Strange Animals Podcast

The sewellel is a little rodent: The superflea is a big flea (left, compared to a regular flea, right): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s learn about a rodent you may never have heard of, unless you live where it does, and a parasite that makes that rodent its host. It’s not an ordinary parasite, but don’t worry, it’s not icky. You can continue to snack. The rodent is called the sewellel, Aplodontia rufa. It’s also called the mountain beaver even though it doesn’t always live in the mountains and it isn’t a beaver. It doesn’t even look like a beaver. For one thing, it only has a little nub of a tail and it only grows around 20 inches long, or 50 cm. It has small eyes and ears, short legs, a chunky body, and long claws. This body shape should give you a hint about its lifestyle: the sewellel is a digger, although it can also swim just fine and can even climb small trees to eat young twigs and leaves. The sewellel is an aplodont, a large group of rodents that have been common in Europe, Asia, and North America for 40 million years. But it’s the only one left. All the other aplodonts went extinct several million years ago at least. We’ve actually talked before about one of the sewellel’s extinct relations, the horned gopher (which was not a gopher), in the Patreon episode about animals with nose horns. The sewellel itself hasn’t been around all that long, only appearing in the fossil record a few million years ago. It lives in a small area of northwestern North America, in parts of British Columbia, Washington state, Oregon, and a few parts of California. It lives in forests where it doesn’t get too cold in the winter, since it doesn’t hibernate and isn’t as good at keeping itself warm as other rodents are. It also needs to drink more water than other rodents and prefers to live in wet climates as a result. In fact, the sewellel is sometimes referred to as a living fossil since it lacks many features that all other living rodents have. Its teeth resemble a simpler version of squirrel teeth, so some researchers think it may be most closely related to squirrels, but even if that’s the case, it isn’t very closely related. The sewellel’s ancestors were more adapted to live in trees and a study published in 2018 determined that it had a larger brain than the sewellel. Since the sewellel is nocturnal and spends most of its life underground, it doesn’t need to see very well, and the part of the brain that processes vision is much smaller than in its ancestors. The sewellel mostly eats ferns, although it also eats other plants, and some of its favorite plants are toxic to other animals. It’s a solitary, mostly nocturnal animal that digs deep, complex burrows, and it stays as close as possible to the burrow entrance so it can hide easily if it needs to. Everything eats the sewellel, from owls to coyotes to bobcats to eagles. And that brings us to the parasite associated with the sewellel. Many animals have parasites that are specific to that particular species. The Patreon episode about whale lice has some information about how specific this can get. The male sperm whale has a different species of louse than the species that lives on female sperm whales, for instance. Also, the whale louse isn’t a louse, it’s a type of crustacean. The sewellel’s parasite is a type of flea. Big deal, you say, fleas are all about the same. Are they, though? Because the sewellel’s flea is actually kind of a big deal. It is, in fact, the largest flea known, called the superflea. It can grow up to 8 mm long (and possibly longer, reports vary). I just measured, and that’s the length of my little fingernail, from the base to the quick. Most species of flea are 3 mm long at most. The superflea is only found on the sewellel. It looks like an ordinary flea except for its size, meaning it’s laterally flattened with legs that allow it to jump long distances. So why is it so big compared to other fleas, especially considering that it lives on an animal that’s about the size of a chonky cat? No one knows. No one has even the slightest idea why this flea is so big. There used to be even bigger fleas, some up to two cm long. That’s 20 mm, or just a little more than twice the length of the superflea. Of course, those 20 mm fleas lived 165 million years ago and probably lived on dinosaurs. Also, they couldn’t jump and instead of being flattened laterally, or side to side, like modern fleas, they were flattened dorsoventrally, or top to bottom. So they weren’t very much like modern fleas. That’s all we know about the superflea, but let’s have one last sewellel fact before we go. With all this talk of the sewellel being a primitive rodent whose closest relations are all extinct, you might think there’s nothing really special about it beyond its giant fleas. You would be wrong, though, because the sewellel’s front paws have opposable thumbs. It’s not as mobile as our opposable thumbs, but it allows the sewellel to manipulate food more easily. It will sometimes sit up on its big round bottom to eat, just like a really weird squirrel. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

The horned gopher: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This time we’re going to learn about some mammals with weird horns. Specifically, weird nose horns. Nose horns are properly called rostral horns, but that’s not as funny. We’ll start with a family of extinct rodents called horned gophers, or more properly, mylagaulids. The horned gopher wasn’t a gopher, but it probably looked similar to ground squirrels like prairie dogs and marmots. It lived in what is now North America around twenty million years ago, and it had a pair of short, broad horns that pointed upwards between the nose and eyes, like a rhino’s horns but side by side and made of bone, not keratin. It was big for a rodent, about a foot long, or 30 cm, and ate plants. So what did the horned gopher use its horns for? Both males and females had the horns and they’re too short and placed too far back for males to use them to fight each other. Horned gophers had poor eyesight so males probably weren’t trying to look and act flashy to attract females anyway. At first researchers thought the horns helped in digging burrows. The horned gopher primarily used what’s called the head-lift method of digging, which means it pushed its nose into the dirt, then lifted its head with powerful neck muscles to remove a chunk of soil—basically using its nose as a shovel. But its horns pointed straight up and were set too far back on the nose to help with digging. Most researchers today think the horns were used for defense. If a predator tried to grab the animal by the neck, it could snap its head back and stab the predator right in the face. The horned gopher had tiny eyes and front feet that resembled a mole’s, with long claws. Researchers think its ancestors probably spent most of the time underground, but that as it evolved to become larger, it also spent more time foraging above-ground. That led to more predators being able to attack it, so evolving horns as a defensive weapon helped it survive. While the horned gopher was distantly related to modern squirrels, its family is completely extinct these days. But it’s still the smallest known horned mammal that ever lived. The horned gopher is also the only horned mammal known that lived mostly underground in burrows. Almost. There was once a type of armadillo, naturally called the horned armadillo but more properly referred to as Peltephilus [pelta-FEElus], that had a pair of horns over its eyes but a little in front of them, close to where the horned gopher’s horns were. The horned armadillo’s horns developed from scutes on its head, and if you remember, scutes are bony plates embedded in the skin as armor. It might also have had a smaller pair of horns over its nostrils. It lived in what is now South America and went extinct around 11 million years ago. The horned armadillo dug burrows liked the horned gopher did, but it was much bigger than the horned gopher, with some species as much as five feet long, or 1.5 meters. Despite its size, it probably resembled the pink fairy armadillo in overall shape rather than the more common nine-banded armadillo that lives in parts of North America. It had a short tail and its rump was squared off instead of rounded. It also had big sharp teeth. It may have eaten insects, possibly digging up ant nests, but more likely it mostly ate roots and other plant parts. Arsinoitherium was another animal with nose horns, this one from Africa. It lived around 30 million years ago and was related to modern-day elephants, but it lived in swampy areas and tropical rainforests and ate plants. It probably looked a little like a rhinoceros and a little like a small elephant without a trunk. Different species were different sizes, but they were all pretty big, probably no smaller than about six feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.75 meters. And they had two pairs of horns, a little pair more like bumps over the eyes and two side-by-side forward-pointing giant nose horns that looked a lot like rhino horns but thicker. But they were real horns made of bone, not keratin, although they may have been covered in skin and hair like ossicones. You know, ossicones are those hornlike structures giraffes have. Brontotherium looked a lot like a rhinoceros too, but that’s because it was distantly related to the rhino, although it was more closely related to the horse. It lived in North America around 35 million years ago and was enormous, standing around 8 feet tall at the shoulder, or 2.5 meters. It was a selective browser, probably preferring tender leaves to tough grass. It carried its massive head low like modern rhinos and buffalo do, and had a humped shoulder like both those animals where its massive neck muscles attached. And it had a pair of nose horns. Both males and females had the nose horns, but the males’ horns were much larger. The horns were blunt and shaped sort of like a V, and researchers are pretty sure males used them to fight each other. We have fossilized brontotherium rib bones that show an injury shaped just like the nose horns. The horns were probably also useful to fight predators. Even though brontotherium was related to the rhino, its horns were bone, not keratin. Our last nose horn animal lived in North America up to about five million years ago. The various species of Protoceratidae [pro-TOSS-e-rated-die] were hoofed animals that looked sort of like deer, but were more closely related to a living ungulate called the chevrotain, or mouse deer. Protoceratid probably ate grass and other plants and may have lived in herds. Males had a pair of ordinary horns that looked a lot like cow horns, and in some species females had the horns too, although they were smaller. But males also had a horn on the nose. And it was weird. Once again, the nose horn wasn’t like a rhino’s horn, which as we have established by now is made of keratin. And maybe I should have reminded you before now that keratin is the same protein that makes hair, fingernails, hooves, and things like that. Keratin also doesn’t fossilize. This nose horn was an actual horn made of bone, but researchers think it may have been covered with skin and fur like an ossicone. Different Protoceratidae had different nose horns. Syndyoceras had a pair of nose horns that were fused at the base, then split apart to form a V shape. It may also have had large nasal passages that made its muzzle look much bigger than the skull would suggest at first glance. Synthetoceras had a long nose horn that grew up and slightly forward but split into a Y at the tip. Kyptoceras had a pair of nose horns that pointed forward. Researchers think the males used these nose horns to fight each other, much like deer fight with their antlers today. One older Protoceratid that lived up to around 20 million years ago was called Protoceras, and males had three pairs of horns, although they probably resembled ossicones and were all covered in skin and hair. A small pair grew between the ears, another pair between the eyes and nose, and the largest pair grew on the nose. Females only had one smaller pair of horns between the ears, so the extra horns males had were probably for display. Some Protoceratidae also had a pair of fanglike canine teeth that they may have used to root around in dead leaves for plant material. Male chevrotains have fangs like this too, but they use them to fight each other since they don’t have horns. So basically, this is what we’ve learned from this episode: There used to be a lot more nose-horned animals than we have now, most of them lived in the Americas for some reason, and they were all awesome. Also, even though the first animal we think of when someone mentions nose horns is the rhino, the rhino’s keratin horns are actually unusual. Just be glad you’re not an intelligent birdlike creature from the far future trying to figure out what a rhinoceros actually looked like when it was alive. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

I took this episode from an article I wrote for Flying Snake magazine, which was published in December 2020 (Vol. 6, #18). Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The Great Smoky Mountains is a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains, which stretches from the middle of Alabama in the United States north into southeastern Canada. The Appalachians formed when the world’s continents crunched together to form the supercontinent Pangaea. The southern Appalachians formed separately and later than the northern Appalachians, around 270 million years ago. The Appalachians were once as high as the Rockies or Himalayas, but by the time the dinosaurs went extinct, they had eroded down to the mountain cores. Sediment weathered from the peaks and filled in valleys. But during the Pleistocene, when massive glaciers covered the northern parts of North America, the weight of the ice pushed the North American plate down, causing the southern part of the plate to rise. Eventually the ancient mountains’ roots were a thousand feet (300 m) above sea level again. Rivers that once flowed east into the Atlantic Ocean or west into the remains of the shallow Western Interior Seaway shifted their courses to flow northward. Streams that once meandered across the land now plunged down steep slopes and dug gorges into the rock. And over thousands of years, animals and plants retreating from the ice migrated southward along the mountain range. When the climate warmed some 11,000 years ago and the ice age glaciers melted, many cold-adapted species were trapped in the peaks of the southern Appalachians. One of the highest peaks is Mount LeConte, with its highest point, High Top, measured at 6,593 ft, or 2,010 meters. I hiked Mount LeConte on 7 May, 2016 when the weather in nearby Knoxville, Tennessee was a warm 82 Fahrenheit, or 27.8 Celcius, but there was snow on the mountain that morning. I wrote my name in it. A spruce-fir forest grows on the upper slopes, a remnant of forest that grew throughout the mountains during the last ice age. The climate at the peak of Mount LeConte is more like that of southern Canada than the warm, humid southeastern United States. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in 1934 to protect the mountains along the Tennessee/North Carolina border. No one lives in the park’s 800 square miles (2,072 square km), which receives up to 90 inches [2.29 m] of rain a year, some of it from hurricanes that sweep up from the southern Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico. Large tracts of old-growth forest still remain in the park too. So as you can see, the Smokies are a biodiversity hotspot. In 2018, the park announced its 1,000th species discovered that is new to science, which by July 2020 had grown to 1,025. Overall, 20,000 known species live in the park as of 2019 and scientists estimate that up to 100,000 more are yet to be discovered. The Smokies are heavily forested, of course, but some mountain summits and crests have no trees. Instead, native grasses and shrubs grow. They’re called grassy balds and no one is sure why they exist. The prevailing theory is that Pleistocene megaherbivores opened the forests for grazing, and after their extinction, the balds remained open due to bison, elk (wapiti), and deer. When white settlers moved into the area, they used the balds to graze cattle and other livestock. Remains of mammoth and mastodon, musk ox, ground sloth, and other megaherbivores have been excavated from various balds throughout the park. Amphibian enthusiasts call the Smokies the Salamander Capital of the World, with 30 known species. Largest of these is the hellbender, which we talked about in episode 14, a giant salamander that can grow nearly 2 ½ feet long, or 74 cm, and which lives in swift-moving mountain streams. It’s most closely related to the Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders, which can grow over twice as long as the hellbender. Twenty-seven of the salamanders found in the Smokies are lungless, in the family Plethodontidae. Instead of breathing with lungs or gills, the lungless salamanders absorb oxygen through their skin. Of these, the red-cheeked salamander is endemic to the Smokies—that is, it’s found nowhere else in the world. The red-cheeked salamander lives in forests in high elevations. It can grow up to seven inches long, or 18 cm, and is gray or black with bright red patches on its face. It spends the day in a burrow, then comes out at night to find insects in the leaf litter. But it’s hard to tell apart from the imitator salamander, although the imitator only grows a little over four inches long, or 11 cm. The imitator has red cheeks but its body is patterned black and brown instead of solid gray or black. Sometimes its cheeks are yellow, too, while the red-cheeked salamander only ever has red cheeks. Another animal found only in the Smoky Mountains, although it may also be present in mountains outside of the park, is a species of jeweled spider fly called Mary-Alice’s emerald (Eulonchus marialiciae). Mary-Alice’s emerald has a metallic-green body and yellow legs, and the adults eat nectar. But the larvae eat spiders. Specifically, they parasitize spiders. After hatching, the larva goes in search of a spider, especially trapdoor spiders that live in burrows. When it finds one, it works its way into the spider’s body and eats it from the inside out, eventually killing it. Then it pupates in the burrow and emerges as an adult spider fly. It prefers high elevations that are cool and moist. A less horrific animal found in the Smokies is the Carolina northern flying squirrel. It was one of the species whose ancestors migrated south along the Appalachians during the Pleistocene. Then, after temperatures started to warm, the cold-adapted flying squirrel migrated north again. Some populations remained on mountaintops in the Smoky Mountains and have been isolated for thousands of years, evolving into a subspecies of flying squirrel found only in high elevations of the Smokies. It’s much rarer than the southern flying squirrel that lives throughout the southeastern United States, and prefers spruce forests instead of the hardwood forests that southern flying squirrels like. But the spruce forests are threatened by climate change, the introduced woolly adelgid insect that kills fir trees, and pollution in the form of acid rain and pesticides that travel to the mountains from other states and even other countries. The Carolina northern flying squirrel has a patagium of furry skin that connects its front and back legs. When it jumps from a branch, it stretches its legs out and uses the patagia to glide to a new perch. It’s clumsy on the ground, though, and spends most of its time in trees. It mostly eats fungi, mushrooms, and lichens, but will also eat nuts, insects, bird eggs and even baby birds, and other plant material like tree sap and buds. Bobcats still live in the Smokies, but the cougar, or mountain lion, was supposedly killed off in the area by the end of the 19th century. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the eastern cougar subspecies from the endangered species list in 2018, since it is supposed to be extinct. The last cougar in what is now the park was supposedly killed in 1920. But sightings continue in the Smokies, close to a dozen a year, and some sightings are compelling, like the 2002 report of a cougar crossing a road in the park, spotted by a veterinarian who treated captive cougars in his practice. Considering how seldom seen the bobcat is despite it being relatively abundant, it’s possible that a small number of cougars still live in the park—either animals that have moved back into the mountains from elsewhere, or a relict population. The red wolf is native to the eastern United States and was once common in the Smoky Mountains, but was killed off by white settlers throughout most of its range. Where it remained in the wild, it interbred with closely related coyotes, until it was declared extinct in the wild in 1980. Fortunately, by then a captive breeding program was in place. Starting in 1991, 37 red wolves were released in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, following the release of 63 red wolves into the Alligator River Natural Area in North Carolina a few years earlier. But the release didn’t go well in the Smokies. Wolves are shy and need enormous territories with lots of game. Before long some wolves were leaving the park and attacking livestock. Others died of parvo virus, especially wolf pups. Worse, this was about the same time that coyotes moved into the area from the west. The wolves started interbreeding with the coyotes, and the coyotes also competed with the wolves for food. In 1998, the Fish and Wildlife Service ended the program and recaptured all but one of the wolves originally released into the park. The North Carolina release went better, with a population peak in 2006 estimated at nearly 130 wolves. But that program was suspended in 2015, and without management of the wild population, the number has dwindled. As of 2019, only 14 wolves remain in North Carolina—and that’s the entire population of red wolves in the wild. But sightings of red wolves continue in the Smokies. The trouble is that the red wolf looks very similar to the coyote. It’s taller and larger, with a more pronounced reddish shade to its coat, but even experts can have trouble telling the two species apart if they can’t get a good look at the animal. Most likely people are seeing coyotes, possibly ones descended from red wolf/coyote hybrids born during the reintroduction program. The biggest mystery in the park is the occasional sighting of a Bigfoot-type creature. Most sightings are probably bears, though. An estimated 1,500 American black bears live in the Smokies, and while some bears get used to hikers and tourists, most are shy and seldom seen. A black bear keeping an eye on hikers or cars will sometimes stand on its hind legs for a better view, and would naturally look like a hulking humanoid if glimpsed. But other sightings aren’t so easy to explain. In February of 2009, a photographer named Deb Campbell was hiking the Middle Prong Trail in the snow. The Middle Prong Trail passes three major waterfalls and many smaller ones as it follows along a tributary of the Little River. She had the trail almost completely to herself—she says she only saw one person the whole time. Later she reported, “[A]t some point I am photographing along the stream and I start to smell a gawd awful stench. Not really like anything I had ever smelled before. I look around, see nothing, listen intently…nothing. So I finish up at that spot and go further up the trail.” The smell receded behind her but the snow increased, so finally she turned around to hike out. Around the area where she smelled the stink earlier, she started feeling watched. She stopped long enough to secure her camera gear for much faster hiking in slick conditions, when she heard a deep growl that she described as “very low, not like a cat, almost guttural.” Needless to say, she got off the mountain as quickly as possible. The black bear doesn’t truly hibernate since its body temperature remains normal instead of dropping, but it does find a den in cold weather and will sleep for long stretches. It may emerge from its den occasionally during the winter during warm spells, but for the most part it’s asleep in its den from around November through March in the Smoky Mountains. But Campbell was hiking in February during a snowfall, with snow already on the ground. A bear would most likely not be out of its den in that weather unless it had been disturbed. And bears don’t actually smell bad. During the winter hibernation most bears don’t defecate at all. Any feces left in a bear’s digestive tract harden to form a fecal plug. If it does feel the need to defecate near the end of the winter, it will do so just outside its den, but the fecal plug has very little odor. Even under ordinary conditions, unless a bear has been eating carrion, it will smell no worse than a dog that needs a bath. Not only that, black bears don’t actually growl. They make grunty, huffing noises when warning people away or when males fight in the summer, and a frightened bear will moan, but they don’t growl like a dog. It’s possible that Campbell hiked past a bear that had emerged from its den early and had found and eaten carrion, possibly roadkill, and that she was so close to the bear without seeing it that she smelled its breath. That’s almost more frightening than the thought of passing near a Bigfoot. The growl might have come from a different animal, a coyote or who knows, maybe even a red wolf. Or Campbell might have encountered a creature sometimes called a skunk ape due to its foul odor. The skunk ape is most commonly reported in Florida swamps, but sightings—or smellings—have come from many other states. The smell is sometimes described as that of rotting food and roadkill on a hot day. A bear or other animal that has been rooting around in garbage bins can pick up this odor, especially in hot weather, but it’s hard to believe that a bear would be actively foraging so much in winter that it would smell like trash. January and February are the depths of winter in East Tennessee. The bears are hibernating, not foraging. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening! This is what a couple of fighting bears sound like: [bear sounds]

This week we’ll learn about a long-forgotten animal of folklore! Further reading: https://www.anomalist.com/ The Pictish Beast: A dragonesque brooch: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The Picts were a population of Celtic people who lived in what is now northern and eastern Scotland between around the third and tenth centuries. They had their own language, which is lost to time except for a handful of place-names, and made beautiful rock carvings and metal art, but we know very little about them even though their descendants still live in Scotland today. Vikings conquered the area, which led to upheavals among the many small kingdoms, so that by the 11th century, all the Picts had been absorbed into the greater Scottish population and had completely forgotten their heritage. The carvings are what we’re interested in today. The Picts carved lots of different animals along with more abstract designs, and although the carvings are often stylized, we generally know what animals they represent. There are roe deer, red deer, dogs, boars, horses, cattle, salmon and other fish, otters, eagles, and more. But there’s one animal no one can identify, referred to as the Pictish Beast. The Pictish Beast isn’t rare, either. One estimate is that 40% of all the animal carvings depict the Pictish beast, so it was obviously important. That makes it even more baffling that we don’t know what it is. There are variations, but generally the Pictish Beast has a long snout or beak with a line showing that the mouth was long too. There’s a horn-like design that emerges from the top or rear of the head and bends backwards, with a little curl at the end. The body looks superficially doglike, with a little curled dog tail, but the legs don’t resemble any real animal’s legs. They appear stiff, not jointed, and often bend backwards slightly. The feet are simplified designs that curl backwards in a little spiral. The head is usually bent as though it’s staring downward. It has no ears or nostrils. Naturally there are lots of theories as to what the Pictish Beast represents. One theory is that it’s not a real animal at all but a type of dragon. Specifically, some experts consider it to be a version of a design called dragonesque brooches. These were pieces of jewelry made throughout southern Scotland and northern England during the first and second century. They were roughly S-shaped, made to look like a double-headed animal with a curly nose and distinctive round ears. Instead of dragons, though, the dragonesque brooch animals were probably actually stylized rabbits or hares. They were also popular at least 200 years before the Pictish Beast started being carved so often, so while there is a superficial resemblance, it’s not a perfect match by any means. Then again, there is one stone, called the Mortlach 2 stone, that depicts both a Pictish Beast and what seems to be a simplified version of the dragonesque brooch design. Some researchers think the artist was depicting what was at the time the modern Pictish Beast and the old-timey dragonesque brooch that inspired it. One suggestion is that the beast was inspired by the dragonesque brooch, but isn’t otherwise related. Remember that the brooches would have been considered super old at the time and were probably rare even then as a result. Think about how many pieces of jewelry you own that are several hundred years old. If an artist saw one of the brooches and thought it looked neat, but had no idea what it was supposed to represent, they might have recreated it with details that made sense to them, trying to imitate what they saw. But that doesn’t explain why the design became so incredibly popular. There are other suggestions, of course. Sometimes the beast is depicted vertically, which makes it look superficially like a weird seahorse. Seahorses do live off the coast of Scotland, but that doesn’t explain why the Pictish Beast has large legs and such a little tail. Most of the time the beast is shown horizontally, legs down. Sometimes the beast is referred to as an elephant, but knowledge of elephants in the British Isles over a thousand years ago was unlikely at best. And the beast has zero resemblance to an elephant so I don’t know who came up with that idea but let’s just set it aside and move on. Because of the horn-like appendage on its head, some people suggest the beast might depict a stylized deer. That’s more likely than an elephant but Pictish carvings of deer exist and are obviously deer. That doesn’t mean the beast couldn’t have started out as a deer that took on more and more stylized and exaggerated components until no one remembered it was actually a deer, but that could be said about any animal, not just a deer. Another suggestion is that it’s supposed to be a water animal of folklore, possibly a kelpie, or water horse, or a water bull. Both creatures were supposed to lure people into the water by posing as a lost pony or bull, but as soon as the person touched the animal, it would drag them under the water and drown them. Other people suggest the Pictish Beast represents a dolphin or beaked whale, and that the horn-like appendage isn’t a horn at all but a representation of the dolphin spouting. When a dolphin or whale comes to the surface to take a breath, it first has to let out the last breath it took. It does so really fast, expelling the warm, moist air from its lungs so that it looks like a spray of mist or water. The beast’s long beak does look like a dolphin’s rostrum, and crucially, its mouth even curves upward slightly like a dolphin’s mouth. The front legs could possibly be explained as stylized fins. But what about the hind legs? Dolphins don’t have rear fins. Even if you accept that the hind legs are supposed to represent the dolphin’s tail, it already has a little doglike tail. That’s where some people have gotten frustrated and said, “Okay, fine. It’s the Loch Ness Monster.” But the Pictish Beast doesn’t fit the general description of Nessie either. Nessie is supposed to have a long neck and a very long body, often with humps or bumps that appear above the surface of the water, and a long tail. The beast doesn’t have a long neck or a long tail. Personally, I like the idea that the Pictish Beast represents a mythical water creature like a kelpie, but that it was given dolphin characteristics to make it more frightening and exotic. Since we know so little about the Picts, it’s possible the beast stood for some important quality in their society, the same way we use a lion to represent courage or a dog to represent loyalty. It’s one of those mysteries that we’ll probably never solve, unless someone invents a time machine and we can go back and ask some Picts. But frankly, if I had access to a time machine, I’d use it to go back and look at dinosaurs. So I guess we may never know what the Pictish Beast really is. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Let’s learn about some of the oldest life ever discovered! Further reading: Microbiologists Find Living Microbes in 2-Billion-Year-Old Rock Chart of life extended by nearly 1.5 billion years Show transcript: Back in episode 168 we talked about the longest-lived organisms known, and finished the episode by discussing endoliths. I’ll quote from that episode as a refresher. An endolith isn’t a particular animal or even a group of related animals. An endolith is an organism that lives inside a rock or other rock-like substance, such as coral. Some are fungi, some lichens, some amoebas, some bacteria, and various other organisms, many of them single-celled and all of them very small if not microscopic. Some live in tiny cracks in a rock, some live in porous rocks that have space between grains of mineral, some bore into the rock. Many are considered extremophiles, living in rocks inside Antarctic permafrost, at the tops of the highest mountains, in the abyssal depths of the oceans, and at least two miles, or 3 km, below the earth’s surface. Various endoliths eat different minerals, including potassium, sulfur, and iron. Some endoliths even eat other endoliths. We don’t know a whole lot about them, but studies of endoliths found in soil deep beneath the ocean’s floor suggest that they grow extremely slowly. Like, from one generation to the next could be as long as 10,000 years, with the oldest endoliths potentially being millions of years old—even as old as the sediment itself, which dates to 100 million years old. That episode was almost five years ago, and in October of 2024 some new information was published. The study mentions the 100-million-year-old limit known so far, where living microorganisms were indeed discovered in geological layers below the ocean floor. But what they found was even older. The scientific team analyzed rock samples from northeastern South Africa, specifically rock that formed when magma cooled below the surface of the earth. It’s called the Bushveld Igneous Complex and is very large, very old, and very stable. The team drilled core samples of the rock from 50 feet down, or 15 meters, and cut it into thin slices to examine. To their surprise, they discovered microbial life in the rock’s cracks, which were sealed tightly with clay so that nothing should be able to get in or out of the rocks. To be sure the microbes hadn’t been introduced during the drilling or preparing process, they used infrared spectroscopy to compare the proteins in the microbes with the proteins caught in the clay. They matched, meaning the microbes had been there as long as the clay had been there, which was basically almost as long as the rocks had been in place. They were also able to verify that yes, the microbes were definitely alive. So, how old are the rocks? TWO BILLION YEARS OLD. Billion with a B! While the individual microbes probably aren’t actually that old, the population of microbes has been living in those cracks far within the rock for two billion years. Scientists are excited to learn more about them, because by studying organisms that have been separated from all other life for that long, they can learn about how early life on earth evolved. Even more exciting, at least if you’re me, NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars is going to be bringing some rocks back to earth that are about 2 billion years old. Scientists are really excited to see if there is any evidence for microbial life inside the Martian rocks! I know I won’t live long enough to see the first macrobial life from another planet, but I really hope I’m alive when we discover the first microbial life. I don’t think life is rare on other planets, it’s just that the distances are so enormous that getting to another planet and sending information back home is an almost insurmountable problem right now. The closest planets to us are Mars and Venus, and these days Mars just doesn’t seem like it would be very habitable for anything but microbes. But microbes can live just about anywhere! Also in 2024, a team from Virginia Tech has put together a chart marking when various life forms started appearing in the fossil record and when they also stopped appearing in the fossil record. Versions of this chart of life have been made before, but they typically only go back to about half a billion years ago, around the time of the Cambrian. Before that, life was much less likely to fossilize, or the rocks containing the fossils have been worn away. The team gathered fossil data from scientists and institutions around the world and compiled it into a chart of life that extends back two billion years. The farther back you look, the less changes there are among the type and differences in species. There’s even a huge stretch of time called the boring billion where things really weren’t changing much at all, at least not according to the fossil record we have available. It wasn’t until the earth’s climate became much cooler and then warmed again, between 720 and 635 million years ago, that things really began to change. The team is considering factors that contributed to the stability of the boring billion, and why it all changed so radically. It’s a good thing it did from our perspective, since if the boring billion had continued over the next billion years until today, we’d all be single-celled organisms. I wonder if the microbes in those two billion year old rocks even noticed the changes. Probably not. They were in rocks. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: Beavers Have Metal Teeth Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s find out about some animals that incorporate metal into their bodies in more than just trace amounts. We’ll start with the scaly-foot gastropod, a deep-sea snail. It lives around hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, about 1 and ¾ miles below the surface, or about 2800 meters. The water around these vents, referred to as black smokers, can be more than 350 degrees Celsius. That’s 660 degrees F, if you even need to know that that’s too hot to live. The scaly-foot gastropod was discovered in 2001 but not formally described until 2015. The color of its shell varies from almost black to golden, depending on which population it’s from, and it grows to almost 2 inches long, or nearly 5 cm. It doesn’t have eyes, and while it does have a small mouth, it doesn’t use it for eating. Instead, the snail contains symbiotic bacteria in a gland in its esophagus. The bacteria convert toxic hydrogen sulfide from the water around the hydrothermal vents into energy the snail uses to live. It’s a process called chemosynthesis. In return, the bacteria get a safe place to live. The snail’s shell contains an outer layer made of iron sulfides. Not only that, the bottom of the snail’s foot is covered with sclerites, or spiky scales, that are also mineralized with iron sulfides. While the snail can’t pull itself entirely into its shell, if something attacks it, the bottom of its foot is heavily armored and its shell is similarly tough. Researchers are studying the scaly-foot gastropod’s shell to possibly make a similar composite material for protective gear and other items. The inner layer of the shell is made of a type of calcium carbonate, common in mollusk shells and some corals. The middle layer of the shell is regular snail shell material, organic periostracum, which helps dissipate heat as well as pressure from squeezing attacks, like from crab claws. And the outer layer, of course, is iron sulfides like pyrite and greigite. Oh, and since greigite is magnetic, the snails stick to magnets. The scaly-foot gastropod is the only animal known that incorporates iron sulfide into its skeleton, but other animals use metals in their teeth. Some spiders have tiny amounts of zinc in the tips of their fangs. Some mollusks have small amounts of iron in the teeth of their radulas—you know, the tongue-like structure used to scrape food off rocks. The teeth of the limpet, a type of mollusk, may be one of the strongest structures in the world. It contains goethite nanofibers, and goethite is a type of iron. The teeth of beavers and some other rodents contain iron in the enamel coating. This makes the teeth much harder, although the amount of iron is quite small and unstructured. Most other mammals, including humans, have magnesium in tooth enamel instead of iron. The iron content makes the teeth look orange because of rust. Bloodworms are disgusting horrible worms that my uncle used to fish with when we visited the beach when I was a kid. I was scared of the bloodworms, which irritated my uncle, because I was very vocal about hating the worms and he wasn’t catching any fish with them. Bloodworms live in the sand or silt of shallow water, usually in the ocean but since they can tolerate low salt levels, they may also live farther inland in canals and inlets. Some species can grow nearly 15 inches long, or 37 cm. They’re usually pink or reddish in color with bristles along the body and four little antennae on the head. But the reason I’m talking about them here is that their teeth are reinforced with copper that makes them nearly as hard as teeth coated with enamel. Its jaw also contains copper ions. Copper is toxic to most animals, which may be the source of the bloodworm’s venom. That’s right: horrible worms are also venomous. Another invertebrate that incorporates metal in its body is the parasitic fig wasp. Fig wasps are interesting and there are a lot of them. Figs are pollinated by fig wasps that are not parasitic. The fig flower has a bulb at its base containing a tiny hole. The pollinating fig wasp crawls into the hole, pollinating the flower at the same time, and lays her eggs inside the bulb. She then dies. As the fig developes, the wasp eggs hatch into larvae and then develop into adult wasps. Males mate with females, then chew a hole out of the fig, but only the female wasps have wings, so the males remain and die. As the fig ripens, it actually digests the dead wasps, and—and this is important to those of us who really like figs—leaves no bits of dead wasp inside the fig. So that’s how the pollinating fig wasps work. It’s a symbiotic relationship between the fig tree and the wasp. But the parasitic fig wasp is different. The female has a long ovipositor, which it uses to drill into developing figs and into the pollinating fig wasp larvae. When its eggs hatch, they eat the larva alive. This is yet another reminder that nature is disgusting! But the really interesting thing is that at least one parasitic fig wasp species, Apocrypta westwoodi, has an ovipositor that resembles a drill bit, and it’s hardened with zinc. The ovipositor is basically a syringe with a drill bit, but since it’s so strong while being much thinner than a human hair, researchers are studying its structure to help develop minimally invasive medical syringes. One interesting note. You’d think that iron and other metals would be more common in animal bodies as armor. Animals use some metals for various purposes as it is, like the iron containing hemoglobin in our blood. But incorporating iron and other metals into the body has a high metabolic cost and frequently biological materials are stronger than metal in the ways that count. Plus, they don’t rust. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Is there life on Europa? We take a look at Greenland and Antarctica to find out more about life on Jupiter’s icy moon. Further reading: Life on Venus claim faces strongest challenge yet Stanford researchers’ explanation for formation of abundant features on Europa bodes well for search for extraterrestrial life  Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Today we’re going to learn about the potential of life on Europa, a moon of Jupiter! To do that we’ll need to look at some extreme life on Earth too. Back in September 2020, we talked about potential signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus, which excited me a whole lot. As a follow-up to that episode, further studies suggest that signs of phosphine detected in Venus’s atmosphere, which might be produced by life, may actually just be sulfur dioxide (not a sign of life). But while it’s not looking likely that phosphine is actually found in Venus’s atmosphere, so far no studies can completely rule it out. So, maybe. Venus isn’t the only part of our solar system where life might exist outside of Earth, though. Astronomers have been speculating about Europa for a long time. The planet Jupiter is a gas giant that has at least 80 moons, but Europa is the one that’s closest to the planet. It’s only a little bit smaller than our own moon. Europa has an atmosphere, mostly made up of oxygen but so thin that if you could magically appear on the moon, you wouldn’t be able to breathe. Also, you would freeze to death almost immediately. It’s a dense moon, so astronomers think it’s probably mostly made up of silicate rock, which is what Earth is mostly made up of, along with Mars, Venus, Mercury, and a lot of moons. If you’ve ever looked at our moon through a telescope or binoculars, you know it has lots of impact craters on its surface caused by asteroid strikes in the past. Europa doesn’t have very many craters—in fact, its surface is incredibly smooth except for what look like cracks all over it. It’s mostly pale in color, but the cracks are reddish-orange or brown. The cause of the cracks has been a mystery ever since astronomers got the first good look at Europa. Many astronomers think these cracks are where warm material from below the surface erupted through the crust, sort of like what happens where lava oozes up on Earth and forms oceanic ridges. But on Europa, the material breaking through the crust isn’t lava, it’s ice—but ice that isn’t as cold as the surface ice. You know you’re on a cold, cold moon when ice that’s close to freezing instead of way below freezing can act like lava. The surface of Europa is about 110 kelvin at the equator and even colder at the poles. That’s -260 F or -160 C. The exciting thing is that researchers are pretty sure the surface of Europa is icy but that the crust lies over a deep saltwater ocean that covers the entire moon. Yes, an ocean! As Europa orbits Jupiter, the planet’s gravity pulls at the moon, while the smaller gravity fields of the other nearest moons also pull on Europa in other directions. This push and pull causes tides that help warm the ocean and keep it from freezing solid. The brown coloration in the moon’s cracks may be due to mineral salts from the water that get leached up through the cracks after warm ice breaks through, assuming that’s what is actually happening to cause the cracks. Astronomers even have images of Europa taken by space probes that show what look like water plumes erupting through the surface and shooting up an estimated 120 miles high, or 200 km. But new studies suggest that the water plumes might not be from the ocean. They might be from pockets of water that form within the crust itself, which grow larger until they burst out through the crust. This is even more exciting when it comes to potential life on the moon, because it suggests that the crust isn’t just a big block of ice. It’s a dynamic system that might harbor life instead of all potential life on Europa being restricted to the ocean. But to learn more about Europa, we have to come back to Earth and examine the island of Greenland. Most of Greenland is covered with a permanent ice sheet like the ones found in Antarctica, but it’s a lot easier to study than Antarctica. One feature seen in the ice sheet is something called a double ridge, shaped sort of like a capital letter M. It’s caused when the ice fractures around pressurized water that forms inside the ice sheet and refreezes. This is caused when water from streams and lakes on the surface finds its way into the ice. The double ridge can look like a crack. New pictures of the cracks on Europa’s surface look just like Greenland’s double ridges, but much bigger. My explanation of all this is extremely clumsy, because this is a really complex mechanism. Researchers only figured it out because some of the team had been studying Greenland’s double ridges for a completely different project, and noticed the similarities. There’s a link in the show notes to an article about this phenomenon if you want to learn more. The Greenland ice sheet is over a mile thick. In 1966, the U.S. Army drilled into the ice to see what was under it, and the answer is dirt, as you might have expected. They took a 15-foot, or 4.5 meter, core sample and stuck it in a freezer, where everyone promptly forgot about it for 51 years. At some point it ended up in Denmark, where someone noticed it in 2017. In 2019, the frozen core sample was finally studied by scientists. They expected to find mostly sand and rock. Instead, it was full of beautifully fossilized leaves and other plant material. The main reason scientists were so surprised to find leaves and soil instead of just rock is that ice is really heavy, and it moves—slowly, but a mile-thick sheet of ice cannot be stopped. If you listened to the recent episode in the main feed about the rewilding of Scotland, you may remember that Scotland doesn’t have a lot of fossils from the Pleistocene because it was covered in glaciers that scoured the soil and everything in it down to bedrock, destroying everything in its path. But this hasn’t happened in Greenland, even though the sample was taken from an area only about 800 miles, or 1,290 km, from the North Pole. Where the ice sheet now is, there used to be a forest. Obviously, the ice sheet hasn’t always covered Greenland. Research is ongoing, but a study of the sediment published in 2021 indicates that Greenland was ice free within the last million years, and possibly as recently as a few hundred thousand years. All this is interesting, but it’s very different from Europa, whose ice sheets have probably been in place almost from the moon’s formation. What kind of life can live on, in, or under ice sheets? On Earth, at least, a lot of organisms live on glaciers. Most are tiny or microscopic, including a type of algae that grows on top of ice, bacteria that live pretty much everywhere, including inside ice crystals, and microbes of various kinds. But there are some larger organisms, including glacial copepods, snow fleas, glacial midges, and the ice worms we talked about in episode 185 that live on glaciers in the Pacific Northwest. Most likely, life on Europa will be tiny too. Researchers hypothesize that there could be microbial life living deep within the ice or in the pockets of melted water that develop inside it. There might be microbial mats or algae-type organisms that live on the underside of the ice, anchored there but able to extract nutrients from the ocean water. But obviously, Europa’s ocean is where most life will probably be found, assuming it’s there. While there’s no environment quite like Europa’s to be found on Earth, since Earth is so close to the sun and nice and warm in comparison, parts of the deep sea are somewhat similar. Lots of animals live around hydrothermal vents, where volcanic activity breaks through the ocean floor and superheats water in small areas. Invertebrates of all kinds have adapted to live between boiling hot water and frigid deep-sea water, where absolutely no sunlight has ever reached. Animals like giant tube worms can grow nearly 10 feet long, or 3 meters, and don’t actually eat anything. Instead, they have symbiotic bacteria that provide them with all the nutrients they need while in turn, the bacteria get a safe place to live. When the intensely heated, mineral-rich water of a hydrothermal vent comes in contact with cold water, it causes all sorts of chemical reactions. That’s what fuels most of the life around the vents. There are even some fish that live around hydrothermal vents, including the cutthroat eel that can grow over 5 feet long, or 1.6 meters. They’re bottom-dwelling deep-sea eels that live worldwide, but they spend time around hydrothermal vents to eat some of the other animals that live there exclusively. There’s even a type of bacteria found at one vent off the coast of Mexico that uses the faint light emitted by lava deep within the vent for photosynthesis. All other known photosynthesizing organisms use the sun as a light source. Scientists think that Europa has hydrothermal vents similar to the ones on Earth. Since at least some researchers think life on Earth got its start around hydrothermal vents, it wouldn’t be surprising if life forms also live around Europa’s vents. But that doesn’t mean that life could only live around the vents. In 2018, a team of scientists in Antarctica bored through the ice sheet and took a sample from the sea floor far below the ice to see if anything lived there. Since this was in the middle of the ice sheet with absolutely no sunlight or open ocean within a million square kilometers, they didn’t expect to find much. When they gave the sample to marine biologist David Barnes to examine, and he got a first look at it, initially he actually thought they’d pulled a practical joke on him. There was no way this one small sample could contain evidence of so much life in such an extreme environment. He counted 77 different species of organism in the sample. There were worms, bryozoans, sponges, even fragments of jellyfish, and of course there were lots and lots of microorganisms. All the animals were small, which isn’t surprising. That they were there at all was the truly surprising thing. We don’t know yet if life exists anywhere outside of Earth. Odds are good that it does, just because there are so many planets and moons around so many stars throughout our galaxy and all the other galaxies in the universe. Whether we’ll ever find it is another thing. Until we do, though, we will just have to appreciate all the amazing diversity of life on our own planet, and keep watching the night skies and wondering. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

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

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

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

DRAMA! Bird drama! Here are some further-reading links if you want to verify that I’m not vilifying anyone: Buff-breasted Buttonquail: An image claimed to be of this species revealed Buff-breasted Buttonquail: Smoke & Mirrors A review of specimens of Buff-breasted Button-quail Turnix olivii suggests serious concern for its conservation outlook A painted button quail: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in episode 136 we talked about the button quail, because that episode was about tiny animals and the button quail is really tiny. But let’s revisit the button quail this month, because we have a mystery associated with a particular species of button quail. Button quails generally live in grasslands and are actually more closely related to shore and ocean birds like sandpipers and gulls than to actual quails, but it’s not very closely related to any other living birds. It can fly but it mostly doesn’t. Instead it depends on its coloring to hide it in the grass where it lives. It’s mostly brown with darker and lighter speckled markings, relatively large feet, and a short little tail. It eats seeds and insects along with other small invertebrates. The button quail is especially interesting because the female is more brightly colored than the male, although not by much. In some species the female may have bright white markings, while in others her speckled markings are crisper than the males. The female is the one who calls to attract a male and who defends her territory from other females. The female even has a special bulb in her throat that she can inflate to make a loud booming call. The male incubates the eggs and takes care of the chicks when they hatch. Baby button quails are fuzzy and active like domestic chicken babies but they’re only about the size of a bumblebee. In many species, as soon as the female has laid her eggs, she leaves them and the male and goes on to attract another male for her next clutch of eggs. The various species of button quail live in different areas, including Africa, Asia, and Australia. The species we’re talking about today is the buff-breasted button quail, which is native to one small area of Queensland, Australia. It grows about 9 inches long, or 23 cm, which is big for a button quail, most of which are closer to the size of sparrows, and it’s reddish-brown with darker and lighter speckles. It’s critically endangered due to habitat loss and introduced animals like cats and cattle. There are only an estimated 50 individuals alive today. But that’s only an estimate, because no one has actually for sure seen a buff-breasted button quail since 1922. Also, I’m going to call it the BBBQ from now on because that name is hard to say. The 1922 specimen was shot by a naturalist who was collecting specimens for a museum, which was regrettably common at the time and led to a lot of endangered species being driven to extinction. The bird was already rare in 1922 and that was the last anyone saw of it until 1985, when someone reported seeing one. People flocked to the area in hopes of spotting it, but while there were lots of sightings, no one got a good picture of a BBBQ. All the pictures, and all the recordings of its calls, turned out to be of another species of button quail, a very similar bird called the painted button quail. It’s been 100 years since the bird was last seen, so while we have lots of museum specimens, we don’t have any modern sightings. That means two things. Either the buff-breasted button quail is probably extinct…or it never actually existed in the first place. There are two other species of button quail that live in the same areas where the BBBQ is found, the painted button quail and the brown quail. They’re smaller but otherwise look very similar, especially the painted button quail. Maybe people were mistaking larger individuals of painted button quails as a different species. In 2018, a team of scientists from the University of Queensland conducted a search for the BBBQ. All they found were painted button quails. But they discovered something surprising that had never been documented before. During the breeding season, the female painted button quail’s feathers are much more reddish-brown, while the rest of the year the feathers on her back are more gray-brown. The team also studied as many BBBQ skins as they could track down from museums, where they learned something else surprising. It turns out that it’s not any larger than the painted button quail, which grows up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm. So the birds are the same size and during part of the year, they have almost identical plumage. Hmm. That doesn’t mean the buff-breasted button quail never existed. One very distinctive difference between the painted and the buff-breasted species is eye color, with the former having red eyes and the latter having yellow. As far as I know a genetic study hasn’t been carried out on the museum specimens, but it’s likely that at least some of the specimens—maybe all of them—really are BBBQs. Scientists and bird enthusiasts are still looking for the bird, and that has led to a strange controversy. In early 2022, a naturalist named John Young published a photo on Facebook of what he said was a male buff-breasted button quail on a nest, a photo taken by a camera trap in a secret location. The location had to be secret so that no one would try to find the birds and scare them away or damage a nest. Young said he had 16 other photos of BBBQs but wasn’t going to share them until he was ready to publish his findings. He was also raising money to continue his studies at the site. Another naturalist thought there was something fishy about the photo. He discovered that the picture is actually a cropped and flipped photo of a painted button quail bird and nest reportedly taken at a different site—published in 2018 by John Young himself and labeled by him as a painted button quail. Young had reused one of his own photos and assumed no one would notice. But it gets worse. Back in 2013, Young got photographs of another extremely rare Australian bird, the night parrot. One day we’ll have an episode about it. It was such a big deal that he was offered a job by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, or AWC, to study the night parrot and the buff-breasted button quail. He documented sightings and produced photos of both birds, but he didn’t stay in that job too long. That’s because some people started getting suspicious of his parrot photos. After an inquiry into the night parrot photos, the AWC concluded that the eggs in a photo of a night parrot nest were probably fake. And Young’s dubious photos go back even farther. In 2006 he claimed to have discovered a new species of parrot in Queensland, but while initially the Queensland government supported learning about the new species, it withdrew its support when the photo turned out to be…suspicious. It looked like Young had altered the coloration of a bird to make it look like a new species. When an expert requested the original photographs, Young said he’d deleted them. More recently, the 2018 painted button quail photo and the supposed 2022 BBBQ photo were examined by a forensic photography expert. Young had removed the metadata from both so no one could tell where they were taken, but there’s a little white stone in both pictures that’s identical, along with many other identical details. The problem with fake sightings and photographs is that it’s actually making things worse for the buff-breasted button quail. The AWC and other conservation groups are trying to get the bird listed as endangered, which means funding for research and conservation. Now all that is in jeopardy because it’s not clear if there have actually been any sightings of the bird at all. Hopefully the buff-breasted button quail is still around and someone will get genuine photos of it soon so it can be protected and studied. That’s assuming it’s a real bird in the first place. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

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

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

Further reading: I Can Has Mutant Larvae? 200-Year-Old ‘Monster Larva’ Mystery Solved ‘Snakeworm’ mystery yields species new to science Hearkening back to the hazelworm Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. A few weeks ago when I was researching big eels, I remembered the mystery eel larva we talked about back in episode 49, and that led me down a fun rabbit hole about other mystery larvae. Let’s start with that eel larva. Eel larvae can be extremely hard to tell apart, so as a catchall term every eel larva is called a leptocephalus. They’re flattened side to side, which is properly referred to as laterally compressed, and transparent, shaped roughly like a slender leaf, with a tiny head at the front. Depending on the species, an eel may remain in its larval form for more than a year, much longer than most other fish, and when it does metamorphose into its next life stage, it usually grows much longer than its larval form. For instance, the larvae of conger eels are only about 4 inches long, or 10 cm, while an adult conger can grow up to 10 feet long, or 3 meters. On January 31, 1930, a Danish research ship caught an eel larva 900 feet deep, or about 275 meters, off the coast of South Africa. But the larva was over 6 feet long, or 1.85 meters! Scientists boggled at the thought that this larva might grow into an eel more than 50 feet long, or 15 meters, raising the possibility that this unknown eel might be the basis of many sea serpent sightings. The larva was preserved and has been studied extensively. In 1958, a similar eel larva was caught off of New Zealand. It and the 1930 specimen were determined to belong to the same species, which was named Leptocephalus giganteus. In 1966, two more of the larvae were discovered in the stomach of a western Atlantic lancet fish. They were much smaller than the others, though—only four inches and eleven inches long, or 10 cm and 28 cm respectively. Other than size, they were pretty much identical to Leptocephalus giganteus. The ichthyologist who examined them determined that the larvae were probably not true eels at all, but larvae of a fish called the spiny eel. Deep-sea spiny eels look superficially like eels but aren’t closely related, and while they do have a larval form that resembles that of a true eel, they’re much different in one important way. Spiny eel larvae grow larger than the adults, then shrink a little when they develop into their mature form. The six-foot eel larva was actually a spiny eel larva that was close to metamorphosing into its adult form. Not everyone agrees that Leptocephalus giganteus is a spiny eel. Some think it belongs to the genus Coloconger, also called worm eels, which are true eels but which have large larvae that only grow to the same size as adults. But worm eels don’t grow much bigger than about two feet long, or 61 cm. If the mystery larvae does belong to the genus Coloconger, it’s probably a new species. Until scientists identify an adult Leptocephalus giganteus, we can’t know for sure. Another mystery larva is Planctosphaera pelagica, which sits all alone in its own class because the only thing it resembles are acorn worms, but scientists are pretty sure it isn’t the larva of an acorn worm. It’s not much to look at, since the larva is just a little barrel-shaped blob that grows about 25 mm across. This sounds small compared to the eel larva we just discussed, but it’s actually quite large compared to similar larvae. Acorn worm larvae are usually only about a millimeter long. Planctosphaera has been classified as a hemichordate, which are related to echinoderms but which show bilateral symmetry instead of radial symmetry. Hemichordates are also closely related to chordates, which include all vertebrates. They’re marine animals that resemble worms but aren’t worms, so it’s likely that Planctosphaera is also wormlike as an adult. Planctosphaera isn’t encountered very often by scientists. It has limited swimming abilities and mostly floats around near the surface of the open ocean, eating tiny food particles. One suggestion is that it might actually be the larva of a known species, but one where an occasional larva just never metamorphoses into an adult. It just grows and grows until something eats it. So far, attempts to sequence DNA from a Planctosphaera hasn’t succeeded and attempts to raise one to maturity in captivity hasn’t worked either. Some people have estimated that an adult Planctosphaera might be a type of acorn worm that can grow nine feet long, or 2.75 meters, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility. The largest species of acorn worm known is Balanoglossus gigas, which can grow almost six feet long, or 1.8 meters, and not only is it bioluminescent, its body contains a lot of iodine, so it smells like medicine. It lives in mucus-lined burrows on the sea floor. Another mystery larva is Facetotecta, which have been found in shallow areas in many oceans around the world. Unlike the other larvae we’ve talked about, they’re genuinely tiny, measured in micrometers, and eleven species have been described. They all have a cephalic shield, meaning a little dome over the head, and scientists have been able to observe several phases of their development but not the adult form. The juvenile form was observed and it looked kind of like a tiny slug with nonfunctioning eyes and weak muscles. Scientists speculate that facetotecta may actually be the larva of an endoparasite that infests some marine animals. That would explain why no adult form has been identified. Genetic testing has confirmed that Facetotecta is related to a group of parasitic crustaceans. DNA has solved some mysteries of what larvae belong to which adults. For instance, Cerataspis monstrosa, a larval crustacean that was first described in 1828. It’s over a cm long, pinkish-purple in color with stalked eyes, little swimming leg-like appendages, and neon blue horn-like structures on its head and back which act as armor. The armor doesn’t help too much against big animals like dolphins and tuna, which love to eat it, and in fact that’s where it was initially discovered, in the digestive tract of a dolphin. But scientists had no idea what the monstrous larva eventually grew up to be. In 2012 the mystery was solved when a team of scientists compared the monster larva’s DNA to that of lots of various types of shrimp, since the larva had long been suspected to be a type of shrimp. It turns out that it’s the larval form of a rare deep-sea aristeid shrimp that can grow up to 9 inches long, or 23 cm. Let’s finish with another solved mystery, this one from larvae found on land. In 2007, someone sent photos and a bag of little dead worms to Derek Sikes at the University of Alaska Museum. Usually when someone sends you a bag of dead worms, they’re giving you an obscure but distressing message, but Sikes was curator of the insect collection and he was happy to get a bag of mystery worms. The worms had been collected from an entire column of the creatures that had been crawling over each other so that the group looked like a garden hose on the ground. Sikes thought they were probably fly larvae but he had never heard of larvae traveling in a column. If you’ve listened to the hazelworm episode from August 2018, you might have an idea. The hazelworm was supposed to be a snake or even a dragon that was only seen in times of unrest. It turns out that it the larvae of some species of fungus gnat travel together in long, narrow columns that really do look like a moving snake. But that’s in Europe, not Alaska. Sikes examined the larvae, but since they were dead he couldn’t guess what type of insect they would grow up to be. Luckily, a few months later he got a call from a forester who had spotted a column of the same worms crossing a road. Sikes got there in time to witness the phenomenon himself. The larvae were only a few millimeters long each, but there were so many of them that the column stretched right across the road into the forest. He collected some of them carefully and took them back to the museum, where he tended them in hopes that they would pupate successfully. This they did, and the insects that emerged were a little larger than fruit flies and were black in color. Sikes identified them as fungus gnats, but when he consulted fungus gnat experts in Germany and Japan, they were excited to report that they didn’t recognize the Alaskan gnats. It was a new species, which Sikes described in late 2023. His summer students helped name the species, Sciara serpens, which are better known now as snakeworm gnats. He and his co-authors think the larvae form columns when they cross surfaces like roads and rocks, to help minimize contacting the dry ground. Fungus gnats live in moist areas with lots of organic matter, like forest leaf litter and the edges of ponds. So the next time you see a huge long snake crossing the road, don’t panic. It might just be a whole lot of tiny, tiny larvae looking for a new home. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening! BONUS: here’s the Hazelworm episode too! The hazelworm today is a type of reptile, although called the slow worm, blind worm, or deaf adder. It lives in Eurasia, and while it looks like a snake, it’s actually a legless lizard. It can even drop and regrow its tail like a lizard if threatened. It spends most of its time underground in burrows or underneath leaf litter or under logs. It grows almost 2 feet long, or 50 cm, and is brown. Females sometimes have blue racing stripes while males may have blue spots. It eats slugs, worms, and other small animals, so is good for the garden. But that kind of hazelworm isn’t what we’re talking about here. Back in the middle ages in central Europe, especially in parts of the Alps, there were stories of a big dragonlike serpent that lived in areas where hazel bushes were common. Like its slow-worm namesake, it lived most of its life underground, especially twined around the roots of the hazel. Instead of scales, it had a hairy skin and was frequently white in color. It was supposed to be the same type of snake that had tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It had a lot of names besides hazelworm, including white worm for its color, paradise worm for its supposed history in the Garden of Eden, and even war worm. That one was because it was only supposed to show itself just before a war broke out. People really believed it existed, although stories about it sound more like folklore. For instance, anyone who ate hazelworm flesh was supposed to become immortal. It was also supposed to suck milk from dairy cows and spread poison. Some accounts said it was enormous, as big around as a man’s thigh and some 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters. Sometimes it was even supposed to have feet, or have various bright colors. Sometimes drawings showed wings. There does seem to be some confusion about stories of the hazelworm and of the tatzelwurm, especially in older accounts. But unlike the tatzelwurm, the mystery of the hazelworm has been solved for a long time—long enough that knowledge of the animal has dropped out of folklore. Back in the 1770s, a physician named August C. Kuehn pointed out that hazelworm sightings matched up with a real animal…but not a snake. Not even any kind of reptile. Not a fish or a bird or a mammal. Nope, he pointed at the fungus gnat. The fungus gnat is about 8 mm long and eats decaying plant matter and fungus. You know, sort of exactly not like an 18-foot hairy white snake. But the larvae of some species of fungus gnat are called army worms. The larvae have white, gray, or brown bodies and black heads, and travel in long, wide columns that do look like a moving snake, especially if seen in poor light or in the distance. I’ve watched videos online of these processions and they are horrifying! They’re also rare, so it’s certainly possible that even people who have lived in one rural area their whole life had never seen an armyworm procession. Naturally, they’d assume they were seeing a monstrous hairy snake of some kind, because that’s what it looks like. Sightings of smaller hazelworms may be due to the caterpillar of the pine processionary moth, which also travels in a line nose to tail, which looks remarkably like a long, thin, hairy snake. Don’t touch those caterpillars, by the way. They look fuzzy and cute but their hairs can cause painful reactions when touched. The adult moths lay their eggs in pine trees and when the eggs hatch the larvae eat pine needles and can cause considerable damage to the trees. They overwinter in silk tents, then leave the trees in spring and travel in a snaky conga line to eat pine needles. Eventually they burrow underground to pupate. They emerge from their cocoons as adult moths, mate, lay eggs, and die, all within one day.

It’s the annual discoveries episode! Thanks to Stephen and Aryeh for their corrections and suggestions this week! Further reading: Salinella Salve: The Vanishing Creature That Defied Science for Over a Century Three new species of the genus Scutiger Baeticoniscus carmonaensis sp. nov. a new Isopod found in an underground aqueduct from the Roman period located in Southwest Spain (Crustacea, Isopoda, Trichoniscidae) A new species of supergiant Bathynomus Giant ‘Darth Vader’ sea bug discovered off the coast of Vietnam A New Species of easter egg weevil Bizarre ‘bone collector’ caterpillar discovered by UH scientists Researchers Discover ‘Death Ball’ Sponge and Dozens of Other Bizarre Deep-Sea Creatures in the Southern Ocean 1,500th Bat Species Discovered in Africa’s Equatorial Guinea Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about some animals discovered in 2025! We’ll also make this our corrections episode. This is the last new episode we’ll have until the end of August when we reach our 500th episode, but don’t worry, until then there will be rescheduled Patreon episodes every single week as usual. We’ll start with some corrections. Shortly after episode 452 was published in September, where we talked about the swamp wallaby and some other animals, Stephen emailed to point out that I’d made a major mistake! In that episode I said that not all animals called wallabies were actually members of the family Macropodidae, but that’s actually not the case. All wallabies are macropodids, but they aren’t all members of the same genus in that family. I corrected the episode but I wanted to mention it here too so no one is confused. Stephen also caught another mistake in episode 458, which is embarrassing. I mentioned that marsupials didn’t just live in Australia, they were found all over the world. That’s not actually the case! Marsupials are found in North and South America, Australia, New Guinea and nearby areas, and that’s it. They were once also found in what is now Asia, but that was millions of years ago. So I apologize to everyone in Africa, Asia, and Europe who were excited about finding out what their local marsupials are. You don’t have any, sorry. One update that Aryeh asked about specifically is an animal we talked about in episode 445, salinella. Aryeh emailed asking for more information if I could find any, because it’s such a fascinating mystery! I looked for some more recent findings, unfortunately without luck. I do have an article linked in the show notes that goes into detail about everything we covered in that episode, though, dated to mid-January 2026, and it’s a nice clear account. Now, let’s get into the 2025 discoveries! There are lots more animals that were discovered last year, but I just chose some that I thought were especially interesting. Mostly I chose ones that I thought had funny names. Let’s start with three new species of frog in the genus Scutiger. Species in this genus are called lazy toads and I couldn’t find out why. Maybe they don’t like to move around too much. Lazy toads live in mountains in some parts of Asia, and we don’t know very much about most of the 31 species described so far. Probably the most common lazy toad is the Sikkim lazy toad that lives along high altitude streams in the Himalaya Mountains. It’s mottled greenish-brown and yellowish in color with lots of warts, and while its feet have webbed toes, it doesn’t have webbed fingers on its little froggy hands. This is your reminder that every toad is a frog but not every frog is a toad. The Sikkim lazy toad grows about two and a half inches long, or about 65 mm, from nose to butt. It seems to be pretty average for a lazy toad. The three new species of lazy toad are found in Yunnan Province in China, in a mountainous region where several species of lazy toad were already known. Between 2021 and 2024, a team of scientists collected 27 lazy toads from various places, then carefully examined them to see if they were species already known to science. This included genetic analysis. The team compared their findings with other lazy toad species and discovered that not all of the specimens matched any known species. Further comparison with each other revealed that the team had discovered three new species, which they described in December of 2025. Next, isopods are common crustaceans that live throughout the world. You have undoubtedly seen at least one species of isopod, because an animal with lots of common names, including woodlouse, pill bug, roly-poly, and sowbug, is a terrestrial isopod. That’s right, the roly-poly is not a bug or a centipede but a crustacean. The order Isopoda contains more than 10,000 species, and there are undoubtedly thousands more that haven’t been discovered by scientists yet. About half the species discovered so far live on land and the other half live in water, most in the ocean but some in fresh water. They don’t all look like roly-polies, of course. Many look like their distant crustacean cousins, shrimps and crayfish, while others look more like weird centipedes or fleas or worms. There’s a lot of variation in an animal that’s extremely common throughout the world, so it’s no surprise that more species are discovered almost every year. In 2021 and 2022, a team of Spanish scientists took a biological survey of an ancient Roman tunnel system beneath Carmona, Spain. The tunnels were built around 2,000 years ago as a water source, since they capture groundwater, but it hasn’t been used in so long that it’s more or less a natural environment these days. The scientists quickly discovered plenty of life in the tunnels, including an isopod living in cracks in some ancient timbers. It grows about two and a half millimeters long and actually does look a lot like a tiny roly-poly. It has long antennae and its body mostly lacks pigment, but it does have dark eyes. Most animals that live in total darkness eventually evolve to no longer have functioning eyes, since they don’t need them, but that isn’t the case for this new isopod. Scientists think it might take advantage of small amounts of light available near the tunnel entrances. As far as the scientists can tell, the Carmona isopod only lives in this one tunnel system, so it’s vulnerable to pollutants and human activity that might disrupt its underground home. Another new isopod species that’s vulnerable to human activity, in this case overfishing, lives off the coast of Vietnam. It’s another isopod that looks a lot like a roly-poly, which I swear is not what every isopod looks like. It’s a deep-sea animal that hunts for food on the ocean floor, and it’s a popular delicacy in Vietnam. Remember, it’s a crustacean, and people say it tastes like another crustacean, lobster. In fact, scientists discovered their specimens in a fish market. Deep-sea animals sometimes feature what’s called deep-sea gigantism. Most isopods are quite small, no more than a few cm at most, but the new species grows almost 13 inches long, or over 32 cm. It’s almost the largest isopod known. Its head covering made the scientists think of Darth Vader’s helmet, so it’s been named Bathynomus vaderi. Next we have a new species of Easter egg weevil, a flightless beetle found on many islands in Southeast Asia. Easter egg weevils are beautiful, with every species having a different pattern of spots and stripes. Many are brightly colored and iridescent. The new species shows a lot of variability, but it’s basically a black beetle with a diamond-shaped pattern that can be yellow, gold, or blue. Some individuals have pink spots in the middle of some of the diamonds. It’s really pretty and that is just about all I could find out about it. Another new insect is a type of Hawaiian fancy case caterpillar, which metamorphose into moths. They’re only found on the Hawaiian islands, and there are over 350 species known. The new species has been named the bone collector, because of what the caterpillar does. Fancy case caterpillars spin a sort of shell out of silk, which is called a case, and the caterpillar carries its case around with it as protection. Some of the cases are unadorned but resemble tree bark, while many species will decorate the case with lichens, sand, or other items that help it blend in with its background. Some fancy case caterpillars can live in water as well as on land, and while most caterpillars eat plant material, some fancy case caterpillars eat insects. That’s the situation with the bone collector caterpillar. It lives in spider webs, which right there is astonishing, and decorates its case with bits and pieces of dead insect it finds in the web. This can include wings, heads, legs, and other body parts. The bone collector caterpillar eats insects, and it will chew through strands of the spider’s web to get to a trapped insect before the spider does. Sometimes it will eat what’s left of a spider’s meal once the spider is finished. The bone collector caterpillar has only been found in one tiny part of O’ahu, a 15-square-km area of forest, although researchers think it was probably much more widespread before invasive plants and animals were introduced to the island. Next, the Antarctic Ocean is one of the least explored parts of the world, and a whole batch of new species was announced in 2025 after two recent expeditions. One of the expeditions explored ocean that was newly revealed after a huge iceberg split off the ice shelf off West Antarctica in early 2025. That’s not where the expedition had planned to go, but it happened to be nearby when the iceberg broke off, and of course the team immediately went to take a look. Back in episode 199 we talked about some carnivorous sponges. Sponges have been around for more than half a billion years, and early on they evolved a simple but effective body plan that they mostly still retain. Most sponges have a skeleton made of calcium carbonate that forms a sort of dense net that’s covered with soft body tissues. The sponge has lots of open pores in the outside of its body, which generally just resembles a sack or sometimes a tube, with one end attached to something hard like a rock, or just the bottom of the ocean. Water flows into the sponge’s tissues through the pores, and special cells filter out particles of food from the water, much of it microscopic, and release any waste material. The sponge doesn’t have a stomach or any kind of digestive tract. The cells process the food individually and pass on any extra nutrients to adjoining cells. In 1995, scientists discovered a tiny sponge that wasn’t a regular filter feeder. It had little hooks all over it, and it turns out that when a small animal gets caught on the hooks, the sponge grows a membrane that envelops the animal within a few hours. The cells of the membrane contain bacteria that help digest the animal so the cells can absorb the nutrients. Since then, other carnivorous sponges have been discovered, or scientists have found that some sponges already known to science are actually carnivorous. That’s the case with the ping-pong tree sponge. It looks kind of like a bunch of grapes on a central stem that grows up from the bottom of the ocean, and it can be more than 20 inches tall, or 50 cm. The little balls are actually balloon-like structures that inflate with water and are covered with little hooks. It was discovered off the coast of South America near Easter Island, in deep water where the sea floor is mostly made of hardened lava. It was classified in the genus Chondrocladia, and so far there are more than 30 other species known. The reason we’re talking about the ping-pong tree sponge is that a new species of Chondrocladia has been discovered in the Antarctic Ocean, and it looks a lot like the ping-pong tree sponge. It’s been dubbed the death-ball sponge, which is hilarious. It was found two and a quarter miles deep on the ocean floor, or 3.6 km, and while scientists have determined it’s a new species of sponge, it hasn’t been described yet. It’s one of 30 new species found so far, and the team says that there are many other specimens collected that haven’t been studied yet. We haven’t talked about any new mammal discoveries yet, so let’s finish with one of my favorites, a new bat! It was discovered on Bioko Island in Equatorial Guinea, which is part of Africa. During a 2024 biodiversity assessment on the island, a PhD student named Laura Torrent captured a bat that turned out to be not only a brand new species, it is the 1,500th species of bat known to science! Pipistrellus etula gets its name from the local language, Bantu, since “etula” means both “island” and “god of the island” in that language. The bat was found in forests at elevations over 1,000 meters, on the slopes of a volcano. Back in 1989, a different researcher captured a few of the bats on another volcano, but never got a chance to examine them to determine if they were a new species. When Torrent’s team were studying their bats, one of the things they did was compare them to the preserved specimens from 1989, and they discovered the bats were indeed a match. P. etula is a type of vesper bat, which is mostly active at dusk and eats insects. It’s brown with black wings and ears. Just like all the other species we’ve talked about today, now that we know it exists, it can be protected and studied in the wild. That’s what science is really for, after all. It’s not just to satisfy our human curiosity and desire for knowledge, although that’s important too. It’s so we can make this world a better place for everyone to live—humans, animals, plants, isopods, weird caterpillars, and everything else on Earth and beyond. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. Thanks for listening! I’ll see you in August.

Thanks to Aila, Stella, George, Richard from NC, Emilia, Emerson, and Audie for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Creature Feature: Snipe Eel How removing a dam could save North Carolina’s ‘lasagna lizard’ Why Has This North Carolina Town Embraced a Strange Salamander? Scentists search for DNA of an endangered salamander in Mexico City’s canals An X-ray of the slender snipe eel: The head and body of a slender snipe eel. The rest is tail [picture by opencage さん http://ww.opencage.info/pics/ – http://ww.opencage.info/pics/large_17632.asp, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26595467]: The hellbender: A wild axolotl with its natural coloration: A captive bred axolotl exhibiting leucism: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to talk about some amphibians and fish. Thanks to Aila, Stella, George, Richard from NC, Emilia, Emerson, and Audie for their suggestions! We’ll start with Audie’s suggestion, the sandbar shark. It’s an endangered shark that lives in shallow coastal water in the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific Oceans. A big female can grow over 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters, while males are smaller on average. It can be brown or gray in color, and its dorsal fin is especially big for a shark its size. The sandbar shark eats fish, crustaceans like crabs, cephalopods like octopuses, and other small animals. It spends a lot of time near the bottom of the seabed, looking for food, and it will also swim into the mouths of rivers. Since it resembles a bull shark, which can live just fine in rivers for quite a while and which can be dangerous to swimmers, people are sometimes afraid of the sandbar shark, but it hardly ever bites people. It just wants to be left alone to find little fish to eat. Emilia and Emerson both asked to learn more about eels. Eels are fish, but not every animal that’s called an eel is actually an eel. Some are just eel-shaped, meaning they’re long and slender. Electric eels aren’t actually eels, for instance, but are more closely related to catfish. The longest eel ever reliably measured was a slender giant moray. That was in 1927 in Queensland, Australia. The eel measured just shy of 13 feet long, or 3.94 meters. We talked about some giant eels in episode 401, but this week let’s talk about a much smaller eel, one that Emerson suggested. That’s the snipe eel, the name for a family of eels consisting of nine species known so far. They live in every ocean in the world, and some species are deep-sea animals but most live a little nearer the surface. The largest species can grow an estimated 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, but because all species of snipe eel are so incredibly thin, even the longest individual weighs less than a football, either American or regular, take your pick. The snipe eel gets its name from its mouth, which is long and slightly resembles the beak of a bird called the snipe. The snipe is a wading bird that pokes its long, flexible bill into mud to find small animals like insect larvae, worms, and snails. But unlike the bird’s bill, the snipe eel’s jaws have a bend at the tip. The upper jaw bends upward, the lower jaw bends downward so that the tip of the jaws are separated. It doesn’t look like that would be very helpful for catching food, but scientists think it helps because the fish’s mouth is basically always open. Since it mainly eats tiny crustaceans floating in the water, it doesn’t even need to open its mouth to catch food. It has tiny teeth along the jaws that point backwards, so when a crustacean gets caught on the teeth, it can’t escape. The slender snipe eel is especially unusual because it can have as many as 750 vertebrae in its backbone. That’s more than any other animal known. Most of its length is basically just an incredibly long, thin tail, with its organs bunched up right behind its head. Even its anus is basically on its throat. We don’t know a whole lot about the snipe eel, since it lives deep enough that it’s hardly ever seen by humans. Most of the specimens discovered have been found in the stomachs of larger fish. Now, let’s leave the world of fish behind and look at some amphibians. First, George wanted to learn about the hellbender, and points out that it’s also called the snot otter or lasagna lizard. I don’t understand the lasagna part but it’s funny. The hellbender is a giant salamander that lives in parts of the eastern United States, especially in the Appalachian Mountains and the Ozarks. It can grow nearly 30 inches long, or 74 cm, and is the fifth heaviest amphibian alive today in the whole world. It spends almost all its life in shallow, fast-moving streams hiding among rocks. As water rushes over and around rocks, it absorbs more oxygen, which is good for the hellbender because as an adult it breathes through its skin. To increase its surface area and help it absorb that much more oxygen, its skin is loose and has folds along the sides. The hellbender is flattened in shape and is brown with black speckles on its back. It mostly eats crayfish, but it will also eat frogs and other small animals. Its skin contains light-sensitive cells, which means that it can actually sense how much light is shining on its body even if its head is hidden under a rock, so it can hide better. Aila and Stella suggested we talk about the axolotl, and a few years ago Richard from NC sent me a lot of really good information about this friendly-looking amphibian. I’d been planning to do a deep dive about the axolotl, which we haven’t talked about since episode 275, but sometimes having a lot of information leads to overload and I never did get around to sorting through everything Richard sent me. Richard also suggested we talk about a rare mudpuppy, so let’s learn about it before we get to the axolotl. It’s called the Neuse river waterdog, although Richard refers to it as the North Carolina axolotl because it resembles the axolotl in some ways, although the two species aren’t very closely related. The mudpuppy, also called the waterdog, looks a lot like a juvenile hellbender but isn’t as big, with the largest measured adult growing just over 17 inches long, or almost 44 cm. It lives in lakes, ponds, and streams and retains its gills throughout its life. The mudpuppy is gray, black, or reddish-brown. It has a lot of tiny teeth where you’d expect to find teeth, and more teeth on the roof of its mouth where you would not typically expect to find teeth. It needs all these teeth because it eats slippery food like small fish, worms, and frogs, along with insects and other small animals. The Neuse River waterdog lives in two watersheds in North Carolina, and nowhere else in the world. It will build a little nest under a rock by using its nose like a shovel, pushing at the sand, gravel, and mud until it has a safe place to rest. If another waterdog approaches its nest, the owner will attack and bite it to drive it away. The mudpuppy exhibits neoteny, a trait it shares with the axolotl. In most salamanders, the egg hatches into a larval salamander that lives in water, which means it has external gills so it can breathe underwater. It grows and ultimately metamorphoses into a juvenile salamander that spends most of its time on land, so it loses its external gills in the metamorphosis. Eventually it takes on its adult coloration and pattern. But neither the mudpuppy nor the axolotl metamorphose. Even when it matures, the adult still looks kind of like a big larva, complete with external gills, and it lives underwater its whole life. The axolotl originally lived in wetlands and lakes in the Mexico Central Valley. This is where Mexico City is and it’s been a hub of civilization for thousands of years. A million people lived there in 1521 when the Spanish invaded and destroyed the Aztec Empire with introduced diseases and war. The axolotl was an important food of the Aztecs and the civilizations that preceded them, and if you’ve only ever seen pictures of axolotls you may wonder why. Salamanders are usually small, but a full-grown axolotl can grow up to 18 inches long, or 45 cm, although most are about half that length. Most wild axolotls are brown, greenish-brown, or gray, often with lighter speckles. They can even change color somewhat to blend in with their surroundings better. Captive-bred axolotls are usually white or pink, or sometimes other colors or patterns. That’s because they’re bred for the pet trade and for medical research, because not only are they cute and relatively easy to keep in captivity, they have some amazing abilities. Their ability to regenerate lost and injured body parts is remarkable even for amphibians. Researchers study axolotls to learn more about how regeneration works, how genetics of coloration work, and much more. They’re so common in laboratory studies that you’d think there’s no way they could be endangered—but they are. A lot of the wetlands where the axolotl used to live have been destroyed as Mexico City grows. One of the lakes where it lived has been completely filled in. Its remaining habitat is polluted and contains a lot of introduced species, like carp, that eat young axolotls as well as the same foods that axolotls eat. Conservationists have been working hard to improve the water quality in some areas by filtering out pollutants, and putting up special barriers that keep introduced fish species out. Even if the axolotl’s habitat was pristine, though, it wouldn’t be easy to repopulate the area right away. Axolotls bred for the pet trade and research aren’t genetically suited for life in the wild anymore, since they’re all descended from a small number of individuals caught in 1864, so they’re all pretty inbred by now. Mexican scientists and conservationists are working with universities and zoos around the world to develop a breeding program for wild-caught axolotls. So far, the offspring of wild-caught axolotls that are raised in as natural a captive environment as possible have done well when introduced into the wild. The hard part is finding wild axolotls, because they’re so rare and so hard to spot. Scientists have started testing water for traces of axolotl DNA to help them determine if there are any to find in a particular area. If so, they send volunteers into the water with nets and a lot of patience to find them. The axolotl reproduces quickly and does well in captivity. Hopefully its habitat can be cleaned up soon, which isn’t just good for the axolotl, it’s good for the people of Mexico City too. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Extinct Hippo-Like Creature Discovered Hidden in Museum: ‘Sheer Chance’ The golden lion tamarin has very thin fingers and sometimes it’s rude: The golden lion tamarin also has a very long tail: The cotton-top tamarin [picture by Chensiyuan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153317160]: The pangolin is scaly: The pangolin can also be round: The East Siberia lemming [photo by Ansgar Walk – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52651170]: An early painting of a mammoth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to look at some mammals suggested by Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris. Let’s jump right in, because we have a lot of fascinating animals to learn about! We’ll start with suggestions by Cillian and Eilee, who both suggested a monkey called the tamarin. Tamarins live in Central and South America and there are around 20 species, all of them quite small. Cillian specifically suggested the golden lion tamarin, an endangered species that lives in a single small part of Brazil. It has beautiful golden or orange fur that’s longer around the face, like a lion’s mane but extremely stylish. Its face is bare of fur and is gray or grayish-pink in color, with dark eyes and a serious expression like it’s not sure where it left its wallet. It grows about 10 inches long, or 26 cm, not counting its extremely long tail. The golden lion tamarin spends most of its time in trees, where it eats fruit, flowers, and other plant material, along with eggs, tree frogs, insects, and other small animals. It has narrow hands and long fingers to help it reach into little tree hollows and crevices where insects are hiding, but if it can’t reach an insect that way, it will use a twig or other tool to help. The golden lion tamarin lives in small family groups, usually a mated pair and their young children. A mother golden lion tamarin often has twins, sometimes triplets, and the other members of her family help take care of the babies. Because the golden lion tamarin is endangered, mainly due to habitat loss, zoos throughout the world have helped increase the number of babies born in captivity. When it’s safe to release them into the wild, instead of only releasing the young tamarins, the entire family group is released together. Eilee suggested the cotton-top tamarin, which lives in one small part of Colombia. It’s about the same size as the golden lion tamarin, but is more lightly built and has a somewhat shorter tail. It’s mostly various shades of brown and tan with a dark gray face, but it also has long white hair on its head. Its hair sticks up and makes it look a little bit like those pictures of Einstein, if Einstein was a tiny little monkey. Like the golden lion tamarin, the cotton-top tamarin lives in small groups and eats both plant material and insects. It’s also critically endangered due to habitat loss, and it’s strictly protected these days. Next, both Tim and Stella suggested we learn about the pangolin. There are eight species known, which live in parts of Africa and Asia. The pangolin is a mammal, but it’s covered in scales except for its belly and face. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein that makes up fingernails, hair, hooves, and other hard parts in mammals. When it’s threatened, it rolls up into a ball with its tail over its face, and the sharp-edged, overlapping scales protect it from being bitten or clawed. It has a long, thick tail, short, strong legs with claws, a small head, and very small ears. Its muzzle is long with a nose pad at the end, it has a long sticky tongue, and it has no teeth. It’s nocturnal and uses its big front claws to dig into termite mounds and ant colonies. It has poor vision but a good sense of smell. Some species of pangolin live in trees and spend the daytime sleeping in a hollow tree. Other species live on the ground and dig deep burrows to sleep in during the day. It’s a solitary animal and just about the only time adult pangolins spend time together is when a pair comes together to mate. Sometimes two males fight over a female, and they do so by slapping each other with their big tails. Unfortunately for the pangolin, its scales make it sought after by humans for decoration. People also eat pangolins. Habitat loss is also making it tough for the pangolin. All species of pangolin in Asia are endangered or critically endangered, while all species of pangolins in Africa are vulnerable. Pangolins also don’t do well in captivity so it’s hard for zoos to help them. Next, Conner wants to learn about the lemming, a rodent that’s related to muskrats and voles. Lots of people think they know one thing about the lemming, but that thing isn’t true. We’ll talk about it in a minute. The lemming grows up to 7 inches long, or 18 cm, and is a little round rodent with small ears, a short tail, short legs, and long fur that’s brown and black in color. It eats plant material, and while it lives in really cold parts of the northern hemisphere, including Siberia, Alaska, northern Canada, and Greenland, it doesn’t hibernate. It just digs tunnels with cozy nesting burrows to warm up in, and finds food by digging tunnels in the snow. Lemmings reproduce quickly, which is a trait common among rodents, and if the population of lemmings gets too large in one area, some of the lemmings may migrate to find a new place to live. In the olden days people didn’t understand lemming migration. Some people believed that lemmings traveled through the air in stormy weather and that’s why a bunch of lemmings would suddenly appear out of nowhere sometimes. They’d just drop out of the sky. Other people were convinced that if there were too many lemmings, they’d all jump off a cliff and die on purpose, and that’s why sometimes there’d be a lot of lemmings, and then suddenly one day not nearly as many lemmings. Many people still think that lemmings jump off cliffs, but this isn’t actually true. They’re cute little animals, but they’re not dumb. Next, let’s learn about two extinct animals, starting with PJ’s suggestion, the woolly mammoth. We actually know a lot about the various species of mammoth because we have so many remains. Our own distant ancestors left cave paintings and carvings of mammoths, we have lots of fossilized remains, and we have lots of subfossil remains too. Because the mammoth lived so recently and sometimes in places where the climate hasn’t changed all that much in the last 10,000 years, namely very cold parts of the world with deep layers of permafrost beneath the surface, sometimes mammoth remains are found that look extremely fresh. The woolly mammoth was closely related to the modern Asian elephant, but it was much bigger and covered with long fur. A big male woolly mammoth could stand well over 11 feet tall at the shoulder, or 3.5 meters, while females were a little smaller on average. It was well adapted to cold weather and had small ears, a short tail, a thick layer of fat under the skin, and an undercoat of soft, warm hair that was protected by longer guard hairs. It lived in the steppes of northern Europe, Asia, and North America, and like modern elephants it ate plants. It had long, curved tusks that could be over 13 feet long, or 4 meters, in a big male, and one of the things it used it tusks for was to sweep snow away from plants. The woolly mammoth went extinct at the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, although a small population remained on a remote island until only 4,000 years ago. Our last animal this week is Morris’s suggestion, and it’s actually not a single type of animal but a whole order. Desmostylians were big aquatic mammals, and the only known order of aquatic mammals that are completely extinct. When you think of aquatic mammals, you might think of whales, seals, and sea cows, or even hippos. Desmostylians didn’t look like any of those animals, and they had features not found in any other animal. Desmostylians lived in shallow water off the Pacific coast, and fossils have been found in North America, southern Japan, parts of Russia, and other places. They first appear in the fossil record around 30 million years ago and disappear from the fossil record about 7 million years ago. They were fully aquatic animals that probably mostly ate kelp or sea grass, similar to modern sirenians, which include dugongs and manatees. Let’s talk about Paleoparadoxia to find out roughly what Desmostylians looked and acted like. Paleoparadoxia grew about 7 feet long, or 2.15 meters, and had a robust skeleton. It had short legs, although the front legs were longer and its four toes were probably webbed to help it swim. It probably acted a lot like a sirenian, walking along the sea floor to find plants to eat. Its nostrils were on the top of its nose so it could take breaths at the surface more easily, and it had short tusks in its mouth, something like modern hippos. It may have looked a little like a hippo, but also a little like a dugong, and possibly a little like a walrus. One really strange thing about Desmostylians in general are their teeth. No other animals known have teeth like theirs. Their molars and premolars are incredibly tough and are made up of little enamel cylinders. The order’s name actually means “bundle of columns,” referring to the teeth, and the bundles point upward so that the tops of the columns make up the tooth’s chewing surface. Actually, chewing surface isn’t the right term because Desmostylians probably didn’t chew their food. Scientists think they pulled plants up by the roots using their teeth and tusks, then used suction to slurp up the plants and swallow them whole. We still don’t know very much about Desmostylians. Scientists think they were outcompeted by sirenians, but we don’t really know why they went extinct. We don’t even know what they were most closely related to. They share some similarities with manatees and elephants, but those similarities may be due to convergent evolution. Then again, they might be related. Until we find more fossils, the mysteries will remain. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions this week! Sorry this episode is late–the site was down. 🙁 Further reading: Bobolinks A frill-neck lizard showing off: A bobolink: The great-eared nightjar [picture by Venkata Shreeram Mallimadugula, taken from this site]: Another great-eared nightjar [Picture by Nigel Voaden from UK – Great Eared-Nightjar, Tangkoko, Sulawesi, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39857392]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have an episode about some birds and reptiles. Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions! If this episode showed up later than usual in the podcast feed, it’s because I’ve been having trouble with the website and couldn’t get it uploaded until it was fixed. We’ll kick off the episode with an animal that can’t kick, because snakes don’t have any legs. Audie suggested we learn about the scaleless rat snake, which means that first we have to learn about the rat snake, the ordinary one with scales. Rat snakes are constrictors and are common throughout many parts of Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East, and they’re called rat snakes because they eat rats and other small animals like lizards, frogs, and baby birds. Rat snakes are popular pets because they’re so pretty and they aren’t dangerous to humans. Different species are different colors and patterns, and the rhinoceros rat snake, also called the Vietnamese longnose snake, even has a little hornlike projection on the tip of its nose that points forward. I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about that particular rat snake before on the podcast, but I can’t look up which episode because the website is down. Most rat snakes don’t grow much bigger than 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, but a few species can get longer than that. The black rat snake, which lives in North America, can grow over 8 feet long, or more than 2.5 meters. It’s black with small white markings on the head, but snakes bred for sale as pets are sometimes white all over or partially white, or even albino, meaning an individual has a mutation where its body doesn’t produce pigment. Pet black rat snakes are also bred that don’t have scales. That brings us to the scaleless rat snake. It’s an ordinary rat snake but it has a mutation that causes it to have very few scales. This is a mutation that happens occasionally in the wild since it’s a recessive trait, and while it can make the snake a little more vulnerable to injury, scaleless snakes can survive just fine in the wild. They do have belly scales like a normal snake, which are the ones that allow them to move around, and they may have a scattering of scales on other parts of the body too. A scaleless snake still sheds its skin once a year like an ordinary snake, since it’s actually the outer layer of skin that sheds along with the scales. Scaleless rat snakes are popular as pets because they’re so soft and because their coloration is usually very bright. A snake’s coloration comes from pigments in its skin. A snake’s scales are actually transparent, so without a layer of scales, a scaleless snake looks even more colorful than a regular snake. Many species of snake have been found in the wild that are scaleless, but it seems to be a little more common in rat snakes. Next, Dylan and Emily wanted to learn about the frill-neck lizard, which is found in northern Australia and the very southern part of New Guinea. It’s a big lizard that can grow almost three feet long, or 90 cm, including its incredibly long tail. Males are larger than females on average, with a bigger frill. The frill is a flap of skin around the head and neck, and most of the time it’s folded back over the neck and shoulders so it’s not that noticeable. The lizard is pretty ordinary-looking that way, just a big gray or brown animal with a big head. But when the lizard feels threatened, or if it comes across another frill-neck lizard, it can extend the frill by moving the small bones and cartilage that act as struts, which also requires the lizard to open its mouth. When extended, the frill is as much as a foot across, or 30 cm, and it’s marked with bright colors. Different individuals have different colored frills, red, orange, yellow, or white, or a mixture of colors and patterns. The size and color of the frill opening up so quickly will often startle a potential predator, allowing the lizard to escape. The frill-neck lizard can even run on two legs if it needs to, although it has to run with its head pointing straight up in the air. The frill-neck lizard mostly eats insects, especially termites. It spends most of its time in trees and some people believe it can use its frill as a parachute, but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case. Let’s move on to a few birds next. Maryjane suggested we learn about the bobolink, a type of blackbird native to the Americas. In summer the male bobolink is black with a pale yellow nape and white markings, and in winter he molts into a drab outfit of brown to help him hide. The female is brown with black streaks and stripes. In the summer the bobolink flies to the northern United States and Canada to nest and raise babies, and it migrates to southern South America in winter. This is a huge distance for such a little songbird to travel, but it’s a strong flyer and can travel over a thousand miles, or 1,800 km, in a single day. It navigates using the stars at night and can sense the earth’s magnetic field too, which helps it find its way. The bobolink prefers prairies and grassy areas. It eats seeds and insects, and especially likes rice and a type of caterpillar called the armyworm. It’s sometimes considered a pest because it eats so much rice, but then again armyworms are also considered pests and the bobolink eats so many of them that it has probably saved a lot of crops that way. While the bobolink is still numerous, its numbers have been in decline for years due to habitat loss. The bobolink is most famous for its song. Both males and females sing, and males not only sing while perched, they sing while flying. The bobolink’s songs are varied and lovely. This is what the bobolink sounds like, first a song recorded while the bird was flying: [bobolink song] And here’s another song recorded while a different bird in a different place was perched and singing: [bobolink song] Finally, both Katie and Eilee wanted to learn about the great-eared nightjar, also called the dragon bird or the baby dragon. Nightjars are nocturnal birds, and the great-eared nightjar is found in parts of southern and Southeast Asia. It can grow up to 16 inches long, or 41 cm, and is a chonky bird with big dark eyes and a broad bill that can open very wide. The “ears” in its name are tufts of feathers on the top of its head that look like ears or little horns. It can raise the ears if it wants to, but most of the time they just stick out backwards. Like other nightjars, the great-eared nightjar’s head looks flattened most of the time, and the bird itself spends a lot of time crouched down looking like a very flat bird, but then it sits up and pricks up its ear tufts, and it looks more like a thin owl with a long tail. The bird is brown with black markings, which makes it almost invisible at night. During the day, the great-eared nightjar sits in a tree or just on the forest floor, so well camouflaged by its feathers that it blends in with the leaf litter or kind of looks like a piece of stump or broken-off branch. At night it flies around catching insects on the wing like a bat. Instead of building a nest and laying eggs in it like other birds, the great-eared nightjar just lays a single egg among dead leaves on the ground. The egg, and the baby when it hatches, are so well camouflaged that it’s as safe on the ground as it would be in a nest way up in a tree. The great-eared nightjar has an eerie call. This is what it sounds like: [great-eared nightjar call] You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!

Here’s the big invertebrate episode I’ve been promising people! Thanks to Sam, warbrlwatchr, Jayson, Richard from NC, Holly, Kabir, Stewie, Thaddeus, and Trech for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Does the Spiral Siphonophore Reign as the Longest Animal in the World? The common nawab butterfly: The common nawab caterpillar: A velvet worm: A giant siphonophore [photo by Catriona Munro, Stefan Siebert, Felipe Zapata, Mark Howison, Alejandro Damian-Serrano, Samuel H. Church, Freya E.Goetz, Philip R. Pugh, Steven H.D.Haddock, Casey W.Dunn – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1055790318300460#f0030]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Hello to 2026! This is usually where I announce that I’m going to do a series of themed episodes throughout the coming year, and usually I forget all about it after a few months. This year I have a different announcement. After our nine-year anniversary next month, which is episode 470, instead of new episodes I’m going to be switching to old Patreon episodes. I closed the Patreon permanently at the end of December but all the best episodes will now run in the main feed until our ten-year anniversary in February 2027. That’s episode 523, when we’ll have a big new episode that will also be the very last one ever. I thought this was the best way to close out the podcast instead of just stopping one day. The only problem is the big list of suggestions. During January I’m going to cover as many suggestions as I possibly can. This week’s episode is about invertebrates, and in the next few weeks we’ll have an episode about mammals, one about reptiles and birds, and one about amphibians and fish, although I don’t know what order they’ll be in yet. Episode 470 will be about animals discovered in 2025, along with some corrections and updates. I hope no one is sad about the podcast ending! You have a whole year to get used to it, and the old episodes will remain forever on the website so you can listen whenever you like. All that out of the way, let’s start 2026 right with a whole lot of invertebrates! Thanks to Sam, warbrlwatchr, Jayson, Richard from NC, Holly, Kabir, Stewie, Thaddeus, and Trech for their suggestions this week! Let’s start with Trech’s suggestion, a humble ant called the weaver ant. It’s also called the green ant even though not all species are green, because a species found in Australia is partially green. Most species are red, brown, or yellowish, and they’re found in parts of northern and western Australia, southern Asia, and on most islands in between the two areas, and in parts of central Africa. The weaver ant lives in trees in tropical areas, and gets the name weaver ant because of the way it makes its nest. The nests are made out of leaves, but the leaves are still growing on the tree. Worker ants grab the edge of a leaf in their mandibles, then pull the leaf toward another leaf or sometimes double the leaf over. Sometimes ants have to make a chain to reach another leaf, with each ant grabbing the next ant around the middle until the ant at the end of the chain can grab the edge of a leaf. While the leaf is being pulled into place alongside the edge of another leaf, or the opposite edge of the same leaf, other workers bring larvae from an established part of the nest. The larvae secrete silk to make cocoons, but a worker ant holds a larva at the edge of the leaf, taps its little head, and the larva secretes silk that the workers use to bind the leaf edges together. A single colony has multiple nests, often in more than one tree, and are constantly constructing new ones as the old leaves are damaged by weather or just die off naturally. The weaver ant mainly eats insects, which is good for the trees because many of the insects the ants kill and eat are ones that can damage trees. This is one reason why farmers in some places like seeing weaver ants, especially fruit farmers, and sometimes farmers will even buy a weaver ant colony starter pack to place in their trees deliberately. The farmer doesn’t have to use pesticides, and the weaver ants even cause some fruit- and leaf-eating animals to stay away, because the ants can give a painful bite. People in many areas also eat the weaver ant larvae, which is considered a delicacy. Our next suggestion is by Holly, the zombie snail. I actually covered this in a Patreon episode, but I didn’t schedule it for next year because I thought I’d used the information already in a regular episode, but now I can’t find it. So let’s talk about it now! In August of 2019, hikers in Taiwan came across a snail that looked like it was on its way to a rave. It had what looked like flashing neon decorations in its head, pulsing in green and orange. Strobing colors are just not something you’d expect to find on an animal, or if you did it would be a deep-sea animal. The situation is not good for the snail, let me tell you. It’s due to a parasitic flatworm called the green-banded broodsac. The flatworm infects birds, but to get into the bird, first it has to get into a snail. To get into a snail, it has to be in a bird, though, because it lives in the cloaca of a bird and attaches its eggs to the bird’s droppings. When a snail eats a yummy bird dropping, it also eats the eggs. The eggs hatch in the snail’s body instead of being digested, where eventually they develop into sporocysts. That’s a branched structure that spreads throughout the snail’s body, including into its head and eyestalks. The sporocyst branches that are in the snail’s eyestalks further develop into broodsacs, which look like little worms or caterpillars banded with green and orange or green and yellow, sometimes with black or brown bands too—it depends on the species. About the time the broodsacs are ready for the next stage of life, the parasite takes control of the snail’s brain. The snail goes out in daylight and sits somewhere conspicuous, and its body, or sometimes just its head or eyestalks, becomes semi-translucent so that the broodsacs show through it. Then the broodsacs swell up and start to pulse. The colors and movement resemble a caterpillar enough that it attracts birds that eat caterpillars. A bird will fly up, grab what it thinks is a caterpillar, and eat it up. The broodsac develops into a mature flatworm in the bird’s digestive system, and sticks itself to the walls of the cloaca with two suckers, and the whole process starts again. The snail gets the worst part of this bargain, naturally, but it doesn’t necessarily die. It can survive for a year or more even with the parasite living in it, and it can still use its eyes. When it’s bird time, the bird isn’t interested in the snail itself. It just wants what it thinks is a caterpillar, and a lot of times it just snips the broodsac out of the snail’s eyestalk without doing a lot of damage to the snail. If a bird doesn’t show up right away, sometimes the broodsac will burst out of the eyestalk anyway. It can survive for up to an hour outside the snail and continues to pulsate, so it will sometimes still get eaten by a bird. Okay, that was disgusting. Let’s move on quickly to the tiger beetle, suggested by both Sam and warblrwatchr. There are thousands of tiger beetle species known and they live all over the world, except for Antarctica. Because there are so many different species in so many different habitats, they don’t all look the same, but many common species are reddish-orange with black stripes, which is where the name tiger beetle comes from. Others are plain black or gray, shiny blue, dark or pale brown, spotted, mottled, iridescent, bumpy, plain, bulky, or lightly built. They vary a lot, but one thing they all share are long legs. That’s because the tiger beetle is famous for its running speed. Not all species can fly, but even in the ones that can, its wings are small and it can’t fly far. But it can run so fast that scientists have discovered that its simple eyes can’t gather enough photons for the brain to process an image of its surroundings while it runs. That’s why the beetle will run extremely fast, then stop for a moment before running again. Its brain needs a moment to catch up. The tiger beetle eats insects and other small animals, which it runs after to catch. The fastest species known lives around the shores of Lake Eyre in South Australia, Rivacindela hudsoni. It grows around 20 mm long, and can run as much as 5.6 mph, or 9 km/hour, not that it’s going to be running for an entire hour at a time. Still, that’s incredibly fast for something with little teeny legs. Another insect that is really fast is called the common nawab, suggested by Jayson. It’s a butterfly that lives in tropical forests and rainforests in South Asia and many islands. Its wings are mainly brown or black with a big yellow or greenish spot in the middle and some little white spots along the edges, and the hind wings have two little tails that look like spikes. It’s really pretty and has a wingspan more than three inches across, or about 8.5 cm. The common nawab spends most of its time in the forest canopy, flying quickly from flower to flower. Females will travel long distances, but when a female is ready to lay her eggs, she returns to where she hatched. The male stays in his territory, and will chase away other common nawab males if they approach. The common nawab caterpillar is green with pale yellow stripes, and it has four horn-like projections on its head, which is why it’s called the dragon-headed caterpillar. It’s really awesome-looking and I put it on the list to cover years ago, then forgot it until Jayson recommended it. But it turns out there’s not a lot known about the common nawab, so there’s not a lot to say about it. Next, Richard from NC suggested the velvet worm. It’s not a worm and it’s not made of velvet, although its body is soft and velvety to the touch. It’s long and fairly thin, sort of like a caterpillar in shape but with lots of stubby little legs. There are hundreds of species known in two families. Most species of velvet worm are found in South America and Australia. Some species of velvet worm can grow up to 8 and a half inches long, or 22 cm, but most are much smaller. The smallest lives in New Zealand on the South Island, and only grows up to 10 mm long, with 13 pairs of legs. The largest lives in Costa Rica in Central America and was only discovered in 2010. It has up to 41 pairs of legs, although males only have 34 pairs. Various species of velvet worm are different colors, although a lot of them are reddish, brown, or orangey-brown. Most species have simple eyes, although some have no eyes at all. Its legs are stubby, hollow, and very simple, with a pair of tiny chitin claws at the ends. The claws are retractable and help it climb around. It likes humid, dark places like mossy rocks, leaf litter, fallen logs, caves, and similar habitats. Some species are solitary but others live in social groups of closely related individuals. The velvet worm is an ambush predator, and it hunts in a really weird way. It’s nocturnal and its eyes are not only very simple, but the velvet worm can’t even see ahead of it because its eyes are behind a pair of fleshy antennae that it uses to feel its way delicately forward. It walks so softly on its little legs that the small insects and other invertebrates that it preys on often don’t even notice it. When it comes across an animal, it uses its antennae to very carefully touch it and decide whether it’s worth attacking. When it decides to attack, it squirts slime that acts like glue. It has a gland on either side of its head that squirts slime quite accurately. Once the prey is immobilized, the velvet worm may give smaller squirts of slime at dangerous parts, like the fangs of spiders. Then it punctures the body of its prey with its jaws and injects saliva, which kills the animal and starts to liquefy its insides. While the velvet worm is waiting for this to happen, it eats up its slime to reuse it, then sucks the liquid out of the prey. This can take a long time depending on the size of the animal—more than an hour. A huge number of invertebrates, including all insects and crustaceans, are arthropods, and velvet worms look like they should belong to the phylum Arthropoda. But arthropods always have jointed legs. Velvet worm legs don’t have joints. Velvet worms aren’t arthropods, although they’re closely related. A modern-day velvet worm looks surprisingly like an animal that lived half a billion years ago, Antennacanthopodia, although it lived in the ocean and all velvet worms live on land. Scientists think that the velvet worm’s closest living relative is a very small invertebrate called the tardigrade, or water bear, which is Stewie’s suggestion. The water bear isn’t a bear but a tiny eight-legged animal that barely ever grows larger than 1.5 millimeters. Some species are microscopic. There are about 1,300 known species of water bear and they all look pretty similar, like a plump eight-legged stuffed animal with a tubular mouth that looks a little like a pig’s snout. 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. Like the velvet worm, the tardigrade’s legs don’t have joints. They can bend wherever they want. Tardigrades have the reputation of being extremophiles, able to withstand incredible heat, cold, radiation, space, and anything else scientists can think of. In reality, it’s just a little guy that mostly lives in moss and eats tiny animals or plant material. It is tough, and some species can indeed withstand extreme heat, cold, and so forth, but only for short amounts of time. The tardigrade’s success is mainly 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. When conditions improve, the tardigrade returns to normal. Another animal has a similar ability, and it’s a suggestion by Thaddeus, the immortal jellyfish. It’s barely more than 4 mm across as an adult, and lives throughout much of the world’s oceans, especially where it’s warm. It eats tiny food, including plankton and fish eggs, which it grabs with its tiny tentacles. Small as it is, the immortal jellyfish has stinging cells in its tentacles. It’s mostly transparent, although its stomach is red and an adult jelly has up to 90 white tentacles. The immortal jellyfish starts life as a larva called a planula, which can swim, but when it finds a place it likes, it sticks itself to a rock or shell, or just onto the sea floor. There it develops into a polyp colony, and this colony buds new polyps that are clones of the original. These polyps swim away and grow into jellyfish, which spawn and develop eggs, and those eggs hatch into new planulae. Polyps can live for years, while adult jellies, called medusae, usually only live a few months. But if an adult immortal jellyfish is injured, starving, sick, or otherwise under stress, it can transform back into a polyp. It forms a new polyp colony and buds clones of itself that then grow into adult jellies. It’s the only organism known that can revert to an earlier stage of life after reaching sexual maturity–but only an individual at the adult stage, called the medusa stage, can revert to an earlier stage of development, and an individual can only achieve the medusa stage once after it buds from the polyp colony. If it reverts to the polyp stage, it will remain a polyp until it eventually dies, so it’s not really immortal but it’s still very cool. All the animals we’ve talked about today have been quite small. Let’s finish with a suggestion from Kabir, a deep-sea animal that’s really big! It’s the giant siphonophore, Praya dubia, which lives in cold ocean water around many parts of the world. It’s one of the longest creatures known to exist, but it’s not a single animal. Each siphonophore is a colony of tiny animals called zooids, all clones although they perform different functions so the whole colony can thrive. Some zooids help the colony swim, while others have tiny tentacles that grab prey, and others digest the food and disperse the nutrients to the zooids around it. Some siphonophores are small but some can grow quite large. The Portuguese man o’ war, which looks like a floating jellyfish, is actually a type of siphonophore. Its stinging tentacles can be 100 feet long, or 30 m. Other siphonophores are long, transparent, gelatinous strings that float through the depths of the sea, and that’s the kind the giant siphonophore is. The giant siphonophore can definitely grow longer than 160 feet, or 50 meters, and may grow considerably longer. Siphonophores are delicate, and if they get washed too close to shore or the surface, waves and currents can tear them into pieces. Other than that, and maybe the occasional whale or big fish swimming right through them and breaking them up, there’s really no reason why a siphonophore can’t just keep on growing and growing and growing… You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Holly for suggesting this week’s topic! Further reading: Mermaids: Myth, Kith and Kin [this article is not for children] Feejee Mermaid A manatee: A female grey seal, looking winsome: A drawing of the “original” Fiji (or Feejee) mermaid: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s close out the year 2025 with a mystery episode! Holly suggested we talk about mermaids! Mermaids are creatures of folklore who are supposed to look like humans, but instead of legs they have fish tails. These days mermaids are usually depicted with a single tail, but it was common in older artwork for a mermaid to be shown with two tails, which replaced both legs. Not all mermaids were girls, either. Mermen were just as common. Cultures from around the world have stories about mermaid-like individuals. Sometimes they’re gods or goddesses, like the Syrian story of a goddess so beautiful that when she transformed into a fish, only her legs changed, because her upper half was too beautiful to alter, or the Greek god Triton, who is usually depicted as a man with two fish tails for legs. Sometimes they’re monsters who cause storms, curse ships, or lure sailors to their doom. Sometimes they can transform into humans, like the story from Madagascar about a fisherman who catches a mermaid in his net. She transforms into a human woman and they get married, but when he breaks a promise to her, she turns back into a mermaid and swims away. In 2012, a TV special aired on Animal Planet that claimed that mermaids were real, and a lot of people believed it. It imitated the kind of real documentaries that Animal Planet often ran, and the only disclaimer was in the credits. I remember how upset a lot of people were about it, especially teachers and scientists. So just to be clear, mermaids aren’t real. Many researchers think at least some mermaid stories might be based on real animals. The explorer Christopher Columbus reported seeing three mermaids in 1493, but said they weren’t as beautiful as he’d heard. Most researchers think he actually saw manatees. A few centuries later, a mermaid was captured and killed off the coast of Brazil by European scientists, and the careful drawings we still have of the mermaid’s hand bones correspond exactly to the bones of a manatee’s flipper. Female manatees are larger than males on average, and a really big female can grow over 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters. Most manatees are between 9 and 10 feet long, or a little less than 3 meters. Its body is elongated like a whale’s, but unlike a whale it’s slow, usually only swimming about as fast as a human can swim. Its skin is gray or brown although often it has algae growing on it that helps camouflage it. The end of the manatee’s tail looks like a rounded paddle, and it has front flippers but no rear limbs. Its face is rounded with a prehensile upper lip covered with bristly whiskers, which it uses to find and gather water plants. The manatee doesn’t look a lot like a person, but it looks more like a person than most water animals. It has a neck and can turn its head like a person, its flippers are fairly long and resemble arms, and females have a pair of teats that are near their armpits, if a manatee had armpits, which it does not. But that’s close enough for Christopher Columbus to decide he was seeing a mermaid. Seals may have also contributed to mermaid stories. In Scottish folklore, the selkie is a seal that can transform into human shape, usually by taking off its skin. There are lots of stories of people who steal the selkie’s skin and hide it so that the selkie will marry the person—because selkies are beautiful in their human form. Eventually the selkie finds the hidden skin and returns to the sea. Similar seal-folk legends are found in other parts of northern Europe, including Sweden, Iceland, Norway, and Ireland. Many of the stories overlap with mermaid stories. Seals do have appealing human-like faces, have clawed front flippers that sort of resemble arms, and have rear flippers that are fused to act like a tail, even if it doesn’t look much like a fish tail. The grey seal is a common animal off the coast of northern Europe, and a big male can grow almost 11 feet long, or 3.3 meters, although 9 feet is more common, or 2.7 meters. It has a large snout and no external ear flaps. Males are dark grey or brown, females are more silvery in color. It mainly eats fish, but will also eat other animals, including crustaceans, octopuses, other seals, and even porpoises. While I don’t think it has anything to do with the mermaid or selkie legends, it is interesting to note that seals are good at imitating human voices. We learned about this in episode 225, about talking mammals. For instance, Hoover the talking seal, a harbor seal from Maine who was raised by a human after his mother died. Imagine if you were walking along the shore and a seal said this to you: [Hoover the talking seal saying “Hey get over here!”] Let’s finish with the Japanese legend of the ningyo and a weird taxidermy creature called the Feejee mermaid. The ningyo is a being of folklore that dates back to at least the 7th century. It was a fish with a head like a person, usually found in the ocean but sometimes in freshwater. If someone found a ningyo washed up on shore, it was supposed to be a bad omen, foretelling war and other disasters. If you remember the big fish episode a few weeks ago, if an oarfish is found near the surface of the ocean around Japan, it’s supposed to foretell an earthquake. The oarfish has a red fin that runs from its head down its spine, like a mane or a comb, and the ningyo was also supposed to have a red comb on its head, like a rooster’s comb, or sometimes red hair. Some people think the ningyo is based on the oarfish. The oarfish is a deep-sea fish so it’s rare, usually only seen near the surface when it’s dying, and it has a flat face that looks more like a human face than most fish, if you squint and really want to believe you’re seeing a mythical creature. These days, artwork of the ningyo usually looks a lot more like mermaids of European legend, but the earliest paintings don’t usually have arms, just a human head on a fish body. But by the late 18th century, a weird type of artwork had become popular among Japanese fishermen, a type of crude but inventive taxidermy that created what looked like small, creepy mermaids. They looked like dried-out monkeys from the waist up, with a dried-out fish tail instead of legs. That’s because that’s exactly what they were. Japanese fishermen made these mermaids along with lots of other monsters, and sold them to travelers for high prices. The fishermen told tall tales about how they’d found the monster, killed it, and preserved it, and pretended to be reluctant to sell it, and of course that meant the traveler would offer even more money for it. The most famous of these fake monsters was called the Fiji Mermaid, and it got famous because P.T. Barnum displayed it in his museum in 1842 and said it had been caught near the Fiji Islands, in the South Pacific. It was about three feet along, or 91 cm, and was probably made from a young monkey and a salmon. The original Fiji mermaid was probably destroyed in a fire at some point, but it was such a popular exhibit that other wannabe showmen either bought or made replicas, some of which are still around today. People still sometimes make similar monsters, but they use craft materials instead of dead animals. They’re still creepy-looking, though, which is part of the fun. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!  

Thanks to Emily, Jo, and Alexandra for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Highland Cattle Society Mongolian Sheep The Donkey Sanctuary The Highland cow is so cute (picture taken from the first site linked above): Some fat-tailed sheep (picture taken from the sheep article linked above): Donkeys: A happy donkey and a happy person (photo taken from the Donkey Sanctuary’s site, linked above): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. After last week’s giant fish episode, this week we’re going to have a shorter episode of animals you’ve probably seen, especially if you live in the countryside. But first, I forgot to credit two people from last week’s episode, Dylan and Emily, who both wanted to hear about mudskippers along with Arthur! I had so many names I missed some. This week we’ll talk about some domestic mammals, suggested by Alexandra, Jo, and Emily. Let’s start with Emily’s suggestion, the Highland cow. Cows are classified in the family Bovidae, which includes not just the domestic cow and its relations but goats, sheep, antelopes, and many other animals with cloven hooves who chew the cud as part of the digestive process–but not deer or giraffes, and not the pronghorn even though people call it an antelope. It is confusing. Many bovids have horns, usually only two but sometimes four or even six, and those horns are never branched. Sometimes only the male has horns, sometimes both the male and female. Bovids don’t have incisors in the front of the upper jaw, only in the lower jaw. Instead, a bovid has a tough dental pad that helps it grab plants. The Highland cow is a breed of domestic cow that originated in Scotland, although it’s now popular in many other places too. It’s a tough animal with a long outer coat of fur and a short, fuzzy undercoat that helps it survive harsh winters. Most are reddish-brown, but some are black, silvery-white, dun, or other shades. It has long, wide horns and its long fur usually falls over its face, which protects its eyes and also looks incredibly cute. Not only can the Highland cow thrive on pasture that’s considered poor, meaning the plants aren’t as nutritious, it’s also disease resistant, even-tempered, and intelligent. It’s a compact, relatively small cow, but it’s not a miniature cow. Like, you can’t pick it up like a dog, although you could probably hug one if the farmer says it’s okay. A bull can stand about 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters, while cows are smaller overall. The Highland cow is raised for its meat, which is naturally lean and delicious. But because they also happen to be small for cows, and so even-tempered, and so cute, many small farms and petting zoos keep a few just as pets. Since the Highland cow likes eating plants that other cow breeds won’t touch, it’s also helpful for clearing overgrown land. Next, Alexandra wanted to learn more about the fat-tailed sheep, another bovid. The sheep is one of the oldest domesticated animals in the world, with some experts estimating that it was first domesticated at least 11,000 years ago and possibly over 13,000 years ago, around Asia and the Middle East. Sheep are especially useful to humans because not only can you eat them, they produce wool. Wool has incredible insulating properties, as you’ll know if you’ve ever worn a wool sweater in the snow. Even if it gets wet, you stay nice and warm. Even better, you don’t have to kill the sheep to get the wool. The sheep just gets a haircut every year to cut its wool short. Wild sheep don’t grow a lot of wool, though. They mostly have hair like goats. Humans didn’t start selecting for domestic sheep that produced wool until around 8,000 years ago. The fat-tailed sheep isn’t a single breed but a type of sheep, most common in central Asia, northern Africa, and the Middle East. It’s adapted for life in arid conditions, where there isn’t a lot of water. The fat deposits on both sides of the tail act like a camel’s hump, allowing the animal to absorb the stored fat if it can’t find enough food and water. The fat-tailed sheep can have a really huge tail, so big it can make up almost a third of its body weight. Because the fat mostly collects on either side of the tail bones, the tail’s shape has two lobes, which makes the sheep look like it has an extra butt on its butt. In some breeds, the tail gets wider as the fat deposits grow, while in other breeds, the tail just gets longer, sometimes so long it actually brushes the ground. The tail fat helps the sheep, but it’s also considered a delicacy to people. Wherever the fat-tailed sheep is raised, there are special recipes to cook the tail. Many breeds of fat-tailed sheep also produce long, coarse wool that’s used to make carpets and felt. We’ll finish with Jo’s suggestion, the domestic donkey. Donkeys are equids, and instead of cloven hooves like bovids, they have solid hooves. They’re closely related to horses and zebras, and more distantly related to rhinoceroses and tapirs. The domestic donkey is descended from the African wild ass. Researchers estimate it was domesticated around five to seven thousand years ago by the ancient nomadic peoples of Nubia in Africa, and quickly spread throughout the Middle East and into southern Asia and Europe. The domestic donkey is a strong, sturdy animal that’s usually fairly small. One of the biggest breeds is the American Mammoth Jackstock, and another is the French Baudet du Poitou, which has long fur. Both breeds can be as big as a horse. Big donkey breeds like these were mostly developed to cross with horses, to produce even larger, stronger mules. Mules are hybrid animals and are infertile, but they’re very strong. The donkey is usually gray or brown and has long ears. Most have a darker stripe down the spine, called an eel stripe, and another stripe across the shoulders. Many have a lighter-colored nose, belly, and legs. The donkey’s mane is short and stands upright. The donkey’s small size and big strength has made it a popular working animal throughout the world. It can carry loads, can be ridden, and can pull carts and plows. It’s famously tough and can be stubborn if it doesn’t feel like it’s being treated well, and it can even be dangerous when it kicks and bites. Sometimes farmers keep donkeys with their sheep or other animals, because the donkey will look out for danger and warn the herd by braying if it sees a predator. If the predator gets too close, the donkey will attack it instead of running away. In many places in the world, the donkey is an important work animal even today. Not everyone is lucky enough to afford a tractor or truck, so donkeys do the same work for people that they’ve done for thousands of years. The problem is that when a donkey gets old or is injured, and can’t work anymore, sometimes they’re killed for meat or just abandoned. Luckily there are donkey rescues who do their best to help as many donkeys as they can, especially the Donkey Sanctuary. The Donkey Sanctuary started in England in 1969, but it now has sanctuaries throughout Europe, and it runs programs that offer free veterinary care and education about donkeys for people in many parts of the world. One important thing the Donkey Sanctuary does, and other donkey rescues do too, is give a home to elderly donkeys who can’t work anymore. It’s only fair that a hard-working donkey gets to retire and have a peaceful old age. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!

It’s an episode just absolutely full of fish! Thanks to Arthur, Yuzu, Jayson, Kabir, Nora, Siya, Joel, Elizabeth, Mac, Ryder, Alyx, Dean, and Riley for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Study uncovers mechanics of machete-like ‘tail-whipping’ in thresher sharks Business end of a sawfish: Giant freshwater stingray! The frilled shark looks like an eel: The frilled shark’s teeth: The thresher shark and its whip-like tail [photo by Thomas Alexander – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50280277]: The Halmahera epaulette shark, looking a little bit like a long skinny koi fish [photo by Mark Erdmann, California Academy of Sciences, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30260864]: A mudskipper, which is a fish even though it kind of looks like a weird frog [photo by Heinonlein – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44502355]: The red-lipped batfish wants a big kiss: The male blue groper is very blue [photo by Andrew Harvey, some rights reserved (CC BY) – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/62196538, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=157789928]: The giant oarfish is very long: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a big fish episode! I mean, it’s a big episode about a lot of different fish, not necessarily fish that are big—although some of them sure are! Thanks to Arthur, Yuzu, Jayson, Kabir, Nora, Siya, Joel, Elizabeth, Mac, Ryder, Alyx, Dean, and Riley. I told you this is a big fish episode. Let’s jump right in with a fish suggested by Jayson, the sawfish. There are five species of sawfish alive today. The smallest can still grow over 10 feet long, or 3 meters, while the biggest species can grow over 20 feet long, or 6 meters. The largest sawfish ever reliably measured was 24 feet long, or 7.3 meters. The sawfish lives mostly in warm, shallow ocean waters, usually where the bottom is muddy or sandy. It can also tolerate brackish and even freshwater, and will sometimes swim into rivers and live there just fine. The sawfish is a type of ray, and rays are most closely related to sharks. Like sharks, rays have an internal skeleton made of cartilage instead of bone, but they also have bony teeth. You can definitely see the similarity between sharks and sawfish in the body shape, although the sawfish is flattened underneath, which allows it to lie on the ocean floor. There’s also another detail that helps you tell a sawfish from most sharks: the rostrum, or snout. It’s surprisingly long and studded with teeth on both sides, which makes it look like a saw. The teeth on the sawfish’s saw are actual teeth. They’re called rostral teeth and the rostrum itself is part of the skull, not a beak or a mouth. It’s covered in skin just like the rest of the body. The sawfish’s mouth is located underneath the body quite a bit back from the rostrum’s base, and the mouth contains a lot of ordinary teeth that aren’t very sharp. Since the sawfish has plenty of teeth in its mouth, you may be wondering how and why it also has extra teeth on both sides of its saw. It’s because the rostral teeth evolved from dermal denticles. Dermal denticles look like scales but they’re literally teeth, they’re just not used for eating. Sharks have them too, along with some other fish. In the case of the sawfish, the rostral teeth grow much larger than an ordinary dermal denticle, and stick out sideways. Both the rostrum and the head are packed with electroreceptors that allow the sawfish to sense tiny electrical charges that animals emit as they move. This might mean a school of fish swimming through muddy water, or it might mean a crustacean hiding in the sand. The sawfish sometimes uses its rostrum to dig prey out of the sand, but it also uses it to slash at fish or other animals. Then the sawfish can either grab the injured or dead animal with its mouth or pin it to the sea floor with its rostrum to maneuver it into its mouth. Its mouth is relatively small and it prefers to swallow its food whole, head-first, so it can only eat fish that are smaller than its mouth. That’s also why it doesn’t want to eat people. Its mouth is too small. Yuzu wanted to learn about another shark relation, the giant freshwater stingray, which lives in rivers in southeast Asia. It’s dark gray-brown on its back and white underneath, and it has a little pointy nose at the front of its disc. It also has dermal denticles on its back. The giant freshwater stingray has a rounded, flattened body, and it’s really big. A big female can grow over 7 feet across, or 2.2 meters. Its tail is long and thin with the largest spine of any stingray known, up to 15 inches long, or 38 cm. Its tail is so long that if you measure the giant freshwater stingray by length including its tail, instead of by width of its disc, it can be as much as 16 feet long, or about 5 meters. Some researchers think there might be individuals out there much larger than any ever measured, possibly up to 16 feet wide. The length and thinness of the tail gives the ray its other common name, the giant freshwater whipray, because its tail looks like a whip. While we’re talking about shark relations, let’s go ahead and talk about a few actual sharks. Kabir wanted to learn about the frilled shark, which looks and acts more like an eel than a shark. A big female can grow up to 6 and a half feet long, or 2 meters. Males are a little shorter on average. The frilled shark has the same anatomy found in ancient sharks from the fossil record, dating back at least 95 million years. It’s found a body type that works for it. The frilled shark lives on the continental shelf in many parts of the world, and while it technically lives near the sea floor, at night it migrates closer to the ocean surface to find fish, squid and other cephalopods, and other food. There are two species known, with the southern African frilled shark only discovered in 2009. The frilled shark is dark brown or gray, and its jaws are long and contain clusters of teeth in little rows. Each tooth has three sharp points, and there are 300 teeth, so a frilled shark has 900 points in its mouth. The points are so sharp that scientists examining dead sharks have gotten cut on the teeth, which would be really embarrassing if you’re a shark expert that was bitten by a dead shark. The frilled shark can open its jaws extremely wide to swallow fish and other animals that are up to about half the size of the shark itself. It even eats other sharks. Next, Joel wanted to learn about the thresher shark. It’s a truly big fish that can grow up to 20 feet long, or over 6 meters. It’s a fast, slender shark with a tail fin that can be as long as its body. It eats a lot of other animals, including birds and crustaceans, but it specializes in hunting fish that travel in schools, like tuna, sardines, and mackerel. It uses its incredibly long tail as a whip, slapping a fish to stun it so the shark can eat it. When it whips its tail, its body flexes so that its head points downward in the water with the tail snapping forward over it. A 2024 study determined that the thresher shark’s vertebral column is fortified to allow it to work like a catapult. The thresher shark can also use its long tail to help it leap out of the water completely, although scientists don’t know why it wants to do that. There are three species of thresher shark known to science, but in 1995 a genetic analysis revealed the possible presence of a fourth species. Scientists think it lives in the eastern Pacific and may look similar to the bigeye thresher, enough that it gets misidentified as that species when it’s seen. The three known species of thresher shark are hard to tell apart at a distance as it is. And for our last shark, Siya asked about the Halmahera epaulette shark. It’s light brown with darker and lighter spots, and is a slender shark that can grow a little over 2 feet long, or 68 cm. It lives around Indonesia, and it might live in other places too. We don’t know yet, because it was only discovered in 2013 and only two specimens have ever been found. Epaulette sharks are also called walking sharks, because they use their fins to walk along the sea floor and explore crevices in rocks. Some species can even walk short distances on land to enter tidal pools and other places where they can find food. They live in warm, shallow water, usually near reefs or islands, and they eat whatever small animals they can find. There are nine species known, but there are undoubtedly more than haven’t yet been discovered by science. You might think this is strange for a shark that can walk on land, but walking sharks are nocturnal and not very big, so it’s easy to miss them when they’re out and about. That brings us to Arthur’s suggestion, the mudskipper. The mudskipper also uses its fins to walk. Its pectoral fins are muscular and allow it to climb out of the water and onto land, climb into low branches, and even jump. Its pectoral fins look like little arms, complete with an elbow. The elbow is actually a joint between the actual fins and the radial bones, which in most fish are hidden within the body but which stick out of the mudskipper’s sides a short distance. This helps it move around on land more easily. Its pelvic fins are also shaped in such a way that they act as little suction cups on land. The mudskipper is so good at living on land that it’s actually considered semi-aquatic. It lives in mudflats, mangrove swamps, the mouths of rivers where they empty into the ocean, and along the coast, although it prefers water that’s less salty than the ocean but more salty than ordinary freshwater. It only lives in tropical and subtropical areas because it needs high humidity to absorb oxygen through its skin and the lining of its mouth and throat. The mudskipper is a fish, but it looks an awful lot like a frog in some ways, due to convergent evolution. It has a wide mouth and froglike eyes at the top of its head and will often float just under the water with its eyes above water, looking for insects it can catch. The largest species grows about a foot long, or 30 cm, and while it has some scales, its body is coated with a layer of mucus to help it retain moisture. It spends most of the day on land, hunting for insects and other small animals. Not only can it absorb oxygen through its skin, it keeps water in its gill chambers to keep the gills wet too. It even has a little dimple under its eye that holds water, that helps keep its eyes moist. The mudskipper also takes a big mouthful of water with it when it climbs on land, but not to breathe. It uses the water to hunt with. When it encounters an insect or other small animal on land, it carefully rotates its mouth–yes, it can rotate its mouth, which has led to me trying to rotate my mouth, something humans can’t actually do–so that its mouth is just above the animal. Then it spits out the mouthful of water onto the insect and immediately sucks the water back into its mouth, carrying the insect with it. When it catches an animal underwater, it opens its big mouth quickly, causing suction that sucks the animal right into its mouth. It also has sharp teeth, so when an animal is in its mouth, it’s not getting out again. Alyx, Dean, and Riley suggested we talk about the red-lipped batfish, a type of anglerfish only found around the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. It lives on the ocean floor where the water is fairly shallow, and it grows about 8 inches long, or 20 cm. It’s usually a mottled brown, green, or grey with a white stomach, but its mouth is bright red. It looks like it’s wearing lipstick. It eats fish and other small animals, which it attracts using a lure on its head, a highly modified dorsal fin called an illicium. The weirdest thing about the red-lipped batfish is actually its fins. It prefers to walk on the bottom of the ocean instead of swim, and it has modified pectoral fins called pseudolegs. The pseudolegs make it look a little bit like a weird frog with lipstick. Researchers think the red lips may be a way to attract potential mates, presumably ones who are hoping for a big smooch. At this rate I’m wondering if there are any fish that don’t walk on their fins. Next, Mac wanted to learn about a fish called the payara. The problem is, there are two fish with that name, so let’s learn about them both! The first payara is a pretty, silvery fish with a couple of small dark spots on its body. It’s found in the Amazon basin in South America and can grow at least 1 foot 8 inches long, or 51 cm. It’s sometimes kept in large aquariums, and is sometimes called the vampire tetra or the vampire fish because it has a pair of long fangs that it uses to stab other fish with before eating them. Its fangs stick up from its lower jaw, though, so if it’s a vampire fish, it’s an upside-down vampire. As for the other payara, it’s related to the first kind and is also found in South America, but it’s even larger. It can grow a little over 3 feet long, or 3.3 meters. Its teeth are also large and sharp, including two big fangs sticking up from its lower jaw. In a big individual, its fangs may be 4 inches long, or 10 cm. This is not a fish you want to get bitten by! You are probably not in any danger of being bitten by this payara, though, unless you happen to spend a lot of your time swimming along the bottom of rivers in the Amazon. Quite a while ago, Ryder suggested we learn about the pipe cichlid. I tried to find more about it and I think it’s actually a fish called the pike cichlid. Pike cichlids are popular freshwater aquarium fish that are native to tropical and subtropical parts of eastern South America, and there are about 45 species known so far. They’re typically quite small, with most species only growing a few inches long, or around 8 cm, although some species are more than twice that length. The pike part of their name comes from their shape, like a teeny-tiny pike, a predatory fish that can grow up to 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters. Pike and pike cichlids aren’t related, but pike cichlids are predatory. It’s just that instead of eating other fish, ducks, frogs, and even reptiles and mammals that end up in the water, the pike cichlid mostly eats insects. Elizabeth wanted to learn about the blue groper, a fish found around Australia and nowhere else in the world. It lives around reefs and rocky areas near the coast, where it can find plenty of starfish, urchins, crustaceans, and other small animals to eat. It can grow almost six feet long, or 1.75 meters, and its teeth are peg-shaped to help it pick mollusks and other animals off of rocks before crushing them. It’s called the blue groper because males are a beautiful blue color, while females are brown or reddish-brown and young fish are green. All young blue gropers are female, and as they grow up some change to become males while most remain females. The fish grow very slowly and can live to be at least 70 years old, so the fish don’t even reach maturity until they’re 15 or 20 years old. When a fish is around 30 or 35 years old, it will change gender again, this time becoming a male. But if the male of a group dies, the group’s dominant female will change into a male and turn blue. This is common in the family of fish that the blue groper belongs to, Labridae, also called wrasses. Let’s finish with a suggestion from Nora, the oarfish. The giant oarfish and Russell’s oarfish can both grow at least 26 feet long, or 8 meters, and possibly much longer. Most of its length is tail, which often shows damage from being bitten. Since its organs are all close to the front of its body, and it doesn’t need its tail for swimming, if a predator takes a bite out of its tail, the fish is going to be fine. The oarfish can even detach pieces of its tail if it needs to, the same way some lizards can, to distract a potential predator. Like those lizards, the tail doesn’t grow back. The oarfish is silvery in color with a red crest on its head and a mane-like fin down its back, although it’s actually an elongated dorsal fin. It has extremely long pelvic fins too. The giant oarfish has a short, blunt snout and no teeth because it filters krill and other tiny animals from the water. It doesn’t have scales. Instead, its skin is soft with a delicate layer called ganoine that gives it a shimmery, almost metallic appearance. The long filaments of the crest on its head and its pelvic fins are also delicate. But although it’s long and slender like an eel, it actually swims vertically with its head pointing up and its tail down. We’re not sure why, although one theory is that this minimizes its profile to predators looking up from below. It can swim quickly straight up and down to avoid predators that mostly just swim forward. We know so little about the oarfish, and what we know is so strange, that it’s the next best thing to a sea serpent. The first living giant oarfish was only filmed in 2001. Most oarfish are only seen when they’re dead or dying. It seems to live throughout the world’s oceans, except for the Arctic and Antarctic, and is a deep-sea fish but may migrate closer to the surface at night to find more food. A Japanese legend says the oarfish predicts earthquakes. If an oarfish is seen near the surface or washes up on a beach, an earthquake is supposed to be imminent. That seems to be a coincidence, though. The oarfish looks like a sea serpent, and some people think it might have given rise to some sea serpent sightings. This may or may not be the case, but it’s certainly a mysterious fish. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Måns, Sam, Owen and Askel for this week’s suggestions! Further reading: Shingleback Lizard What controls the colour of the common mānuka stick insect? The mossy leaf-tailed gecko has skin flaps that hide its shadow. There’s a lizard in this photo, I swear! [photo by Charles J. Sharp – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92125100]: A shingleback lizard, pretending it has two heads: The beautiful wood nymph is a beautiful moth but also it looks like a bird poop: The Indian stick insect (photo by Ryan K Perry, found on this page): The buff tip moth mimics a broken-off stick. This person has a whole handful of them: A cuttlefish can change colors quickly [photo by Σ64 – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77733806]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to talk about a few types of camouflage, a suggestion by Måns, and we’ll also talk about some camouflaged animals suggested by Sam, Owen and Aksel, Dylan, and Nina. There are lots of types of camouflage, not all of it visual in nature. Back in episode 191 we talked about some toxic moths that generate high-pitched clicks that bats hear, recognize, and avoid. Naturally, some non-toxic moths also generate the same sounds to mimic the toxic moths. Måns specifically suggested cryptic coloration, also called crypsis. It’s a type of camouflage that allows an animal to blend into their surroundings, which can involve multiple methods. Some animals have cryptic coloration mainly along the edges of the body, to defeat a skill many predators use called edge detection. A lot of amphibians and reptiles have patches surrounded by an outline, with dark patches having a darker outline and light patches having a lighter outline. This acts as disruptive camouflage, hiding the outline of an animal’s body as it moves around. Some animals take this camouflage even further, with a way to hide their own shadow. This is the case with the mossy leaf-tailed gecko, which is native to the forests of eastern Madagascar. It can grow up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm, not counting its tail, and it’s nocturnal. Its tail is flat and broad, sort of shaped like a leaf, but it doesn’t disguise itself as a leaf. The mossy leaf-tailed gecko has a complicated gray and brown pattern that looks like tree bark, and it can change its coloration a little bit to help it blend in even more. At night it’s well hidden in tree branches as it climbs around looking for insects, but in the day it needs to hide really well to avoid becoming some other animal’s snack while it’s sleeping. It does this by finding a comfortable branch and flattening its body and tail against it so that it just looks like another part of the branch. But to make it even more hidden, it has a flap of skin along its sides that wraps even farther around the branch. Not only do these skin flaps hide its edges, it hides its shadow, since the flaps are really flat and there’s no curved edge of a lizard belly pressed against a branch that a predator might notice. The most common kind of cryptic coloration is called countershading, and it’s so common that you might not even have noticed it although you see it almost every time you see a fish, amphibian, reptile, and many birds and mammals. Countershading is an animal that’s darker on top and lighter underneath, like a brown mouse with a white belly. It’s even found in some insects and other invertebrates. Countershading is another way to hide a shadow. If a dolphin, for instance, was gray all over, its underside would look darker because of shadows, since sunlight shines down from the sky and makes shadows underneath the body. That would make its body shape look rounder, meaning it stands out more and a predator would notice it more easily. But most dolphins are pale gray or even white underneath. There’s still a shadow, but it’s no longer darker than the rest of the body. The lighter colored underside makes the shadow paler, and as a result, from a distance the dolphin looks almost the same shade all over, which makes it appear flat and the edges of its body harder to see. We even know that some dinosaurs were countershaded, with lighter colored bellies. Countershading is so common in animals that it’s almost impossible to pick one example. Dylan suggested we learn about the shingleback lizard, an amazing animal found in many parts of Australia. It’s also called the stumpy-tailed lizard, the bobtail lizard, or the two-headed lizard. All three of those names refer to the animal’s tail, which is short and fat and actually looks like a second head. This is an example of automimicry, similar to animals that have markings that look like eyes. The lizard is brown with darker and lighter speckles and it sometimes has yellow spots too. Its belly is pale with dark spots. Its scales are large and overlap each other, and its eyes are tiny, like little black beads. It grows about a foot long, or 30 cm. The shingleback lives in arid and desert areas, and its tough skin and overlapping scales help reduce water loss. It eats snails, insects, flowers, and other small animals and plants. When threatened, it will open its mouth wide and stick out its large, dark blue tongue. It is an impressively blue, impressively big tongue, and the inside of the shingleback’s mouth is bright pink, so the lizard has a chance to escape while its predator is startled and wondering if the lizard is dangerous. The shingleback can give a painful bite, although it’s not venomous. The shingleback mates for life, and the female gives birth to two or three live young every year instead of laying eggs. In many reptiles that give birth to live young, the eggs basically remain in the mother’s body until they hatch, and then she gives birth. But in the shingleback’s case, her babies develop in placentas in a process very similar in many ways to placental mammals. The babies eat the placenta after they’re born, giving them a quick first meal, and they’re born ready to take care of themselves. Sam suggested we talk about animals that can be confused with inanimate objects, which is a type of camouflage referred to as mimicry. Mimicry of all kinds is a really common type of camouflage, like all those harmless insects that have yellow and black stripes to mimic bees and wasps that can sting. My favorite inanimate object mimic is a moth we talked about in episode 191, the beautiful wood nymph of eastern North America. It has a wingspan of 1.8 inches, or 4.6 cm, and it is indeed a beautiful little moth. Its front wings are mostly white with brown along the edges and a few brown and yellow spots, while the rear wings are a soft yellow-brown with a narrow brown edge. It has furry legs that are white with black tips. But when the moth folds its wings to rest, suddenly those pretty markings make it look exactly like a bird dropping. It even stretches out its front legs so they resemble a little splatter on the edge of the poop. If you think about it, it makes sense that a tiny animal like an insect would want to resemble something common in its environment that’s also not eaten by very many other animals. For instance, a stick. Owen and Aksel wanted to learn more about the walking stick, since it’s been a long time since we talked about it, episode 93. Walking stick insects are also called stick insects or phasmids. When I was a kid I was terrified of the whole idea of a stick insect, although I don’t know why. I think I thought one day I’d climb a tree and discover that some of those sticks were not actually part of the tree. I guess I spent a lot of time climbing trees, but I never actually saw a walking stick insect. Maybe that’s because they were so well camouflaged that I thought they were sticks! Walking sticks live in trees and bushes, naturally, especially in warm areas, but they’re found on every continent except Antarctica. They’re long, thin insects with long, thin legs and they really do look like sticks. Some are green, some are brown or gray, and many have little patterns, projections, and ridges that make them look even more like real sticks. They’re closely related to another type of phasmid called a leaf insect, which as you may have already guessed, mimics a leaf. All phasmids eat leaves and other plant material and most are nocturnal. Some phasmids can even change colors to help blend in with their background. The Indian stick insect, which is indeed found in southern India although it’s been introduced in many other parts of the world and is considered invasive in some places, grows up to about 4 inches long, or 10 cm. It’s usually brown, but it can change its color in response to light levels by moving pigment granules in its cuticle that absorb and scatter light. The Indian stick insect has many other ways to hide in plain sight. If it feels threatened, it will stretch out with its rear legs folded flat against its body and its front pair of legs stretched forward to make it look even longer. It will stay perfectly stiff even if someone picks it up, but if it thinks it’s in danger, it will spread its front legs to show a patch of red at the base of the legs. This can startle or frighten a potential predator long enough to let the stick insect get away. One interesting thing about the Indian stick insect is that almost all individuals are females. Females don’t need to mate with a male to reproduce. The female’s babies are little clones of herself, and she drops an egg every so often onto the ground. It looks like a tiny seed, and ants think it’s a seed and will collect it and take it back to the nest to be stored for later. The egg is then protected until it hatches, when the larval insect leaves the ant nest and finds a tree or bush to hide in. The buff tip moth also looks like a twig or branch when its wings are folded, but not in the same way the walking stick insect does. It looks like a broken-off branch instead. It’s a fairly large moth with a wingspan more than 2 and a half inches across, or 7 cm, and its wings are mostly gray with a rounded buff patch at the end. The end of its abdomen is buff too, so that it looks like the inside part of a tree branch, that’s paler than the bark. It lives throughout much of Europe and Asia, and different populations look slightly different because they’ve evolved to resemble the branches of different species of tree. Let’s finish with Nina’s suggestion, about an animal that can change colors really fast to blend in with its background. That’s the cuttlefish, and Nina wanted to know how it changes colors so fast, and while we’re at it, why octopuses are so flexible. The cuttlefish is a cephalopod, closely related to octopuses and squid, but is quite small in comparison. It has eight arms and two feeding tentacles, just like the squid, but its arms are really small in comparison to its mantle. There are over 100 species known so far, most of which are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But unlike the squid or the octopus, the cuttlefish has an internal structure called the cuttlebone. It’s not a bone at all but a modified shell, which is your reminder that cephalopods are mollusks and are distantly related to clams, snails, and many other animals that have shells. The cuttlebone helps the cuttlefish stay buoyant without effort, and it also incidentally makes the body a little more structured than its squid and octopus cousins. Octopuses are flexible because they have no bones. Basically the only hard structure in an octopus is its beak. A cephalopod’s mouth is in the middle of its arms, so it’s usually hidden from view. Way back in episode 142 we talked about how octopus muscles work, so let’s revisit that briefly. In animals with bones, muscles are attached to the bones. But octopuses don’t have bones. The octopus’s muscles are structured differently than muscles in animals with bones. Our muscles are made up of fibers that contract in one direction. Let’s say you pick up something heavy. To do so, you contract the fibers in some muscles to shorten them, which makes the bone they’re attached to move. Then, when you push a heavy door closed, you contract other muscles and at the same time you relax the muscles you used to pick up something heavy. This pulls the arm bone in the other direction. But in the octopus, the fibers in its muscles run in three directions. When one set of fibers contracts, the other two tighten against each other and form a hard surface for the contracted fibers to move. So they’re muscles that also sort of act like bones. It’s called a muscular hydrostat, and it actually can result in muscle movements much more precise than muscle movements where a bone is involved. So, if you combine the octopus’s strong, precise muscle movements with its general lack of hard structures, you get a very flexible animal. Basically an octopus can squish itself through extremely small openings, as long as its beak will fit through. This can make it really hard to keep an octopus in captivity, because in addition to being flexible and squishy, the octopus is also really intelligent. It can survive for short periods of time out of the water, and it can figure out how to open its enclosure and get out to explore, or just escape. But, back to the cuttlefish, which is small and needs to hide from predators. Like other cephalopods, the cuttlefish can change color and pattern in less than a second, and can even change the texture of its skin if it wants to look bumpy like the rocks around it. Cephalopods have specialized cells called chromatophores in their skin. A chromatophore consists of a sac filled with pigment and a nerve, and each chromatophore is surrounded by tiny muscles. When a cuttlefish wants to change colors, its nervous system activates the tiny muscles around the correct chromatophores. That is, some chromatophores contain yellow pigment, some contain red or brown. Because the color change is controlled by the nervous system and muscles, it happens incredibly quickly, in just milliseconds. But that’s not all, because the cuttlefish also has other cells called iridophores and leucophores. Iridophores are layers of extremely thin cells that can reflect light of certain wavelengths, which results in iridescent patches of color on the skin. While the cuttlefish can control these reflections, it takes a little longer, several seconds or sometimes several minutes. Like other cephalopods, the cuttlefish uses its ability to change color and pattern in order to hide from predators. It also uses these abilities to communicate with other cuttlefish, because it’s a social animal. It will also sometimes frighten potential predators away with a bright, sudden display of color changing. The most amazing thing of all is that cuttlefish can’t see colors. They have no color receptors in their eyes. But they accurately change color to match their background, even though they can’t see the color, and they can even do so if it’s almost completely dark. While scientists have some theories as to how the cuttlefish manages this, we don’t yet know how they do it for sure. So it is still a mystery! You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!

Further reading: Study: Giant Therizinosaurs Used Their Meter-Long, Sickle-Like Claws for Display Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I am delighted to report that Therizinosaurus lived in what is now Mongolia in Central Asia, in the Gobi Desert. 70 million years ago, the land wasn’t a desert at all but a forest with multiple rivers and streams flowing through it. Lots of other dinosaurs and birds lived in the area, including a tyrannosaurid called Tarbosaurus that was probably the only predator big enough to kill Therizinosaurus. When the first Therizinosaurus fossils were discovered in the 1950s, they were initially thought to belong to a type of giant turtle. Later it was reclassified as a sauropod relation, not a turtle. These days, we know for sure it’s not a turtle and we’re pretty sure it’s not anything like a sauropod. The Therizinosaurus fossils found so far are incomplete. All we have are some ribs, one hind foot, and mostly complete arms and hands. We don’t have any parts of the skull or any vertebrae, so paleontologists still have a lot of questions about what Therizinosaurus looked like and how it lived, although we have more complete specimens of some of its close relations to help scientists make good guesses. Luckily we have its hands, because its claws are enormous. Therizinosaurus had claws bigger than any other dinosaur known. Therizinosaurus was a big dinosaur overall, with an estimated length of 33 feet, or 10 meters, although until a more complete specimen is discovered we can’t know for sure how big it really was. It may have stood up to 16 feet tall, or 5 meters, and walked on its hind legs. It’s classified as a theropod these days, a group that includes famous dinosaurs like T. rex and Spinosaurus, but it wasn’t closely related to those big fast meat-eaters. Most paleontologists think Therizinosaurus ate plants, but again, we don’t know for sure since we don’t have any of its teeth to examine. Its closest relatives were herbivorous but its immediate ancestors were carnivorous. If Therizinosaurus was a plant-eater, why did it have such enormous claws? Its claws were seriously terrifying! Its arms were big and strong in general, measuring about 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters, including long, slender fingers, and the claws measured over three feet long! That’s more than a meter long. If the claws were covered with a keratin sheath, which is probable, they would have been even longer when Therizinosaurus was alive. They were relatively thin and straight with a curve at the end. There are many reasons why an animal develops big claws. Predators need claws to help grab prey or tear meat into pieces, or an animal may need big claws to help it dig or climb trees. Claws are also great for defense. Some animals use claws to grab tree branches and bend them closer to the animal’s mouth, which is something that giant ground sloths probably did, at least sometimes. The new study published in February 2023 examined the claws of Therizinosaurus and lots of other dinosaurs to learn how strong they were. The claws were 3D scanned, and then the scans were used in various models that measured the stress placed on each claw in various different activities. The study discovered that the claws of different dinosaurs were strong in different ways depending on what they were used for, which wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise was that Therizinosaurus’s claws were weak no matter which model the scientists used. In other words, Therizinosaurus probably didn’t use its claws to fight other dinosaurs unless it just had to, because they would break too easily. It wouldn’t have dug with its claws or even used them to hook branches down closer to its mouth. As far as we can tell, its claws were basically useless. But obviously, Therizinosaurus used its claws for something or it wouldn’t have evolved to have such gigantic claws. The study concluded that the giant claws must have been for display, to attract a mate or maybe just scare off potential predators. Lots of animals have special features used to attract a mate, like a peacock’s tail. Sometimes these features serve a double purpose, like a male deer’s antlers. The size of the antlers show how healthy he is, and he also uses them to fight other males. I’m not a claw expert, but as far as I know there aren’t any other animals known that use their claws for display only. It’s possible that Therizinosaurus did use its claws for something else, we just don’t know what. It’s also possible that the study had flaws that a follow-up study will discover, and Therizinosaurus’s claws weren’t actually so weak. But for now, as far as we know, during mating season Therizinosaurus would strut around waving its super-long claws to show how amazing it was. And, let’s face it, Therizinosaurus really was amazing. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: Mysterious ‘blue goo’ at the bottom of the sea stumps scientists Three new species of ground snakes discovered under graveyards and churches in Ecuador Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I’ve come down a cold this week, and while I’m feeling better, it is settling into my chest as usual and I’m starting to cough. Since I’m still recovering and need to be in bed instead of sitting up researching animals, and since my voice is already sounding a little rough, here’s a Patreon episode this week instead of a regular episode. I had been planning to run old Patreon episodes for a few weeks in December so I could have some time off for the holidays, and those were already scheduled, so I just moved one of those episodes up to use this week instead. This is a Patreon episode from October of 2022, where we talked about two very slightly spooky animal discoveries. We’ll start with a suggestion from my brother Richard, about a strange newly discovered creature at the bottom of the ocean. On August 30, 2022, the NOAA Ocean Exploration research team was off the coast of Puerto Rico. That’s in the Caribbean, part of the Atlantic Ocean. The expedition was mostly collecting data about the sea floor, including acoustic information and signs of climate change and habitat destruction. Since the Caribbean is an area of the ocean with high biodiversity but also high rates of fishing and trawling, the more we can learn about the animals and plants that live on the sea floor, the more we can do to help protect them. When a remotely operated vehicle dives, it sends video to a team of scientists who can watch in real time and control where the rover goes. On this particular day, the rover descended to a little over 1,300 feet deep, or around 407 meters, when the sea floor came in view. Since this area is the site of an underwater ridge, the sea floor varies by a lot, and the rover swam along filming things and taking samples of the water and so forth, sometimes as deep as about 2,000 feet, or 611 meters. The rover saw lots of interesting animals, including fish and corals of various types, even a fossilized coral reef. Then it filmed something the scientists had never seen before. It was a little blue blob sitting on the sea floor. It wasn’t moving and it wasn’t very big. It was shaped roughly like a ball but with little points or pimples all over it and a wider base like a skirt where it met the ground. And it was definitely pale blue in color. Then the rover saw more of the little blue blobs, quite a few of them in various places. The scientists think it may be a species of soft coral or possibly a type of sponge, possibly even a tunicate, which is also called a sea squirt. All these animals are invertebrates that don’t move, which matches what little we know about the blue blob. The rover wasn’t able to take a sample from one of the blue blobs, so for now we don’t have anything to study except the video. But we know where the little blue blobs are, so researchers hope to visit them again soon and learn more about them. Next, let’s return to dry land and learn about some newly discovered snakes. In fact, we’re not just on dry land, we’re way up high in the Andes Mountains in South America, specifically in some remote villages in Ecuador. A teacher named Diego Piñán moved to the town of El Chaco in 2013, and he started noticing dead snakes on the road that he didn’t recognize. He also realized that people were killing the snakes on purpose. A lot of people are afraid of snakes, so Piñán made sure to teach his students about them so they would learn that most snakes aren’t dangerous. He also kept the dead snakes he found and preserved them in alcohol so he could figure out later what species they were. But he never could figure it out. Then a scientist named Alejandro Arteaga assembled a team to study the animals found in remote areas of the Andes Mountains. When they came to Piñán’s town, they were excited to see the snakes he’d preserved, because even the snake experts on the team didn’t recognize the snakes either, although they were pretty certain they belonged to a genus of snakes called Atractus. The snakes were quite pretty, gray-brown above with a bright yellow pattern underneath. They were small and slender, completely harmless to humans and pets, and they lived underground most of the time. The team searched and discovered more of the snakes living in the area. Most Atractus snakes are shy and stay away from people, but because the town of El Chaco had grown a lot recently, the snakes had moved from their home in the forest into the local cemetery. That’s right, they were burrowing around among the crypts. Of course, the snakes don’t know they’re in a graveyard. They just know they’re in a quiet place where people don’t visit very often to disturb them. The team eventually found three new species of snake in different towns, all three described in September 2022. One species was living in the cemetery, another was in a schoolyard, and another was living near a church. Still. Graveyard snakes. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Thanks to Alexandra, Jayson, and Eilee for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Scientists have discovered an ancient whale species. It may have looked like a mash-up of ‘a seal and a Pokémon’ The nomenclatural status of the Alula whale Field Guide of Whales and Dolphins [1971] The little Benguela dolphin [photo taken from this site]: The spinner dolphin almost looks like it has racing stripes [photo by Alexander Vasenin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25108509]: The Alula whale, which may or may not exist: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week let’s learn about some whales and dolphins, including an ancient whale and a mystery whale, all of them really small. Thanks to Alexandra, Eilee, and Jayson for their suggestions! Let’s start with an ancient whale, suggested by Jayson. The genus Janjucetus has been known since its first species was described in 2006, after a teenage surfer in Australia discovered the fossils in the late 1990s. It grew to about 11 feet long, or 3.5 meters, and lived about 25 million years ago. So far it’s only been found around Australia. But much more recently, just a few months ago as this episode goes live, a new species was described. That’s Janjucetus dullardi, also found in Australia along the same beach where the first Janjucetus species was found, and dating to around the same time period. We don’t know a lot about the newly described whale, since it’s only known from some teeth and partial skull. Scientists think the individual was a juvenile and estimate it was only around 6 feet long when it died, or 2.8 meters. Small as it was, it would have been a formidable hunter when it was alive. Its broad snout was shaped sort of like a shark’s and it had strong, sharp teeth and large eyes. Because it was an early whale, it wouldn’t have looked much like the whales alive today. It might even have had tiny vestigial back legs. Its eyes were huge in proportion to its head, about the size of tennis balls, and it probably relied on its eyesight to hunt prey because it couldn’t echolocate. Its serrated teeth and strong jaws indicate that it might have hunted large animals, but some scientists suggest it could also filter feed the same way a crabeater seal does. Modern crabeater seals have similar teeth as Janjucetus, as do a few other seals. The projections on its teeth interlock when the seal closes its mouth, so to filter feed the seal takes a big mouthful of water, closes its teeth, and uses its tongue to force water out through its teeth. Amphipods and other tiny animals get caught against the teeth and the seal swallows them. If Janjucetus did filter feed, it probably also hunted larger animals. Otherwise its jaws wouldn’t have been so strong or its teeth so deeply rooted. But Janjucetus wasn’t related to modern toothed whales. While it wasn’t a direct ancestor of modern baleen whales, it was part of the baleen whale’s family tree. Baleen whales, also called mysticetes, have baleen plates made of keratin instead of teeth. After the whale fills its mouth with water, it closes its jaws, pushes its enormous tongue up, and forces all that water out through the baleen. Any tiny animals like krill, copepods, small squid, small fish, and so on, get trapped in the baleen. It’s just like the crabeater seal, but really specialized and way bigger. Whether or not Janjucetus could and did filter feed doesn’t really matter, because the fact that it’s an ancestral relation of modern baleen whales but it had teeth helps us understand more about modern whales. Next, Eilee wanted to learn about the Benguela [BEN-gull-uh] dolphin, also called Heaviside’s dolphin. It lives only off the southwestern coast of Africa, and it’s really small, only a little over 5 and a half feet long at the most, or 1.7 meters. It’s dark gray with white markings, with a blunt head that’s almost cone-shaped and a triangular dorsal fin. The Benguela dolphin is named for its ecosystem. The Benguela current flows northward along the coast, bringing cold, nutrient-rich water up from the depths, which attracts lots of animals. The dolphin lives in relatively shallow water and mainly eats fish and octopuses that it finds on or near the sea floor. The Benguela dolphin lives in social groups and sometimes hangs out with other species of dolphin. It doesn’t travel very far throughout the year, barely more than 50 miles, or 80 km. When it hunts for food, it uses very high-pitched navigation clicks that orcas can’t hear, but when it’s in safe areas, socializing without any predators around, it communicates and navigates with lower-pitched sounds. Sharks also sometimes attack it and sometimes humans will catch and eat one, but for the most part, it lives a pretty stress-free life just hanging out with its friends and eating little fish. And that’s basically all we know about this little dolphin. Alexandra wanted to hear about the spinner dolphin, which is common in warmer waters throughout the world. It’s called the spinner dolphin because it likes to leap into the air, spinning around as it does like an American football, which is pretty spectacular. No one except the spinner dolphin is completely sure why it spins, but scientists speculate it serves more than one purpose. The activity takes a lot of energy, so it might be a way to signal to other dolphins that it’s really strong and fit. The big splash when it lands on its side may be a way to communicate with other dolphins. The action might also help dislodge parasites like remora fish that really do attach themselves to bigger, faster animals to hitch rides and incidentally steal food. Whatever the reason, the spinner dolphin is one of the most acrobatic dolphins in the world. It not only spins, but it jumps around, flips, slaps its tail on the water, and basically acts like a kid on the first swimming pool visit of the summer. Like most dolphins and whales, it’s a social animal, hanging out with friends, family, and sometimes other dolphin species. It eats small animals like fish, squid, and crustaceans, and at least some populations are nocturnal so they can hunt animals that migrate to shallower water at night. The spinner dolphin is actually pretty small, growing to not quite 7 feet long at most, or 2.4 meters. It’s mainly dark gray on top, lighter gray on the sides, and pale gray or white on its belly. Let’s finish with our mystery whale or dolphin, called the Alula whale because it was sighted near the town of Alula, Somalia at some time prior to the early 1970s. In 1971 a Dutch sea captain reported that he had seen these whales on multiple occasions, in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. But although it’s a distinctive-sounding whale or dolphin, its existence hasn’t been verified. Captain Willem Mörzer Bruyns, whose name I have mispronounced, described the Alula whale as being similar in size and shape to the orca or pilot whale, with a tall dorsal fin and rounded forehead. It was sepia brown all over, though, except for white scars all over its body that were shaped sort of like stars. He reported seeing small groups of these whales, anywhere from 4 to 8 of them, traveling together on at least four occasions. He estimated the whales were up to 24 feet long, or 7.2 meters. There’s quite a bit of confusion about this mystery whale spread across the internet. Some sites I looked at mentioned a book written by Mörzer Bruyns called Field Guide of Whales and Dolphins, published in 1971, but quoted a different book, A World Guide to Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises published in 1981 by Donald S. Heintzelman. Let me quote the relevant paragraphs from the 1971 book, the original: “At first encounter a school of 4 approached the ship head on and seeing the dorsal fins the author thought they were [orcas]. When they passed the ship at a distance of less than 50 yards just under the surface in the flat calm, clear sea, it was obvious that this was a different species. … These dolphins were seen in the area during crossings in April, May, June and September, usually swimming just under the surface with the dorsal fin above the water. One duty officer reported he observed them chasing a school of smaller dolphins, who tried to escape. There is, however, a possibility that both species were chasing the same prey.” If you go to Wikipedia to read about the Alula whale, as of mid-November 2025, it states that the dorsal fin was about 6 and a half feet tall, or 2 meters. But Mörzer Bruyns reported that the dorsal fin was 2 feet tall, or about 60 cm. That’s an important difference. Orcas, AKA killer whales even though they’re actually big dolphins, are distinctively patterned with black and white, and a male orca can have a dorsal fin up to 6 feet tall, or 1.8 meters, while a female’s is typically less than half that height. The pilot whale is also a dolphin, despite its name, but it has a relatively small dorsal fin and is black, dark gray, or sometimes brown. Some researchers suggest that Mörzer Bruyns misidentified pilot whales as something mysterious, but the details he provided don’t really match up. There are a lot of little-known whales alive today, some only discovered in the last few decades. It’s possible that the Alula whale really is a very rare small whale or dolphin. It’s not clear from his report, but it sounds like Mörzer Bruyns saw the whales on several occasions in the same year. If so, maybe the Alula whale doesn’t actually live in that part of the ocean most of the time, and Mörzer Bruyns saw the same small group several times that just happened to have traveled to the Indian Ocean that year. Maybe no one else has seen them because they’re all living in some remote part of the ocean where humans seldom travel. Hopefully someone will spot one soon. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Viki, Erin, Weller, and Stella for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Tasmanian tiger pups found to be extraordinary similar to wolf pups The thylacine could open its jaws really wide: A sugar glider, gliding [photo from this page]: A happy quokka and a happy person: A swimming platypus: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about some marsupial mammals suggested by Erin, Weller, and Stella, and a bonus non-marsupial from Australia suggested by Viki. Marsupials are mammals that give birth to babies that aren’t fully formed yet, and the babies then finish developing in the mother’s pouch. Not all female marsupials actually have a pouch, although most do. Marsupials are extremely common in Australia, but they’re also found in other places around the world. Let’s start with Weller’s suggestion, the Tasmanian tiger. We’ve talked about it before, but not recently. We talked about it in our very first episode, in fact! Despite its name, it isn’t related to the tiger at all. Tigers are placental mammals, and the Tasmanian tiger is a marsupial. It’s also called the thylacine to make things less confusing. The thylacine was declared extinct after the last known individual died in captivity in 1936, but sightings have continued ever since. It’s not likely that a population is still around these days, but the thylacine is such a great animal that people hold out hope that it has survived and will one day be rediscovered. It got the name Tasmanian tiger because when European colonizers arrived in Tasmania, they saw a striped animal the size of a big dog, about two feet high at the shoulder, or 61 cm, and over six feet long if you included the long tail, or 1.8 meters. It was yellowish-brown with black stripes on the back half of its body and down its tail, with a doglike head and rounded ears. The thylacine was a nocturnal marsupial native to mainland Australia and the Australian island of Tasmania, but around 4,000 years ago, climate change caused more and longer droughts in eastern Australia and the thylacine population there went extinct. By 3,000 years ago, all the mainland thylacines had gone extinct, leaving just the Tasmanian population. The Tasmanian thylacines underwent a population crash around the same time that the mainland Australia populations went extinct—but the Tasmanian population had recovered and was actually increasing when Europeans showed up and started shooting them. The thylacine mostly ate small animals like ducks, water rats, and bandicoots. Its skull was very similar in shape to the wolf, which it wasn’t related to at all, but its muzzle was longer and its jaws were comparatively much weaker. Its jaws could open incredibly wide, which usually indicates an animal that attacks prey much larger than it is, but studies of the thylacine’s jaws and teeth show that they weren’t strong enough for the stresses of attacking large animals. Next, Stella wanted to learn about the sugar glider, and I was surprised that we haven’t talked about it before. It’s a nocturnal marsupial native to the forests of New Guinea and parts of Australia, with various subspecies kept as exotic pets in some parts of the world. It’s called a glider because of the animal’s ability to glide. It has a flap of skin between its front and back legs, called a patagium, and when it stretches its legs out, the patagia tighten and act as a parachute. This is similar to other gliding animals, like the flying squirrel. The sugar glider resembles a rodent, but it isn’t. It’s actually a type of possum. It lives in trees and has a partially prehensile tail that helps it climb around more easily, and of course it can glide from tree to tree. It’s an omnivore that eats insects, spiders, and other small animals, along with plant material, mainly sap. It will gnaw little holes in a tree to get at the sap or gum that oozes out. It will also eat fruit, nectar, pollen, and seeds, but most of the time it prefers to hang around flowers and wait for insects to approach. Then it grabs and eats the insect without having to chase it. The sugar glider is gray with black and white markings, big eyes that allow it to see well in darkness, rounded ears, and a really long, thick, furry tail. It’s a social animal that lives in family groups in small territories. Both males and females help take care of the joeys when they’re out of the mother’s pouch, mainly by helping them stay warm when it’s cold. Our last marsupial of this episode is Erin’s suggestion, the quokka. It’s about the size of a domestic cat, related to wallabies and kangaroos. It’s shaped roughly like a chonky little wallaby but with a smaller tail and with rounded ears, and it’s grey-brown in color. The quokka is considered incredibly cute because of the way its muzzle and mouth are shaped, which makes it look like it’s smiling. If you take a picture of a quokka’s face, it looks like it has a happy smile and that, of course, makes the people who look at it happy too. This has caused some problems, unfortunately. People who want to take selfies with a quokka sometimes forget that they’re wild animals. While quokkas aren’t very aggressive and are curious animals who aren’t usually afraid of people, they can and will bite when frightened. Touching a quokka or giving it food or drink is strictly prohibited, since it’s a protected animal. The quokka is most active at night. It sleeps during most of the day, usually hidden in a type of prickly plant that helps keep predators from bothering it. It gets most of its water needs from the plants it eats, and while it mostly hops around like a teensy kangaroo, it can also climb trees. Let’s finish with our non-marsupial animal. Viki wanted to learn about the platypus, which we haven’t really talked about since way back in episode 45. It’s native to Australia and is very weird-looking, so it’s easy to think it’s another marsupial, but the platypus is even weirder than that. It’s not a marsupial and it’s not a placental mammal. Instead, it’s an extremely rare third type of mammal called a monotreme. There are only two kinds of monotremes alive today, the echidna and the platypus. Monotremes retain a lot of traits that are considered primitive in mammals. Instead of giving birth to live babies, a monotreme mother lays eggs. The eggs have soft, leathery shells, but when they hatch, the babies look like marsupial newborns. The platypus is sometimes called the duck-billed platypus, because its snout does kind of look like a duck’s bill, but instead of being hard, the snout is soft and rubbery, and it’s packed with electroreceptors that allow the platypus to sense the tiny electrical fields generated by muscle contractions in its prey. I bet that was not what you expected from what looks like a small beaver with a duck bill! The platypus grows not quite two feet long, or 50 cm, and has short, dense, brown fur. It spends a lot of its time in the water, and has a flattened tail that acts as a rudder when it swims, along with its hind feet. It propels itself through the water with its front feet, which are large and have webbed toes. It lives in eastern Australia along rivers and streams, and digs a short burrow in the riverbank to sleep in. The female digs a deeper burrow before she lays her eggs, and she makes them a nest out of leaves. Baby platypuses are called puggles, and while the mother doesn’t have a pouch, she keeps her babies warm by tucking them against her tummy with her tail. Monotremes don’t have teats, but they do produce milk from what are called milk patches. The puggles lick the milk up. Until scientists figured out that monotremes have these milk patches, in 1824, they thought monotremes weren’t mammals at all but something more closely related to reptiles. Monotremes were much more common throughout the world until about 60 to 70 million years ago, when marsupials started outcompeting them. Marsupials don’t spend much time in water, though, because if they did their joeys would drown. The platypus and echidna both survived to the present day because they’re adapted for the water. The platypus mainly navigates in the water using its electrolocation abilities, and eats worms, fish, insects, crustaceans, and anything else it can catch. It’s easy to think, “Oh, that mammal is so primitive, it must not have evolved much since the common ancestor of mammals, birds, and reptiles was alive 315 million years ago,” but of course that’s not the case. It’s just that the monotremes that survived did just fine with the basic structures they evolved a long time ago, and they’re still going strong today. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Fleur, Yuzu, and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week! Further reading: World’s rarest parrot, extinct in wild, hatches at zoo Kakapo recovery This Parrot Stood 3 Feet Tall and Ruled the Roost in New Zealand Forests 19 Million Years Ago The magnificent palm cockatoo: The gigantic kakapo: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a bird episode, specifically some interesting parrots. Thanks to Fleur, Yuzu, and Richard from NC for their suggestions! Parrots are intelligent, social birds that are mostly found in tropical and subtropical parts of the world, but not always. Most parrots eat plant material exclusively, especially seeds, nuts, and fruit, but some species will eat insects and other small animals when they get the chance. Most parrots are brightly colored, but again, not always. And, unfortunately, most parrot species are endangered to some degree due to habitat loss, hunting for their feathers and for the pet trade, and introduced predators like cats and rats. All parrots have a curved beak that the bird uses to open nuts and seeds, but which also acts as a tool or even a third foot when it’s climbing around in trees. All parrots have strong clawed feet that they also use to climb around and perch in trees, and to handle food and tools. Let’s start with Yuzu’s suggestions, the cockatoo and the parakeet. A parakeet is a small parrot, but it’s a term that refers to a lot of various types of small parrots. This includes an extinct bird called the Carolina parakeet. It was small parrot that was common throughout a big part of the United States. It had a yellow and orange head and a green body with some yellow markings, and was about the size of a mourning dove or a passenger pigeon. Its story of extinction mirrors that of the passenger pigeon in many ways. The Carolina parakeet lived in forests and swamps in big, noisy flocks and ate fruit and seeds, but when European settlers moved in, turning forests into farmland and shooting birds that were considered pests, its numbers started to decline. In addition, the bird was frequently captured for sale in the pet trade and hunted for its feathers, which were used to decorate hats. By 1860 the Carolina parakeet was rare anywhere except the swamps of central Florida, and by 1904 it was extinct in the wild. The last captive bird died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918, which was not only the same zoo where the last passenger pigeon died in 1914, it was the same cage. It was declared extinct in 1939. The parakeet Yuzu is probably referencing is the budgie, or budgerigar. It’s the one that’s extremely common as a pet, and it’s native to Australia. In the wild it’s green and yellow with black markings, but the domestic version, which has been bred in captivity since the 1850s, can be all sorts of colors and patterns, including various shades of blue, yellow all over, white, and piebald, meaning the bird has patches of white on its body. The budgie can learn to repeat words and various sounds, especially if it’s a young bird. I had two parakeets as a kid, named Dandelion and Sky so you can guess their colors, and neither learned to talk although I really tried to teach them. Some birds just aren’t interested in mimicry, while others won’t stop, especially if they get attention when they speak. In the wild, budgies live in flocks that will travel long distances to find food and water. The birds mostly eat grass seeds, especially spinifex, but will sometimes eat wheat, especially in areas where farmland has destroyed much of their wild food. They’re social birds that are sometimes called lovebirds, although that’s the name of a different type of bird too, because they will preen and feed their mates. Like many birds, the parakeet can see ultraviolet light, and their feathers glow in UV light. This makes them even more attractive to potential mates, as if the parakeet wasn’t beautiful enough to start with. Yuzu also asked about the cockatoo. There are 21 species of cockatoo, also native to Australia and other nearby places, including Indonesia and New Guinea. It’s much larger than the budgie and most species have a crest of some kind. It lives in flocks and eats various types of plant material, including flowers and roots, but it will also eat insects. The cockatoo isn’t as brightly colored as many parrots, and is usually black, white, or gray, often with patches of color on the crest, cheeks, or tail. The pink cockatoo is white with pale salmon pink markings on the body, and brighter pink and yellow on its crest. The sulphur-crested cockatoo is white with pale yellow on the undersides of the wings and tail, and a bright yellow crest. We talked about the palm cockatoo in episode 23 because not only does it look like it should be a drummer of the Muppet Animal variety, since it’s black with red cheeks and a big messy crest, it does actually use sticks and nuts to drum against tree branches, to attract a mate. Richard from NC suggested we learn about Spix’s macaw, also called the blue macaw, because it’s considered one of the world’s rarest parrots. In fact, it was declared extinct in the wild in 2019. It only survives at all because of intensive conservation efforts, including a captive breeding program spread over multiple zoos. The blue macaw is native to one small part of Brazil in South America, although it used to be much more common several hundred years ago. It’s blue with a gray-blue head. It’s such a beautiful parrot that it was driven to extinction by people trapping the birds to sell as pets, even though that had been outlawed by Brazil, although its numbers had been falling for centuries due to habitat loss. It relied on a particular species of tree called the tree of gold, because its flowers are bright yellow. The blue macaw nested in these trees, and its seedpods were one of its main foods. As groves made up of the tree of gold were chopped down to make way for farmland and towns, the bird became more and more rare. Luckily, even though the blue macaw doesn’t breed very quickly in captivity, by 2022 there were enough healthy young birds to release twenty into the wild. Just a few weeks ago as this episode goes live, another egg has hatched in captivity in a bird conservation center in Belgium, after the previous hundred eggs were infertile and never hatched. Next, Fleur wanted to learn more about the kakapo, a flightless, nocturnal parrot that lives only in New Zealand. We talked about it in episode 313, but it’s definitely time to revisit it. The kakapo is the largest living parrot. It has green feathers with speckled markings, blue-gray feet, and discs of feathers around its eyes that make its face look a little like an owl’s face. That’s why it’s sometimes called the owl parrot. Males are almost twice the size of females on average. It can grow over two feet long, or 64 cm, and can weigh as much as 9 lbs, or about 4 kg. That’s way too heavy for it to fly, but its legs are short but strong and it will jog for long distances to find food. It can also climb really well, right up into the very tops of trees. It uses its strong legs and its large curved bill to climb. Then, to get down from the treetop more efficiently, the kakapo will spread its wings and parachute down, although its wings aren’t big enough or strong enough for it to actually fly. A big heavy male sort of falls in a controlled plummet while a small female will land more gracefully. The kakapo evolved on New Zealand where it had almost no predators. A few types of eagle hunted it during the day, which is why it evolved to be mostly nocturnal. Its only real predator at night was one type of owl. As a result, the kakapo was one of the most common birds throughout New Zealand when humans arrived. But by the end of the 19th century, the kakapo was becoming increasingly rare everywhere. By 1970, scientists worried that the kakapo was already extinct. Fortunately, a few of the birds survived in remote areas. Several islands were chosen as refuges, and all the kakapos scientists could find were relocated to the islands, 65 birds in total. While the kakapo is doing a lot better now than it has in decades, it’s still critically endangered. The current population is 237 individuals according to New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. The kakapo may be the largest living parrot, but it’s not the largest parrot that ever lived. That would be the giant parrot. It’s known only from a few fossils dated to between 16 and 19 million years ago, but from those fossils scientists estimate that the giant parrot grew around 3 feet tall, or almost a meter, and possibly weighed almost twice what the kakapo weighs. It’s the largest parrot that ever lived as far as we know, and it was probably related to the kakapo. We don’t know a lot about the giant parrot because only two fossils have been found, both of them leg bones and probably from the same individual. They bones are so big that scientists initially thought they belonged to an eagle. Hopefully soon more fossils will come to light so we can learn more about the giant parrot. For all we know, those leg bones belonged to a young parrot that wasn’t fully grown yet. Maybe the adults were even bigger than we think! 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to William who suggested we talk about the Loch Ness Monster for our big Halloween episode! Further reading: 1888 (ca.): Alexander Macdonald’s Sightings 1933, July 22: Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer’s Loch Ness Encounter The 1972 Loch Ness Monster Flipper Photos White Mice, Bumblebees, and Alien Worms? Unexpected Mini-Monsterlings in Loch Ness Further watching: 1933 King Kong clip: Brontosaurus attack! The following stills are from the above King Kong clip: The drawing by Rupert T. Gould for his 1934 book about the Loch Ness Monster. He drew it after interviewing Mr. Spicer about his 1933 sighting: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week is our big Halloween episode to finish off monster month! I hope your October has been amazing and you have fun plans for Halloween. William suggested we learn about the Loch Ness Monster, so let’s go! We talked about the Loch Ness Monster, AKA Nessie, a really long time ago, back in episode 29. Those old episodes aren’t even available in the feed anymore—you have to go to the website to find them, and the audio isn’t very good. So here’s a revised and updated Nessie episode! There are some spooky stories associated with this one, but not too scary. Let’s call it one and a half out of five monsters on the spooky scale. First, a little background about what Loch Ness is. It’s the biggest of a chain of long, narrow, steep-sided lakes and shallow rivers that cut the Scottish Highlands right in two along a fault line. Loch Ness is 22 miles long, or 35 km, with a maximum depth of 754 feet, or 230 meters, the biggest lake in all of the UK, not just Scotland. During the Pleistocene, or ice age, Scotland was repeatedly covered with glaciers and ice sheets that were almost a kilometer thick. The ice only completely melted about 8,000 years ago. The massive weight of the glaciers over the fault line, where the rocks are already weaker, started the process of carving out the lake, and when the ice started melting in earnest around 10,000 years ago, the massive amounts of meltwater washed the weakened rocks out and left the deep valley that is now Loch Ness. The land slowly rose from where the ice had pressed it down, so that Loch Ness is now about 50 feet above sea level, or 15 meters. In other words, Loch Ness is only about 10,000 years old. All the lochs and their rivers have made up a busy shipping channel since the Caledonian Canal made them more navigable with a series of locks and canals in 1822, but the area around Loch Ness was well populated and busy for centuries before that. It’s a beautiful area, so Loch Ness has also long been a popular tourist destination, well before the Nessie sightings started. There have been stories of strange creatures in Loch Ness and all the lochs, but nothing that resembles the popular idea of Nessie. The stories were mostly of water monsters of Scottish folklore, like the kelpie we talked about in episode 351, or of out-of-place known animals like a bottle-nosed dolphin that was captured at sea and released in the loch as a prank in 1868. The oldest monster report in the area actually comes from the 7th century, but it’s supposed to have happened in the River Ness, which drains from the lake. When local people told St. Columba about a monster that had grabbed a man swimming in the River Ness, and presumably ate him, the saint went there to take care of the monster. He told one of his followers to swim across the river, which sounds pretty rough, but the saint said, “Don’t worry, fam, I gotchu,” but in old-timey language. The man started swimming and sure enough, a water beast approached. The saint made the sign of the Christian cross and said, “Stop right there, don’t touch him. Get back, monster!” The monster swam away immediately and was never seen again. The next sighting important enough for people to write down happened more than 1,400 years later, in 1933. The newspaper Inverness Courier printed a sighting by a woman named Aldie Mackay, who saw something that looked like a whale rolling around in the lake while she looked out the car window as her husband drove. Her husband saw it too. Mackay’s sighting happened in mid-April of 1933 and the report appeared in May. But the big sighting that pretty much everyone has heard about happened two months later, in late July. It’s sometimes reported as an August sighting because the initial report appeared in the Inverness Courier on August 4, 1933. A couple on holiday from London, Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer, reported seeing a large creature crossing the road around 50 meters in front of their car. In his initial report, Mr. Spicer described it as grayish with a thick body and a long neck, moving jerkily. The neck twisted and moved up and down. He didn’t see legs or a tail, but thought that a flopping movement around the downward slope of the body toward the neck might be the end of the tail, curved around the body. Mrs. Spicer disagreed and thought it was a small animal being carried at its shoulder. Mr. Spicer initially described the monster as being about 6 to 8 feet long, or 1.8 to 2.4 meters, because, he said later, he was worried about accidentally exaggerating the size. Later, after he returned to look at the road again, he realized the monster had to have been around 25 feet long, or over 7.5 meters, since it was longer than the road was wide and its front and back ends were hidden in the trees on either side. By the time the Spicer’s car reached the monster, it had already disappeared down the slope toward the lake, although neither witness actually saw it in the water. Mr. Spicer said that the monster actually looked like “a huge snail with a long neck.” The Spicers didn’t stop where they saw the monster, but shortly later they stopped and talked to a man on a bicycle, telling him what they’d seen. The man must have read about the April sighting, or heard about it, because he told the Spicers that there were other recent monster reports around Loch Ness. But something else featuring monsters happened in April of 1933. The movie King Kong was released in the first week of April, before the Spicer sighting and only a few days before the Aldie Mackay sighting. In addition to the giant gorilla King Kong, the movie featured dinosaurs, including a brontosaurus that attacks some people on a raft. Like the other monsters in King Kong, the brontosaurus was filmed using stop-motion animation, where a model is moved small increments, photographed, moved a little more, photographed again, and so on, so that when the photos are put together into a film, the model appears to move. This is how Wallace and Gromit is animated, and some old holiday specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It’s done well in King Kong, but the movements are a little jerky. To make the model look more realistic, the dinosaur was obscured by fog and trees in many scenes. It also emerges initially from the water and pursues the men onto land. Spicer admitted in an interview a few months after his sighting that he had seen King Kong and that his monster strongly resembled the dinosaur in the movie. It’s possible that he and his wife really did see something crossing the road that they couldn’t identify, and that their memories of the King Kong dinosaurs filled in the gaps of what they couldn’t actually see. Remember that Mr. Spicer described the animal as moving jerkily with its neck moving up and down and twisting, something that also happens in the movie. He didn’t see any legs, and most of the time in the movie the brontosaurus’s legs are hidden or mostly hidden. After the Spicer sighting, lots of previous monster sightings were reported. For instance, the Northern Chronicle newspaper printed a letter it received about an 1888 sighting, or sightings. A man named Alexander Macdonald traveled on the mail steamer pretty frequently, and he often saw what he said looked like a stubby-legged, really big salamander in the water. But by 1933 Macdonald was long dead, so no one could ask him if the letter-writer maybe just made it all up. One good thing has come from Nessie’s popularity. Loch Ness has been studied far more than it would have been otherwise. The water is murky with low visibility, so underwater cameras aren’t much use. However, submersibles with cameras attached have been deployed many times in the loch. In 1972 a dramatic result was reported, with a clearly diamond-shaped flipper photographed from a submersible, but it turned out that the flipper was basically painted onto two photos that otherwise show nothing but the reflection of light on silt or bubbles. Sonar scanning has been done on the entire lake repeatedly, in 1962, 1968, 1969, twice in 1970, 1981 through 1982, 1987, 2003, and 2023. They found no gigantic animals. The 1987 scan resulted in three hits of something larger than the biggest known salmon in the loch, but much smaller than a lake monster. It’s possible that the hits were only debris such as sunken boats or logs. From all the scans, though, we know there are no hidden outlets to the sea under the lake’s surface. There are lots of known animals in and around the loch, from salmon to otters, and lots and lots of birds. Seals frequently visit, coming up the shallow River Ness through its locks. Any of these animals, especially the seals, may have contributed to Nessie sightings over the years, together with boats seen in the distance and floating debris such as logs. The lake doesn’t contain enough fish to sustain a population of large mystery animals even if they had somehow eluded all those sonar scans. No bones or dead bodies have been found, and no clear photographs have ever been taken of an unknown animal. In the 1970s the idea that sightings of the Loch Ness Monster might actually be sightings of unusually large eels became popular. A 2018 environmental DNA study brought the idea back up, since the study discovered that there are a whole, whole lot of eels in Loch Ness. The estimate is a population of more than 8,000 eels in the loch, which is good since the European eel is actually critically endangered. But most of the eels found in Loch Ness are smaller than average, and the longest European eel ever measured was only about 4 feet long, or 1.2 meters. An eel can’t stick its head out of the water like Nessie is supposed to do, but it does sometimes swim on its side close to the water’s surface, which could result in sightings of a string of many humps undulating through the water. There are also lots of suggested weather and water conditions in Loch Ness that could make people believe they’d seen a monster, from rare mirages to less rare standing waves. But whatever Nessie really is, there is a mystery animal in Loch Ness. It’s just not very exciting so very few people have heard of it. A 1972 search for Nessie by the same team that announced that famous underwater photograph of a flipper, which later turned out to be mostly painted on, filmed something in the loch that wasn’t just paint. They were small, pale blobs on the grainy film. The team called them bumblebees from their shape. Then in July of 1981, a different company searching not for Nessie but for a shipwreck from 1952, filmed some strange white creatures at the bottom of the loch. One of the searchers described them as giant white tadpoles, two or three inches long, or about 5 to 7 cm. Another searcher described them as resembling white mice but moving jerkily. The search for the wreck lasted three weeks and the white mystery animals were spotted more than once, but not frequently. Afterwards, the company sent video of them to Dr. P Humphrey Greenwood, an ichthyologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Since this was the 1980s, of course, the film was videotape, not digital, but Dr. Greenwood got some of the frames computer enhanced. The enhancement showed that the animals seemed to have three pairs of limbs and Dr. Greenwood tentatively identified them as bottom-dwelling crustaceans, but not ones native to Loch Ness. A few years ago, zoologist Karl Shuker suggests they might be some kind of amphipod. Amphipods are shrimp-like crustaceans that live throughout the world in both the ocean and fresh water, and most species are quite small. While they do have more than three pairs of legs—eight pairs, in fact, plus two pairs of antennae—the 1981 video wasn’t of high quality and details might easily have been lost. Some of the almost 10,000 known species of amphipod are white or pale in color and grow to the right size to be the ones filmed in Loch Ness. But no amphipods of that description have ever been caught in Loch Ness. New amphipods are discovered all the time, of course. They’re simply everywhere, and the smallest species are only a millimeter long. But because they’re so common, it’s also easy to transport them from one body of water to another. It’s possible that the white mice crustaceans in Loch Ness traveled there on a monster hunter’s boat. If you’re lucky enough to visit Loch Ness, definitely bring your binoculars just in case you see something big in the water. But keep your scientist hat on too, because it’s more likely that you’ll see a floating log or stump, a big fish, an anomalous wave causing an optical illusion, or some other reasonable explanation for the sighting. But you never know! Happy Halloween! 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Richard of NC, Richard my brother, Siya, Ezra, and Owen and Aksel for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Creature Feature: Googly-Eyed Stubby Squid Nocturnal Spiders Use Trapped Fireflies as Glowing Bait to Attract Additional Prey A male vampire deer: The adorable googly eyed squid [still taken from video linked above]: The snowy owl [photo by Bill Bouton from San Luis Obispo, CA, USA – Snowy Owl, Bubo scandiacus, male, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19899431]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week for monster month, let’s learn about some animals that are considered spooky, although in actuality they’re just regular animals who don’t even know the meaning of spooky. Thanks to Ezra, Owen and Aksel, Richard from NC, my brother Richard, and Siya for their suggestions! We’ll start with the two Richards. Richard from NC suggested vampire deer, and my brother Richard suggested zombie salmon. The vampire deer is more commonly called the water deer, but considering it has tusks growing down from its upper jaw that look like fangs, vampire deer is an excellent name. Females have short tusks, but in males they grow quite long, sometimes over 3 inches long, or 8 cm. Since the animal only stands about two feet tall at the shoulder, or 65 cm, that’s pretty impressive. Its hind legs are longer than its front, so that when it runs it sort of bounces like a rabbit. It has a very short tail, small rounded ears, and is golden brown in color with a lighter underside. It doesn’t have antlers. We talked about the musk deer in episode 366, which also has fangs instead of antlers, but the vampire deer isn’t closely related to the musk deer. The vampire deer currently lives in Korea, China, and Russia although it used to be much more widespread. It mostly lives in reedy habitats near rivers, and it’s a solitary animal although females will sometimes congregate to eat. Males protect their territories by fighting with their tusks, although they don’t actually drink blood. As for the zombie salmon, it’s not a type of fish but something that can happen to an ordinary salmon. The salmon is a fish that famously spends most of its adult life in the ocean, but travels up rivers to spawn. The eggs hatch in freshwater and the baby fish grow up in the river, and then they migrate to the ocean and live there for almost the rest of their lives. Eventually the fish is fully mature and ready to spawn, so it travels to the river where it was hatched, fights its way upstream, and the cycle starts all over with the new generation. Almost all salmon die after spawning. This is partly because the energy requirements of swimming upstream is so high, but also because a salmon is genetically programmed to die after spawning. This is called senescence, and while it’s common in invertebrates like octopuses and some insects, it’s rare in vertebrates. Not only that, there’s not enough food for an adult salmon in the spawning area, and an adult salmon’s body is adapted for salt water, not fresh water, so it can’t live long in rivers as an adult anyway. A small number of female Atlantic salmon are able to return to the ocean, recover and regain their strength, and spawn again a few years later, but for all other species, after spawning, that’s it. Within days all the salmon have died. But sometimes, rarely, a salmon remains alive for weeks after spawning. It doesn’t have the energy to return to the ocean, and its body is in the process of shutting down for planned senescence, and the freshwater is causing damage to the fish’s skin. But still it survives, growing more and more raggedy, just like a zombie in a movie. But unlike movie zombies, it doesn’t want to eat brains. Eventually the zombie salmon dies, if something doesn’t catch and eat it first. Next, Siya suggested the googly-eyed squid. Some people find squid and octopuses scary because they look so strange, but I admit I added this squid to the episode because I think its name is funny. It’s also called the stubby squid or the googly-eyed stubby squid. Its scientific name is Rossia pacifica, which gives you a hint that it lives in the northern Pacific Ocean. In the winter it likes shallow water without strong currents, but in summer it migrates to deeper water where it doesn’t get too warm. The googly-eyed squid is small and closely related to the cuttlefish. It grows less than four and a half inches long, or 11 cm, including its eight short arms and two retractable tentacles. It’s usually reddish-brown or purplish in color, but like most squid it can change color when it needs to. It gets its name because it has large eyes that show white around the edges and have a black pupil, which makes it look like it has googly eyes. During the day, the googly-eyed squid buries itself most of the way in sand or mud at the bottom of the sea floor, with just its googly eyes showing so it can watch for danger. At night it comes out to hunt small animals like crabs and other crustaceans, mollusks, and fish, but what it really likes is shrimp. Naturally, it has good eyesight. Next, let’s talk about a bird that some people find spooky. Ezra, Owen, and Aksel all suggested the snowy owl. The snowy owl is mostly snow-white although young birds have black and gray markings. Its eyes are yellow and it often hunts in the daytime, but not always. Its wingspan can be as much as six feet across, or 1.8 meters. The snowy owl lives throughout the Arctic and nearby regions, especially in summer, but sometimes travels long distances to find food. It’s also migratory, traveling south for the winter. Snowy owls have been spotted in such far-flung places as Hawaii, Bermuda, Pakistan and India, Iran, and Japan and Korea. The snowy owl mostly eats small animals like lemmings and mice, although it will kill and eat pretty much anything it can catch, including ducks and other water birds, fish, and even insects and frogs. It will sometimes eat carrion and even sometimes steals food from other birds. It swallows small animals whole, and a day or two later, regurgitates a compacted pellet made up of the indigestible parts, including bones and fur. A lot of predatory birds do this, not just snowy owls. Scientists who study the birds love finding these pellets, because they can dissect them and learn what the bird has been eating. Not only does the snowy owl make its nest on the ground, sometimes it hunts on the ground too, just running along after an animal on its big feet. This is what the snowy owl sounds like: [owl call] Let’s finish with an invertebrate that a lot of people are scared of, a spider! This particular spider is a species of sheet-web spider, which lives in Taiwan. It’s a nocturnal spider that was only described in 2012. Unlike a lot of spiders, which build upright webs to trap insects that are flying along between branches and twigs, the sheet-web spider builds its web horizontally just above the ground. The webs are light-colored and reflect light. The spiders build their webs in shady areas, and scientists think that moths see the light reflecting off the webs, and think the webs are actually the ground in an area open to the sky. Moths like open areas like this, and moths also happen to be one of the spider’s favorite foods. When a group of scientists experimented by darkening some webs with charcoal dust, they determined that the darkened webs attracted considerably fewer moths. But it turns out that the sheet-web spider does something even more extraordinary. If a firefly gets caught in the web, the spider doesn’t eat it—or at least, not right away. It lets it stay in the web, flashing its light. Scientists noticed this and were intrigued. Did the fireflies not taste good, or was something else going on? They placed LEDs that blinked like fireflies in some webs, but not in others, and monitored the results. It turns out that three times the number of insects were attracted to the webs with fake fireflies, and most of those were other fireflies. Fireflies attract a mate by flashing. The spiders were taking advantage of having a built-in lure stuck in their webs. So even though spiders are very tiny and have tiny brains, sometimes they’re pretty darn smart. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

This week we’re going to learn about a bunch of bats! Thanks to John, Murilo, and Alexandra for their suggestions! Further reading: Why Bats Can’t Walk: The Evolutionary Lock That Keeps Them Flying On a Wing and a Song—Bats Belt out High-Pitched Tunes to Woo Mates Why some bats hunt during the day Puzzling Proto-Bats A pekapeka just walking around catching bugs on the ground [photo by Rod Morris, from link above]: BLOOOOOOD! but a really cute smile too: The western red bat looks ready for Halloween! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week as monster month continues, we’re going to learn about bats! We’ve talked about bats in lots of previous episodes, but we have a lot of really neat information in this one that we’ve never covered before. Thanks to John, Alexandra, and Murilo for their suggestions! John suggested we learn about diurnal bats and also asked if there are any flightless bats, maybe ones that live on islands. There are lots of island-living bats, and many birds that live on islands evolve to be flightless. It makes sense that bats might do the same thing–but I couldn’t find any information about any known bat that has lost the ability to fly. The reason seems to be how highly derived bats are. That means they’re specialized, the only mammal known that has ever evolved true flight. Unlike birds, which don’t need to use their legs when flying, bats’ legs are actually part of the wings. The wing membranes, called patagia, stretch not just between the elongated finger bones of the bat’s hands, they also stretch between the arms and legs, and connect the legs too. A January 2025 study comparing bat skeletons to the skeletons of birds determined that unlike in birds, where the size of the legs doesn’t have anything to do with the size of the wings, in bats the leg size and the wing size are closely related. If a bat evolves smaller wings, its legs also evolve to become smaller. That’s why there are no bats that resemble ostriches, with tiny wings but really long legs. Another possible reason is that bat legs have evolved to point backwards compared to other animals. It’s not just the feet, the knees are also rotated backwards. That’s why bats hang upside-down when they’re not flying. Many species of bat never land on the ground, because they literally can’t walk at all. But there are a few species of bats that can walk quite well. One is the increasingly threatened New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat. It lives in a few places in both the North and South Islands, as well as some small islands off the coast, although it used to be much more widespread. It’s also called by its Maori name, the pekapeka. The pekapeka mainly lives in forested areas and is quite small. It’s brown with a lighter belly, and it has big ears, as do most bats. Its eyes are small and its vision isn’t very good, but it has a good sense of smell. Its wings are small so its legs are correspondingly small too, but its legs are also strong despite their size. It has a clawed thumb toe on its feet and on its wings that helps it climb around in trees when it needs to, and it also spends about half of its time on the ground. It walks just fine, crawling with its wings folded so that the ends point up and back, out of the way. And yes, its legs are rotated backwards as you’d expect in a bat, and it roosts by hanging from its feet in trees. The pekapeka flies normally and catches insects using echolocation, just like other microbats throughout the world. It especially likes moths. Unlike almost all other bats, it finds a lot of its food on the ground too, using its sense of smell to track down spiders, insects and larvae, and other small invertebrates. It will actually dig into the dirt and leaf litter to find food. It also eats nectar and flowers, and is an important pollinator of some plants. One great thing about the pekapeka is that the males sing to attract a mate. The sound is so high-pitched that it’s not practical to share it here, because you probably wouldn’t be able to hear it, but I’ll link to an article that has a sample bat song so you can listen. Another bat that can walk just fine is one suggested by Murilo, the vampire bat. In movies, vampire bats are usually depicted as being humongous, as big as a person! In reality, those big bats are actually megabats, and megabats mostly eat fruit. Megabats are the ones that are sometimes called sky puppies, because they don’t rely very much on echolocation so they don’t have the complicated ears and noses that microbats do. Until recently scientists thought megabats couldn’t echolocate at all, but now we know they can, they’re just not all that good at it. The vampire bat is tiny in comparison. There are three species of vampire bat alive today. They share the same subfamily, Desmodontinae, but have been classified in different genera because they differ considerably from each other. Their other relations are ordinary bats that eat insects, fruit, and other things that you’d expect from bats. Vampire bats really do eat blood exclusively. The hairy-legged vampire bat is the most basal of the three species, meaning it retains traits that haven’t changed as much from its ancestors. It feeds exclusively on bird blood. The white-winged vampire bat also mostly feeds on bird blood, but it will sometimes eat the blood of mammals. It’s the common vampire bat that eats the blood of mammals. Vampire bats probably evolved from ancestors that ate insects. Scientists hypothesize that they might have originally specialized in eating ectoparasites of other animals, or possibly insects that were attracted to animal wounds. If that’s the case, the bat would have already been eating a lot of blood along with the insects, and at some point it started taking a shortcut to getting that yummy blood. We know this has happened at least one other time, in a bird. I thought we had talked about the red-billed oxpecker in an old episode, but if we did, I couldn’t find it. It lives throughout the savannas of sub-Saharan Africa and is brown with a bright orange bill and eyes, with a yellow eye ring. It eats ticks that it picks off rhinoceroses, cattle, and other large mammals, but it actually mainly eats blood. It’s happy to eat the ticks, because they’re full of blood, and the animals it perches on are happy that it eats ticks, but the bird will also peck at wounds so it can drink blood directly from the animal. So it’s likely that the vampire bat started out eating ticks or other ectoparasites, then began eating the blood that oozed from the wound after it removed a tick. From there it was a short step to biting the animal to cause blood to flow, and within four million years, it was fully adapted to drinking blood. The vampire bat has extremely sharp front teeth that stick out so that it can use them to make little cuts in an animal’s skin, after first using its teeth to shave the fur down so it can reach the skin more easily. Its fangs lack enamel, so they stay razor sharp. The vampire bat’s saliva contains anticoagulants, so the blood won’t clot right away and the bat can lick it up until it’s full, which takes about 20 minutes. It digests blood extremely quickly, so that it absorbs the nutrients from the blood and starts urinating the extra liquid within a few minutes of starting to feed. That way it can eat more and it can also stay light enough to take flight if it’s disturbed. If you were wondering, its poop is the same as other bat poop. It does echolocate, although not as expertly as bats that eat insects, but the common vampire bat also has specialized thermoreceptors on its nose that sense heat. It’s the only mammal known that can detect infrared radiation, and the only other vertebrates known that can do the same thing are some snakes. Because vampire bats have to be able to walk around on animals to find a good spot to bite them, the bats have evolved to be able to walk, run, and even jump just fine. Like the pekapeka, it folds the ends of its wings back out of the way and basically walks on the wrists of its wings and its backwards-pointing feet. Even though the pekapeka and the vampire bat are comfortable running around on the ground, neither has lost the ability to fly. Being able to fly seems to be baked into being a bat. So while it’s not impossible that a bat might eventually become truly flightless, it’s unlikely. As for bats that are diurnal, or daytime bats, there are a few. A study published in 2018 determined that of the four known species of bat that routinely go out hunting during the daytime, all four live on islands where there are no predatory birds. That doesn’t mean that all bats that live in places where there aren’t any hawks or eagles or crows are active during the day, because most species are still nocturnal, but that seems to be the one requirement for a daytime bat. John was also interested in learning about the biggest fossil bat ever found. Bats are delicate creatures and don’t fossilize very well, so the bat fossil record is really fragmentary. For example, until 2015 the oldest pekapeka fossil discovered was only 17,500 years old. In 2015, a new fossilized pekapeka ancestor was discovered on the South Island that’s been dated to 16 to 19 million years ago. The fossil shows that the bat was adapted to walk just as the modern pekapeka is, and its teeth are similar so it probably had a similar diet—but it’s estimated to be three times the size of the pekapeka! That sounds like it must have been a huge bat, but the pekapeka only weighs 15 grams at most. That’s barely more than half an ounce, or about the same weight as a CD or DVD, not counting the case. Its ancestor is estimated to have weighed as much as 40 grams, which is almost as heavy as a golf ball. It’s also what a typical vampire bat weighs, if you were wondering. An even bigger fossil bat has been discovered in a fossil site in France, a country in Europe, and another in Tunisia, a country in North Africa. It’s called Necromantis and is estimated to have weighed as much as 47 grams, which is the same weight as two mice. Two nervous mice, because Mecromantis had strong jaws and big teeth, which suggests it ate small vertebrates–like mice. It lived between 44 and 36 million years ago in areas that were most likely tropical. An ancestor of the vampire bat was even bigger, possibly as much as 60 grams. That’s just over 2 ounces! That’s a bit heavier than a tennis ball. It lived in South America during the Pleistocene, so recently that in addition to fossils, we also have subfossil remains. That means they’re mineralized but not yet fully fossilized. It’s called Desmodus draculae, and it was most likely still around when humans migrated to South America around 25,000 years ago. Big as it was, it still wasn’t as big as a typical megabat. Because bat fossils are so rare, it’s led to a scientific mystery. We don’t have any fossils of bat ancestors that weren’t yet bats, but were evolving into bats. In other words, we don’t know what bats looked like before they evolved to be flying animals. The best guess is that the earliest bat ancestors were shrew-like animals that lived in trees and ate insects. So far we haven’t mentioned any bats that live in Arizona, suggested by Alexandra, so let’s learn about the western red bat. Most bats are black, gray, or brown in color, but the western red bat is a cheerful orange with white shoulder patches and black wing membranes. It’s ready for Halloween all the time! Males are usually more brightly colored than females. The western red bat lives throughout western North America in summer. It migrates to the southern parts of its range in winter, as far south as Central America. It’s also called the desert red bat but it actually spends most of its life in forests, where its red coat blends in with dead leaves. It eats insects and while it doesn’t spend much time on the ground, every so often it will drop to the ground to catch an insect before hopping back into the air. Not only that, but when the western red bat migrates, it will sometimes fly along with flocks of migrating birds in the daytime. Unlike many bats, the western red bat is solitary most of the year. Also unlike most bats, instead of having just one baby at a time, it can have up to four babies in a litter. The mother has four nipples instead of just two as in most bats, and for the first three or four weeks of the babies’ lives, the mother has to carry them around while she hunts, until they learn to fly. As a last note about bats, Murilo specifically mentioned that vampire bats carry diseases that humans can catch. (If diseases bother you, you can stop listening now because we’re almost done.) The common vampire bat does occasionally bite humans, usually the bare big toe of someone sleeping outside, or sometimes the earlobe or even the nose. Vampire bats do show a lot of resistance to blood-borne diseases, but they still spread diseases. The best way to avoid catching a disease from a vampire bat is to not sleep outside without shelter if you can avoid it, if you’re in an area of South America where vampire bats live. That means that if you’re out camping, bring a tent even if it’s hot. Also, avoid eating the meat of wild boar from South America. Not only can boars catch diseases from vampire bats that they pass on to humans, but wild boars also eat fruit partially eaten by fruit bats that also carry diseases. The fruit bats drop partially eaten fruit, the wild boar eats the fruit along with the saliva left on it by the bat, and then the boar can get sick from the saliva. Most mammals can catch rabies. If you see a bat out in the daytime crawling on the ground, don’t assume that you’re seeing a very rare daytime bat that can also walk around like a pekapeka. Leave the bat alone and contact animal control, because most likely the poor bat has contracted rabies. If you touch the bat, even if it doesn’t bite you, you will have to get a series of rabies vaccines to make sure you don’t come down with rabies, which is an incurable disease and always fatal. That is way scarier than anything else we’ve ever talked about on monster month episodes! 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

It’s October, AKA Monster Month! Let’s learn about some animals of the Skeleton Coast–which sounds spooky, but actually isn’t. Lots of brown fur seals [photo by Robur.q – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]: The desert plated lizard [photo by redrovertracy, some rights reserved (CC BY) – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/45483586, CC BY 4.0]: Rüppell’s korhaan [photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]: The pearl spotted owlet is cute rather than spooky, but it has a haunting call [photo by Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s October at last, and that means monster month! To start us off this year, we’re going to learn about animals of the Skeleton Coast, which sounds a lot more spooky than it actually is. The Skeleton Coast is a stretch of coastline 310 miles long, or 500 km, on the Atlantic coast of Africa. It’s part of Namibia, a huge country in southern Africa that’s mostly quite dry, with two deserts within its borders. Because the country gets so little rainfall, it has to conserve water for its people, animals, and crops, so the government is serious about conservation and natural resources. It’s home to one of the most cutting-edge water treatment plants in the world, and since the government’s establishment in 1993, it’s been working to help farmers and citizens in general to practice sustainable natural resource management. It’s also a beautiful part of the world, with amazing geography, and animals and plants found nowhere else in the world, so eco-tourism has been increasing, which helps the economy. Namibia is also home to the San people, who call the Skeleton Coast “the land god made in anger.” The northern part of the coast is blocked off from land by huge sand dunes, while the southern part is rocky. To get there, you have to cross a desert, and then cross a treacherous marsh that’s hundreds of miles across. Then to get home, you have to go back the way you came across the marsh and the desert, because launching a boat from the Skeleton Coast is impossible if you don’t have a powerful engine. The sea along the Skeleton Coast is treacherous, with lots of rocks offshore, extremely heavy surf, and frequent thick fogs. There are around a thousand shipwrecks visible along the coast, with the oldest dating to the 1530s, and thousands more documented that aren’t visible or haven’t been found yet. Ships still wreck there sometimes. Animals do live along the Skeleton Coast, especially seals. The brown fur seal, also called the Cape fur seal, has a huge colony in the northern part of the coast, which is a national park. The brown fur seal lives in various parts of southern Africa, with a subspecies that also lives on some islands off southeastern Australia and Tasmania. A big male can grow 7 ½ feet long, or 2.3 meters, and as you can probably guess from its name, it’s mostly brown in color. Males have a short mane on the neck that’s usually darker than the rest of its fur. It has magnificent long whiskers, especially males. The brown fur seal mainly eats fish, but it also likes squid and will eat other animals like crustaceans and even birds. It can dive deeply and stay underwater for over seven minutes. It spends most of its life in the water, mainly only coming out on land to breed, give birth, and take care of the babies. The seals used to be killed for their fur, but this was outlawed in Namibia in 1990 except by special permit, which has allowed the seals’ numbers to increase. The Skeleton Coast is named that mainly because of the massive amounts of seal bones that fur hunters left behind after killing and skinning seals. Unfortunately, something the rocks around the Skeleton Coast collect are plastic debris, especially fishing debris like nets. So many brown fur seals get caught in the debris and drown that a group of volunteers called Ocean Conservation Namibia go out almost every day to help untangle seals. The Skeleton Coast doesn’t get any rain to speak of, or only trace amounts in any given year, but it does get thick sea fogs. Most of the plants along the coast are succulents and lichens that don’t need a lot of moisture. A lot of larger animals that hunt seals along the coast actually live farther inland, like hyenas and lions. The animals that live year-round on the coast are much smaller. That includes the desert plated lizard, which is only found in parts of Namibia and Angola. It’s a slender but strong lizard that can grow over 6 inches long, or 16 cm, not counting its long tail. It’s mainly the color of sand, tan or orange and gray, or gray-white, or some other similar variation, with a white belly, and this is because it lives on sand dunes. The sand dunes are covered with scrubby vegetation, so in the daytime the lizards come out and eat anything they can find among the plants or in the sand, from seeds and other plant materials to insects and other arthropods. If a potential predator approaches, the lizard will dive into the sand to hide. Its scales are smooth and its legs are short, which allows it to “swim” through sand efficiently and fast. The desert plated lizard lives in small colonies, and although it only lives in this one small part of Africa, it’s extremely common throughout its territory. A lot of birds visit the skeleton coast—306 of them, in fact, including Rüppell’s korhaan, a species of bustard that only lives in Namibia. It’s a gray and brown bird with black and white markings, with a long neck and fairly long legs. Its body is chunky but its neck is very thin, which makes it look slightly weird but very cute. It mainly eats insects, especially termites, but it will also eat small animals like lizards when it can find them, and it also eats seeds and other plant material. It’s small for a bustard, because bustards are pretty big birds, with the largest species, the great bustard that lives in parts of Europe and Asia, standing over three feet tall, or about a meter. Rüppell’s korhaan is about a third of that size. Let’s finish with another bird that’s a little more spooky, considering that it’s October. It’s the pearl-spotted owlet, a little owl that’s found throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, including along the Skeleton Coast. It’s a very small owl, barely more than 8 inches long, or 21 cm. It’s brown with lots of white speckles and streaks, yellow eyes, and two black spots on the back of its head that look like MORE EYES. It shares this trait with some other species of owl, including the northern pygmy owl of western North America, and in fact the two owls belong to the same genus, so they’re closely related. The pearl spotted owlet is active during the day, but it mostly hunts at night. Since it’s such a small owl, barely larger than a typical songbird, it eats lots of insects, but it will also eat other small birds, bats, lizards, and any other small animal it can catch. It’s not a very spooky-looking owl, despite having eye spots on the back of its head, but it has a spooky call. Listen to this and be glad you’re not a little bat hearing this sound and wondering if you’re in danger: [owl call] 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Brody, Oz, and Sam for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Chasing gold Two spectacled hare-wallabies hanging out under a spinifex bush [picture from this site]: A regular swamp wallaby [photo by jjron – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4022233]: The glorious golden swamp wallaby [photo by Jack Evershed, taken from the first article linked above]: The takin can also be golden: The gaur is so incredibly big! It’s so big, honestly, it’s just ridiculous: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have suggestions from Oz, Sam, and Brody, with some interesting mammals! Let’s start with Brody’s suggestion, the wallaby! It’s been a while since we talked about the wallaby, which is an adorable marsupial closely related to the kangaroo. It’s native to Australia and New Guinea, part of the family Macropodidae. One thing everyone knows about kangaroos, which is also true for wallabies, is that they hop instead of running. Their hind legs are extremely strong with big feet, and in fact the word Macropodidae means big feet. The animal hops by leaning forward and jumping, with its big hind feet leaving the ground at about the same time, and landing at the same time too before it bounces again. Its big tail helps it balance. We talked about the wallaby last in episode 390, so let’s learn about some species of wallaby that we didn’t talk about then. For example, the spectacled hare-wallaby. It’s a small species that’s common in northern Australia and parts of Papua New Guinea. It’s active at night and is mostly solitary, so unless you’re wandering around at night you might not have seen one. It’s called the spectacled hare-wallaby because it has orange-colored fur around its eyes so that it looks sort of like it’s wearing glasses. The rest of its fur is brown, gray, and golden. Its ears are small and its tail and hind legs are very long, with short little front legs. It’s very cute. The spectacled hare-wallaby prefers sandy or stony areas, like dunes and shrubland, where it can find lots of plants to eat but can easily hop away if it spots a predator. It’s smaller than a domestic cat, but it can travel incredibly fast when it wants to. If you live along the eastern part of Australia, you might have seen the swamp wallaby, also called the black wallaby because it’s mostly dark gray or gray-brown in color, often with a white tip to the tail. It’s stocky and much larger than the spectacled hare-wallaby, almost three feet tall, or 85 cm, when it’s sitting up. It doesn’t just live in swamps but also likes forests and other areas with lots of places to hide. Unlike the spectacled hare-wallaby, it’s not that fast and can’t always outrun potential predators, but it’s good at hiding because its fur is so dark. Most wallabies are grazers, meaning they mainly eat grass, but the swamp wallaby is a browser. Instead of having grinding teeth to break down grass, its teeth are sharper for cutting through plant material like bushes, shrubs, and ferns. The swamp wallaby will even use its front legs to pull branches into reach so it can eat the leaves. Wallabies are marsupials, meaning the babies are born extremely early by our standards, crawl into the mother’s pouch and clamp onto a teat, and continue to develop in the pouch. Wallabies usually only have one baby at a time, but the mother swamp wallaby has two babies in its pouch almost all its adult life. The swamp wallaby has two uteruses, and a few days before the first baby is ready to be born, the female comes into estrus again, meaning she’s ready to mate. By the time her first baby is born, she’s already pregnant with her second baby. When the second baby is born, the first baby is old enough that’s it doesn’t spend all the time in the pouch—but by then, she’s already pregnant with her third baby. By the time the third baby is born, the first baby is grown up and on its own, the second baby is old enough that it isn’t in the pouch all the time, and—you guessed it—the mother is already pregnant with baby four. It sounds exhausting, but it works well for the swamp wallaby. As I mentioned, the swamp wallaby is also called the black wallaby, but there’s a rare color variation that’s called a golden swamp wallaby. It’s still a swamp wallaby but its fur is golden yellow and it has a white face. The coloration is due to a mutation in coat color, but golden swamp wallabies seem to be perfectly safe in the few areas where they’re found, so it doesn’t seem to be a detriment. Some scientists suspect the color morph is helpful in open forests with sandier soil, which is exactly where the golden swamp wallabies are found. Speaking of golden animals, let’s talk next about the takin, suggested by Sam. We talked about the golden takin back in episode 218, which is a subspecies of takin. The takin is closely related to sheep and mountain goats, but it looks more like a small musk ox. The takin lives in the eastern Himalaya Mountains, and is a strong, stocky animal with a lot of adaptations to intense cold. It has a thick coat that grows even thicker in winter, with a soft, dense undercoat to trap heat next to the body. It also has large sinus cavities that warm the air it breathes before it reaches the lungs, which means it has a big snoot. Its skin is oily, which acts as a water repellent during rain and snowstorms. In spring it migrates to high elevations, but when winter starts it migrates back down to lower elevations where it’s not quite as cold. It will eat just about any plant material it can reach, including tree bark, tough evergreen leaves, and bamboo. It sometimes shares the same bamboo forests where pandas live. It will even sometimes push over small trees so it can eat the leaves. It visits salt licks regularly, and some researchers think it needs the minerals available at salt licks to help neutralize the toxins found in many plants it eats. Both male and female takins have horns, which grow sideways and back from the forehead in a crescent and can be almost three feet long, or 90 cm. It can stand over four feet tall at its humped shoulder, or around 1.4 m. Its fur is mainly golden-brown with gray and white patches. A full-grown takin is big enough and strong enough that it doesn’t have many predators. If a bear or wolf threatens it, it can run fast if it needs to or hide in dense underbrush. But it’s just a little tiny baby compared to our last animal this week, suggested by Oz: the gaur. [pronounced gow-ur] We’ve only mentioned the gaur once on the podcast, way back in episode 58, when I mispronounced it “gar.” It’s the largest living bovid, also called the Indian bison, although it doesn’t just live in India. It’s native to southeast Asia, but it’s increasingly rare due to habitat loss and poaching, even though it’s a protected animal. The gaur looks kind of like a domestic cow, but much larger. It’s dark brown and its lower legs are white, as is its nose. It has a fairly short tail and long curving horns that are mostly pale but black at the tips, and its ears are large. Females are lighter in color than males and calves are a pale sandy-brown. How big is the gaur? A big bull can grow over seven feet high at the shoulder, or 2.2 meters, and it’s even a bit taller if you measure it at the muscular hump just behind the shoulder. It’s an incredibly heavy animal too, with only elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes being heavier than a big bull. A bull can weigh over 3,300 lbs, or 1,500 kg. It’s so massive and muscular that bulls in particular look like they just got back from the gym and they’re flexing to show off. The gaur is a bovid, but it doesn’t eat very much grass. Like the swamp wallaby, it’s a browser. It’s mainly found in forests, where it eats leaves, flowers, fruit, and even the bark of some trees, and it lives in herds of about a dozen animals each led by a wise old cow. Almost the only predator that can kill a full-grown gaur is a tiger, and naturally the gaur does not like tigers at all as a result. If a herd spots a tiger, they form a ring around the calves to protect them, and if the tiger tries to approach, the adult gaurs attack and try to drive the tiger away. Sometimes the gaurs can even kill the tiger. At night the adult gaurs make a ring around the calves this same way, so that if a tiger or other predator approaches in the night, the adults are ready to defend their babies as soon as they wake up. Personally, if I were a tiger I think I wouldn’t bother trying to kill a gaur. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Joelle, Jacob, and Anna for their suggestions this week! Further reading/watching: Gulper Eel Balloons Its Massive Jaws Watch rare footage of a shapeshifting eel with ‘remarkably full tummy’ swimming in the deep sea The beautiful stellar jay: The maybe not quite as beautiful but really awesome gulper eel (with its mouth full of water, image taken from first video linked above): The same eel as above but with its mouth open so you can see just how big it is! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about a bird suggested by Joelle, Jacob, and Anna, and a weird fish also suggested by Jacob. Let’s start with the bird, the stellar jay, also called Steller’s jay! In the last few years there has been a push among bird enthusiasts to change the common names of birds named after people to names that are more general. While Steller’s jay hasn’t officially been renamed to the stellar jay, a lot of people are calling it that already so that’s what we’ll call it here. The word stellar means outstanding, and that’s definitely a good description of this bird. The stellar jay is a beautiful bird that lives in western North America down into parts of Central America. It’s closely related to the blue jay found in eastern North America, and if you saw it from the middle down you might think it was a blue jay, except that it doesn’t have white markings on its tail and wings. It has a blue tail and wing feathers with dark bars, but from about the shoulders up it looks very different from the blue jay. It’s silvery-gray, brownish, or black on its head, neck, and back. Some populations have a white eyebrow marking that makes the bird look like it’s frowning. It has a crest like the blue jay, but its crest is bigger, spikier like it hasn’t brushed its hair yet, and the bird itself is bigger overall than its eastern cousin. The stellar jay lives in forests, especially coniferous forests, where it eats pretty much anything it can find. It’s an omnivore that likes insects and other invertebrates, eggs and baby birds of other species, and even small animals like lizards and mice, but it also eats lots of nuts, berries, seeds, and other plant material. It will visit bird feeders, and especially likes sunflower seeds and raw peanuts. The stellar jay is a corvid, distantly related to crows and magpies, and it shares the corvid trait of being intelligent, sometimes aggressive, and loud. It will imitate hawks in order to scare other birds away from food, and it will often chase smaller birds away from feeders. During nesting season, the birds get a lot quieter, and the male will sneak his way to and from the nest to feed his mate while she’s sitting on the eggs. The stellar jay prefers to build its nest in a conifer, either in a hollow in the trunk or on branches close to the trunk. This is what the stellar jay sounds like: [bird calls] Jacob also suggested we learn about the gulper eel, which is sort of the opposite of the stellar jay. It’s a deep-sea fish with a lot of names, including pelican eel and my favorite, the umbrella-mouth. It’s black or sometimes dark brown and can grow up to about three feet long, or 90 cm. Much of its length consists of a long, whip-like tail. The gulper eel’s mouth is ENORMOUS, ridiculously enormous, especially considering how slender the rest of the fish is. Its lower jaw is hinged and is extremely long, with a stretchy pouch of skin that forms its mouth and I guess you can call them cheeks. It is a very weird fish. Most of the time it keeps its jaw folded down against its sides, so that the jaws are barely visible and it looks more or less like a regular eelh. But when it wants to, the gulper eel can unfold its jaw and gulp in water to inflate its pouch, which makes it look like a black balloon with a tail. It sometimes does this if it feels threatened so that it looks bigger, but the huge jaws are actually for swallowing animals whole. Not only can its mouth stretch to engulf animals bigger than the gulper eel is, its stomach can stretch just as much. It has tiny teeth, though, so it’s not likely that it would try to eat animals stronger than it is, because if it swallowed a big fish, that fish might thrash around inside the gulper eel and kill it. More often, the gulper eel’s stretchy mouth and stomach allow it to eat large groups of very small animals, mostly shrimp and other small crustaceans. It also helps it swallow squid and other soft-bodied animals that are larger than it is but not dangerous. The gulper eel has a well-developed lateral line system, more properly called the octavolateralis system. All fish and some amphibians have this system, and in many species you can see it. It’s a line or a series of dots along the fish’s sides, and it’s actually a series of modified cells that are super sensitive to water motion. The lateral line system is what allows schools of fish to stay in formation while moving around as a group, and it also helps a fish know when a predator is approaching or when potential prey is nearby. It can even help the fish sense obstacles in the water that aren’t moving, like rocks. In the gulper eel, instead of the sensory cells being in a tiny canal under the skin, they’re on the surface to increase the amount of information the fish can gather from tiny water movements. At the end of the tail, the gulper eel has a tiny organ called a caudal appendage, which is translucent. It has tiny tentacles and glows with a pinkish light, although it occasionally flashes red. Some researchers report that the lateral line also sometimes produces bioluminescence. The bioluminescence may lure small animals to the gulper eel the same way the anglerfish’s lure does. It’s possible that the gulper eel sometimes hangs in the deep water with its long tail curved up over its head, waiting for prey to approach, but for the most part it’s an active hunter of small crustaceans and other animals. You may remember from other episodes that most deep-sea animals can’t see the color red. Some predatory fish, including a species of dragon fish, use that to their advantage by emitting red light that they can see but their prey can’t. It’s possible that the gulper eel’s tail emits red light to help it find groups of the tiny crustaceans it mostly eats. It has very small eyes and we don’t even know if it can see the color red or not. We also don’t know if its bioluminescent tail also gives off other light wavelengths that would act as a lure to small animals, or if it uses its caudal appendage to communicate with other gulper eels. The gulper eel lives in many of the world’s oceans, especially in tropical areas, in depths up to 9,800 feet, or 3,000 meters. Sometimes it lives in shallower water too. Because it lives so deep most of the time, we don’t know a whole lot about it. Luckily, in the last few years scientists have learned a lot more about it from deep-sea rover observations. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks for Preston and Pranav for suggesting this week’s topics! Further reading: DNA has revealed the origin of this giant ‘mystery’ gecko Snow Leopards Dispersed Out of Tibetan Plateau Multiple Times, Researchers Say Conquest of Asia and Europe by snow leopards during the last Ice Ages uncovered The crested gecko AKA the eyelash gecko: The fluffy snow leopard: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a couple of suggestions from Preston and one from Pranav! This is the first episode I’ve recorded in my new apartment, so let’s make it a good one. First, Preston wanted to learn more about the crested gecko, mainly because he has a pet crested gecko named George Washington. That is one of the best gecko names ever! The crested gecko is also called the eyelash gecko. We’ve talked about it a few times, but not recently at all. It’s native to a collection of remote Pacific islands called New Caledonia, where it spends most of its time in trees, eating insects and other small animals, but also fruit, nectar, and lots of other food. It’s an omnivore and nocturnal, and can grow more than 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It gets its names from the 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 has tiny claws on its toes, which is unusual since most geckos don’t have claws. It can drop its tail like other geckos if a predator is after it, but the tail doesn’t grow back. Since its tail is prehensile and helps it climb around in trees, you’d think the gecko would have trouble climbing after it loses its tail, but it doesn’t. Maybe that’s because in addition to claws, like other geckos it has basically microscopic hairlike structures on its toes that allow it to climb smooth surfaces like windows and walls and the trunks of smooth trees. It can also jump long distances to get to a new branch. 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 in 1994, a German herpetologist out looking for specimens after a tropical storm found a single crested gecko. It turns out that the geckos had been fine all along, but because they’re nocturnal and mostly live in trees, scientists just hadn’t spotted any. While we’re talking about geckos, Pranav requested that we revisit Delcourt’s giant gecko with some updated information. We did mention the new findings back in episode 389, but it’s really interesting so let’s go over it again. Way back in episode 20 we talked about Delcourt’s giant gecko, which is only known from a single museum specimen donated in the 19th century. In 1979 a herpetologist named Alain Delcourt, working in the Marseilles Natural History Museum in France, noticed a big taxidermied lizard in storage and wondered what it was. It wasn’t labeled and he didn’t recognize it, surprising since it was the biggest gecko he’d ever seen—two feet long, or about 60 cm. He sent photos to several reptile experts and they didn’t know what it was either. Finally the specimen was examined and in 1986 it was described as a new species. No one knew anything about the stuffed specimen, including where it was caught. At first researchers thought it might be from New Caledonia since a lot of the museum’s other specimens were collected from the Pacific Islands. None of the specimens donated between 1833 and 1869 had any documentation, so it seemed probable the giant gecko was donated during that time and probably collected not long before. More recently there was speculation that it was actually from New Zealand, since it matched Maori lore about a big lizard called the kawekaweau. In June of 2023, Delcourt’s gecko was finally genetically tested and determined to belong to a group of geckos from New Caledonia, the same archipelago of islands where the crested gecko is from. Many of its close relations are large, although not as large as it is. It’s now been placed into its own genus. Of course, this means that Delcourt’s gecko isn’t the identity of the kawekaweau, since it isn’t very closely related to the geckos of New Zealand, but it might mean the gecko still survives in remote parts of New Caledonia. It was probably nocturnal and lived in trees, hunting birds, lizards, and other small animals. Now we’re done with geckos for today, but we’re not done with this episode! Preston also wanted to learn about the snow leopard, and it’s amazing that we’ve never talked about it before! The snow leopard is a big cat that’s most closely related to the tiger, although they don’t look very much alike. The term big cat refers to tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, and jaguars, but it can also include cheetahs and cougars depending on who you ask. Big cats have round pupils instead of slit pupils like domestic cats and other smaller cats. The snow leopard mostly lives in cold, mountainous areas in parts of Asia, from Siberia to India. It prefers to live in rocky areas where its coat pattern hides it from its prey. Its fur is thick and it can be anywhere from pure white to tan or gray, with black spots and rosettes. Its head is small, its legs relatively short, and its tail is very fluffy and incredibly long. A big male can grow up to 1.5 meters long, or 5 feet, plus a tail that’s almost as long as his body, but he’s only about two feet tall at the shoulder, or not quite 60 cm. The snow leopard is well adapted to cold and snow. Fur grows on the underside of its paws to keep its feet warm, its paws are really large to act as snowshoes, and its ears are small and rounded to keep the tips from being frostbitten. Its long tail helps it balance when climbing over rocks. Its tail also stores fat, and is so long and fluffy that the snow leopard can use its tail as a blanket when it’s sleeping. Built-in blanket! Unfortunately for the snow leopard, its thick, beautiful fur has been used as a blanket by humans for a long time, and it’s still sometimes killed for its fur even though it’s a protected species almost everywhere it lives. It’s also sometimes killed by farmers and herders who think the snow leopard will kill their livestock. It actually doesn’t attack livestock very often, and almost never attacks people. It eats small animals of various kinds depending on where it lives, like mice and rats, hares and rabbits, wild goats and sheep, marmots, deer, civets, and even rhesus macaques. It mainly only kills livestock where its wild prey has been reduced because of human activity. It’s also vulnerable to habitat loss and climate change. Snow leopards are mostly solitary, although a mated pair will hunt together and of course the mother snow leopard teaches her babies to hunt as they get older. Individuals leave scent marks and spray urine to let other snow leopards know they’re around. Males roam widely but females usually stay to a territory that they’re familiar with, although the territory may be quite large. Most snow leopard cubs are born in the early summer, and a female usually only has two or three babies in a litter. The mother takes care of her babies by herself. She makes a den among rocks and lines it with her belly fur, but cubs are born with a lot of fur already to keep them warm. The mother takes care of them for about two years until they finally leave to find their own territories. Lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars can all roar. Snow leopards, cheetahs, and cougars can’t. But snow leopards, cheetahs, and cougars can purr, while lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars can’t. The ability to roar is due to special adaptations in the larynx, but these adaptations also mean the animal can’t purr. So basically a cat can either roar or purr but not both and the snow leopard can purr. We actually don’t know a whole lot about the snow leopard because it lives in such remote places, and one big mystery is how the snow leopard ended up adapted to cold. Most cats, large and small, prefer hot climates. Until recently, we didn’t even have any snow leopard fossils to give us a clue. Then a collection of leopard fossils revealed some snow leopard fossils mixed in. They’re about a million years old, collected in parts of China, France, and Portugal. A study of the fossils, and a beautifully preserved partial skeleton found in Portugal, has shed light on the migration and evolution of the snow leopard. The snow leopard was already well adapted for mountainous areas, but when the climate became colder during the Pleistocene, AKA the Ice Age, it evolved to thrive in a cold climate. It spread into many parts of Asia and Europe, especially mountainous areas, out-competing other predators like leopards that weren’t well adapted to cold. With the warming climate after the ice ages ended, the snow leopard was at a disadvantage and gradually died out except around the Tibetan plateau where it still lives today, and we’re very lucky to still have it. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

This is a chapter of the Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie book, which you can buy or request at the library! Further reading: Debunking a Great New England Sea Serpent A narwhal. I use this picture all the time: The diseased black snake that was taken for a baby sea serpent: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to have a sea monster episode! This is actually a chapter of the book that I published a few years ago now, Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie, and it’s called the Gloucester Sea Serpent. We had a Patreon episode recently that was about a different sea serpent, and while I was researching that, it was driving me completely nuts, because I kept trying to find the episode where I talked about the Gloucester sea serpent, and I finally remembered that that wasn’t an episode at all. It was just a chapter in the book. Maybe it’s time to record it. While the Gloucester sea serpent was first mentioned in a traveler’s journal in 1638, it really came to prominence almost two centuries later. On August 6, 1817, two women said they’d seen a sea monster in the Cape Ann harbor. A fisherman said he’d seen it too, but neither the fisherman nor the women were believed. A 60-foot, or 18-meter, sea serpent in the harbor? Ridiculous! Only a few days later, though, the monster started showing up in Gloucester Bay and attracted major attention—not because it was elusive, but because it was so commonly seen. Sailors, fishers, and even people on shore saw what was described as a huge serpent in the waters of Gloucester Bay, Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. On one occasion more than two hundred people watched it for nearly four hours. The creature’s length was described as anywhere up to 150 feet long, or 46 meters, and many people said it had a horse-sized head. Some people described its head as being about the same shape as a horse’s too, although with a shorter snout. The body was snake-like and about the thickness of a barrel. Many people thought the sea monster had humps along the back, usually referred to as bunches or occasionally joints. Others said it undulated through the water in an up-and-down motion, which looked like humps. Others said it had no bunches or humps at all. Most people agreed that its back was dark brown. One of the earlier witnesses, a man named Amos Story, watched the sea serpent from shore for an hour and a half. He was adamant that it had no bunches, that he only saw at most about 12 feet of its length at one time, or 3.6 meters, and that its head resembled that of a sea turtle. It was also fast, with Story claiming it covered a mile in only three minutes or so. That’s about 20 miles per hour, or 32 kilometers per hour—an incredible speed for an animal in the water. As it happens, the leatherback sea turtle has been recorded as swimming that fast, and it can grow over 7 feet long, or 2.2 meters, and possibly much longer. It lives throughout the world’s oceans and is just as happy in cold waters as it is in tropical waters. In other words, it’s possible Story actually saw a huge leatherback turtle, which would explain why it had a turtle-like head that it held above the surface of the water at least part of the time. This is something leatherback turtles do. Then again, the leatherback has distinctive ridges and serrations on its back that Story didn’t mention. So many people reported seeing the sea serpent that the Linnaean Society of New England decided it needed to investigate. The society had only formed a few years before, in 1814, to promote natural history. By 1822 it had disbanded, but in those eight years it accomplished quite a bit, including opening a small museum in Boston. Its most controversial endeavor was the sea serpent investigation. Members of the Linnaean Society interviewed witnesses, making careful notes that were signed by the interviewees to indicate the details were accurate. These statements tell us a lot about what people saw, although it hasn’t helped us determine what the sea serpent actually was. For instance, Captain Solomon Allen saw the creature more than once and gave a clear description of it. It was at least 90 feet long, or 27.5 meters, with as many as fifty joints, or bunches. Its head was snake-like—specifically rattlesnake-like, presumably meaning it was wider at the back and had a narrower snout—but the size of a horse’s head. It was dark brown, plain in color, and swam with an undulating side-to-side motion. It dived by sinking straight down, moved quickly, and sometimes seemed to play in the water by swimming in circles. All this is great information, but it doesn’t resemble any known animal. It also doesn’t necessarily resemble the other witness statements. Let’s go over some of the more detailed sightings and see if we can come to some conclusions. A man named William Foster reported bunches along the monster’s length, although he also described them as rings. When the animal’s head rose from the water, the first thing Foster saw was what he described as a prong or spear. It was about a foot long, or 30 centimeters, and tapered to a point. His interviewer asked if the spear might have been a tongue, but Foster didn’t think so. Three men on a schooner named the Laura, becalmed in the mouth of the harbor, witnessed the monster in late August. Sewall Toppan, master of the ship, reported that the monster’s head was the size of a 10-gallon keg, which would have been about 18 inches tall, or 46 centimeters, and 16 inches in diameter, or 40 centimeters. He said its head was held about 6 inches out of the water, or 15 centimeters, and that he could see 10 or 15 feet of its length disappearing into the water, or 3 to 4.5 meters. He didn’t see any kind of prong, but two of his sailors did. One of the two sailors was Robert Bragg, who reported that the monster was swimming rapidly toward the ship with its head and about 15 feet of its body out of the water, or 4.5 meters. As it drew closer he saw its tongue, which he described as looking like a harpoon about 2 feet long, or 61 centimeters. He even reported that the animal raised its tongue almost straight up several times. He also said it was dark brown and smooth. The third Laura witness, helmsman William Somerby, corroborated Bragg’s details, including the animal’s tongue, which he mentioned was light brown. As the monster passed within 40 feet of the ship, or 12 meters, Somerby even saw one of its eyes clearly. He said it was the size of an ox’s eye and was completely dark brown or possibly black. He and Bragg both noted that the animal had a bunch above its eyes, presumably meaning a bump or knob of some kind. All three men said that they were familiar with whales and the animal was not a whale. August 14 was a warm day and the water was calm. A man named Matthew Gaffney, a ship’s carpenter by trade but in his heart a monster hunter, borrowed a boat and took his brother and a friend with him to row. He also took a musket. As the small boat approached cautiously, the monster was spiraling around in the water, as various people reported it doing on and off throughout the day. Gaffney waited until the boat was as close as it could safely approach without risking being capsized, then fired a shot at the monster’s head. He was a good marksman and was certain he hit the animal, which sank immediately below the surface and vanished. Worried that the wounded monster would be enraged once its initial shock wore off, Gaffney and all the other boats on the harbor took off for shore. But when the sea monster resurfaced some distance off, it was obviously unbothered by being shot at. It continued its apparently playful circling around in the harbor. Several witnesses who saw the monster on August 14, before and after Gaffney’s attempt to shoot it, gave statements. William H. Foster said it at first moved slowly, but then sped up and twisted and turned through the water. Sometimes its head would bend around toward its tail, and Foster specifically said that when that happened, parts of its body between the bunches would raise up as much as 8 inches out of the water, or 20 centimeters, showing that the animal was at least 40 feet long, or 12 meters. Lonson Nash saw the sea serpent and reported that it moved quickly and left a long wake, and that while it swam underwater sometimes, it didn’t seem to be very far under. He could track its progress underwater by the disturbance it made on the surface. He also saw it double around so that its head was sometimes near its tail, but he mentioned that when it was swimming forward, it appeared perfectly straight. Later that day, a shipmaster named Epes Ellery saw the monster’s head through a spyglass. He reported that it was flattened on top like a snake’s and that its mouth resembled a snake’s mouth—presumably meaning it had a thin lower jaw. He reported that its joints were the size of two-gallon kegs and rose about 6 inches above the surface, or 15 centimeters. He said the animal swam with a vertical motion, not a side-to-side motion. An unnamed woman reported that the sea monster’s bunches looked like gallon kegs tied in a line. Another man said he saw the creature’s bunches at the surface as it lay still for a while, and that around 50 feet, or 15 meters, of its length was visible although he couldn’t see its head or tail. Other witnesses that same day reported much the same thing. Captain Elkanah Finney saw the sea monster from shore later in August, after his son reported seeing something strange in the harbor. Finney first thought it was a bunch of seaweed, but when he looked at it through his spyglass he realized it was an animal moving quickly through the water. He said it might have been 100 feet long, or 30 meters, with 30 or 40 bunches down its length. In fact, he said it looked like a string of buoys and that each bunch was about the size of a barrel. There are lots of other reports, all of them similar to these. The sea monster, whatever it was, spent a lot of time in and around Gloucester Bay that summer and even returned the following two summers. People were obviously seeing something. The question is what. Let’s look at the sightings where the monster had a prong or that it stuck out a long, straight tongue. This sounds a lot like a narwhal. A narwhal can grow up to about 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and males, and some females, have a brown or brownish spiral tusk that can grow just over 10 feet long, or 3 meters. Many people think the narwhal’s tusk is a horn that sticks up from its forehead, but it’s actually an elongated tooth that grows through the upper lip. That would explain why some of the witnesses thought it was a tongue. A young narwhal is black or dark brown, although it grows lighter throughout its life so that old narwhals are almost white. A young animal would also have a short tusk. A narwhal often swims with its head out of the water and a male will sometimes lift his tusk up and down in the air. He can do this easily because, unlike most whales, the narwhal’s neck vertebrae aren’t fused and can bend the head around. Most importantly, the narwhal is an Arctic animal and isn’t typically found as far south as Massachusetts, although it’s certainly been seen in that part of the ocean on rare occasions. Its rareness, together with its odd appearance compared to other whales, might lead witnesses to think it wasn’t a whale at all but some kind of monster. That doesn’t explain the bunches, though. The witnesses on the schooner Laura didn’t report seeing any bunches on their sea monster (whose “tongue” reportedly looked like a harpoon), but William Foster’s pronged sea monster did have bunches. Some researchers have dismissed the bunches, or humps, as a string of narwhals or other small whales traveling in a line. That’s definitely a possibility, but too many witnesses described the bunches as being always partially out of the water, not moving up and down. Not only that, the bunches were seen when the sea monster was lying quietly on the placid surface, not moving, often for long stretches. Remember, though, that many witnesses described the bunches as resembling a line of buoys or kegs tied on a line. The animal often seemed to swim in circles until its head nearly touched its tail. William Foster reported that when it did this, its body between the bunches would rise several inches out of the water. Lonson Nash said when it was swimming forward, its body appeared perfectly straight. Maybe witnesses weren’t seeing a long serpentine animal with bumps along its back. Maybe they were seeing a string of kegs used as buoys to keep fishing nets afloat, that had become tangled around a small whale’s tail. Small kegs or large pieces of cork were sometimes used for this purpose at the time, including in Newfoundland and Norway. If a net tangled around a narwhal’s tail, the animal might have become used to dragging its burden around until the net eventually rotted away and freed the whale. This is something that still happens to whales today with nets and other fishing gear, although these days the nets are all plastic and won’t rot. Narwhals mostly eat fish and squid, and often dive deeply to find food along the ocean floor. Our entangled narwhal chasing fish underwater might appear to be traveling in playful circles as the net dragged along behind and above it. Pulling all the buoys underwater would probably be difficult for the whale, which would explain why it mostly stayed near the surface. It’s not a perfect match, of course, but the tangled-narwhal hypothesis fits a lot of the details reported for the Gloucester sea serpent. Narwhals also often travel in small groups, so if the entangled narwhal was with a few friends, that would explain why not every witness saw the bunches. As for the Linnaean Society of New England, their investigation of the sea monster was excellent for the time. They took the sightings seriously and tried to remain impartial, although the members did seem to start from an assumption that the animal was an actual serpent of some kind. Unfortunately, they made one fatal blunder. In late September 1817, someone found and killed a snake 3.5 feet long, or a little over a meter, that had bunches all down its spine. It was found only a few miles from Gloucester Harbor. The Linnaean Society decided it had to be a baby sea serpent. They said so loudly and even proposed a scientific name for the sea serpent. But it wasn’t long before the “baby sea serpent” was identified as a common black snake. The body was dissected and the bunches turned out to be tumors from a diseased spine. The society’s investigation became a joke. But at least we still have the eyewitness accounts they gathered. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

While I’m at Dragon Con, here’s an old Patreon episode about Tennessee water mysteries, including some spooky sightings of what were probably bears, and some mystery fish! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. As this episode goes live, I should be at Dragon Con, so I decided to go ahead and schedule an old Patreon episode to run instead of trying to get a new episode ready in time. It’s about some water mysteries in my home state of Tennessee, although I actually just moved away from Tennessee to Georgia. Tennessee is in the southeastern United States, a long thin state divided into three geographical sections. East Tennessee borders the southern Appalachian Mountains, Middle Tennessee is on the Cumberland Plateau, and West Tennessee borders the Mississippi River. The only natural lake in the state is Reelfoot in northwestern Tennessee, a shallow, swampy body of water formed in the early 19th century. Before 1811, instead of a lake a small river flowed through the area, a tributary of the Mississippi. In earlier accounts, Reelfoot River is called Red Foot River. Most of the residents of the area at the time were Choctaw, although white settlers lived in the small town of New Madrid near the bank of the Mississippi. From December 1811 through February 1812, a series of earthquakes in the New Madrid Seismic Zone changed the land radically. There were three main quakes and innumerable smaller ones, ranging from an estimated 6.7 for the smallest quake to a possible 8.8 for the largest. In the initial quake and aftershocks on 16 December 1811, chimneys collapsed, trees fell, and fissures opened and closed, projecting water or sand high in the air. Boats on the Mississippi capsized as huge waves crashed from bank to bank. A woman named Eliza Bryan, who lived in New Madrid, wrote an account of the quakes: On the 16th of December, 1811, about 2 o’clock a.m., a violent shock of earthquake, accompanied by a very awful noise, resembling loud but distant thunder, but hoarse and vibrating, followed by complete saturation of the atmosphere with sulphurous vapor, causing total darkness. The screams of the inhabitants, the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species, the falling trees, and the roaring of the Mississippi, the current of which was retrograde for a few minutes, owing, as it is supposed, to an eruption in its bed, formed a scene truly horrible. From this time on until the 4th of February the earth was in continual agitation, visibly waving as a gentle sea. On that day there was another shock…and on the 7th, at about 4 o’clock a.m., a concussion took place so much more violent than those preceding it that it is denominated the ‘hard shock.’ The Mississippi first seemed to recede from its banks, and its waters gathered up like a mountain… Then, rising 15 or 20 feet perpendicularly and expanding, as it were, at the same time, the banks overflowed with a retrograde current rapid as a torrent. A riverboat captain reported in another account that his boat was caught in a ferocious current on the Mississippi, crashing across waves he estimated as six feet high, or 1.8 m. He also reported whirlpools that he estimated were 30 feet deep, or 9 m. He saw all the trees on either bank fall at once. The December quake was so large it was felt across North America, from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Then, only five weeks later, it happened again, followed by the third major earthquake on 7 February. Only 15 miles, or 24 km, from the epicenter, the land dropped 20 feet, or 6 m, and created a basin that immediately filled with water. Reelfoot Lake was formed, Tennessee’s only natural lake. Reelfoot is a state park these days, popular with boaters, fishers, hunters, and birdwatchers. The only cryptid sighting I could find took place in the Glass community near Obion, within ten miles, or 16 km, of the lake. A man who grew up in Glass reported in 2009 that a bipedal creature 8 or 9 feet tall, or 2.5-2.7 m, and covered in off-white hair was well-known to the residents of the community. They referred to it as “the white thing.” The man had seen it several times as a child and his father, who was initially a skeptic, changed his mind when he found huge tracks in the woods. Technically, Tennessee has two natural lakes, but the “Lost Sea” is underground. It’s located in a large cave system called Craighead Caverns in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. It’s one of the largest underground lakes ever found, although it hasn’t been fully explored so its actual size isn’t known. The lake doesn’t support any known animals, although scientific explorations haven’t been conducted as far as I could find. In the 1960s the cave owners stocked the lake with rainbow trout in hopes that they would discover an exit to the surface. They didn’t, and the fish have to be fed and restocked since they have no natural food sources and won’t spawn in the lake. The cave, and the lake, are a local tourist attraction. Besides Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee is home to many man-made lakes. Most are in East Tennessee. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt set up the New Deal plan, creating government-funded projects to employ out-of-work Americans. The Tennessee Valley Authority was founded in 1933 to improve the lives of people who lived along the Tennessee River and its tributaries. To curb seasonal flooding and stop the spread of malaria, and to bring electricity to residents, TVA built numerous hydroelectric dams. I grew up in a town built in the 1930s to house workers on Norris Dam, which formed Norris Lake from the Clinch River. Norris Dam was TVA’s first large project, completed in 1936. This makes the lake only 85 years old, but that’s certainly long enough for local lore to grow up around it. As a kid I heard about monster catfish—as big as a VW Beetle—living at the bottom of the spillway. The largest fish ever caught in the lake, however, was a 49.5 pound, or 22.45 kg, striped bass in 1978. The largest catfish ever caught in Tennessee was a blue catfish that weighed 112 pounds, or 50.8 kg. That’s huge, but not the size of a car. There are other strange reports from around Norris Lake. On the night of 3 March 2012, two men went to a clearing near the first man’s house, in a swampy area near the lake’s edge, to build a bonfire and talk. They noticed footsteps and the sound of a large animal moving around in the trees nearby but assumed it was a white-tailed deer, although both men did have the sensation of being watched throughout the evening. Around midnight, when the men decided to leave, they heard sticks breaking in the trees as though being stepped on. One of the men knocked on a tree with a piece of wood and heard knocking in response, and then both were frightened by a loud, deep, long growl. Black bears do occasionally stray into the Norris area from the nearby Smoky Mountains, but black bears don’t growl—they make distinctive moaning or chuffing noises instead. They also usually stay away from humans and fire. In the late 1980s, possibly September of 1988, a woman returning to her car after a day of fishing with her family saw a huge hairy Bigfoot-type figure cross the trail ahead of her at speed. She only caught a quick glimpse of it at dusk but estimated it was 8 or 9 feet tall, or 2.5-2.7 m, with long arms that swung oddly as it took huge strides. Other Tennessee lakes have their share of mysteries too. The “catzilla” legend is repeated in just about every waterway, with the catfish’s size usually compared to that of a small car. There really are some enormous fish in Tennessee’s lakes, though. In January of 2021 a man caught and released an American paddlefish in Cherokee Lake that might have approached the world record weight of 151 pounds, or 68.5 kg. It was six feet long, or 1.8 m. There’s also a 19th century mystery associated with the Tennessee River. The earliest report of it I could find is from April 1878 in the Chattanooga Daily Times, an account from an old resident about river monster sightings from earlier that century. The first sighting by a white settler is from 1822, when a man named Buck Sutton was fishing and sighted the monster. The next reported sighting was near the same area five years later, when a man named Billy Burns saw the monster while crossing the ferry. Jim Windom was fishing in 1829 when he saw it. All three men died the summer after their encounters, although subsequent sightings (including 1836 and 1839) didn’t lead to anyone’s death. The sightings all apparently took place in a part of the Tennessee River near Chattanooga, now dammed to form Chickamauga Lake. At the time the river there was relatively sluggish and shallow, with many shoals. The monster was described as serpent-like and about the length of a canoe, or around 20 to 25 feet long, or 6 to 7.6 m. At least one report says it had a doglike head. Billy Burns reported that its belly was yellow and its back was blue. The most interesting detail comes from at least two reports, that of a tall black fin on its back that stood at least 18 inches high, or 45 cm, or possibly two feet high, or 61 cm. The Tennessee River has its share of unusual animals, from tiny freshwater jellyfish to the paddlefish, a filter feeder with an elongated rostrum, but nothing with such a large and prominent dorsal fin. The lake sturgeon, which can grow well over seven feet long, or 2.2 m, has bony plates on its back and an elongated snout, which doesn’t fit the description given by witnesses. The alligator gar can grow 10 feet long, or 3 m, but like the lake sturgeon, its dorsal fin is small and set far back on the body. The longnose gar can grow six feet long, or 1.8 m, but again, its dorsal fin is small and set far back on its body, and as its name implies, its jaws are elongated. In shallow water the tail fins of any of these fish or others can show above the surface higher than the dorsal fin, but not two feet out of the water. Moreover, all these fish were much more common in the early 19th century than they are now, and locals would likely recognize all of them. Alligators do occasionally show up in Tennessee, although not historically. Most alligator sightings are quite recent. The American alligator can grow up to 15 feet long, or 4.5 m, but even if one occasionally strayed into the Tennessee River in the 19th century, it has no structure on its back that could be mistaken for a tall fin. On rare occasions, a bull shark could find its way into the Tennessee River. The Tennessee is a tributary of the Ohio River, which in turns flows into the Mississippi, which then empties into the Gulf of Mexico. While bull sharks do occasionally swim up the Mississippi, no genuine sighting of one in the Ohio or Tennessee rivers has ever been documented. It’s not impossible, though. An exceptionally large bull shark can grow up to 13 feet long, or 4 m, and it prefers shallow water. Tennesseans in the early 19th century would have no knowledge of sharks and might consider it a monster, not an ordinary fish. It’s possible that the Tennessee River was once home to a large fish with a tall dorsal fin, one that was already rare in the early 19th century and which went extinct soon after. It’s also possible that the story was just a newspaper hoax, written to fill space on a slow news day. The article from 1878 was a “contribution…from an old citizen of Chattanooga” who was not named, talking about events that took place more than fifty years before. In 1885 another newspaper, the Chattanooga Daily Commercial, ran a nearly identical article—obviously taken from the 1878 one, often word-for-word—that claims the reporter heard the story “yesterday while listening attentively to the conversation of one of Chattanooga’s oldest citizens.” We may never know what the strange Tennessee River animal was, just as we may not know whether bigfoot-type creatures live near Tennessee’s lakes. I have my doubts that there are catfish in Tennessee bigger than cars, though—but just to be on the safe side, I’m staying in the boat. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Thanks to Mila for suggesting one of our topics today! Further reading: The mystery of the ‘missing’ giant millipede Never-before-seen head of prehistoric, car-size ‘millipede’ solves evolutionary mystery A centipede compared to a millipede: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s finish invertebrate August this year with two arthropods. One is a suggestion from Mila and the other is a scientific mystery that was solved by a recent discovery, at least partially. Mila suggested we learn about centipedes, and the last time we talked about those animals was in episode 100. That’s because centipedes are supposed to have 100 legs. But do centipedes actually have 100 legs? They don’t. Different species of centipede have different numbers of legs, from only 30 to something like 300. Like other arthropods, the centipede has to molt its exoskeleton to grow larger. When it does, some species grow more segments and legs. Others hatch with all the segments and legs they’ll ever have. A centipede’s body is flattened and made up of segments, a different number of segments depending on the centipede’s species, but at least 15. Each segment has a pair of legs except for the last two, which have no legs. The first segment’s legs project forward and end in sharp claws with venom glands. These legs are called forcipules, and they actually look like pincers. No other animal has forcipules, only centipedes. The centipede uses its forcipules to capture and hold prey, and to defend itself from potential predators. A centipede pinch can be painful but not dangerous unless you’re also allergic to bees, in which case you might have an allergic reaction to a big centipede’s venom. Small centipedes can’t pinch hard enough to break a human’s skin. A centipede’s last pair of legs points backwards and sometimes look like tail stingers, but they’re just modified legs that act as sensory antennae. Each pair of a centipede’s legs is a little longer than the pair in front of it, which helps keep the legs from bumping into each other when the centipede walks. The centipede lives throughout the world, even in the Arctic and in deserts, but it needs a moist environment so it won’t dry out. It likes rotten wood, leaf litter, soil, especially soil under stones, and basements. Some centipedes have no eyes at all, many have eyes that can only sense light and dark, and some have relatively sophisticated compound eyes. Most centipedes are nocturnal. The largest centipedes alive today belong to the genus Scolopendra. This genus includes the Amazonian giant centipede, which can grow over a foot long, or 30 cm. It’s reddish or black with yellow bands on the legs, and lives in parts of South America and the Caribbean. It eats insects, spiders–including tarantulas, frogs and other amphibians, small snakes and lizards, birds, and small mammals like mice. It’s even been known to catch bats in midair by hanging down from cave ceilings and grabbing the bat as it flies by. Some people think that the Amazonian giant centipede is the longest in the world, but this isn’t actually the case. Its close relation, the Galapagos centipede, can grow 17 inches long, or 43 cm, and is black with red legs. But if you think that’s big, wait until you hear about the other animal we’re discussing today. It’s called Arthropleura and it lived in what is now Europe and North America between about 344 and 292 million years ago. Before we talk about it, though, we need to learn a little about the millipede. Millipedes are related to centipedes and share a lot of physical characteristics, like a segmented body and a lot of legs. The word millipede means one thousand feet, but millipedes can have anywhere from 36 to 1,306 legs. That is a lot of legs. It’s probably too many legs. The millipede with 1,306 legs is Eumillipes persephone, found in western Australia and only described in 2021. It lives deep underground in forested areas, where it probably eats fungus that grows on tree roots. It’s long and thin with short legs and no eyes. It’s only about 1 mm in diameter, but can grow nearly 4 inches long, or almost 10 cm. Millipedes mostly eat decaying plant material and are generally chunkier-looking than centipedes. They have two pairs of legs per segment instead of just one, with the legs attached on the underside of the segment instead of on the sides. A millipede usually has short, strong antennae that it uses to poke around in soil and decaying leaves. It can’t pinch, sting, or bite, although some species can secrete a toxic liquid that also smells terrible. Mostly if it feels threatened, a millipede will curl up and hope the potential predator will leave it alone. The biggest millipede alive today is probably the giant African millipede, which can grow over 13 inches long, or almost 34 cm, but because millipedes are common throughout the world and are often hard for scientists to find, there may very well be much larger millipedes out there that we just don’t know about. As an example, in 1897 scientists discovered a new species of giant millipede in Madagascar and named it Spirostreptus sculptus. One specimen found was almost 11 inches long, or over 27 cm. But after that, no scientist saw the millipede again—until 2023, when a scientific expedition looking for lost species rediscovered it, along with 20 other species of animal. It turns out that the millipede isn’t even uncommon in the area, so the local people probably knew all about it. But Arthropleura was way bigger than any millipede or centipede alive today. It could grow at least 8 ½ feet long, or 2.6 meters, and possibly longer. It probably weighed over 100 lbs, or 45 kg. We have plenty of fossilized specimens, but not one of them has an intact head. Then scientists discovered two beautifully preserved juvenile specimens in France, and CT scans in 2024 revealed that both specimens had nearly complete heads. The big question about Arthropleura was whether it was more closely related to millipedes or centipedes, or if it was something very different. Without a head to study, no one could answer that question with any confidence, although a lot of scientists had definite opinions one way or another. Studies of the head scans determined that Arthropleura was indeed more closely related to modern millipedes—but naturally, since it lived so long ago, it also had a lot of traits more common in centipedes today. It also had something not found in either animal, eyes on little stalks. There are still lots of mysteries surrounding Arthropleura. For instance, what did it eat? Because of its size, scientists initially thought it might be a predator. Now that we know it was more closely related to the millipede than the centipede, scientists think it might have eaten like a millipede too. That would mean it mostly ate decaying vegetation, but we don’t know for sure. We also don’t know if it could swim or not. We have a lot of Arthropleura tracks that seem to be made along the water’s edge, so some scientists hypothesize that it could swim or at least spent part of its time in the water. Other scientists point out that Arthropleura didn’t have gills or any other way to absorb oxygen while in the water, so it was more likely to be fully terrestrial. The first set of scientists sometimes comes back and argues that we don’t actually know how Arthropleura breathed or even why it was able to grow so large, and maybe it really did have gills. A third group of scientists then has to come in and say, hey, everyone calm down, maybe the next specimen we find will show evidence of both lungs and gills, and it spent part of its time on land and part in shallow water, so there’s no need to argue. And then they all go for pizza and remember that they really love arthropods, and isn’t Arthropleura the coolest arthropod of all? At least, I think that’s how it works among scientists. And Arthropleura is really cool. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Yonatan and Eilee for this week’s suggestion! Further reading: Replanted rainforests may benefit from termite transplants A vast 4,000-year-old spatial pattern of termite mounds A family of termites has been traversing the world’s oceans for millions of years Worker termites [photo from this site]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a topic I’ve been wanting to cover for a while, suggested by both Yonatan and Eilee. It’s the termite episode! We talk a lot about animals that eat termites, and in many cases termite-eating animals also eat ants. I’ve always assumed that termites and ants are closely related, but they’re not. Termites are actually closely related to cockroaches, which are both in the order Blattodea, but it’s been 150 million years since they shared a common ancestor. They share another trait too, in that no one wants either insect infesting their house. Like most cockroach species, though, most termite species don’t want anything to do with humans. They live in the wild, not in your house, and they’re incredibly common throughout most of the world. That’s why so many animals eat termites almost exclusively. There are just so many termites to eat! There are around 3,000 species of termite and about a third of them live in Africa, with another 400 or so in South America, 400 or so in Asia, and 400 or so in Australia. The rest live in other parts of the world, but they need warm weather to survive so they’re not very common in cold areas like northern Europe. A termite colony consists of a queen, soldiers, and workers, which sounds very similar to ants, but there are some major differences. Worker termites take care of the nest and babies, find and process food so the other termites can eat it, and store the processed food. They also take care of the queen. Unlike ants and bees, worker termites aren’t only female and aren’t always sterile. Soldiers are bigger and stronger than workers, with much bigger heads and jaws so they can fight off potential predators. In some species, the soldiers have such big jaws that they can’t actually eat without help. Worker termites feed them. Finally, the queen is the largest individual in the colony, usually considerably larger than workers, but unlike queen bees and ants, she has a mate who stays with her throughout her life, called a king. Some termite queens can live to be as much as 50 years old, and she and the king spend almost their entire lives underground in a nesting chamber. The larger the colony, the more likely it is that the colony has more than one queen. The main queen is usually the one that started the colony along with her king, and when it was new they did all the work—taking care of the eggs and babies, foraging for food, and building the nest itself. As the first workers grew up, they took on more of those tasks, including expanding the nest. Workers are small and their bodies have little to no pigment, so that they appear white. Some people call them white ants, but of course they’re not ants. Workers have to stay in a humid environment like the nest or their bodies dry out. Workers and soldiers don’t have eyes, although they can probably sense light and dark, and instead they navigate using their antennae, which can sense humidity and vibrations, and chemoreceptors that sense pheromones released by other termites. Termites have another caste that’s not as common, usually referred to as reproductives. These are future kings and queens, and they’re larger and stronger than workers. They also have eyes and wings. When outside conditions are right, usually when the weather is warm and humid, the reproductive termites leave the nest and fly away. Males and females pair off and search for a new nesting site to start their own colony. Termites mainly eat dead plant material, including plant material that most other animals can’t digest. A termite’s gut contains microbes that are found nowhere else in the world, which allow the termite to digest cellulose found in plants, especially wood. Baby termites aren’t born with these microbes, but they gain them from worker termites when the babies are fed or groomed. In some areas termites will eat the wood used to build houses, which is why people don’t like them, but termites are actually important to the ecosystems where they live, recycling nutrients and helping break down fallen trees so other plants can grow. They also host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which are important to plant life. A recent study in Australia determined that termites are really important for rainforest health. In some parts of Australia, conservation groups have started planting rainforest trees to restore deforested areas. Decomposers like termites are slower to populate these areas, with one site that was studied 12 years after planting showing limited termite activity. That means it takes longer for fallen branches, logs, and stumps to decay, which means it takes longer for the nutrients in those items and others to be available for other plants to use. The problem seems to be that the new forests don’t have very many dead trees yet, so the termites don’t have a lot to eat. The team is considering bringing in fallen logs from more established forests so the termites have food and can establish colonies more easily. Some species of termite in Africa, Australia, and South America build mounds, and those mounds can be huge. A mound is built above ground out of soil and termite dung, held together with termite saliva. It’s full of tunnels and shafts that allow the termites to move around inside and which bring air into the main part of the nest, which is mostly below ground. Different species build differently-shaped mounds, including some that are completely round. Some termite mounds can be twice the height of a tall person, and extremely big around. The biggest measured had a diameter of almost 100 feet around, or 30 meters. But in at least one place on earth, in northeastern Brazil, there’s a network of interconnected termite mounds that is as big as Great Britain. The complex consists of about 200 million mounds, each of them about 8 feet tall, or 2.5 meters, and about 30 feet across, or 9 meters. They’re just huge piles of soil excavated from underground, and tests have determined that the mounds range in age from 690 years old to at least 3,820 years old and are connected by tunnels–but the nests under the mounds are still in use! Not all termite species build mounds or even live underground. A group called drywood termites live in wood and usually have much smaller colonies than other termites. They probably split off from other termites about 100 million years ago, and a 2022 genetic study determined that they probably originated in South America. But drywood termites have spread to many other parts of the world, and scientists think it’s because their homes float. They estimate that over the last 50 million years, drywood termites have actually floated across entire oceans at least 40 times. When their floating log homes washed ashore, the termites colonized the new land and adapted to local conditions. A lot of people worry that termites will damage their homes, but in many parts of the world, people eat termites. The termites are fried or roasted until they’re nicely crunchy, and they’re supposed to have a nut-like flavor. They’re also high in protein and important fats. So the next time you worry about your house, you can shout at any potential termites that if they’re around, you might just eat them as a snack. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

It’s a tiny mystery animal! Further reading: Salinella – what the crap was it? Some of Frenzel’s drawings of Salinella: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Johannes Frenzel was a German zoologist in the 19th century. He worked in Argentina for several years, studying microscopic and near-microscopic animals, and seemed to be a perfectly good scientist who did good work but didn’t make a real splash. But these days he’s remembered for a mystery animal that is still causing controversy in the scientific community. Frenzel described a strange worm-like animal he named Salinella salve in 1892, and Salinella hasn’t been seen since. According to Frenzel’s description of it, Salinella is very different from every other animal known. It’s so different, in fact, that some scientists think Frenzel just made the whole thing up. In 1890 or 1891, a colleague gave Frenzel a soil sample reportedly from the salt pans in Argentina. We don’t know exactly where it came from, just that it’s somewhere in the Río Cuarto region. Frenzel put the sample in an aquarium and added water, although apparently some iodine got mixed in too, either on purpose or maybe by accident. Then he forgot all about the sample for a few weeks. It wasn’t covered and Frenzel reported that some dead flies had fallen into the aquarium. When Frenzel finally got around to examining the sample, he discovered something he had never seen before. No one else had either, before or since. He said it was a worm-like animal about 2 millimeters long, and there wasn’t just one of them. There were quite a few in the sample, some in the soil and some attached to the glass. When he studied the tiny worms, he discovered they had a very basic, very unusual body plan. It was basically just a tube open at both ends, with a single layer of cells around the interior sac. Each cell was covered with cilia on both the exterior side of the animal and the interior side. Cilia are hair-like structures, and salinella used them to move around, a method of propulsion called ciliary gliding. It didn’t have any organs or even tissues—basically nothing you’d expect even in a very simple animal. It reproduced by splitting down the middle, called transverse fission. Assuming Frenzel was describing a real animal, and was describing it accurately, this body plan is unlike any other animal known. It’s most similar to what scientists think the body plan was of the precursors to sea sponges. It’s also similar in some ways to a group of parasitic animals called Mesozoa, which are wormlike, very simple, only a few millimeters long at most, and which have an outer layer of ciliated cells. Mesozoans aren’t well understood and most scientists these days think the group is made up of animals that aren’t closely related to each other. Salinella has sometimes been considered a mesozoan, but it’s still not that close of a match. Frenzel took detailed notes and made careful drawings of Salinella, and compared it to known animals like protozoans. His description of the animal is solid, and he described many other animals in his career that are well-known to scientists today. The main reason some scientists now think Frenzel made Salinella up is because it’s so weird and no one has been able to find it since. Frenzel died in 1897 without ever having the chance to look for more specimens. In 1963 an American biologist placed Salinella in its own phylum, which he named Monoblastozoa. In the early 2010s, a team of German scientists visited various saline lakes in Argentina and Chile in hopes of finding Salinella specimens, but without luck. The area where the original soil sample came from has mostly been converted to farmland, so if Salinella was restricted to that one spot, it might well be extinct now. So what happened to the type specimens that Frenzel collected? We don’t know. They vanished sometime between 1891 when Frenzel moved back to Germany from Argentina, and now. It might even be that he couldn’t preserve the specimens, since he reported that every time he tried to preserve one, it disintegrated. While I was researching this episode, I wondered if Salinella actually came from the flies that reportedly fell into the aquarium. Many parasites evolve to become very simple, like Myxozoa that we talked about in episode 422. But Frenzel observed Salinella apparently eating organic matter in the soil, which isn’t something a fly parasite would or could do. At this point, unless we can find a living Salinella specimen, there’s no way to know if the animal was real or a figment of Frenzel’s imagination. Some scientists even suggest that Frenzel was mistaken in his description and the real animal might actually be very different from what he described. Considering how detailed and careful Frenzel’s notes and drawings are, and how many other species he described without causing any controversy at all, I think Salinella was a real animal, just a weird one. Let’s hope that one day it’s discovered again so we can learn more about it. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

It’s Invertebrate August! These creatures are the most invertebrate-y of all! Further reading: Dubious Diskagma Horodyskia is among the oldest multicellular macroorganisms, finds study A painting of diskagma, taken from the top link above: Little brown jug flowers (not related to diskagma in any way!): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This episode started out as the March 2025 Patreon episode, but there was more I wanted to add to it that I didn’t have time to cover in that one. Here’s the expanded version to kick off Invertebrate August, which also happens to be episode 444 and releasing on August 4th! It’s about two mystery fossils. The first is named Diskagma, which means disc-shaped fragment, and it was only described in 2013. That’s partly because it’s so small, barely two millimeters long at most, and partly because of where it’s found. That would be fossilized in extremely old rocks. When I saw the illustration accompanying the blog post where I learned about Diskagma, I thought it was a cluster of cup-like flowers, sort of like the flowers of the plant called little brown jug. I was ready to send the link to Meredith Hemphill of the Herbarium of the Bizarre podcast, which by the way you should be listening to. But then I saw how old Diskagma is. It’s been dated to 2.2 billion years old. That’s older than any plant, probably by as much as a billion years. Even more astounding, it lived on land. As a reminder, the Cambrian explosion took place about half a billion years ago, when tiny marine animals diversified rapidly to fill new ecological niches. That happened in the water, though, mainly in shallow, warm oceans. If you go back to around 850 million years ago, that may have been roughly the time that land plants evolved from green algae that lived in fresh water. Plant-like algae, or possibly algae-like plants, might be as old as 1 billion years old. But before then, scientists don’t find evidence of anything except microbes living on land, and they were probably restricted to lakes and other bodies of fresh water. That’s because there wasn’t much soil, just broken-up rock that contained very few nutrients and couldn’t retain much water. Diskagma was shaped like a tiny elongated cup, or an urn or vase, with what looks like a stem on one end and what looks like an opening at the other end. The opening contained structures that look like little filaments, but the filaments didn’t fill the whole cup. Most of the cup was diskagma’s body, so to speak, although we don’t know what it contained. We also don’t know what the filaments were for. We do know that the stem actually did connect diskagma to other cups, so that they lived in little groups. We don’t know if it was a single animal with multiple cuplike structures or if it was a colony, or really anything. That’s the problem. We don’t know anything about diskagma except that it existed, and that it lived on land 2.2 billion years ago. Tiny as it was, though, it wasn’t microscopic, and it definitely appears more complex than would be expected that long ago, especially from something living on dry land. One suggestion is that the main part of its body contained a symbiotic bacteria that could convert chemicals to nutrients. As in many modern animals, especially extremophiles, the bacteria would have had a safe place to live and the diskagma would have had nutrients that allowed it to live without needing to eat. Diskagma lived at an interesting time in the earth’s history, called the great oxygenation event, also called the great oxidation event. We talked about it in episode 341 in conjunction with cyanobacteria, because cyanobacteria basically started the great oxygenation event. Cyanobacteria are still around, by the way, and are doing just fine. They’re usually called blue-green algae even though they’re not actually algae. Cyanobacteria photosynthesize, and they’ve been doing so for far longer than plants–possibly as much as 2.7 billion years, although scientists think cyanobacteria originally evolved around 3.5 billion years ago. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old, if you were wondering. Like most plants also do, cyanobacteria produce oxygen as part of the photosynthetic process, and when they started doing so around 2.7 billion years ago, they changed the entire world. Before then, earth’s atmosphere hardly contained any oxygen. If you had a time machine and went back to more than two billion years ago, and you forgot to bring an oxygen tank, you’d instantly suffocate trying to breathe the air. But back then, even though animals and plants didn’t yet exist, the world contained a whole lot of microbial life, and none of it wanted anything to do with oxygen. Oxygen was toxic to the lifeforms that lived then, but cyanobacteria just kept producing it. Cyanobacteria are tiny, but there were a lot of them. Over the course of about 700 million years, the oxygen added up until other lifeforms started to go extinct, poisoned by all that oxygen in the oceans and air. By two billion years ago, pretty much every lifeform that couldn’t evolve to use or at least tolerate oxygen had gone extinct. Since Diskagma lived during the time of the great oxygenation event, some scientists suggest that it contained microbes that photosynthesized sunlight into nutrients diskagma could use. And, as in cyanobacteria, the side effect of photosynthesis is oxygen, so diskagma might have been contributing to the oxygen in the air that allows us to breathe these days. On the other hand, it might not have had anything to do with photosynthesis and the great oxygenation event might have driven diskagma to extinction. We have no way to know right now. What we do know is that 700 million years after diskagma lived, something similar appears in the fossil record. It’s called Horodyskia and its fossils have been found in rocks dating between 1.5 billion years ago to 550 million years ago. Unlike diskagma, which has only been found in rocks from South Africa, horodyskia fossils have been found in Australia, China, and North America. That doesn’t mean diskagma wasn’t widespread, just that we haven’t found it anywhere else. There aren’t all that many rocks that are over two billion years old. Horodyskia lived in the water, specifically at the bottom of the ocean, probably in shallow water. It’s been described as looking like a row of beads on a thread. The thread seemed to be buried in the sand, and growing up from it in intervals were little pear-shaped bulbs, each no larger than a millimeter long, that stuck up through the sand into the water. There may have been little root-like structures called holdfasts that grew from the bottom of the thread to help keep it in place. We don’t know a lot about horodyskia either. It wasn’t a plant, since it also lived long before plants evolved. A 2023 study determined that it was a multicellular creature and that it was most likely a protist. Protists are related to animals, plants, and fungi, but aren’t any of those things, and they’re an incredibly diverse group. Most are single-celled and microscopic, but not always. They include algae, amoebas, slime molds, and lots more. Horodyskia’s bulbs might have been encased in a jelly-like substance, as is common in a lot of protists. Some horodyskia specimens found in younger rocks, the ones about 550 million years old, are much smaller than the earlier specimens, with each bulb barely a fraction of a millimeter in size. We might not know much about these strange life forms, but knowing they existed tells us that even two billion years ago, life was a lot more varied than we used to think. And that’s the most exciting thing of all. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

I just wanted everyone to know that a listener has claimed the books and magazines I offered for giveaway in episode 443. You can also learn about 60 seconds’ worth of information about the African pygmy mouse. The tiniest mouse [photo by Alouise Lynch – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59068329]:

Thanks to Jayson and warblrwatchr for suggesting this week’s invertebrates! Further reading: Parasite of the Day: Orthohalarachne attenuata Trap-jaw ants jump with their jaws to escape the antlion’s den Get out of my noooooose: An ant lion pit: An ant lion larva: A lovely adult antlion, Nannoleon, which lives in parts of Africa [photo by Alandmanson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58068259]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s almost August, and of course we’re doing invertebrate August again this year. Let’s get ready by talking about a few extra invertebrates this week, with suggestions from Jayson and warblrwatchr. Before we get started, I have some quick housekeeping. First, a big shout-out to Nora who emailed me recently. I just wanted to say hi and I hope you’re having a good day. Next, I’m moving in just a few weeks to Atlanta, Georgia! I know I was talking forever about moving to Bloomington, Indiana, but I changed my mind. The next few episodes are already scheduled so I can concentrate on moving. I’m about 75% packed at this point and have given away or sold a lot of stuff, including a lot of books. But I have a collection that a listener might be interested in. I offered it to the patrons last month but no one grabbed it, so I’ll offer it here. I have every issue of the little magazine Flying Snake ever published, 30 in all. They’re a fun hodgepodge of articles, reprinted newspaper clippings, old photos, and other stuff more or less associated with cryptozoology and weirdness in general. I’ve decided they take up too much space on my shelves to take with me to Atlanta. If you’re interested in giving them a home, let me know and I’ll box them up and send them to you for free. The first person who says they’ll take them will get them, but the catch is that you have to take them all. I won’t just send you a few. I’ll also throw in all four volumes of the Journal of Cryptozoology. This offer stands until mid-August when I move, because if I have to move them to my new apartment, I’m just going to keep them. Okay, now let’s learn about some invertebrates! First, Jayson wanted to learn about a tiny invertebrate called Orthohalarachne attenuata. It doesn’t have a common name because most people will never ever encounter it, or think about it, and I kind of wish I didn’t have to think about it because it’s gross. Thanks a lot, Jayson. It’s a mite that lives in the nasal passages of seals, sea lions, and walruses. It’s incredibly common and usually doesn’t bother the seal very much, although sometimes it can cause the seal to have difficulty breathing if the infestation is heavy. The adult mite spends its whole life anchored in the seal’s nasal passages with sharp little claws, although it can move around if it wants to. Its larvae are more active. The mite is mainly spread by seals sneezing on each other, which spreads the larvae onto another seal, and the larvae crawl into the new seal’s nose and mouth. Unless you’re a seal or other pinniped, this might sound gross but probably doesn’t bother you too much. But consider that in 1984, a man went to the doctor when one of his eyes started hurting. The doctor found a mite attached to his eyeball, and yes, it was Orthohalarachne attenuata. The man had visited Sea World two days before he started feeling pain in his eye, and happened to be close to some walruses that were sneezing. Luckily for pinnipeds kept in captivity in zoos that give their animals proper care, mite infestations can be treated successfully by veterinarians. Let’s move on quickly to an invertebrate that isn’t a parasite that can get in your eyes, the ant lion! It was suggested by warblrwatchr and I’ve been wanting to cover it for a while. When I was a kid, there was a strip of soft powdery dirt under the eaves of the school gym that always had ant lions in it, and I would squat down during recess and watch to see if any ants would fall in and get caught. Sometimes this did actually happen and the resulting battle between ant and ant lion was exciting and kind of horrible to witness. The ant lion is actually the larva of antlion lacewing, which look like a small damselfly that is mainly active at dusk. Ant lions live throughout the world, with more than 2,000 species known. Some wait for prey while hidden in leaf litter, while some hide in rock crevices and become camouflaged by lichens growing on them. Many others dig little pits in sand or soft dirt. They’re also called the doodlebug in some places, because when they’re looking for a place to dig a little pit, they make a loopy pattern in the dirt as they’re walking around. The ant lion’s body is robust and has little backwards-pointing bristles that help it dig itself into the dirt and stay there without moving until it needs to. It waits at the bottom of the pit, hidden underground with just its long, sharp jaws showing through the dirt, until an ant or other insect falls in. The ant can’t climb out because the sides of the pit are so sharply angled that they start to cave in, sending the ant down to the bottom of the pit. If that doesn’t work, the ant lion kicks dirt at the ant so that it falls. Then the ant lion grabs the ant in its fearsome jaws and injects venom and digestive enzymes into it, and that is the end of the ant. The jaws actually have little projections that are hollow and act like horrible little straws, so that the ant lion sucks the liquefied ant insides into its digestive system. One species of ant, the trap-jaw ant, can sometimes escape the ant lion’s pit by using its own fearsome jaws as a spring to bounce itself to safety. There are many species of trap-jaw ant that live in tropical and subtropical areas throughout much of the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, and much of the Americas. Its long jaws can snap closed extremely quickly and with a lot of force, allowing it to kill prey, bite pieces off of food, and lots of other activities. They can also jump with their jaws, and this improves their ability to bounce right out of the ant lion pit. The ant lion can remain in its larval stage for years, maturing slowly. It has no anus but it doesn’t expel the waste products that it can’t digest, it just stores them in its body. When it does finally pupate, it uses a lot of the waste to produce silk for its cocoon. Whatever is left over it leaves behind when it emerges from its cocoon. The cocoons are naturally hidden underground, and when the adult antlion lacewing emerges, it digs its way to the surface and rests while its wings open. Compared to the tough little larva, the adult is delicate and not very robust. It doesn’t live very long, usually no more than a few weeks, and most species eat pollen or nectar, or maybe tiny insects. It mainly just seeks out a mate, and the female lays her eggs in soft soil. When they hatch, they build their first tiny pits and the cycle starts again. And nobody gets into anybody’s eyeballs. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Further reading: The Trees That Miss the Mammoths The disappearance of mastodons still threatens the native forests of South America Study reveals ancient link between mammoth dung and pumpkin pie A mammoth, probably about to eat something: The Osage orange fruit looks like a little green brain: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Way back at the end of 2017, I found an article called “The Trees That Miss the Mammoths,” and made a Patreon episode about it. In episode 320, about elephants, which released in March of 2023, I cited a similar article connecting mammoths and other plants. Now there’s even more evidence that extinct megafauna and living plants are connected, so let’s have a full episode all about it. Let’s start with the Kentucky coffeetree, which currently only survives in cultivation and in wetlands in parts of North America. It grows up to 70 feet high, or 21 meters, and produces leathery seed pods so tough that most animals literally can’t chew through them to get to the seeds. Its seed coating is so thick that water can’t penetrate it unless it’s been abraded considerably. Researchers are pretty sure the seed pods were eaten by mastodons and mammoths. Once the seeds traveled through a mammoth’s digestive system, they were nicely abraded and ready to sprout in a pile of dung. There are five species of coffeetree, and the Kentucky coffeetree is the only one found in North America. The others are native to Asia, but a close relation grows in parts of Africa. It has similar tough seeds, which are eaten and spread by elephants. The African forest elephant is incredibly important as a seed disperser. At least 14 species of tree need the elephant to eat their fruit in order for the seeds to sprout at all. If the forest elephant goes extinct, the trees will too. When the North American mammoths went extinct, something similar happened. Mammoths and other megafauna co-evolved with many plants and trees to disperse their seeds, and in return the animals got to eat some yummy fruit. But when the mammoths went extinct, many plant seeds couldn’t germinate since there were no mammoths to eat the fruit and poop out the seeds. Some of these plants survive but have declined severely, like the Osage orange. The Osage orange grows about 50 or 60 feet tall, or 15 to 18 meters, and produces big yellowish-green fruits that look like round greenish brains. Although it’s related to the mulberry, you wouldn’t be able to guess that from the fruit. The fruit drops from the tree and usually just sits there and rots. Some animals will eat it, especially cattle, but it’s not highly sought after by anything. Not anymore. In 1804, when the tree was first described by Europeans, it only grew in a few small areas in and near Texas. The tree mostly survives today because the plant can clone itself by sending up fresh sprouts from old roots. But 10,000 years ago, the tree grew throughout North America, as far north as Ontario, Canada, and there were seven different species instead of just the one we have today. 10,000 years ago is about the time that much of the megafauna of North and South America went extinct, including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, elephant-like animals called gomphotheres, camels, and many, many others. The osage orange tree’s thorns are too widely spaced to deter deer, but would have made a mammoth think twice before grabbing at the branches with its trunk. The thorns also grow much higher than deer can browse. Trees that bear thorns generally don’t grow them in the upper branches. There’s no point in wasting energy growing thorns where nothing is going to eat the leaves anyway. If there are thorns beyond reach of existing browsers, the tree must have evolved when something with a taller reach liked to eat its leaves. The term “evolutionary anachronism” is used to describe aspects of a plant, like the Osage orange’s thorns and fruit, that evolved due to pressures of animals that are now extinct. Scientists have observed evolutionary anachronism plants throughout the world. For instance, the lady apple tree, which grows in northern Australia and parts of New Guinea. It can grow up to 66 feet tall, or 20 meters, and produces an edible red fruit with a single large seed. It’s a common tree these days, probably because the Aboriginal people ate the fruit, but before that, a bird called genyornis was probably the main seed disperser of the lady apple. In episode 217 we talked about the genyornis, a flightless Australian bird that went extinct around 50,000 years ago but possibly more recently. It grew around 7 feet tall, or over 2 meters, and recent studies suggest it ate a lot of water plants. It would have probably eaten the lady apple fruit whenever it could, most likely swallowing the fruits whole and pooping the big seeds out later. Way back in episode 19 we talked about a tree on the island of Mauritius that relied on the dodo’s digestive system to abrade its seeds so they could sprout. It turns out that study was flawed and the seeds don’t need to be abraded to sprout. They just need an animal to eat the flesh off the seed, either by just eating the fruit and leaving the seed behind, or by swallowing the entire fruit and pooping the seed out later, and that could have been done by any number of animals. The dodo probably did eat the fruits, but so did a lot of other animals that have also gone extinct on Mauritius. In June of 2025, a study was published showing that the gomphothere Notiomastodon, which lived in South America until about 10,000 years ago, definitely ate fruit. Notiomastodon was an elephant relation that could probably grow almost ten feet tall, or 3 meters. It probably lived in family groups like modern elephants and probably looked a lot like a modern elephant, at least if you’re not an elephant expert or an elephant yourself. The 2025 study examined a lot of notiomastodon teeth, and it discovered evidence that the animals ate a lot of fruit. This means it would have been an important seed disperser, just like the African forest elephant that we talked about earlier. Another plant that nearly went extinct after the mammoth did is a surprising one. Wild ancestors of modern North American squash plants relied on mammoths to disperse their seeds and create the type of habitat where the plants thrived. Mammoths probably behaved a lot like modern elephants, pulling down tree limbs to eat and sometimes pushing entire trees over. This disturbed land is what wild squash plants loved, and if you’ve ever prepared a pumpkin or squash you’ll know that it’s full of seeds. The wild ancestors of these modern cultivated plants didn’t have delicious fruits, though, at least not to human taste buds. The fruit contained toxins that made them bitter, which kept small animals from eating them. Small animals would chew up the seeds instead of swallowing them whole, which is not what the plants needed. But mammoths weren’t bothered by the toxins and in fact probably couldn’t even taste the bitterness. They thought these wild squash were delicious and they ate a lot of them. After the mammoth went extinct, the wild squash lost its main seed disperser. As forests grew thicker after mammoths weren’t around to keep the trees open, the squash also lost a lot of its preferred habitat. The main reason why we have pumpkins and summer squash is because of our ancient ancestors. They bred for squash that weren’t bitter, and they planted them and cared for the plants. So even though the main cause of the mammoth’s extinction was probably overhunting by ancient humans, at least we got pumpkin pies out of the whole situation. However, I personally would prefer to have both pumpkin pie and mammoths. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Maryjane and Siya for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Look, don’t touch: birds with dart frog poison in their feathers found in New Guinea The hooded pitohui: The rufous-naped bellbird: The regent whistler: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about some birds that by human standards seem pretty mean, although of course the birds are just being birds. Thanks to Maryjane and Siya for their suggestions this week! We’ll start with Maryjane’s suggestion, the Northern shrike. It lives in North America, spending winter in parts of Canada and the northern United States. In summer it migrates to northern Canada. It’s a lovely gray and black bird with a dark eye streak, white markings on its tail and wings that flash when it flies, and a hooked bill. It’s a strong bird about the size of an American robin, and both the male and female sing. They will sometimes imitate other bird songs, and during breeding season a pair will sing duets. The Northern shrike looks very similar to the loggerhead shrike that lives farther south, in the southern parts of Canada and throughout most of the United States and Mexico. Most important to us today, the Northern shrike is sometimes called the butcher bird, because in the olden days, butchers would hang meat up to cure–but we’ll get to that part. It prefers to live in the edges of a forest near open spaces, and in the summer it lives along the border of the boreal forest and tundra. While it’s just a little songbird, in its heart it’s a falcon or hawk. It eats a lot of insects and other invertebrates, especially in summer, but it mainly kills and eats other songbirds and small mammals like mice and lemmings, even ones that are bigger and heavier than it is. The shrike has ordinary feet for a perching bird, not talons, but its feet are strong and can hold onto struggling prey. Its beak is deadly to small animals. The bill has a sharp hook at the end and is notched so that it has two little projections that act like fangs. It will hover and drop onto its prey, or grab a bird in mid-flight and bear it to the ground to kill it. Sometimes it will hop along the ground until it startles a bird or insect into flying away. It will even flash the white patches on its wings to frighten hidden prey into moving. If the shrike kills a wasp or bee, it will remove the stinger before eating it. It will pick off the wings of large insects and will sometime beat a dead insect against a rock or branch to soften it up and break off parts of the hard exoskeleton before eating it. Shrikes are territorial and will chase away birds that are much bigger than them, like ducks and even geese. During nesting season, the female takes care of the eggs and the male provides food for her. To prove that he can provide lots of food for the female while she’s incubating the eggs, he will cache food throughout his territory in advance. This is something shrikes do anyway, but it’s especially important during nesting season. If a shrike catches an animal it doesn’t want to eat right away, it will store it for later. It will cram it into a crack in a rock, impale it on a thorn or other sharp item like the points of a barbed wire fence, or wedge it into the fork of a tree branch. Then it can come back and eat it in a day or two when it’s hungry, or take the food to its mate. When the eggs hatch, both parents help feed the babies. When the babies are old enough to leave the nest, the parents go their separate ways, but they will often each take some of the fledglings with them so they can continue to feed them and help them learn to hunt. Since a nest can have as many as nine babies, it’s not always possible for one parent to take all the babies. The siblings stick together even once they’re mostly grown and independent, often through their first winter. This is what a Northern shrike sounds like: [Northern shrike call] We talked about some poisonous birds in episode 222, but Siya wanted to learn more about them. In that episode we mostly talked about the hooded pitohui, but since then, two more poisonous birds have been discovered in New Guinea. Let’s refresh our memories about the hooded pitohui, mostly because its discovery by scientists is such a fun story. The hooded pitohui lives in forests throughout much of New Guinea and eats seeds, insects and other invertebrates, and fruit. It’s related to orioles and looks very similar, with a dark orange body and black wings, head, and tail. It’s a social songbird that lives in family groups where everyone works to help raise the babies. The people who live in New Guinea knew all about its toxicity, of course. They mentioned this to European naturalists as long ago as 1895, but weren’t believed, because the scientists had never heard of a toxic bird. It wasn’t until 1989 that a grad student studying birds of paradise made a surprising discovery. Jack Dumbacher was trying to net some birds of paradise to study but kept catching pitohuis in his nets. He would untangle the birds and let them fly away, but naturally they were upset and one scratched him. He was in a hurry so he just licked the cuts clean. His tongue started to tingle, then burn, and then it went numb. Fortunately the effects didn’t last long, but he mentioned it to another researcher who had had a similar experience. They realized something weird was going on, so Dumbacher asked some of the local people what the cause might be. They all said, “Yeah, don’t lick the pitohui bird.” Dumbacher did, though, because sometimes scientists have to lick things. The next time his nets caught a pitohui, Dumbacher plucked one of its feathers and put it in his mouth. His mouth immediately started to burn. Dumbacher was amazed to learn about a toxic bird, but it took a year for anyone else to take an interest, specifically Dr. John W. Daly, an expert in poison dart frogs in Central and South America. Back in the 1960s while he was studying the frogs, in order to determine which ones were actually toxic and which ones weren’t, he frequently poked a frog and licked his finger, so Daly completely understood Dumbacher putting a feather in his mouth. Maybe don’t put random stuff in your mouth. Both Dumbacher and Daly were lucky they didn’t die, because it turns out that poison dart frogs and pitohuis both contain one of the deadliest neurotoxins in the world, called batrachotoxin. A chemical analysis determined that both animals excrete the same toxin. In captivity, poison dart frogs lose their toxicity. Daly was the one who figured this out, but he couldn’t figure out why except that he was pretty sure they absorbed the toxins from something they were eating in the wild. He thought the same might be true for the pitohui. Dumbacher agreed, and after he achieved his doctorate he started making expeditions to New Guinea to try to find out what. Both he and Daly thought it was probably an insect. But there are a lot of insects in Papua New Guinea and he couldn’t stay there and test insects for toxins all the time. He came and went as often as he could, and to make his trips easier he left his equipment in a village rather than hauling it back and forth with him. What he didn’t know is that one villager, named Avit Wako, had gotten interested in the project. When Dumbacher was gone, he continued the experiments. In 1995 Dumbacher sent a student intern to the village, since he didn’t have time to go himself, and Avit Wako said, “Hey, good to see you! I solved your problem. The toxin comes from this particular kind of beetle.” He was right, too. The toxin comes from beetles in the genus Choresine. But the pitohui isn’t the only toxic bird in New Guinea. In 2018 and 2019, two researchers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark got interested in poisonous birds and did some studies. One of the scientists is Kasun Bodawatta, whose colleagues thought he was having a rough time during the trip. The life of a scientist in the field can be hard, and Bodawatta kept having issues with a runny nose and weepy eyes. It wasn’t allergies or exhaustion, though, but the result of handling poisonous birds and their feathers. He described it as feeling “like cutting onions, but with a nerve agent.” Bodawatta’s team discovered that two more birds in New Guinea contain the same toxins as the pitohui in their feathers and skin. The rufous-naped bellbird is gray-brown with white and yellow markings, and a patch of rufous on the back of its head. The regent whistler is black and yellow with a white patch on its throat. Both eat insects as a large part of their diets, and both show similar genetic mutations that allow them to sequester the Choresine toxins in their feathers and skin. Not only does this keep potential predators from eating the birds, it also probably helps kill mites and other parasites that might otherwise want to live in their feathers. A 2023 study on the birds’ toxins discovered something new. In addition to the neurotoxin the birds absorb from beetles, the regent whistler’s skin also contains a different toxin that doesn’t have anything to do with beetles or other insects. The regent whistler’s skin glands contain a population of symbiotic bacteria that secrete a completely different toxin made of previously unknown molecules. The toxin helps protect the birds from harmful bacteria and fungi that are known to infect the skin and feathers of birds. In 2024, a team of microbiologists and chemists began studying the antimicrobial secretions in hopes of creating a new type of antimicrobial drug for use in humans and other animals. So thank you, little birds, and thank you to the scientists and citizen scientists who study them. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Micah for suggesting this week’s topic, the trilobite! Further reading: The Largest Trilobites Stunning 3D images show anatomy of 500 million-year-old Cambrian trilobites entombed in volcanic ash Strange Symmetries #06: Trilobite Tridents Trilobite Ventral Structures A typical trilobite: Isotelus rex, the largest trilobite ever found [photo from the first link above]: Walliserops showing off its trident [picture by TheFossilTrade – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133758014]: Another Walliserops individual with four prongs on its trident [photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about an ancient animal that was incredibly successful for millions of years, until it wasn’t. It’s a topic suggested by Micah: the trilobite. Trilobites first appear in the fossil record in the Cambrian, about 520 million years ago. They evolved separately from other arthropods so early and left no living descendants, that they’re not actually very closely related to any animals alive today. They were arthropods, though, so they’re distantly related to all other arthropods, including insects, spiders, and crustaceans. The word trilobite means “three lobes,” which describes its basic appearance. It had a head shield, often with elaborate spikes depending on the species, and a little tail shield. In between, its body was segmented like a pillbug’s or an armadillo’s, so that it could flex without cracking its exoskeleton. Its body was also divided into three lobes running from head to tail. Its head and tail were usually rounded so that the entire animal was roughly shaped like an oval, with the head part of the oval larger than the tail part. It had legs underneath that it used to crawl around on the sea floor, burrow into sand and mud, and swim. Some species could even roll up into a ball to protect its legs and softer underside, just like a pillbug. Because trilobites existed for at least 270 million years, there were a lot of species. Scientists have identified about 22,000 different species so far, and there were undoubtedly thousands more that we don’t know about yet. Most are about the size of a big stag beetle although some were tinier. The largest trilobite found so far lived in what is now North America, and it grew over two feet long, or more than 70 centimeters, and was 15 inches wide, or 40 cm. It’s named Isotelus rex. I. rex had 26 pairs of legs, possibly more, and prominent eyes on the head shield. Scientists think it lived in warm, shallow ocean water like most other trilobites did, where it burrowed in the bottom and ate small animals like worms. There were probably other species of trilobite that were even bigger, we just haven’t found specimens yet that are more than fragments. Because trilobites molted their exoskeletons the way modern crustaceans and other animals still do, we have a whole lot of fossilized exoskeletons. Fossilized legs, antennae, and other body parts are much rarer, and preserved soft body parts are the rarest of all. We know that some trilobite species had gills on the legs, some had hairlike structures on the legs, and many had compound eyes. A specimen with preserved eggs inside was also found recently. Some incredibly detailed trilobite fossils have been found in Morocco, including details like the mouth and digestive tract. The detail comes from volcanic ash that fell into shallow coastal water around half a billion years ago. The water cooled the ash enough that when it fell onto the trilobites living in the water, it didn’t burn them. It did suffocate them, though, since so much ash fell that the ocean was more ash than water. The ash was soft and as fine as powder, and it covered the trilobites and protected their bodies from potential damage, while also preserving the body details as they fossilized over millions of years. The fossils were discovered in 2015, about 509 million years after the trilobites died, and are still being studied. Two species of trilobite have been found at this Morocco site, and the team is using non-invasive technology to study the preserved insides in one exceptionally preserved specimen. Its entire digestive system is intact, probably because the poor trilobite ended up swallowing a lot of ash before it died. The ash kept the soft tissues from decomposing. Some trilobites had spines growing from their head shields and even from the rest of the exoskeleton. Scientists think these may have helped protect the animals from being eaten, but they might also have helped them navigate more easily in the water without getting flipped over by currents. One genus of trilobite, Walliserops, even had a structure sticking out from the front of its head called a trident. The trident grew forward and slightly upward from the head, then split into three prongs. Scientists aren’t sure what it was for, but suggest that it acted as a nose spike like some modern beetles have, which allowed trilobites to fight each other for resources or mates. The tridents weren’t completely symmetrical, and one individual has even been found with a four-pronged trident. (I guess you would call that a quadrent.) Some species had long tridents, some short, but there’s no evidence that only males or only females had them. Electron microscopes and other modern imaging technology have allowed scientists to learn more about what the trilobite looked like when it was alive. This includes some hints about different species’ coloration and markings. Most trilobites had good vision and were probably as colorful as modern crustaceans. Some rare trilobite fossils show microscopic traces of spots and stripes. One species studied may have had a brown stripe that faded to white along the edges of the body. All trilobites went extinct at the end of the Permian, about 250 million years ago, during the extinction event called the Great Dying. We talked about it in detail in episode 227 so I won’t go over its causes and effects again except to say that an estimated 95% of all marine animals went extinct during that event. The Great Dying ended the trilobite’s successful 270 million year run on this amazing planet. When I was little, I found trilobites fascinating. They were so common for so long, and then they were gone. I’ve always wondered if some trilobites survived the Great Dying and were still alive in the deep sea. I’m not the only one who’s wondered that, so let’s talk a little more about why the trilobites went extinct and how some of them might have survived. Almost all trilobites we know of lived in shallow coastal water. We have trilobite tracks of an ancient low tide shore, which tells us that at least some species could leave the water and venture onto land occasionally, possibly the first animals on earth to do so. Coastal water is well oxygenated and we know trilobites had trouble surviving anoxic events, when the water where they lived had much less oxygen than usual. Anoxic events are actually what led to the Great Dying, but it wasn’t the first time the world’s oceans became less oxygenated. It happened in earlier extinction events too during the Devonian, around 372 and 359 million years ago, and each time many species and genera of trilobites went extinct. The trilobite was already in decline when the Great Dying occurred, with only a handful of genera left, and the extinction event finished them off once and for all according to the fossil record. But we do know of a few species of trilobite that were adapted to the deep sea. Deep-sea animals have to evolve to be tolerant of low-oxygen conditions. The deep sea is also very little known by humans. It’s possible, even if it’s unlikely, that deep-sea trilobites survived the Great Dying and that their descendants are still around, unknown to science. One interesting note, and an ongoing mystery about trilobites, is that while we know they were arthropods, we don’t actually know which branch of the phylum Arthropoda they’re most related to. That’s because there are no ancestral versions of the trilobite that have ever been found. When they appear in the fossil record, they’re already recognizably trilobites. It’s possible that the ancestral forms didn’t have exoskeletons that were likely to fossilize, or that we just haven’t found the right fossil bed yet. Until we learn more, it’ll remain a mystery. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Cara for suggesting we talk about the long-beaked echidna this week! Further reading: Found at last: bizarre, egg-laying mammal finally rediscovered after 60 years A short-beaked echidna: The rediscovered Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about an animal suggested by Cara, the echidna, also called the spiny anteater. It’s a type of mammal, but it’s very different from almost all the mammals alive today. We talked about the echidna briefly in episode 45, but this week we’re going to learn more about it, especially one that was thought to be extinct but was recently rediscovered. Cara specifically suggested we learn about the long-beaked echidna, which lives only in New Guinea. The short-beaked echidna lives in New Guinea and Australia. The names short and long beaked make it sound like the echidna is a bird, but the beak is actually just a snout. It just looks beak-like from a distance and is covered with tough skin, sort of like the platypus’s snout is sometimes called a duck-bill. In June and July of 2023, an expedition made up of scientists and local experts from various parts of Indonesia, as well as from the University of Oxford in England, discovered and rediscovered a lot of small animals in the Cyclops Mountains. They even discovered an entire cave system that no one but some local people had known about, and they discovered it when one of the expedition members stepped on a mossy spot in the forest and fell straight through down into the cave. But one animal they were really hoping to see hadn’t made an appearance and they worried it was actually extinct. That one was Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, a type of mammal known as a monotreme. There are three big groups of mammals. The biggest is the placental mammal group, which includes humans, dogs, cats, mice, bats, horses, whales, giraffes, and so on. A female placental mammal grows her babies inside her body in the uterus, each baby wrapped in a fluid-filled sac called a placenta. Placental mammals are pretty well developed when they’re born. The second type is the marsupial mammal group, which includes possums, kangaroos, koalas, wombats, sugar gliders, and so on. A female marsupial has two uteruses, and while her babies initially grow inside her, they’re born very early. A baby marsupial, called a joey, is just a little pink squidge about the size of a bean that’s not anywhere near done growing, but it’s not completely helpless. It has relatively well developed front legs so it can crawl up its mother’s fur and find a teat. Some species of marsupial have a pouch around its teats, like possums and kangaroos, but other species don’t. Once the baby finds a teat, it clamps on and stays there for weeks or months while it continues to grow. The third and rarest type of mammal these days is the monotreme group, and monotremes lay eggs. But their eggs aren’t like bird eggs, they’re more like reptile eggs, with a soft, leathery shell. The female monotreme keeps her eggs inside her body until it’s almost time for them to hatch. The babies are small squidge beans like marsupial newborns, and I’m delighted to report that they’re called puggles. There are only two monotremes left alive in the world today, the platypus and the echidna. The echidna has a pouch and after a mother echidna lays her single egg, she tucks it in the pouch. Monotremes show a number of physical traits that are considered primitive. Some of the traits, like the bones that make up their shoulders and the placement of their legs, are shared with reptiles but not found in most modern mammals. Other traits are shared with birds. The word monotreme means “one opening,” and that opening, called a cloaca, is used for reproductive and excretory systems instead of those systems using separate openings. It wasn’t until 1824 that scientists figured out that monotreme moms produce milk. They don’t have teats, so the puggles lick the milk up from what are known as milk patches. Before then a lot of scientists argued that monotremes weren’t mammals at all and should either be classified with the reptiles or as their own class, the prototheria. It’s easy to think, “Oh, that mammal is so primitive, it must not have evolved much since the common ancestor of mammals, birds, and reptiles was alive 315 million years ago,” but of course that’s not the case. It’s just that the monotremes that survived did just fine with the basic structures they evolved a long time ago. There were no evolutionary pressures to develop different shoulder bones or stop laying eggs. Other structures have evolved considerably. Monotremes aren’t closely related to any of the other mammals alive today, either marsupial or placental mammals. The last shared ancestor lived at least 163 million years ago and possibly much earlier, maybe even 220 million years ago. The first dinosaurs lived around 230 million years ago, so we are talking a very long time ago. The echidna is relatively closely related to the platypus and its ancestors probably looked and acted a lot like a platypus, including being largely aquatic. The echidna is adapted to life on land, even though it can swim quite well. It looks superficially like a big hedgehog since it’s covered in spines as well as hair, and if it feels threatened it will curl up into a ball like a hedgehog with its spines sticking out. It’s also a strong digger and will often dig a shallow hole very quickly when threatened, so that a potential predator encounters basically a bunch of spines sticking up out of the dirt. But unlike a hedgehog, which is usually small enough to fit in an adult human’s hand, the echidna can grow over 20 inches long, or 52 cm, and a big male can weigh as much as 13 lbs, or 6 kg. The echidna has a long, skinny snout with a pair of nostrils at the end. The snout is bare of fur and the echidna pokes it into the ground and leaf litter to find the worms and other small invertebrates it eats. Not only does it have a good sense of smell to locate food, its snout also contains electroreceptors that allow it to sense the tiny muscle movements of its prey. The short-beaked echidna mostly eats termites and ants, while the long-beaked echidna mostly eats earthworms. The echidna doesn’t have teeth and its mouth is tiny, but it has a long sticky tongue to lick up the animals it eats. The long-beaked echidna’s tongue has tiny spines on it, sort of like a cat’s tongue has tiny spines that help it groom its fur, but the spines on the echidna’s tongue help it stab worms and insect larvae and drag them into its mouth. Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna is a subspecies that was only discovered by scientists in 1961. It’s only known from a single specimen, and it hadn’t been seen since. In 2007 a scientific expedition found signs that an echidna was still living in the Cyclops Mountains, namely nose-pokes in the dirt where an echidna had been looking for food, but despite lots of searching for the animal, no one had seen it. Since the echidna is nocturnal and spends most of the day sleeping in its burrow, it’s hard to spot even under the best conditions. The 2023 expedition used over 80 trail cameras to try and find the echidna. The trail cams were set up for four weeks and not a single one recorded a single echidna—until the very last day, and even then it was almost the very last video on the memory card. It’s just a short little video of an echidna just walking along on its way to do echidna stuff, but it made a big difference for the scientists. Now that we know that Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna isn’t extinct, scientists can work with local people to help protect it and its habitat. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

This week we’re going to learn about a new finding about the skull referred to as the Dragon Man! Further reading: We’ve had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s—only nobody knew The proteome of the late Middle Pleistocene Harbin individual Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It never fails that only a few days after our annual updates episode, a study is published that’s an important update to an older episode. This time it’s an update so important that it deserves its own episode, so let’s learn more about one of our own extinct close relations, the Denisovan people. We didn’t know about the Denisovans until 2010, when DNA was sequenced from a finger bone found in Denisova Cave in Siberia in 2008. Scientists were surprised when the DNA didn’t match up with Neanderthal DNA, which is what they expected, since they knew Neanderthals had lived in the cave at various times over thousands of years. Instead, the DNA was for a completely different hominin, a close relation of both humans and Neanderthals. Since then, researchers have found some Denisovan teeth, two partial mandibles, a rib fragment, and some other bone fragments, but nothing that could act as a type specimen. The type specimen is the preserved specimen of a new species, which is kept for scientists to study. It needs to be as complete as possible, so a handful of fragments just won’t work. Even without a type specimen, having Denisovan DNA answered some questions about our own history as a species. Ever since scientists have been able to sequence genetic material from ancient bones, they’ve noticed something weird going on with our DNA. Some populations of people show small traces of DNA not found in other human populations, so scientists suspected they were from long-ago cross-breeding with other hominin species. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced, it matched some of the unknown DNA traces, but not all of them. Mystery DNA sequences in a closely related population are called ghost lineages. The Denisovan DNA matched the ghost lineage scientists had identified in some populations of people, especially ones in parts of east Asia, Australia, and New Guinea. This is your reminder that despite tiny genetic differences like these, all humans alive today are 100% human. We are all Homo sapiens. Naturally, we as humans are interested in our family tree. We even have an entire field of study dedicated to studying ancient humans and hominins, paleoanthropology. Lots of scientists have studied the Denisovan remains we’ve found, along with the genetic material, but they really need a skull to learn so much more about our long-extinct distant relations. Luckily, we’ve had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s. But wait, you may be saying, you just said we didn’t have anything but bone fragments and teeth! Why didn’t you mention the skull? It’s because the skull was hidden by its finder, a Chinese construction worker. The man was helping build a bridge and was ashamed that he was working for a Japanese company. That region of China was under Japanese occupation at the time, and the man didn’t want anyone to know that he was working for people who were treating his fellow citizens badly. He thought the skull was an important find similar to the Peking Man discovery in 1929, so he hid the skull at the bottom of an abandoned well to keep it safe. He didn’t dare share any information about it until he was on his death-bed, when he whispered his secret to his son. It wasn’t until 2018 that the man’s family took another look at the skull and realized it definitely wasn’t an ordinary human skull. It was obviously extremely old and had a pronounced brow and really big teeth. In 2021 the skull was classified as a new species of hominin, Homo longi, where the second word comes from the Mandarin word for dragon. That’s because the area where it was found is called Dragon River. But not everyone agreed that the Dragon Man skull, as it came to be known, was actually a new species. Scientists continued to study the skull, and finally, a paleoanthropologist named Qiaomei Fu and her team managed to extract DNA from the skull and one of its teeth. The resulting genetic profile indicated that the Dragon Man was a Denisovan. The skull has been dated to 146,000 years ago, possibly older. It’s nearly complete, which provides a lot of information to scientists. Scientists are pretty sure Dragon Man was a fully grown male, but less than 50 years old when he died. So what did Dragon Man look like when he was alive? We don’t know how tall he was or his overall build, although from the other Denisovan bones we have, we know Denisovans were a strong, robust people, similar to Neanderthals, and were more closely related to Neanderthals than humans. Dragon Man would have had a pronounced brow that would probably make his eyes look deep-set, and a large nose but a receding chin. Genetic markers indicate he probably had dark hair and eyes, and a medium shade of skin. If you had a time machine and could go back and meet Dragon Man when he was alive, you’d know at a glance that he wasn’t a Homo sapiens but he would probably look pretty normal in most respects. One exciting note is that paleoanthropologists now think that three other ancient skulls from China may actually be Denisovan skulls. With luck they’ll be able to extract genetic material from them soon so we can learn more about our ancient cousins. 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Nicholas, Måns, Warblrwatchr, Llewelly, and Emerson this week, in our yearly updates episode! Further reading: An Early Cretaceous Tribosphenic Mammal and Metatherian Evolution Guam’s invasive tree snakes loop themselves into lassos to reach their feathered prey Rhythmically trained sea lion returns for an encore — and performs as well as humans Scientists Solve Mystery of Brown Giant Pandas Elephant turns a hose into a sophisticated showering tool New name for one of the world’s rarest rhinoceroses Antarctica’s only native insect’s unique survival mechanism Komodo dragons have iron-coated teeth to rip apart their prey The nutria has really orange teeth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week is our annual updates episode, and we’ll also learn about an animal suggested by Emerson. But first, we have some corrections! Nicholas shared a paper with me that indicates that marsupials actually evolved in what is now Asia, with marsupial ancestors discovered in China. They spread into North America later. So I’ve been getting that wrong over many episodes, over several years. Måns shared a correction from an older episode where I mentioned that humans can’t get pregnant while breastfeeding a baby. I’ve heard this all my life but it turns out it’s not true. It is true that a woman’s fertility cycle is suppressed after giving birth, but it’s not related to breastfeeding. Some women can become pregnant again only a few months after giving birth, while others can’t get pregnant again for a few years. It depends on the individual. That’s important, since the myth is so widespread that many women get pregnant by accident thinking they can’t since they’re still feeding a baby. Warblrwatchr commented on the ultraviolet episode and mentioned that cats can see ultraviolet, which is useful to them because mouse urine glows in UV light. Finally, Llewelly pointed out that in episode 416, I didn’t mention that fire ant venom isn’t delivered when the ant bites someone. The ant bites with its mandibles to hold on, then uses the stinger on its back end to sting repeatedly. Now, let’s dive into some updates about animals we’ve talked about in past episodes. As usual, I don’t try to give an update on every single animal, because we’d be here all week if I did. I just chose interesting studies that caught my eye. In episode 402, we talked about snakes that travel in unusual ways, like sidewinders. Even though I had a note to myself to talk about the brown tree snake in that episode, I completely forgot. The brown tree snake is native to parts of coastal Australia and many islands around Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. It’s not native to Guam, which is an island in the western Pacific, way far away from the brown tree snake’s home. But in the late 1940s, some brown tree snakes made their way to Guam in cargo ships and have become invasive since then. The brown tree snake can grow up to six and a half feet long, or 2 meters, and is nocturnal, aggressive, and venomous. It’s not typically a danger to adults, but its venom can be dangerous to children and pets. The government employs trained dogs to find the snakes so they can be removed, and this has worked so well that brown tree snake population is declining rapidly on the island. But that hasn’t stopped the snake from driving many native animals to extinction in the last 75 years, especially birds. One of the things scientists did in Guam to try and protect the native birds was to place smooth poles around the island so birds could nest on top but snakes couldn’t climb up to eat the eggs and chicks. But before long, the snakes had figured out a way to climb the poles, a method never before documented in any snake. To climb a pole, the snake wraps its body around it, with the head overlapping the tail. Then it sort of scoots itself up the pole with tiny motions of its spine, a slow, difficult process that takes a lot of energy. Tests of captured brown tree snakes afterwards showed that not all snakes are willing or able to climb poles this way. Scientists think the brown tree snake evolved this method of movement to climb smooth-trunked trees in its native habitat. They also suspect some other species of snake can do the same. Way back in episode 23 we talked about musical animals, including how some species can recognize and react to a rhythmic beat while most can’t. Sea lions are really good at it, especially a sea lion named Ronan. Ronan was rescued in 2009 when she was a young sea lion suffering from malnutrition, wandering down a highway in California. She was determined to be non-releasable after she recovered, so she’s been a member of the Pinniped Lab in the University of California – Santa Cruz ever since, where she participates in activities that help scientists study sea lions. The rhythm studies are only one of the things she does, and only occasionally. The scientists put on a metronome and she bobs her head to the beat while they film her in ultra-slow motion. The latest study was published in May of 2025. Ronan is 16 years old now and in her prime, so it’s not surprising that she performed even better than her last tests when she was still quite young. The study determined that not only does Ronan hit the beat right on time, she’s actually better at it than a human a lot of the time. She hits the beat within 15 milliseconds. When you blink your eye, it takes 150 milliseconds. If only she had hands, she’d be the best drummer ever! The greatest thing about this process is that Ronan enjoys it. She’s rewarded with fish after a training session, and if she doesn’t feel like doing an activity, she doesn’t have to. Back in episode 220, we talked about the giant panda, especially the mysterious Qinling panda that’s brown and tan instead of black and white. A study published in March of 2024 looked into the genetics of this unusual coat color and determined that it was a natural genetic mutation that doesn’t make the animals unhealthy, meaning it probably isn’t a result of inbreeding. We talk occasionally about tool use in animals, especially in birds like crows and parrots, and in primates like chimpanzees. But a study published in November of 2024 detailed an elephant in the Berlin Zoo that uses a water hose to shower. You may not think that’s a big deal, but the elephant in question, named Mary, uses the hose the way a human would to shower off. She holds the hose with her trunk just behind the nozzle, then moves it around and shifts her body to make sure she gets water everywhere she wants. She has to sling the hose backwards to clean her back, and when researchers gave her a heavier hose that she couldn’t move around as easily, she didn’t bother with it but just used her own trunk to spray water on herself. Even more interesting, another elephant, named Anchali, who doesn’t get along with Mary, will interfere with the hose while Mary is using it. She lifts part of the hose to kink it and stop the water from flowing. Sometimes she even steps on the hose to stop the water, something the elephants have been trained not to do since zookeepers use hoses to clean out the enclosures. Anchali only steps on a hose if Mary is using it. This is the first time researchers have studied a water hose as tool use, but it makes sense for elephants to understand how to use a hose, since they have a built-in hose on their faces. We talked about the rhinoceros in episode 346, and more recently in the narwhals and unicorns episode. A study published in March of 2025 suggested that the Javan rhino should be classified as a new species of rhino in its own genus. The Javan rhino is incredibly rare, with only about 60 individuals alive in the world, all of them living in the wild in one part of Java. The Javan rhino is also called the Sundaic rhinoceros, and it’s been considered a close relation of the Indian rhinoceros. It’s smaller than the Indian rhino and most Javan rhino females either don’t have a horn at all or only have a big bump on the nose instead of a real horn. The Javan rhino is so rare that we don’t really know much about it. The new study determined that there are big enough differences between the Javan rhino and the Indian rhino, in their skeletons, skin, diet, behavior, and fossil remains, that they should be placed in separate genera. The proposed new name for the Javan rhino is Eurhinoceros sondaicus instead of Rhinoceros sondaicus. The only insect native to Antarctica is the Antarctic midge, which we mentioned in episode 221 but haven’t really talked about. It’s a flightless insect that can grow up to 6 mm long, and it’s the only insect that lives year-round in Antarctica. It’s only been found on the peninsula on the northwestern side of the continent. Every animal that lives in Antarctica is considered an extremophile, and this little midge has some remarkable adaptations to its harsh environment. Its body contains compounds that minimize the amount of ice that forms in its body when the temperature plunges. It’s so well adapted to cold weather that it actually can’t survive if the temperature gets much above freezing. It eats decaying vegetation, algae, microorganisms, and other tiny food in its larval stages, but doesn’t eat at all as an adult. The midge spends most of its life as a larva, only metamorphosing into its adult form after two winters. During its first winter it enters a dormant phase called quiescence, but as soon as the weather warms, it can resume development. It enters another dormant phase called obligate diapause for its second winter, where it pupates as soon as the weather gets cold. When summer arrives, all the midges emerge as adults at the same time, which allows them to find mates and lay eggs before dying a few days later. The female midge lays her eggs and deposits a jelly-like protein on top of them. The jelly acts as antifreeze and keeps the eggs from drying out, and when the eggs hatch, the babies can eat the jelly. In episode 384, we talked about the Komodo dragon, and only a month or so after that, and right after the 2024 updates episode, a new study was released about Komodo dragon teeth. It turns out that the Komodo dragon has teeth that are tipped with iron, which helps keep them incredibly sharp but also strong. As if Komodo dragons weren’t already scary enough, now we know they have metal teeth! Many animals incorporate iron in their teeth, especially rodents, which causes some animals to have orange or partially orange teeth. In the Komodo dragon, the iron is incorporated into the tooth’s enamel coating, but only on the tips of the teeth. Since Komodo dragons have serrated teeth, that’s a lot of very sharp points. There’s no way currently to test fossilized teeth to see if they once contained iron, especially since the iron would most likely be deposited in the tooth coating, the way it is for animals living today, not in the tooth itself. But because the Komodo dragon has teeth that are very similar in many ways to the teeth of meat-eating dinosaurs, scientists think some dinosaurs may have had iron in their teeth too. And that brings us to the nutria, an animal suggested by Emerson. Emerson likes the nutria because of its orange teeth, and hopefully you can guess why its teeth are orange. The nutria is also called the coypu, and it’s a rodent native to South America. In Spanish the word nutria means otter, so in South America it’s almost exclusively called the coypu, and the name coypu is becoming more popular in other languages too. It’s been introduced to other parts of the world as a fur animal, and it has become invasive in parts of Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. The nutria is a semi-aquatic rodent that looks like a muskrat but is much bigger, up to two feet long, or 64 cm, not counting its tail. It also kind of looks like a beaver but is smaller. If you’re not sure which of these three animals you’re looking at, since they’re so similar, the easiest way to tell them apart is to look at their tails. The beaver has a famously flattened paddle-like tail, the muskrat’s tail is flattened side to side to act as a rudder, and the nutria’s tail is just plain old round. The nutria also has a white muzzle and chin, and magnificent white whiskers. The nutria mostly eats water plants and is mostly active in the twilight. While it usually lives around slow-moving streams and shallow lakes, it will also tolerate saltwater wetlands. Wild nutrias are generally dark brown, but ones bred for their fur are often blond or even white. The nutria digs large dens with the entrance usually underwater, but the nesting chamber inside is dry. It also digs for roots. This can cause a lot of damage to levees and riverbanks, which is why the nutria is so destructive as an invasive animal. It will also eat people’s gardens and commercial crops like rice and alfalfa. One interesting thing about the nutria is that the female has teats that are high up on her sides, which allows her babies to nurse even when they’re all in the water. The nutria’s big incisor teeth are bright orange, as we mentioned before. This is indeed because of the iron in the enamel that strengthens the teeth. Like other rodents, the nutria’s incisors grow throughout its life and are continually worn down as it chews tough plants. A nutria eats about 25% of its weight in plants every single day. That’s almost as much as me and pizza. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Trech for suggesting this week’s topic, the red-eyed tree frog! Further reading: Tadpoles hatch in seconds to escape predator The colorful red-eyed tree frog [photo by Geoff Gallice]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to have a short little episode about a little frog, suggested by Trech. The frog in question is the red-eyed tree frog, which is native to Central America, including parts of Mexico, and northwestern South America. It lives in forests, always around water. You might be thinking, “of course, frogs live in water,” but remember that this is a tree frog. It lives in trees. But it still needs water for its babies, just not quite in the way most frogs do. Before we learn about that, let’s learn about the frog itself. A big female can grow about 3 inches long, or 7.5 cm, while males are smaller. It’s a cute frog, of course, because frogs are always cute, but it’s also brightly colored. It’s bright green with red eyes, blue and yellow stripes on its sides, and orange feet. Ordinarily, a frog with such bright colors would warn potential predators that it’s toxic, but the red-eyed tree frog isn’t toxic at all. Its bright colors have a different purpose. When it’s sitting on a leaf, the bright colors are hidden and only the frog’s smooth green back is showing, which makes it look like just another leaf. Only its eyes are bright, but it closes its eyes when it’s resting. But if a predator approaches, the frog opens its eyes suddenly and jumps up, revealing all those bright colors. The predator is startled, and maybe even hesitates because it thinks the frog might be toxic, and by the time the predator decides it should try eating the frog after all, the frog is long gone. Oh, and if you’re wondering, the red-eyed tree frog can see through its eyelids. They’re actually not eyelids like we have, but a membrane that it can move over its eyes. The frog is nocturnal and eats insects like mosquitoes, crickets, and moths. It has a good sense of smell, which helps it find insects in the dark. The tree frog also has suction cups on its toes that help it stay put on smooth leaves. During the day it sticks itself to the underside of a leaf to sleep where it’s more hidden. The female also lays her eggs on the underside of a leaf. This protects them from heavy rain, since the frogs breed during the rainy season, and it also helps hide them from predators. The female chooses a leaf that’s growing above water, and if the leaf isn’t very big she’ll lay eggs on both sides of it and fold the leaf to help hide all the eggs. The eggs stick to the leaf with a type of jelly that also helps keep them from drying out. The eggs hatch in about a week, but they can hatch a few days early if a predator approaches. The embryonic tadpoles in their eggs can sense vibrations, and if a predator like a snake shakes the leaf as it approaches the eggs, the tadpoles can hatch within seconds. They drop straight down into the water below the leaf. Hatching early when in danger is called phenotypic plasticity, and it’s really rare. It’s especially unusual because the embryonic tadpoles can actually tell the difference between a typical predator of frog eggs and vibrations caused by other animals or the wind. They can hatch so quickly because the stress reaction causes the pre-tadpoles to secrete an enzyme from their little noses, which weakens the egg wall and allows them to push and wiggle their way out. Tadpoles stay in the water for several weeks, or sometimes several months depending on conditions, during which time they eat algae and other tiny food in the water. As they grow bigger, the tadpoles can eat bigger food, including other tadpoles. They switch to tiny insects after they metamorphose into froglets. At some point during its development, a red-eyed tree frog needs to eat enough food containing carotenoids in order to develop properly, and in order to develop brightly colored skin as an adult. The red-eyed tree frog is a popular pet, but captive-bred frogs sometimes aren’t as brightly colored because they didn’t get enough of the right foods as young frogs. During breeding season, a male will claim a small branch and jump and bounce around on it, both to call attention to himself and to shake other males off the branch. He also croaks loudly to attract a mate. This is what he sounds like: [frog call] 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 [email protected]. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!