate an organism called a siphonophore that has stinging cells. Another squid called Verany’s long-armed squid is Chiroteuthis veranii. It’s related to the long-arm squid we talked about at the beginning of the episode, but they’re placed in different genera. It lives throughout the world’s oceans, often in the deep sea although not as deep as some of the species we’re talking about today. Unlike most squid, whose arms are all about the same length, two of its arms are much wider and longer than the others. Like the other long-arm squid, its feeding tentacles are incredibly long and thin. The mantle is quite small, up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm, with the legs about the same length as or a little longer than the mantle, but the total length of this squid, including the feeding tentacles, is over four feet, or 130 centimeters. Most of the time the feeding tentacles are retracted, though, so they’re no longer than the arms, and they’re protected by the two largest arms. When the squid sees a tiny fish or crab or other small animal it wants to eat, it can shoot its retracted tentacles out at high speed to catch it. It’s probable that other species of long-armed squid hunt the same way. A squid’s eggs hatch into an initial form called a paralarva. This is actually the case for other cephalopods too, including octopuses. The paralarvae usually just look like teeny-tiny miniature versions of the adult, but with stubby little arms. In the case of Verany’s long-armed squid, though, the larval squid looks sort of like a little rod. It’s long and thin, mostly transparent, and has a gladius, also called a pen, that sticks out the end of the mantle on the opposite side from the arms. The pen of a squid is named after an ink pen, although the other name, gladius, refers to the shape of a type of ancient Roman sword. It’s a vestigial shell but located inside the squid’s body. The tail of the long-tailed squid we just talked about is given structure by the gladius, so it’s possible that its paralarvae look rod-like, like those of Verany’s long-armed squid. Speaking of internal shells, the ram’s horn squid has a coiled internal shell. This is unique among all the squid known to be alive today, so the ram’s horn squid is the only living member of its own order and its own family and its own genus. Technically it’s not really considered a squid although it is a closely related cephalopod. It’s small, with a mantle length only about an inch and a half long, or 4.5 centimeters. Its eight arms are quite short and it has two feeding tentacles that are about the same length as its mantle. Its mantle has an outer covering that extends down almost to the squid’s eyes, and it’s big enough that the squid can pull its eyes and legs and tentacles under this covering. The spiral shell resembles that of a nautilus, but it’s inside the squid instead of the nautilus living inside the shell. The shell contains gas that the squid uses to adjust its buoyancy. For a long time researchers were confused as to how the ram’s horn squid oriented itself in the water. The empty shells from dead squid wash ashore pretty often, and experiments with them show that they want to float with the big end of the shell pointing downward. That confused the researchers, since that would mean the squid floats around with its arms downward too, which means that the photophore on the tail end of its mantle points upward. A photophore is a light-emitting organ, which is common in deep-sea animals. Usually an animal wants its light to point downwards, which means that larger animals looking up toward the surface see a little light sparkling amid the light shining down from the surface instead of seeing a squid-shaped shadow against the surface. Then, in late 2020, a deep-sea rover exploring the northern section of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia got a video of a ram’s horn squid in the water. It was the first time a living one had ever been observed. In the video, the squid is floating with its arms pointing upward, flapping the fins on its mantle to move along in the water. Mystery solved! There’s still a lot we don’t know about the ram’s horn squid, but at least we know it doesn’t swim around upside-down. Another squid that has only recently been seen alive in the wild from a deep-sea rover is the clawed armhook squid. My brother Richard alerted me to this one in a Twitter thread. The clawed armhook squid lives in the northern Pacific Ocean and has a mantle length of about seven inches, or 18 cm. Its arms are about the same length as its mantle. It gets its name from the female, which has small hooks on her arms to help her keep hold of her egg cluster. She lays about 3,...

Episode 234: Sun Bears, Water Bears Jul 26, 2021

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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 undersea volcanic vents or inside rocks deep below the ocean floor. Tardigrades aren’t technically extremophiles, but they are incredibly tough. Researchers have found tardigrades in environments such as the gloppy ooze at the bottom of the ocean to the icy peaks of the Himalayas. It can survive massive amounts of radiation, dehydration for up to five years, pressures even more intense than at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, temperatures as low as -450 Fahrenheit, or -270 Celsius, heat up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, or 150 Celsius, and even outer space. It’s survived on Earth for at least half a billion years. Mostly, though, it just lives in moss. One thing to remember is that different species of tardigrade are good at withstanding different extreme environments. Not every tardigrade is able to do everything we just talked about. They’re tough, but they’re not invulnerable. Many species can withstand incredible heat, but only for half an hour or less. Long-term temperature increases, even if only a little warmer than it’s used to, can cause the tardigrade to die. Most species of tardigrade eat plant material or bacteria, but a few eat smaller species of tardigrade. It has no lungs since it just absorbs air directly into its body by gas exchange. It has a teeny brain, teeny eyes, and teeny sensory bristles on its body. Its legs have no joints. Its tubular mouth contains tube-like structures called stylets that are secreted from glands on either side of the mouth. Every time the tardigrade molts its cuticle, or body covering, it loses the stylets too and has to regrow them. In some species, the only time the tardigrade poops is when it molts. The poop is left behind in the molted cuticle. The tardigrade’s success is largely due to its ability to suspend its metabolism, during which time the water in its body is replaced with a type of protein that protects its cells from damage. It retracts its legs and rearranges its internal organs so it can curl up into a teeny barrel shape, at which point it’s called a tun. It needs a moist environment, and if its environment dries out too much, the water bear will automatically go into this suspended state, called cryptobiosis. The tardigrade’s DNA gets fractured during dehydration but it’s incredibly successful at repairing its DNA upon rehydration, which explains a big part of its success. In 2016, Japanese researchers sequenced the genome of the species of tardigrade that best resists radiation. In the process, they discovered a new protein in the tardigrade’s genome, which they named DSUP, short for damage suppressor. Even more interesting, when cultured human cells were given the ability to create DSUP, after exposure to X-rays, they showed half the DNA damage that non-DSUP cells showed. Tests in 2007 and 2011 that exposed tardigrades to outer space led to some speculation that tardigrades might actually be from outer space, and that they, or organisms that gave rise to them, might have hitched a ride on a comet or some other heavenly body and ended up on earth. But this isn’t actually the case, since genetic studies show that tardigrades fit neatly into what we know of animal development and evolution. The tardigrade is probably most closely related to arthropods, like insects and spiders. Their closest relatives were probably lobopodians, extinct wormlike organisms with stubby legs. The famous Hallucigenia creature is a lobopodian, which we talked about in episode 69 about the Cambrian explosion. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the tardigrade’s ancestry, since we have so few fossilized water bears, but many researchers think their oldest ancestors were probably much bigger than the microscopic or nearly microscopic living animals. In other words, maybe once there were water bears you could pick up and hug. Well, they probably weren’t that big, but I like to imagine it. I think that if you hugged a water bear too hard, it would make this noise: [little prrrt sound] You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us that way, and don’t forget to join our mailing list. There’s a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening!

Episode 233: The Astonishing Aye-Aye Jul 19, 2021

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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 primates are nocturnal. It echolocates to find its food, which is completely weird. Also, its incisors grow continuously like a rodent’s. Incisors are those squarish front teeth. Since it uses its incisors to chew holes in wood, they need to keep growing or they’d get worn down to nothing eventually. The aye-aye’s incisors are very similar to a squirrel’s, and in fact is skull and jaw are also very similar to those of a squirrel. You know what that means. Yes, convergent evolution! It’s everywhere! Its skull and teeth look so much like a big squirrel’s that when scientists first examined the aye-aye back in the 18th and early 19th centuries, they classified it as a rodent. It wasn’t until 1931 that it was recognized as a primate, and even today some researchers think it’s not as closely related to primates as is currently thought. Genetic studies do indicate that it’s most closely related to lemurs, though. The aye-aye also has fewer teeth than lemurs and other primates, only 18 in all. If you shine a light at an aye-aye at night, its eyes will reflect some of the light just like a cat. This is due to a specialized layer in the eye called the tapetum lucidum, which reflects light toward the retina so the animal can see better in the dark. Very few primates have a tapetum lucidum because most primates are diurnal, or active during the day, instead of nocturnal like the aye-aye. Most nocturnal animals don’t see colors very well or at all. Naturally, they don’t need to since colors are hard or impossible to see in low light. But when researchers studied aye-aye genetics to learn more about how color vision developed in primates, including humans, they were in for a big surprise. The aye aye is completely nocturnal, but it still has the gene to see colors related to green and blue. Researchers have no idea why this is the case, although naturally they have some theories. One theory is that the aye-aye uses its color vision to find flowers, especially blue flowers. Another theory is that it can see ultraviolet, which allows it to see urine marks left by other aye-ayes, since urine glows in ultraviolet light. The most ultraviolet light is available at dusk, which is when an aye-aye first ventures out to see what’s going on in its territory. But let’s go back to the aye-aye’s fingers again. I just can’t get over its fingers. Not only is the skeletal middle finger just plain weird-looking, it’s weird compared to all other animal fingers. That one middle finger has what’s called a ball and socket joint, which is just not a joint found in fingers. You may not be familiar with the term, but you know what a ball-and-socket joint is because you have some in your own body. Your leg bones fit into your hip bone with ball-and-socket joints and your upper arm bones fit into your shoulders the same way. This allows you to move your arms and legs all around, whereas your fingers mostly just bend down, and a little bit up and sideways. But the aye-aye’s thin middle finger is incredibly flexible because of its ball-and-socket joint. All its other fingers have ordinary finger joints. But wait, there’s more about the aye-aye’s fingers. In 2019, results of a study of the aye-aye’s unusual hands were published, and I just want to point out that the lead author of that paper is quoted as saying, “When you watch [an aye-aye] move, it looks like a strange lemur walking on spiders.” I’m not the only one who thinks their hands look like spiders! Anyway, the study intended to learn more about the tendons in an aye-aye’s hands. But the researchers found a little structure on the wrist that no one had ever noticed before. It’s a small pseudo-thumb, or false thumb, which acts as an extra digit and helps the aye-aye climb through trees. The pseudo-thumb isn’t just a little nubbin that helps it balance. No, it’s basically a real digit. It has bone and cartilage inside, muscles that allow it to move just like a regular thumb, and it even has a little thumbprint. It’s also strong. Researchers think that the aye-aye’s other fingers are so specialized that they’re not much help in climbing, so it developed an extra thumb. Strange and specialized as the aye-aye is, it’s not the only animal we know of that had long, thin fingers that it used to tap on trees to find insects. 55 million years ago an animal called Labidolemur kayi lived in Europe and North America and shared many characteristics with the aye-aye. It was a little smaller than the aye-aye but had the same rodent-like teeth and two long thin fingers. Labidolemur kayi shared an ancestor with both rodents and primates, although it wasn’t a direct ancestor of the aye-aye. The aye-aye developed its rodent-like teeth and long thin fingers independently. Say it with me again: convergent evolution! The aye aye is not only the only member of its own genus, it’s the only member of its own family....

Episode 232: Almost Domesticated Jul 12, 2021

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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 strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com, 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 detailed description. The Voice of Mongolia in English says the Mongolian language has over 300 words to describe horses, while Wikipedia says it’s over 500. Either way, the terminology is so precise that everyone knows exactly which horse someone’s talking about, which if you think about it is more useful than a name. The Australian dingo is in a similar situation. It’s considered a feral dog breed, but it doesn’t need people to survive. Most feral dogs throughout the world barely scrape by, eating garbage and rats and often dying of starvation or disease. Dingos live like wild animals and do just fine. But at the same time, they’re happy to hang out with people from time to time, acting as hunting companions who are neither dependent on humans nor frightened of them. The dingo is a strong, tough, lean dog that stands around 22 inches tall at the shoulder, or 56 cm. It has flexible joints like the Norwegian lundehund we talked about in episode 230, which allows it to climb cliffs and fences and otherwise navigate difficult terrain. It’s usually a yellowy or ginger color, sometimes with small white markings, although some dingoes are black and tan. It can survive on very little water. It often hunts in packs and will hunt animals larger than it is, like the red kangaroo. The dingo was probably brought to Australia by humans, although we’re not sure when. Dingo fossils have been found dating to 3,500 years ago in western Australia, so it was at least that long ago. Genetic studies show that the modern dingo and the dingo of 3,500 years ago are pretty much identical. It also shows that it’s definitely a domestic dog, related to other dog breeds that were once common in Asia around 7,000 years ago, but which are rare now. It’s most closely related to the New Guinea singing dog, which makes sense since New Guinea is so close to Australia. Until somewhere between 6,500 and 8,000 years ago, New Guinea and Australia were connected when sea levels were low. Genetically the two dog breeds have been separated for about 8,300 years, which suggests that the dingo has been in Australia for at least that long. Traditionally, Aboriginal Australians would take a dingo puppy from its den to keep as a pet, a hunting dog, or sometimes a herding animal. Sometimes the dingo would stick around when it was grown, but sometimes it would return to the wild. There’s a lot of controversy about breeding dingoes as pets, since it would be easy to breed the wild traits and behaviors out. Since the dingo has been killed as a livestock pest since white settlers arrived in Australia, in many places its numbers are in decline and there are worries that the wild dingo could go extinct. There are already problems with the dingo cross-breeding with other dog breeds. It’s a complicated topic, because while the dingo is a dog, it’s not precisely domesticated at this point but also not precisely a wild animal. There used to be a domesticated canid in South America called the Fuegian dog, which was probably used as a hunting dog, especially to hunt otters. On cold nights, the dogs would wrap themselves around their people like living blankets so everyone stayed nice and warm. The Fuegian dog wasn’t a dog, though. It was the domesticated form of the culpeo, also called the Andean fox. It’s actually not a fox although it looks a lot like one. It’s related to wolves and jackals, and it lives on the western slopes of the Andes Mountains all the way down to the southern tip of Patagonia. It eats small animals like rodents and introduced European rabbits. While the culpeo is sandy or tawny in color with gray on its back and a black tip to its tail, the Fuegian dog was sometimes brown and white or all white. Reportedly the Fuegian dog was not very tame in general and was an aggressive animal compared to actual dogs. It would hunt on its own and basically acted like a wild animal that just happened to hang out with humans a lot, like the dingo does today. The culpeo is doing just fine, but the Fuegian dog is extinct. The Fuegian dog was tamed by a Patagonian people called the Selk’nam [shelknam], or ‘Ona, who were nomadic hunter-gatherers. They lived in such a remote part of South America that Europeans didn’t encounter them until the late 19th century when settlers showed up to raise sheep and rubber trees. We’ve talked about what happened to them in a previous episode, although I can’t remember which one. The Selk’nam didn’t understand the concept of livestock, so they figured those sheep were literally fair game. The sheep were living on their own hunting grounds, after all. The Selk’nam killed some of the sheep, and in retaliation, the European settlers murdered all the Selk’nam. I was going to tell you the name of the man who started the genocide, but I don’t think anyone should remember his name. It wasn’t just “oh, you killed my sheep, I’m going to shoot you because I’m mad,...

Episode 231: Fish of the Twilight Zone Jul 05, 2021

Show notes

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 also be aggressive when hunting. This is probably a good place to learn a little more about the twilight zone, AKA the mesopelagic. It’s measured not by depth but by how much light is available from the surface, in this case only 1% of light. There’s also not as much oxygen in the water here as at the surface. Many, if not most, animals that live in the mesopelagic migrate closer to the surface at night to find food, then retreat to the darkness below to avoid being seen as the sun rises and fills the upper layers of water with more light. Lots and lots of animals live in the mesopelagic, from giant squid to oarfish, although most of the animals here are small. Below this layer of water is the bathypelagic, and below that is the real depths, the abyssopelagic where conditions are extreme and life gets really weird and scarce. The uppermost layer of the ocean is called epipelagic, if you were wondering. No plants live in the mesopelagic or below, because there’s not enough light. Obviously, the ocean isn’t always deep enough to have a bathypelagic layer or below, and quite often the mesopelagic ends at the sea floor. It’s hard to study mesopelagic animals because many of them can’t survive at the surface. They’re built to withstand the increased water pressure at depths up to 3,300 feet, or 1000 meters, below the surface, and when they’re dragged up in nets they often die within minutes. Many marine animals have an organ called a swim bladder that’s filled with gases, which helps the animal stay neutrally buoyant in the water so it doesn’t float upward or sink downward when it’s not moving. The animal can adjust the amount of gas in its bladder as it swims upward, but when it’s pulled upward quickly in a net it can’t expel enough gas fast enough and the swim bladder can burst or expand so much that it squishes the rest of its insides, killing the animal before it even reaches the surface. Animals that don’t migrate vertically often don’t have a swim bladder since they don’t need it, and they’re just adapted for water pressure that’s as much as 120 times greater than pressure at the surface. This pressure difference is why blobfish look so blobby, so let’s talk about the blobfish next, Anonymous’s suggestion. The blobfish lives on the sea floor in deep water near Australia and New Zealand. It grows about a foot long at most, or 30 cm, and is grayish with little spikes all over it. It has a gelatinous body with weak muscles and a weak skeleton, but it doesn’t need either since the intense pressure of the water presses in around the fish all the time and keeps it just the way it should be. It looks like a fish. Its gelatinous flesh is slightly less dense than the water around it, which means it can float just above the sea floor without much effort, just drifting along, giving its tail and broad fins a little flap every so often. It eats whatever detritus floats down from far above, although it’s also mostly on the lookout for small crustaceans that live on the sea floor. The problem comes when a fishing net catches a blobfish and brings it to the surface. Suddenly there’s no nice firm water around the fish. Instead of being slightly less dense than the water around it, the blobfish is suddenly way more dense than the water, and it expands as a result. Then someone looks at this horrible dead pinkish blob that was once a happy live fish and thinks, “Gross! I’ll take a picture of that for the internet,” and that’s why the blobfish gets its name. Poor blobfish! Fortunately, scientists have developed a compression chamber for the animals they study. When a deep-sea animal is put in the compression chamber and brought to the surface, the compression chamber keeps the water pressure where the animal needs it. The animal doesn’t die horribly, and that allows researchers to observe a live animal instead of a dead blobby one. Next, let’s learn about Page’s suggestion, the barreleye fish. It lives in the North Pacific in deep water, and it has upward-pointing eyes that are very sensitive to light. It’s a small fish, only about six inches long, or 15 cm, and is mostly dark in color, as you would expect from a deep-sea fish. It’s chonky in shape with large fins that help it stay motionless in the water while it looks for tiny fish and jellyfish silhouetted against the water’s surface far above. Then the barreleye will move quickly to grab its prey. It seems like there’s something I’m forgetting to tell you. Hmm. There’s something unusual about the barreleye fish, I just know it. Oh yeah. The domed top of its head is transparent and its eyeballs are inside the dome. You can see the internal eyeballs and its brain through its transparent head, which is otherwise filled with liquid. It is really weird-looking. Its eyes are tubular, which gives it its name, and they can rotate around to focus on things or look straight ahead

Episode 230: Weird Dogs and Round Frogs Jun 28, 2021

Show notes

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 with other Nordic breeds to retain the lundehund’s unique traits but make it healthier. The lundehund definitely has unique traits. It has six toes on each foot, has incredibly flexible leg and neck joints, and can fold its ears shut to keep out water and dirt. All these traits helped it climb nearly vertical cliffs and caves where puffins nested. It also has a double coat to help keep it warm in cold weather. But there is good news for the lundehund: it has a job again! In 2013 the dogs started being used to find bird nests around Norwegian airports. Airports need to keep birds away from the flight paths of planes, since if they hit the plane’s windshield or get sucked into the engine’s air intake, they can cause a plane to crash. The lundehunds hunt down bird nests on the airport grounds so they can be removed before there’s a terrible accident. While I was working on this episode, Richard from NC, who had no idea that I was researching weird dog breeds, asked if I’d heard about the Carolina dog, also known as the American dingo. I looked it up and it’s a real animal—specifically, a dog breed. But it has a strange history. The Carolina dog is medium-sized, up to 20 inches tall at the shoulder, or 51 cm, but lightly built. Its short hair is often yellow, ginger, or pale brown in color, sometimes with white markings. It has long, slender, erect ears and a long tail. White settlers sometimes called it the Indian dog because Native Americans kept it as a pet or hunting dog, but there were also plenty of feral Carolina dogs living in the wild in the eastern United States. Archaeological excavations done in the late 19th century found lots of dog remains buried with people. Several archaeologists noted that the dog’s jaw was slightly different from other dog breeds, lacking one pair of teeth. They suggested that the so-called Indian dogs were descended from the earliest domesticated dogs in Asia and migrated into North America when humans did in the Pleistocene. This was the accepted theory until 2013, when genetic testing was finally done on the breed. Later genetic studies have also been carried out. The studies all conclude that although the Carolina dog has interbred with modern dog breeds, it does have genetic markers that indicate some of its ancestors are from East Asia. It’s more complicated than it sounds, though. A 2018 genetic study compared fossils from ancient North American dogs with the living Carolina dogs and didn’t find much of a match. The fossil dogs migrated from Siberia and were isolated in North America for 9,000 years. Then their unique genetic signature vanished, with the exception of some Arctic dog breeds, as Eurasian dogs brought to North America from Europe took over. Some Carolina dogs do contain that unique genetic signature, but there’s no way to tell if it’s from ancient ancestors or more recent cross-breeding with Arctic breeds. What is definitely true is that the Carolina dog shares a lot of physical traits with other feral dog populations from around the world. Basically, if dogs are allowed to live and breed without human help or interference, the result is a dog that looks a lot like the Carolina dog of North America, or the pariah dog of Asia, or the dingo of Australia. But let’s talk now about dogs with double noses, such as the Pachón Navarro, a Spanish hunting dog that sometimes has a double nose, also called a split nose. That doesn’t mean it has two snouts or four nostrils, but that each nostril has its own nose pad separated by a strip of skin and fur, with a groove running down the middle of the snout. The Pachón Navarro almost went extinct as a breed. A breeding program got underway in the 1970s but it’s still a rare breed. It’s a pointer hound bred since at least the 15th century in the Pyrenees Mountains, and it has short hair that’s white with brown or orange markings, especially on the ears and over the eyes. Not all dogs of this breed have the double nose, and some modern breeders try not to breed for it since the double nose trait is linked to a cleft palate that can cause other health issues. The double-nosed trait is only seen in one other dog population. The Tarsus Catalburun [chatal-burrun], or Turkish pointer, may be a descendant of Spanish dogs favored by Turkish nobility, or it may be the dog that gave rise to the Pachón Navarro breed. Most historians think the breed was probably developed in the 19th century from European dogs since there has never been a tradition of hunting with pointers in the area. It’s really rare outside of Turkey and rare inside of Turkey, with a population of only a few hundred dogs that are somewhat inbred. They’re mostly kept by partridge hunters. There is a mystery associated with double-nosed dogs. The Andean tiger hound is a third variety of double-nosed dog that’s supposed to live in Bolivia, South America....

Episode 229: Blue Ghosts and Vanishing Sharks Jun 21, 2021

Show notes

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 faintly blue-white in the distance, but when it’s closer to you it looks like an ordinary firefly’s light. They do indeed fly very low to the ground while lit up, but they’re also cautious. We had trouble catching one because when we got too close, the firefly would fly down to the ground and put his light out. Naturally, after photographing our lightning bugs we let them go again. I’m happy to report that the synchronous fireflies have expanded their range a lot since I first stumbled across them about ten years ago, and the blue ghosts seem reasonably common too. They live in a protected area of our local watershed so they’ll be safe and sound forever, hopefully. This is good, because blue ghosts in particular are vulnerable to habitat loss. Since the female can’t fly, she can’t travel far to lay her eggs. During mating season, some state and national parks in the southern Appalachians close some trails to protect the blue ghost and other fireflies, especially from light pollution from flashlights. The synchronous fireflies and blue ghosts are only active for a few weeks in June, which is their mating season. We’ll probably be just about at the end of this year’s display by the time you hear this, but if you’re going to be in East Tennessee and want to go out and see them with me next summer, just let me know. As we talked about in episode 180, they only live a few minutes’ walk away from a small parking lot but no one but me seems to know about them. Next, let’s learn about a shark mystery that’s 19 million years old but that scientists only learned about recently. This month, June of 2021, a team of researchers published results of a shark study in the journal Science. The team had decided to graph the number and diversity of shark species known from the fossil record so they’d have a baseline to compare modern shark diversity to. But they discovered something really surprising. Nineteen million years ago, there were over ten times as many sharks in the oceans as there are today. They were an important part of the ocean’s ecosystems, especially in the open ocean. And then…they disappear from the fossil record. Over 90% of the world’s sharks died, with shark diversity decreasing by more than 70%. Not only that, sharks never fully recovered from whatever happened. So what did happen? We don’t know yet. There was a small extinction event called the Middle Miocene extinction peak five million years after the sharks vanished, which researchers think was due to global cooling leading to climate change. The cooling period was caused by a lot of factors, but a big cause was changes in ocean currents and air currents as the continents moved into new positions. Before that, though, the world was comfortably warm for millions of years and the shark population was overall quite stable. Researchers have found no reason why sharks suddenly started dying in such huge numbers, especially in the open ocean instead of in coastal waters. The leader of the study, Elizabeth Sibert, says that there might have been a climate event of some kind that was disastrous to sharks but that was over relatively quickly, leaving very little evidence behind except for the fossil remains of way more sharks than usual and a lack of sharks afterwards. Other scientific teams have already started studying the open ocean ecosystem from 19 million years ago and earlier for clues as to what happened, whether other animals were affected, and why sharks never regained their supremacy in the world’s oceans afterwards. That’s how science works: someone makes a discovery and that inspires lots of new studies, which lead to more discoveries. When we do learn more about the great shark die-off of the Miocene, I will keep you posted. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us that way, and don’t forget to join our mailing list. There’s a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening!

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