Strange Animals Podcast

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.

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...

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...

Thanks to Owen and Aksel, and Dylan and Emily for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Where did the unicorn myth come from? The narwhal is my favorite whale: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to look at an animal suggested by Owen and Aksel, and a related suggestion by Dylan and Emily. Owen and Aksel suggested we talk about the narwhal, which we haven't really discussed since episode 5 even though it's one of my favorite animals. Dylan and Emily suggested we learn about animals that might have inspired legends of the unicorn. These two topics are definitely linked! The narwhal is a toothed whale, but it doesn't have very many teeth—in fact, most narwhals don't have any teeth at all. It swallows its food whole and doesn't need to chew, mostly small fish but also squid and other small animals. Male narwhals do have one tooth, a tusk that can be almost 10 feet long, or over 3 meters. The tusk is a spiral shape, developed from what would have been the left canine tooth, but instead of growing downward like a regular tooth, it grows forward, directly through the front of the lip. A lot of times people get confused and think the tusk is a horn that grows from the narwhal's forehead, and that's mainly because the narwhal is closely related to the unicorn legend. That sounds weird at first, since the narwhal is a whale that can grow up to 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and lives in cold waters of the Arctic Circle. The unicorn is supposed to be a horse-like animal with a spiral horn growing from its forehead, although it's also sometimes depicted as more goatlike in appearance, with cloven hooves and a little beard. It also usually has a long tail with a tuft at the end like a donkey or zebra. In the olden days in Europe, the unicorn's single spiral horn was supposed to have curative properties. If you ground up a little bit of the horn, known as alicorn, people thought it acted as a medicine to cure you of poisoning or other ailments. The alicorn was actually the tusk of the narwhal, but traders claimed it was a unicorn horn because they could charge more for it. The legend of the unicorn having a long spiral horn doesn't come from ancient stories, it comes from the appearance of the narwhal's tusk. The narwhal is as mysterious as the unicorn in its own way. In fact, the narwhal seems a lot less plausibly real than a unicorn and a lot of people actually don't realize it's a real animal. The biggest question about the narwhal is what its tusk is used for. Most males have one, and occasionally a male will grow two tusks. Most females don't have one, although about 15% of females will grow a tusk, usually smaller than the male's. Females live longer than males on average, so obviously the tusk isn't helping males survive. Most scientists assume that it's just a way for males to attract mates. But the narwhal's tusk seems to be useful for more than just decoration. It contains high concentrations of nerve endings, and scientists think it might help the whale sense a lot of information about the water around it. Narwhals have been observed smacking fish with their tusks to stun them, so that the whale can slurp them up more easily. And even though it's technically a tooth, the narwhal's tusk can bend up to a foot, or about 30 cm, in any direction without breaking. The narwhal is pale gray in color with darker gray or brown dapples, but like gray horses, many narwhals get paler as they age. Old individuals can appear pure white. This can make them easy to confuse with another small whale that's closely related, the beluga, which shares other characteristics with the narwhal. The beluga is white, has a small rounded head and doesn't have a dorsal fin, and has a neck so that it can bend it head around. Most whales have lost the ability to move their heads. The beluga also lives in the same areas as the narwhal and both ...

Thanks to Jaxon for suggesting this week's topic, Coelurosauravus! Further reading: Coelurosauravus New Research Reveals Secrets of First-Ever Gliding Reptile The modern Draco lizard glides on "wings" made from extended rib bones: Coelurosauravus glided on wings that were completely different from any other wings known [art from the first link above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about an extinct animal suggested by Jaxon. It's called Coelurosauravus and it lived around 255 million years ago in what is now Madagascar. Coelurosauravus was a member of the Weigeltisauridae family, reptiles whose fossils have been found not just in Madagascar but in parts of Europe, and maybe even North America (although we're not sure yet). They were gliding reptiles that probably lived in trees and ate insects and other small animals, sort of like modern gliding lizards. But while most gliding lizards are very small, Coelurosauravus grew over a foot long, or around 40 cm, and that's nowhere near the weirdest thing about it. To explain why Coelurosauravus was so very peculiar, we have to learn a little about other gliding reptiles. Back in episode 255 we learned about kuehneosaurids, and that's a good place to start. Kuehneosaurids lived around 225 million years ago in what is now England. This wasn't all that long after Coelurosauravus lived and not that far away from where some of its relations lived, but the two weren't related. Kuehneosaurus looked like a big lizard although this was before modern lizards evolved, but it was a reptile and it was even larger than Coelurosauravus. Kuehneosaurus grew about two feet long, or 70 cm, including a long tail, and probably lived in trees and ate insects. Kuehneosaurus glided on sail-like structures on its sides that were made from extended ribs with skin stretched over them. Its wings weren't all that big, although they were big enough that they could act as a parachute if the animal fell or jumped from a branch. Another gliding reptile, Kuehneosuchus, had wings that were much longer. In a study published in 2008, a team of scientists built models of kuehneosuchus and tested them in a wind tunnel used for aerospace engineering. It turned out to be quite stable in the air and could probably glide very well. We don't know a whole lot about the kuehneosaurids because we haven't found very many fossils. We're not even sure if the two species are closely related or not. We're not even sure they're not the same species. Individuals of both were uncovered in caves near Bristol in the 1950s, and some researchers speculate they were males and females of the same species. Despite the difference in wings, otherwise they're extremely similar in a lot of ways. Generally, researchers compare the kuehneosaurids to modern draco lizards, which we talked about in episode 237, even though they're not related. Draco lizards are much smaller, only about 8 inches long including the tail, or 20 cm, and live throughout much of southeastern Asia. Many gliding animals, like the flying squirrel, have gliding membranes called patagia that stretch from the front legs to the back legs, but the draco lizard is different. It has greatly elongated ribs that it can extend like wings, and the skin between the ribs acts as a patagium. This skin is usually yellow or brown so that the lizard looks like a falling leaf when it's gliding. Draco lizards can fold their wings down and extend them, which isn't something the kuehneosaurids appear to have been able to do. But now let's return to Coelurosauravus. It too had wing-like structures on its sides that consisted of skin stretched over bony struts. But in this case, the bones weren't elongated ribs. Coelurosauravus had about 30 pairs of long, flexible bones that extended from the sides of its belly, and it could open and close its wings like draco lizar...

Thanks to Ryder, Alexandria, and Simon for their suggestions this week! Let's learn about three remarkable wading birds. Two of them are pink! Bird sounds taken from the excellent website xeno-canto. The goliath heron is as tall as people [picture by Steve Garvie from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland - Goliath Heron (Ardea goliath), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12223810]: The roseate spoonbill has a bill shaped like a spoon, you may notice [picture by Photo Dante - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42301356]: Flamingos really do look like those lawn ornaments [picture by Valdiney Pimenta - Flamingos, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6233369]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about three large birds with long legs that spend a lot of time wading through shallow water, suggested by Ryder, Alexandria, and Simon. Wading birds tend to share traits even if they're not closely related, because of convergent evolution. In order to wade in water deep enough to find food, a wading bird needs long legs. Then it also needs a long neck so it can reach its food more easily. A long beak helps to grab small animals too. Having big feet with long toes also helps it keep its footing in soft mud. Let's start with Ryder's suggestion, the goliath heron. It's the biggest heron alive today, standing up to 5 feet tall, or 1.5 meters. That's as tall as a person! It only weighs about 11 lbs at most, though, or 5 kg, but its wingspan is over 7 ½ feet across, or 2.3 meters. It's a big, elegant bird with a mostly gray and brown body, but a chestnut brown head and neck with black and white streaks on its throat and chest. The goliath heron lives throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, meaning south of the Sahara Desert, anywhere it can find water. It's happy on the edge of a lake or river, in a swamp or other wetlands, around the edges of a water hole, or even along the coast of the ocean. It usually stands very still in the water, looking down. When a fish swims close enough, the heron stabs it with its bill, pulls it out of the water, and either holds it for a while until the bird is ready to swallow the fish, or sometimes it will even set the fish down on land or floating vegetation for a while. It's not usually in a big hurry to swallow its meal. Sometimes that means other birds steal the fish, especially eagles and pelicans, but the goliath heron is so big and its beak is so sharp that most of the time, other birds and animals leave it alone. The goliath heron will also eat frogs, lizards, and other small animals when it can, but it prefers nice big fish. It can catch much bigger fish than other wading birds, and eating big fish is naturally more energy efficient than eating small ones. If a goliath heron only catches two big fish a day, it's had enough to eat without having to expend a lot of energy hunting. This is what a goliath heron sounds like: [goliath heron call] Alexandria's suggestion, the roseate spoonbill, is also a big wading bird, but it's very different from the goliath heron. For one thing, it's pink and white and has a long bill that's flattened and spoon-shaped at the end. It's only about half the size of a goliath heron, with a wingspan over 4 feet across, or 1.3 meters, and a height of about 2 ½ feet, or 80 cm. That's still a big bird! It mostly lives in South America east of the Andes mountain range, but it's also found in coastal areas in Central America up through the most southern parts of North America. Unlike the goliath heron, which is solitary, the roseate spoonbill is social and spends time in small flocks as it hunts for food. It likes shallow coastal water, swamps, and other wetlands where it can find it preferred food. That isn't fish, although it will eat little fish like minnows when it catches...

This week we learn about the fossa and a few other animals of Madagascar, a suggestion by Pranav! Further reading: The stories people tell, and how they can contribute to our understanding of megafaunal decline and extinction in Madagascar The fossa! The votsotsa is a rodent, not a rabbit! [photo by Andrey Giljov - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113271739]: The golden mantella frog is sometimes golden, but sometimes red: The nano-chameleon may be the smallest reptile in the world: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a very old Pranav suggestion, animals of Madagascar! The island country of Madagascar is off the southeastern coast of Africa. About 88 million years ago, it broke off from every other landmass in the world, specifically the supercontinent Gondwana. The continent we now call Africa separated from Gondwana even earlier, around 165 million years ago. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world and even though it's relatively close to Africa these days, many of its animals and plants are much different from those in Africa and other parts of the world because they've been evolving separately for 88 million years. But at various times in the past, some animals from Africa were able to reach Madagascar. We're still not completely sure how this happened. Madagascar is 250 miles away from Africa, or 400 kilometers, and these days the prevailing ocean currents push floating debris away from the island. In the past, though, the currents might have been different and some animals could have arrived on floating debris washed out to sea during storms. During times when the ocean levels were overall lower, islands that are underwater now might have been above the surface and allowed animals to travel from island to island until they reached Madagascar. We're not sure when the first humans visited Madagascar, but it was at least 2,500 years ago and possibly as much as 9,500 years ago or even earlier. It's likely that hunting parties would travel to Madagascar and stay there for a while, then return home with lots of food, but eventually people decided it would be a nice place to live. By 1,500 years ago people were definitely living on the island. Let's start with the fossa, an animal we've only talked about on the podcast once before, and then only in passing. It resembles a type of cat about the size of a cougar, although its legs are short in comparison to a similarly-sized cat. Its tail is almost as long as its body, and if you include its tail, it can grow around five feet long, or 1.5 meters. It's reddish-brown with a paler belly. Its head is small with a short muzzle, rounded ears, and big eyes. But the fossa isn't a felid. It resembles a really big mustelid in many ways, especially a mongoose, and some studies suggest it's most closely related to the mongoose. Really, though, it's not closely related to anything living today. It spends a lot of time in trees, where it uses its long tail to help it balance. It even has semi-retractable claws. It eats lemurs and other mammals, birds, insects, crabs, lizards, and even fruit. There used to be an even bigger fossa called the giant fossa, although we don't know much about it. We only know about it from some subfossil remains found in caves. We're not sure how big it was compared to the fossa living today, but it was definitely bigger and stronger and might have grown 7 feet long including its tail, or a little over 2 meters. There used to be much bigger lemurs living on Madagascar that have also gone extinct, so the giant fossa probably evolved to prey on them. Most scientists estimate that the giant fossa went extinct at least 700 years ago, but some think it might have survived in remote areas of Madagascar until much more recently. There are even modern sightings of unusually large fossas,

Thanks to Jayson for suggesting this week's topic, the new "dire wolf"! Also, possibly the same but maybe a different Jayson is the youngest member of the Cedar Springs Homeschool Science Olympiad Team, who are on their way to the Science Olympiad Nationals! They're almost to their funding goal if you can help out. Further reading: Dire wolves and woolly mammoths: Why scientists are worried about de-extinction The story of dire wolves goes beyond de-extinction These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals Dire Wolves Split from Living Canids 5.7 Million Years Ago: Study This prehistoric monster is the largest dog that ever lived and was able to crush bone with its deadly teeth – but was wiped out by cats "Dire wolf" puppies: An artist's interpretation of the dire wolf (red coats) and grey wolves (grey coats) [taken from fourth link above]: The "mammoth fur" mice: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion from Jayson, who wants to learn about the so-called “new” dire wolf. Before we get started, a big shout-out to another Jayson, or maybe the same one I'm honestly not sure, who is the youngest member of the Cedar Springs Homeschool Science Olympiad Team. They've advanced to the nationals! There's a link in the show notes if you want to donate a little to help them with their travel expenses. This is a local team to me so I'm especially proud of them, and not to brag, but I've actually met Jayson and his sister and they're both smart, awesome kids. Now, let's find out about this new dire wolf that was announced last month. In early April 2025, a biotech company called Colossal Biosciences made the extraordinary claim that they had produced three dire wolf puppies. Since dire wolves went extinct around 13,000 years ago, this is a really big deal. Before we get into the details of Colossal's claim, let's refresh our memory about the dire wolf. We talked about it in episode 207, so I've taken a lot of my information from that episode. According to a 2021 study published in Nature, 5.7 million years ago, the shared ancestor of dire wolves and many other canids lived in Eurasia. Sea levels were low enough that the Bering land bridge, also called Beringia, connected the very eastern part of Asia to the very western part of North America. One population of this canid migrated into North America while the rest of the population stayed in Asia. The two populations evolved separately until the North American population developed into what we now call dire wolves. Meanwhile, the Eurasian population developed into many of the modern species we know today, and some of those eventually migrated into North America too. By the time the gray wolf and coyote populated North America, a little over one million years ago, the dire wolf was so distantly related to it that even when their territories overlapped, the species avoided each other and didn't interbreed. We've talked about canids in many previous episodes, including how readily they interbreed with each other, so for the dire wolf to remain genetically isolated, it was obviously not closely related at all to other canids at that point. The dire wolf looked a lot like a grey wolf, but researchers now think that was due more to convergent evolution than to its relationship with wolves. Both lived in the same habitats: plains, grasslands, and forests. The dire wolf was slightly taller on average than the modern grey wolf, which can grow a little over three feet tall at the shoulder, or 97 cm, but it was much heavier and more solidly built. It wouldn't have been able to run nearly as fast, but it could attack and kill larger animals. The dire wolf went extinct around 13,000 years ago, but Colossal now claims that they're no longer extinct. There are now exactly three dire wolves in the world, two males and a female,

This week we examine two recent articles about coelacanth discoveries. Which one is real and which one is fake?! Further reading: Fake California Coelacanth First record of a living coelacanth from North Maluku, Indonesia A real coelacanth photo: A fake coelacanth photo (or at least the article is a fake) [photo taken from the first article linked above]: A real coelacanth photo [photo from the second article linked above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. I had another episode planned for this week, but then I read an article by geologist Sharon Hill and decided the topic she researched was so important we need to cover it here. No, it's not the dire wolf—that's next week. It's the coelacanth. We talked about the coelocanth way back in episode two, with updates in a few later episodes. Because episode two is so old that it's dropped off the podcast feed, and to listen to it you have to actually go to the podcast's website, I'm going to quote from it extensively here. In December of 1938, a museum curator in South Africa named Marjorie Courtenay Lattimer got a message from a friend of hers, a fisherman named Hendrick Goosen, who had just arrived with a new catch. Lattimer was on the lookout for specimens for her tiny museum, and Goosen was happy to let her have anything interesting. Lattimer went down to the dock. Then she noticed THE FISH. It was five feet long, or 1.5 meters, blueish with shimmery silvery markings, with strange lobed fins and scales like armored plates. She described it as the most beautiful fish she had ever seen. She didn't know what it was, but she wanted it. She took the fish back to the museum in a taxi and went through her reference books to identify it. Imagine it. She's flipped through a couple of books but nothing looks even remotely like her fish. Then she turns a page and there's a picture of the fish--but it's extinct. It's been extinct for some 66 million years. But it's also a very recently alive fish resting on ice in the back of her museum. Lattimer sketched the fish and sent the drawing and a description to a professor at Rhodes University, J.L.B. Smith. But Smith was on Christmas break and didn't get her message until January 3rd. In the meantime, Lattimer's museum director told her the fish was a grouper and not worth the ice it was lying on. December is the middle of summer in South Africa, so to keep the fish from rotting away, she had it mounted. Then Smith sent her a near-hysterical cable that read, “MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS.” Oops. Smith got a little obsessed about finding another coelacanth. He offered huge rewards for a specimen. But it wasn't until December of 1952 that a pair of local fishermen on the island of Anjuan, about halfway between Tanzania and Madagascar, turned up with a fish they called the gombessa. It was a second coelacanth. Everyone was happy. The fishermen got a huge reward—a hundred British pounds—and Smith had an intact coelacanth. He actually cried when he saw it. Most people have heard of the coelacanth because its discovery is such a great story. But why is the fish such a big deal? The coelacanth isn't just a fish that was supposed to be extinct and was discovered alive and well, although that's pretty awesome. It's a strange fish, more closely related to mammals and reptiles than it is to ordinary ray-finned fish. The only living fish even slightly like it is the lungfish, which we talked about in episode 55. While the coelacanth is unique in a lot of ways, it's those lobed fins that are really exciting. It's not a stretch to say its paired fins look like nubby legs with frills instead of digits. Until DNA sequencing in 2013, many researchers thought the coelacanth was a sort of missing link between water-dwelling animals and those that first developed the ability to walk on land. As it happens, the lungfish turns out to be closer to that stage t...

Thanks to Katie, Torin, and Eilee for suggesting this week's topic, foxes! Further reading: Meet the Endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox Long snouts protect foxes when diving headfirst in snow Black bears may play important role in protecting gray fox The red fox: A black and gold Sierra Nevada red fox [photo taken from the first link above]: The extremely fluffy Arctic fox: The gray fox [photo by VJAnderson - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115382784]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have an episode about foxes, a suggestion by Katie, and we'll talk about fox species suggested by Torin and Eilee. Foxes are omnivorous canids related to dogs and wolves, and just to be confusing, male foxes are sometimes called dogs. Female foxes are vixens and baby foxes are cubs or kits. But even though foxes are related to dogs and wolves, they're not so closely related that they can interbreed with those other canids. Plus, of course, not every animal that's called a fox is actually considered a fox scientifically. The largest species of fox is the red fox, which also happens to be the one most people are familiar with. It's common throughout much of North America, Eurasia, and the Middle East, and even parts of northern Africa. It's also been introduced in Australia, where it's an invasive species. It's a rusty-red in color with black legs and white markings, including a white tip to the tail. It has large pointed ears and a long narrow muzzle. There are lots of subspecies of red fox throughout its natural range, including one suggested by Eilee, the Sierra Nevada red fox. It lives in the Sierra Nevada and Oregon Cascades mountain ranges in the western United States, in parts of California, Nevada, and Oregon. It's smaller than the red fox and some individuals are red, some are black and gold, and some are a mix of red and gray-brown. Its paws are covered with long hair that protects the paw pads from snow, and its coat is thick. The Sierra Nevada red fox was first identified as a subspecies in 1937, but it took more than half a century until any scientists started studying it. It used to be common throughout the mountain ranges where it lives, but after more than a century of trapping for fur and shooting it for bounty, it's one of the rarest foxes in the world. Fewer than 100 adults are known to survive in the wild, maybe even fewer than 50. For a long time, scientists thought the Sierra Nevada red fox had been extirpated from California, and that it might even be completely extinct. Then a camera trap got pictures of one in 2010. It's fully protected now, so hopefully its numbers will grow. Torin suggested we learn about the Arctic fox, which lives in far northern areas like Greenland, Siberia, Alaska, and parts of northern Canada. The Arctic fox's muzzle is relatively short and its ears are rounded, and it also has a rounder body and shorter legs than other foxes. This helps keep it warm, since it has less surface area to lose body heat. During the summer, the Arctic fox is brown and gray, while in winter it's white to blend in with the snowy background. There are some individuals who are gray or brown-gray year-round, although it's rare. The Arctic fox's fur is thick and layered to keep it warm even in bitterly cold weather, and like the Sierra Nevada red fox, it has a lot of fur on its feet. The Arctic fox is omnivorous like other foxes, although in the winter it mostly eats meat. In summer it eats bird eggs, berries, and even seaweed along with fish and small animals like lemmings and mice. It also eats carrion from dead animals and what's left from a polar bear's meal. It has such a good sense of smell that it can smell a carcass from 25 miles away, or 40 km. Its hearing is good too, which allows it to find mice and other animals that are traveling under the snow. Like other foxes,

Thanks to Nora and BlueTheChicken for suggesting the inland taipan this week! The inland taipan in its summer colors [picture by AllenMcC. - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4442037]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion by Nora and BluetheChicken, who both wanted to learn about the inland taipan. Is it really the most venomous snake in the world? Let's find out, from a safe distance. The inland taipan is native to some parts of Australia, specifically in dry areas around the border of Queensland and South Australia. In the summer it's lighter in color, tan or yellowy-brown, and in winter it's dark brown or black with a lighter belly. Its head is usually darker in color than the rest of its body, and even in summer it usually has darker scales that make a zig-zaggy pattern on its back and sides. It can grow more than eight feet long, or 2.5 meters. It eats small animals, especially Dasyurids, which are members of the family Dasyuridae. Dasyurids are marsupials and include larger animals like the Tasmanian devil and the quoll, but those particular species don't live where the inland taipan does. The inland taipan mainly eats species that are often referred to as marsupial mice and marsupial rats, although they're not related to rodents at all. It also eats introduced placental mammals like actual rats and house mice. The inland taipan was described in 1879 from two specimens captured in northwestern Victoria. Then it wasn't seen again by scientists until 1972, when someone in Queensland sent a snake head to the herpetologist Jeanette Covacevich. Most people would consider that a threat, but she was delighted to get a mystery snake head in the mail. She grabbed a colleague and they hurried to Queensland to look for the snake. They found 13 of them, and to their utter delight, they turned out to be the long-lost inland taipan! Part of the reason it wasn't rediscovered sooner is that everyone thought it lived in Victoria, when it's actually still not been seen in that state since 1879. The inland taipan is often called the fierce snake because if it feels threatened, it will strike repeatedly and very fast. Its venom is incredibly toxic and takes effect incredibly quickly. It's a neurotoxin that can cause convulsions, paralysis, kidney failure, cerebral hemorrhage, heart failure, and lots more horrible symptoms. People have died from the venom, but unless you keep an inland taipan in captivity and handle it a lot, you don't have to worry about one biting you. It's very shy in the wild and will hide in rock crevices or cracks in dry soil rather than attack, plus it lives in remote areas of Australia that most people never visit. Even in captivity it's usually calm and not aggressive, which leads to reptile keepers and scientists not always taking the correct precautions for handling it. Luckily, with quick treatment and antivenin, most people recover from an inland taipan bite. So is it the most venomous snake in the world? The inland taipan's venom hasn't been fully studied yet, and scientists haven't fully studied the venom of many other snakes either, but as far as we know right now, yes. The inland taipan is the most venomous snake known, even compared to sea snakes. You may be wondering if anything would dare eat the inland taipan since it's so venomous. A big perentie monitor lizard, which we talked about in episode 384, will eat lots of different snakes, including the inland taipan. A snake called the mulga, also referred to as the king brown snake, will eat the inland taipan. The mulga usually only eats small snakes, but it's immune to the venom of most Australian snakes and can grow up to 11 feet long, or 3.3 meters. The mulga lives throughout most of Australia and is venomous itself. Even though its venom isn't all that toxic, it will bite repeatedly and even chew to inject even more venom.

Further reading: Reconstructing fossil cephalopods: Endoceras Retro vs Modern #17: Ammonites Hammering Away at Hamites An endocerid [picture by Entelognathus - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111981757]: An ammonite fossil: A hamite ammonoid that looks a lot like a paperclip [picture by Hectonichus - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34882102]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. When you think about cephalopods, if that's a word you know, you probably think of octopuses and squid, maybe cuttlefish. But those aren't the only cephalopods, and in particular in the past, there used to be even more cephalopods that are even weirder than the ones we have today. Cephalopods are in the family Mollusca along with snails and clams, and many other animals. The first ancestral cephalopods date back to the Cambrian, and naturally we don't know a whole lot about them since that was around 500 million years ago. We have fossilized shells that were only a few centimeters long at most, although none of the specimens we've found are complete. By about 475 million years ago, these early cephalopod ancestors had mostly died out but had given rise to some amazing animals called Endocerids. Endocerids had shells that were mostly cone-shaped, like one of those pointy-ended ice cream cones but mostly larger and not as tasty. Most were pretty small, usually only a few feet long, or less than a meter, but some were really big. The largest Endoceras giganteum fossil we have is just under 10 feet long, or 3 meters, and it isn't complete. Some scientists estimate that it might have been almost 19 feet long, or about 5.75 meters, when it was alive. But that's just the long, conical shell. What did the animal that lived in the shell look like? We don't know, but scientists speculate that it had a squid-like body. The head and arms were outside of the shell's opening, while the main part of the body was protected by the front part of the shell. We know it had arms because we have arm impressions in sections of fossilized sea floor that show ten arms that are all about the same length. We don't know if the arms had suckers the way many modern cephalopods do, and some scientists suggest it had ridges on the undersides of the arms that helped it grab prey, the way modern nautiluses do. It also had a hood-shaped structure on top of its head called an operculum, which is also seen in nautiluses. This probably allowed Endoceras giganteum to pull its head and arms into its shell and use the operculum to block the shell's entrance. We don't know what colors the shells were, but some specimens seem to show a mottled or spotted pattern. The interior of Endoceras giganteum's shell was made up of chambers, some of which were filled with calcium deposits that helped balance the body weight, so the animal didn't have trouble dragging it around. 3D models of the shells show that they could easily stick straight up in the water, but we also have trace fossils that show drag marks of the shell through sediment. Scientists think Endoceras was mainly an ambush predator, sitting quietly until a small animal got too close. Then it would grab it with its arms. It could also crawl around to find a better spot to hunt, and younger individuals that had smaller shells were probably a lot more active. We talked about ammonites way back in episode 86. Ammonites were really common in the fossil record for hundreds of millions of years, only going extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs. Some ammonites lived at the bottom of the ocean in shallow water, but many swam or floated throughout the ocean. Many ammonite fossils look like snail shells, but the shell contains sections inside called chambers. The largest chamber, at the end of the shell, was for the ammonite's body,

Thanks to Murilo, Alexandra, and Joel for their suggestions this week! The bird sounds in this episode come from xeno-canto, a great resource for lots of animal sounds! A cactus wren [picture by Mike & Chris - Cactus WrenUploaded by snowmanradio, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15876953]: The sultan tit [photo by By Dibyendu Ash - CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72070998]: A female scarlet tanager [photo by Félix Uribe, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81340425]. The male is red with black wings: The Northern cardinal: The yellow grosbeak [photo by Arjan Haverkamp - originally posted to Flickr as 2008-08-23-15h00m37.IMG_4747l, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9596644]: The purple martin isn't actually purple [photo by JJ Cadiz, Cajay - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4255626]: The dusky thrush [photo by Jerry Gunner from Lincoln, UK Uploaded by snowmanradio, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20762838]: The European rose chafer, not a bird [photo by I, Chrumps, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2521547]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about a lot of little birds that deserve more attention, because they're cute and interesting. Thanks to Murilo, Alexandra, and Joel for their little bird suggestions! All the birds we'll talk about today are called passerines, because they belong to the order Passeriformes. They're also sometimes referred to as perching birds or songbirds, even though not all passerines sing. Passerines are common throughout the world, with more than 6,500 species identified. I've seen about 150 of those species, so clearly I need to work harder as a birdwatcher. Passerines are referred to as perching birds because of their feet. A passerine bird has three toes that point forward and another toe pointing backwards, which allows it to wrap its toes securely around a twig or branch to sit. Its legs are also adapted so that the toes automatically curl up tight when the leg is bent. That's why a sleeping bird doesn't fall off its branch. Let's start with one of Murilo's suggestions, the wren. Wrens are birds in the family Troglodytidae, and are usually very small with a short tail, a pointy bill that turns slightly downward at the tip, and brown plumage. It mainly eats insects and larvae that it finds in nooks and crannies of trees, and many species will investigate dark places like hollow logs, the openings to caves, or your apartment if you leave the back door open on a warm day. Many sing beautiful songs and have very loud voices for such little bitty birds. Most wrens are native to the Americas, including the canyon wren that's native to western North America in desert areas. It's cinnamon-brown with a white throat and an especially long bill, which it uses to find insects in rock crevices. It lives in canyons and has a more flattened skull than other wrens, which means it can get its head into crevices without hurting itself. No one has ever seen a canyon wren drink water, and scientists think it probably gets all the water it needs from the insects it eats. Where do the insects get the water they need? That's an episode for another day. This is what a canyon wren sounds like: [bird sound] Not every bird that's called a wren is actually in the family Troglodytidae. Some just resemble wrens, like an unusual bird that Murilo brought to my attention. It's called Lyall's wren but it's actually in the family Acanthisittidae, and it was once widespread throughout New Zealand. By the time it was scientifically identified and described in 1894, it was restricted to a single island in Cook Strait. Lyall's wren was flightless,

Thanks to Alyx and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week! Let's learn about rabbits! Further reading: Why your pet rabbit is more docile than its wild relative FOUND: Small enigmatic rabbit with black tail lost to science for more than 120 years rediscovered hopping around mountain range in Mexico The Omiltemi cottontail rabbit, as caught on a camera trap [photo taken from second article linked above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about bunnies, and also learn about how a wild animal differs from its domesticated counterpart. Thanks to Alyx for suggesting this excellent topic. Thanks also to Richard from NC who alerted me to a rediscovered rabbit we'll discuss too. Thanks for all the well wishes in the last few weeks about my surgery. It went just fine and all I have now is a cool-looking new scar, although I was seriously hoarse for about a week. It's pretty weather here in East Tennessee and officially it's spring in the northern hemisphere, so let's talk about some springtime bunnies! Collectively rabbits and hares are called leporids after their family, Leporidae. Leporids are famous for hopping instead of walking, and they're able to do so because their hind legs are longer than their front legs and have specialized ankle joints. Ancestors of leporids developed this ankle as much as 53 million years ago, but their legs were much shorter so they probably ran instead of hopped. Hares have longer legs than rabbits and can run faster as a result, but both rabbits and hares are known for their ability to bound at high speeds. When a rabbit or hare runs, it pushes off from the ground with the tips of its long hind toes, and its toes are connected with webbed skin so they can't spread apart. If the toes did spread apart, they would be more likely to get injured. Rabbits and hares also don't have paw pads like dogs and cats do. The bottom of its foot is covered with dense, coarse fur that protects the toes from injury. Its long claws help it get a good purchase on the ground so its feet won't slip. Leporids eat plants, including grass, weeds, twigs, and bark. Animals that eat grass and other tough plants have specialized digestive systems so they can extract as many nutrients from the plants as possible. Many animals swallow the plants, digest them for a while, then bring up cuds of plants and water to chew more thoroughly. Rabbits and hares don't chew their cud in that way, but they do have a system that allows them to twice-digest the plants they eat. After a leporid eats some plants, the plant pieces go into the stomach, naturally, and then travel into the first part of the large intestine, called the cecum. The cecum separates the softer parts of the plants from the harder, less digestible parts. The hard parts are compressed into hard pellets that the rabbit poops out. But the soft parts of the plants, which are most nutritious, develop into softer pellets. These are called cecotropes, and as soon as the rabbit poops out the cecotropes, it immediately eats them again. This allows the digestive system to get a second round to extract more nutrients from the plants. Hares aren't domesticated, but rabbits have probably been domesticated many times in different places over the last several thousand years, first for food and fur, and then as pets. The domesticated rabbit we have today is descended from the European rabbit, also called the cony. If other species of rabbit were ever domesticated, we don't have record of it. The rabbit has also been introduced into the wild in places it has no business to be, like Australia, where it's an invasive species. You know where else the European rabbit has been introduced? The British Isles. It's native to mainland Europe, not England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and smaller islands nearby. Historians think the rabbit was introduced to England soon after the year 1066,

Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Recently I read about a giant snake supposedly seen in Tennessee in 1908. The story seemed a little suspicious so I dug into it, and it got a lot more complicated than I expected. On July 25, 1908, the St. Louis (Missouri) Globe-Democrat ran an article about a giant snake in Loudon, Tennessee. Loudon is a town half an hour's drive away from Knoxville in East Tennessee, although it took longer to get there from Knoxville in 1908. According to the article, the snake was “at least twenty-five feet in length, eight inches in diameter and twenty-four inches in circumference.” The longest snake ever reliably measured is a reticulated python named Medusa, who was measured as 25 feet 2 inches long in 2011, or 7.67 meters. Medusa holds the world record for the longest snake in captivity. Reticulated pythons are constrictors, which are non-venomous snakes who kill their prey by squeezing them until blood flow is shut off to the organs, causing cardiac arrest and death. As a result, they're incredibly strong snakes. The reticulated python is native to southern Asia and not likely to be found running loose in East Tennessee even today, and certainly not in 1908. The famous Boa constrictor and other snakes in the genus Boa are all native to Central and South America, while the closely related anaconda is from tropical South America. These snakes are also constrictors. The anaconda is rumored to grow over 30 feet long, or 9 meters, although the longest specimen ever reliably measured was 17 feet long, or 5.2 meters. Since snake skin is stretchy, though, preserved skins of huge size are often provided as proof of snakes much longer than the known maximum. While the anaconda isn't as long as the reticulated python, it's much bulkier, so a 25-foot anaconda would be much heavier and larger around than a 25-foot reticulated python. The 1908 article claims that the snake “has been seen off and on for the last twenty-eight years, but not until this summer has it caused any serious alarm.” I don't know about you, but even as someone who likes animals and thinks snakes are neat, if I saw a 25-foot snake I would be a little bit alarmed even if it wasn't doing anything. The article then describes how the snake had knocked down a fence while climbing over it and that it had taken a lamb. One man even managed to shoot the snake, although only with “small shot,” and the article claims that the snake, “in a frenzy from the pain, tore up saplings in getting away.” The article finishes by reporting that women and children were barricaded in their homes while men organized a posse to hunt down the giant snake, which was rumored to live in a cave overlooking the river. The same article ran in various newspapers around the country for months, but there was no follow-up to let readers know if the snake had been found. But the story didn't appear in any Tennessee newspapers. The only 1908 article about a giant snake in Tennessee that appears in a Tennessee newspaper is from August 21. The Chattanooga, Tennessee Daily Times reported that a blacksnake “fully six feet long and two inches in diameter” had been spotted eating young pigeons above the Birmingham railway station. A police officer shot and killed it, but its body couldn't be recovered from the steep hillside above the tunnel. “Blacksnake” is a term used for two snakes that are common throughout the southern United States: the eastern black kingsnake and the North American racer. Both are black in color and can grow more than 6 feet long, or 1.8 meters. Both are non-venomous and eat small animals like mice, frogs, and lizards, while the kingsnake also sometimes eats other snakes. The longest snake found in Tennessee, which also lives throughout much of eastern North America, is the gray ratsnake, which is frequently 6 feet long and sometimes longer.

Further reading: Mouse filmed moving items in man's shed in Bristol The pack rat: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week I'm sharing a Patreon episode from last year because I have surgery scheduled. Don't worry, it's minor thyroid surgery and I'll be fine, but my doctor said that a side effect might be hoarseness while I recover. Rather than risk sounding like an old frog, and to allow myself lots of time to rest afterwards, I've scheduled Patreon episodes for this week and next week. At the beginning of this year, in early January 2024, you may have heard about a man in Wales who had an interesting visitor to his work shed. Rodney Holbrook is 75 years old and a retired postal worker, and at the end of 2023 he started noticing something weird. Things in his work shed kept being moved, and not in a way that suggested another person was getting in. Initially Rodney noticed that some bird food had been moved into an old pair of shoes. This wasn't just a one-time thing that would suggest an accident, like maybe Rodney had absent-mindedly decided to store the bird food in his shoes, or maybe it just fell there. The bird food kept ending up in the shoes. Other things kept getting moved too. Small items that Rodney had left out while making and repairing things at his work bench kept getting put into a box, like tools and nuts and bolts. It happened almost every night. Fortunately, Rodney is also a wildlife photographer, and he just happened to have a night vision camera. He set it up in the shed to find out what on earth was going on. A mouse was going on, that's what was going on. This actually wasn't a huge surprise to Rodney, because years before, in 2019, a friend of his had had the same thing happen. His friend was Steve Mckears who lived near Bristol, England. Steve kept crushed peanuts in a tub to use as bird food, but he started to notice other things mixed in with the peanuts. First it was just one screw, then it was lots more things that he'd left around his shed. He couldn't figure out a solution, because he always locked his shed at night. As Steve said at the time, “I was worried. I'm 72 and you hear of things going wrong with 72-year-old gentlemen in the mind.” Fortunately, Steve's friend Rodney set up a camera and proved that there was nothing wrong with Steve's mind or with the shed's lock. It was just a mouse who was tidying up. The question is why are these mice tidying up someone else's shed? Don't the mice have sheds of their own to clean up? It's probable that the mice are actually living in the sheds and are wondering why some humans keep barging in every day and making a mess. Rodents of all kinds do tend to tidy up as part of the foraging and nesting process. Sometimes that means moving debris so the animal can find important items more easily, sometimes it means bringing items back to its nest. House mice and rats will steal small items from humans to make nests, like socks and facecloths. Some rodents are attracted to shiny things and will stash them away or even bury them. One animal, the pack rat, is so famous for storing items that we call a person who likes to collect things a pack rat. The pack rat lives throughout much of North and Central America and is related to mice and rats. It's bigger than a mouse but smaller than most rats, and some species have furry tails like ground squirrels. It builds a den out of whatever materials are available where it lives, and its den is complex and usually well hidden. Desert species like to build under a cactus, while others live in cliffs or among rocks, in abandoned buildings or sometimes non-abandoned buildings, under bushes, in the tops of trees, or even in the entrances to caves. The den can be quite large and contains numerous rooms used for food storage, sleeping, and storing all the interesting things the pack rat finds while foraging.

Thanks to Tim and Mia who suggested one of this week's animals! Further reading: Genomic insights into the evolutionary origin of Myxozoa within Cnidaria A tardigrade, photo taken with an electron microscope because these little guys are incredibly tiny: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about two microscopic or almost microscopic animals, one suggested by Mia and Tim, the other one I just learned about myself. We'll start with Mia and Tim's suggestion, the water bear, also known as the tardigrade. We've talked about it before but there's always more to learn about an animal. The water bear isn't a bear at all but a tiny eight-legged animal that barely ever grows larger than 1.5 millimeters. Some species are microscopic. There are about 1,300 known species of water bear and they all look pretty similar. It looks for all the world like a plump eight-legged stuffed animal made out of couch upholstery. It uses six of its fat little legs for walking and the hind two to cling to the moss and other plant material where it lives. Each leg has four to eight long hooked claws. It has a tubular mouth that looks a little like a pig's snout. An extremophile is an organism adapted to live in a particular environment that's considered extreme, like undersea volcanic vents or inside rocks deep below the ocean floor. Tardigrades aren't technically extremophiles, but they are incredibly tough. Researchers have found tardigrades in environments such as the gloppy ooze at the bottom of the ocean and the icy peaks of the Himalayas. It can survive massive amounts of radiation, dehydration for up to five years, pressures even more intense than at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, temperatures as low as -450 Fahrenheit, or -270 Celsius, heat up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, or 150 Celsius, and even outer space. It's survived on Earth for at least half a billion years. Mostly, though, it just lives in moss. Not every tardigrade is able to do everything we just talked about. They're tough, but they're not invulnerable, and different species of tardigrade are good at withstanding different extreme environments. Many species can withstand incredible heat, but only for half an hour or less. Long-term temperature increases, even if only a little warmer than what it's used to, can cause the tardigrade to die. Most species of tardigrade eat plant material or bacteria, but a few eat smaller species of tardigrade. It has no lungs since it just absorbs air directly into its body by gas exchange. It has a teeny brain, teeny eyes, and teeny sensory bristles on its body. Its legs have no joints. Its tubular mouth contains tube-like structures called stylets that are secreted from glands on either side of the mouth. Every time the tardigrade molts its cuticle, or body covering, it loses the stylets too and has to regrow them. In some species, the only time the tardigrade poops is when it molts. The poop is left behind in the molted cuticle. The tardigrade's success is largely due to its ability to suspend its metabolism, during which time the water in its body is replaced with a type of protein that protects its cells from damage. It retracts its legs and rearranges its internal organs so it can curl up into a teeny barrel shape, at which point it's called a tun. It needs a moist environment, and if its environment dries out too much, the water bear will automatically go into this suspended state, called cryptobiosis. Tests in 2007 and 2011 that exposed tardigrades to outer space led to some speculation that tardigrades might actually be from outer space, and that they, or organisms that gave rise to them, might have hitched a ride on a comet or some other heavenly body and ended up on earth. But this isn't actually the case, since genetic studies show that tardigrades fit neatly into what we know of animal development and evolution. In other words,

Thanks to Nora, Holly, Stephen, and Aila for their suggestions this week! Further reading: How 'bin chickens' learnt to wash poisonous cane toads Monkeys in Australia? Revisiting a Forgotten Furry Mystery Down Under The Australian white ibis: The greater glider looks like a toy: The thorny devil is very pointy: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about some animals native to Australia, which is Nora's suggestion. We'll learn about animals suggested by Holly, Stephen, and Aila, along with a mystery animal reported in the 1930s in northern Australia. Australia isn't currently connected to any other landmass and hasn't been for about 50 million years. That means that most animals on the continent have been evolving separately for a very long time. While in other parts of the world placental mammals took over many ecological niches, marsupials are still the dominant mammal type in Australia. Most marsupial females give birth to tiny, helpless babies that then continue their development outside of her body, usually in a pouch. But let's start the episode not with a marsupial but with a bird. Stephen suggested the Australian white ibis, a beautiful bird that doesn't deserve its nickname of bin chicken. The white ibis is related to ibises from other parts of the world, but it's native to Australia, and is especially common in eastern, northern, and southwestern Australia. It's a large, social bird that likes to gather in flocks. Its body is mostly white with a short tail, long black legs, and a black head. Like other ibises, the adult bird's head is bare of feathers. It also has a long, down-curved black bill that it uses to dig in the mud for crayfish and other small animals. When the bird spreads its magnificent black-tipped wings, it displays a stripe of featherless skin that's bright red. The Australian white ibis prefers marshy areas where it can eat as many frogs, crayfish, mussels, and other animals as it can catch. But at some point around 50 years ago, the birds started moving into more urban areas. They discovered that humans throw out a lot of perfectly good food, and before long they started to become a nuisance to people who had never encountered raccoons and didn't know they should clamp those trash barrels closed really securely. But no matter how annoying the Australian white ibis can be to people, it's been really helpful in another way. In the 1930s, sugarcane plantation owners wanted to control beetles and other pests that eat sugarcane plants, so they released a bunch of cane toads in some of their fields in Queensland. But the cane toads didn't do any good eating the beetles. Instead, they ate native animals and spread like wildfire. Since the toads are toxic, nothing could stop them, and there are now an estimated two billion cane toads living in Australia. But the Australian white ibis eventually figured out how to deal with cane toads. The ibis will grab a cane toad, then whip it around and throw it into the air so that the toad secretes its toxins in hopes that the bird will leave it alone. Then the ibis will wash the toad in water or wipe it in wet grass, which washes away the toxins. Then the ibis eats the toad. Goodbye, toad! Our next Australian animal is one suggested by Holly, the greater glider. When I saw the picture Holly sent, I was convinced it wasn't a real animal but a toy plushie, but that's just what the greater glider looks like. It's incredibly cute! The greater glider lives in eastern Australia, and as you might guess from its name, it is the largest of the three glider species found in Australia, and it can glide from tree to tree on flaps of skin between its front and back legs. Until 2020 scientists thought there was only one species of glider with local variations in size and coat color, but it turns out those differences are significant enough that it...

Thanks to Sam for suggesting this week's topic, the sea bunny! My plush sea bunny, with one of my cats, Dracula, who does not like it: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to revisit an animal we haven't talked about in a few years! Thanks to Sam for suggesting it, and for sending a whole list of questions after listening to episode 215. Episode 215 was about the cutest invertebrates, and we talked about a lot of them. This week it's all about the sea bunny. Before we answer Sam's questions, let's go over what we learned in episode 215, in case you haven't listened to it since it came out in March of 2021. The sea bunny, or sea rabbit, is a type of nudribranch [noodi-bronk] that lives along the coastline of the Indo-Pacific Ocean, especially in tropical waters. Nudibranchs are a type of mollusk that are sometimes called sea slugs. Many are brightly colored with beautiful patterns. Compared to some sea slugs, the sea bunny is a little on the plain side. It's usually orange or yellow, sometimes white or even green, with tiny brown or black speckles. It looks fuzzy because it's covered in little protuberances that it uses to sense the world around it, as well as longer, thinner fibers called spicules. It also has two larger black-tipped protuberances that look for all the world like little bunny ears, although they're actually chemoreceptors called rhinophores. It has a flower-shaped structure on its rear end that looks kind of like a bunny tail, but it's actually gills. It really is amazing how much the sea bunny actually resembles a little white bunny with dark speckles. Like other nudibranchs, the sea bunny is a hermaphrodite, which means it produces both eggs and sperm, although it can't fertilize its own eggs. When it finds a potential mate, they both perform a little courtship dance to decide if they like each other. After mating, both lay strings of eggs in a spiral pattern. The eggs hatch into larvae that are free-swimming, although the adults crawl along the ocean floor looking for food. Some nudibranch larvae have small coiled shells like snails, which they shed when they metamorphose into an adult, but the sea bunny hatches into a teeny-tiny miniature sea bunny. One of Sam's questions was what the sea bunny eats. It mainly eats sea sponges. The toxins present in many sponges don't bother the sea bunny. Instead, the sea bunny absorbs the sponge's toxins and keeps them in its body. I don't usually bother with Reddit posts while researching episodes, but I saw one where people were discussing how toxic the sea bunny is. Someone pointed out that small as they are, it's not a good idea to pick up a sea bunny because they are so toxic, and someone replied, “That's good for them, because I'm going to assume they taste like Marshmallows.” That brings us to Sam's next question, does anything eat the sea bunny? That's mainly a no, because they are so incredibly toxic. An animal the size of a big shark or something like that probably wouldn't be affected by the sea bunny's toxins, but it also wouldn't bother with such a tiny snack. A fish or other animal small enough for the sea bunny to seem like a meal probably wouldn't survive its toxins. Sam also wants to know if the sea bunny travels in groups, and that doesn't seem to be the case. It's a mostly solitary animal most of the time. If it did gather in a group, say if a bunch of sea bunnies were munching on the same sponge at the same time, maybe we could call it a fluffle of sea bunnies, or a school of sea bunnies. Sam also wants a better idea of how small the sea bunny is. It's easy enough to say, oh, it's a little less than an inch, or around 2 ½ cm, but most of us have a hard time picturing that. So here's a comparison that will help you visualize it. If you have an ordinary paperclip, not one of the jumbo ones, it's usually around 2.5 cm long,

Thanks to Charlotte, Clay, and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Seal whiskers, the secret weapon for hunting Elephant seals drift off to sleep while diving far below the ocean surface Scientists Discover Remains of Antarctic Elephant Seal in Indiana River The elephant seal and its proboscis: The bunyip carving: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have an animal suggested by three different listeners, Charlotte, Clay, and Richard from NC. So, by popular demand, let's learn about the elephant seal, including some elephant seal mysteries. The elephant seal gets its name because it's big, grayish-brown, and wrinkled. Adult male elephant seals even have a proboscis, although it's not anywhere near as long as an elephant's trunk. It's basically an enlarged and elongated nose that allows the animal to make loud roaring noises to intimidate other males. This is what that sounds like: [elephant seal roars] There are two species of elephant seal, the northern and southern. The southern elephant seal is larger on average while the northern male has a larger proboscis on average. We talked about elephant seals briefly in episode 155, about sexual dimorphism, because males and females are much different in size. A big male southern elephant seal can grow up to 20 feet long, or 6 meters, and can weigh about 9,000 lbs, or 4,000 kg. Females are about half that length and much lighter in weight. A big male northern elephant seal can grow up to 16 feet long, or almost 5 meters, and weigh around 5,500 lbs, or 2,500 kg, while females are much smaller. There are many reasons why male elephant seals are bigger than females, but it's mainly because the males spend a lot of energy fighting each other. The bigger and stronger a male is, the more likely he is to win a fight and the more likely it is that other males won't bother to challenge him. Meanwhile, females are smaller so they need less food. The elephant seal has thick fur that helps keep it warm, but it also has a layer of blubber like whales do. The blubber also helps make the seal streamlined so it can swim faster. Since the elephant seal spends most of its life in the water, and it does a lot of diving, it needs to be as streamlined as possible. It eats animals like fish, squid, and octopuses, but it especially likes sharks and rays. Since a lot of the elephant seal's favorite prey lives on or near the ocean floor, it has to dive to find it. The deepest recorded dive of an elephant seal was almost 5,700 feet, or about 1,700 meters. That's just over a mile deep, the deepest dive made by a mammal that isn't a whale. The elephant seal can hold its breath for well over an hour and a half. To conserve energy and maximize its time, quite often an elephant seal will actually sleep while it's swimming downward, since a really deep dive can take a long time to descend. It might only wake up when it bumps into the sea floor, but sometimes it's sleeping so soundly that it will just lie there at the bottom of the ocean and continue to sleep. I guess that's why the sea floor is sometimes called the seabed. Because the elephant seal hunts for food where there's not much light, it often can't rely on its vision to find its prey. Instead, it has really good hearing underwater, and it has whiskers on its upper lip that are extremely sensitive, with more nerve fibers in each whisker than in any other mammal studied. Its whiskers can sense tiny movements of water that indicate an animal moving around nearby. Once a year, the elephant seal molts and new fur grows in, but unlike most mammals it doesn't just lose its fur. The outer layer of its skin peels off too. It takes a lot longer for its fur to regrow because blubber doesn't contain any blood vessels. New blood vessels have to grow around the blubber to supply the skin with extra nutrients,

This week we take a look at some of the many animals that were discovered last year! Further reading: ‘Blob-Headed' Catfish among New Species Discovered in Peru New Species of Dwarf Deer Discovered in Peru Hylomys macarong, the vampire hedgehog Hairy giant tarantula: The monster among mini tarantulas with 'feather duster' legs Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and partners discover new ocean predator in the Atacama Trench Never-before-seen vampire squid species discovered in twilight zone of South China The blob headed catfish [photo by Robinson Olivera/Conservation International]: A new mini tarantula [photo by David Ortiz]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week is the 8th year anniversary of this podcast, so thanks for listening! It's also our annual discoveries episode, where we'll learn about a few animals that were discovered last year--in this case, in 2024. Let's start in Peru, a country in western South America. A 2022 survey of organisms living in the Alto Mayo region was published at the very end of 2024, revealing at least 27 new species and potentially more that are still being studied. One of those new species is a fish called the blob headed catfish. The new fish has been placed in the bristlemouth armored catfish genus, but as you can probably guess from its name, it has a big blobby head and face. Scientists have no idea why it has a blob head. It lives in mountain streams and that's about all we know about it right now. Another animal found in the same survey is a new mouse. It lives in swampy forests and is semi-aquatic, including having webbed toes. It's dark gray in color and is probably closely related to the Peruvian fish-eating rat, which is mostly brown in color and was only described in 2020. Another new species from Peru is a type of small deer, called a pudu, that has been named Pudella carlae. It's one of those “hidden in plain sight” discoveries, because until 2024 it was thought to be the same as the northern pudu that also lives in Ecuador and Colombia. The new deer is only 15 inches tall, or 38 cm, and is dark brownish-orange in color with black legs and face. It only lives in Peru, mostly in high elevations. It's also the first deer species discovered in the 21st century, although hopefully not the last. While we're talking about mammal discoveries, we have to talk about the vampire hedgehog just because of its name. It was actually described at the very end of 2023, but it's such an interesting animal that we'll say it's a 2024 discovery. The vampire hedgehog was actually discovered a whole lot earlier than 2023, but no one noticed it was new to science for a long time. A small team of researchers studying soft-furred hedgehogs decided to collect DNA samples from all the museum specimens they could find. One of the specimens was in the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, collected in 1961 but never studied. When the scientists compared its DNA to the other specimens they'd found, it didn't match up. Not only that, a closer look showed that it had fangs. Naturally, they named it the vampire hedgehog and went searching for living ones. The vampire hedgehog lives in parts of Vietnam and is a member of the soft-furred hedgehogs, also called gymnures, hairy hedgehogs, or moonrats. Instead of spines, moonrats have bristly fur and long noses that make them look like shrews, but hairless tails that make them look like rats. They're not rodents but are closely related to other hedgehogs. They eat pretty much anything but especially like to eat meat. This includes mice and frogs, along with various invertebrates. As for the vampire hedgehog's fangs, both males and females have them, but males have bigger fangs. Scientists don't know yet what the hedgehogs use their fangs for. It could be they help the animals keep a better hold on wiggly prey,

I'm a bit under the weather this week, so here's a Patreon episode about a weird bird! Further reading: Hoatzin nestling locomotion: acquisition of quadrupedal limb coordination in birds Show transcript: Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for mid-November, 2019! We're going to learn about a mystery bird today. When I say mystery bird, I don't mean that people aren't sure if it exists. It definitely exists. You can go to South America and look at it if you like, because fortunately it's not rare or endangered. But scientists aren't completely sure what it's related to, because it's a really weird bird. The hoatzin [pronounced what-seen] is a large bird, over two feet long, or 65 cm. It's shaped sort of like a pheasant, with a chunky body, long neck and small head, and a long tail made of stiff feathers like a hawk's. Its face has no feathers and blue skin, it has red eyes, and it has a spiky feather crest on its head. It's black and chestnut brown with some darker and lighter streaks, and is a softer brown underneath. It's a really pretty bird, in fact, with a strong bill. But it really doesn't resemble any other bird alive today. The hoatzin is the only species in its genus, and the only genus in its family, and the only family in its order. It's basically not really related to any other bird alive today, although in 2012 its genome was sequenced and found to be most closely related to cranes and plovers—but only very distantly. In fact, a 2015 study determined that the hoatzin started evolving separately from other birds 65 million years ago, right after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. We only have a few fossils of hoatzin ancestors, but they show that it was much more widespread in the past and lived in what is now North America and Europe. But these days it only survives in northern and central South America. It likes swampy areas and forests near rivers or other water. The hoatzin eats plants—specifically leaves and buds, although it also eats some flowers and fruit. And leaves require a lot of digesting before the body can make use of the nutrients. The hoatzin's digestive system is unlike any other living bird's, because the hoatzin is a foregut fermenter. Its crop, which most birds only use to store extra food temporarily when the stomach is full, acts as a bacterial fermentation chamber—two chambers, in fact, since it's divided into two sections. This acts like the rumen of a cow. Its crop is so big it doesn't have room on its body for big flight muscles, so it's not a strong flyer. It mostly stays in trees and bushes, eating leaves, flapping its big wings for balance and display, and hanging out with other hoatzins. The hoatzin's digestive system has a weird side effect. It smells bad. It's supposed to smell like manure. It's sometimes called the stinkbird and, fortunately for the hoatzin, almost no one wants to eat it as a result. As you probably know, birds developed from dinosaurs. It's easy to forget that, since birds have evolved structures like toothless beaks and front legs modified for flight and they no longer have lizard-like tails. But the hoatzin retains something from its dinosaur ancestry that is a startling reminder. The hoatzin is a social bird that lives in small flocks. It breeds during the local rainy season and builds its nest over water when the forest floods due to rain. The female lays two or three eggs, and when the babies hatch, they can climb around in the branches near the nest right away. This means they can hide from predators instead of being helpless in the nest. And the reason a hoatzin chick can climb so well is partly because it has big feet, and partly because it has finger claws on its wings: specifically a thumb claw and one finger claw, which are fully functional and make it look a lot like a fuzzy baby dinosaur.

Thanks to Siya, Sutton, Owen, and Aksel for suggesting this week's topic, the Goliath birdeater tarantula and the fire ant! Further listening: The TEETH Podcast Further reading: Tropical fire ants traveled the world on 16th century ships The Goliath birdeater tarantula, bigger than some kittens: Fire ants: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about two invertebrates, a spider and an insect. Thanks to Siya, Sutton, Owen, and Aksel for suggesting them! We'll start with the spider, which Siya and Sutton both suggested. It's the goliath tarantula, also called the goliath birdeater. You know it has to be a big spider if it's called a birdeater. We've talked about it before, but not in a long time. The goliath birdeater is the heaviest spider in the world. If you think of the usual spider, even a big one, it's still pretty lightweight. Let's use a wolf spider as an example, which is found just about everywhere in the world. It's a hunting spider that doesn't spin a web, and while different species vary in size, the biggest is the Carolina wolf spider found in many parts of North America. A big female can have a legspan of four inches across, or 10 cm, with a body up to an inch and a half long, or 35 mm—but it weighs less than an ounce. That's barely 28 grams, or just a little heavier than five sheets of printer paper. In comparison, the goliath birdeater tarantula can weigh over 6 ounces, or 175 grams. That's heavier than a baseball, or two packs of cards. Its legspan can be as much as 12 inches across, or 30 cm with a body length of about 5 inches, or 13 cm. It's brown or golden in color and lives in South America, especially in swampy parts of the Amazon rainforest. It's nocturnal and mostly eats worms, large insects, other spiders, amphibians like frogs and toads, and occasionally other small animals like lizards or even snakes. And yes, every so often it will catch and eat a bird, but that's rare. Birds are a lot harder to catch than worms, especially since the Goliath birdeater lives on the ground, not in trees. Because it's so large, the goliath looks like it would be incredibly dangerous to humans. It does have fangs and can inflict a venomous bite, but it's not very strong venom. The danger comes from a very different source, because the goliath birdeater is famous for its urticating spines. Many species of tarantula have special setae, hairlike structures called urticating spines, that can be dislodged from the body easily. If a tarantula feels threatened, it will rub a leg against its abdomen, dislodging the urticating spines. The spines are fine and light so they float upward away from the spider on the tiny air currents made by the tarantula's legs, and right into the face of whatever animal is threatening it. The spines are covered with microscopic barbs that latch onto whatever they touch. If that's your face or hands, they are going to make your skin itch painfully, and if it happens to be your eyeball you might end up having to go to the eye doctor for an injured cornea. Scientists who study tarantulas usually wear eye protection. The goliath birdeater tarantula is considered a delicacy in northeastern South America. People eat it roasted. Apparently it tastes kind of like shrimp. Next, Owen and Aksel wanted to learn about fire ants. I couldn't believe that we've never talked about fire ants before! Fire ant is the name for any of the more than 200 species in the genus Solenopsis, but it's typically used to refer to the species Solenopsis invicta. It's native to tropical South America but has been introduced to parts of North America, Australia, China, Taiwan, India, Africa, and many other places where the climate is tropical or sub-tropical. The fire ant initially became so invasive due to Spanish galleons in the 16th century, which carried trade goods around the world.

This week we're going to learn about some animals that seem to have individual names! Further reading: Bottlenose dolphins can use learned vocal labels to address each other How Do Dolphins Choose Their Name? Vertical transmission of learned signatures in a wild parrot Baby Parrots Learn Their Names from Their Parents Study: African Elephants Address Each Other With Name-Like Calls Marmoset Monkeys Use Names to Communicate with Each Other The green-rumped parrotlet (photo by Rick Robinson, taken from this site): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about some animals that seem to be using names to refer to other individuals or themselves. Let's start with bottlenose dolphins, because they're well-studied and scientists have known about this particular aspect of their society for over a decade. Every bottlenose dolphin has a signature whistle that identifies it to other dolphins. The signature whistles can be complex and the dolphin may add or change details to indicate its mood or other information. It's not precisely a name in the way humans would think of it, but it is an identifier. The dolphin creates its own signature whistle when it's young. Some dolphins pattern their whistles on their mother's signature whistle, while others mimic their siblings or friends. Some seem to pattern theirs on a distant acquaintance, which sounds to me like they just like something about an unusual whistle and decide to incorporate it into their own whistle. As dolphins grow up, females typically don't change their whistles, but males often do. Male dolphins often pair up together and remain bonded, and a pair may change their signature whistles to be similar. When a dolphin is trying to find a friend it can't see, it will mimic that friend's signature whistle. If a mother can't see her calf and is worried, she'll do the same, and her calf will answer by repeating its signature whistle. A lost calf will imitate its mother's whistle. But it's even more complicated than it sounds, because a group of dolphins who get together to forage may choose a shared whistle that the whole group uses. This helps them coordinate their behaviors to work together. Each member of the group uses a slightly different version of the group whistle, which means that each member can identify who's speaking. Other cetaceans seem to use a similar kind of name. Sperm whales, for instance, have a unique click sequence that they use to announce themselves when approaching other whales. The signature clicks always appear at the beginning of a sequence and don't vary. Bottlenose dolphins and many other cetaceans are extremely social animals. So are parrots. Studies of parrot calls indicate that parrots appear to have signature calls that they use the same way as dolphins do, to identify themselves to other parrots and as a way for other parrots to call for them. A study of wild green-rumped parrotlets in Venezuela discovered that the birds give a unique signature call to each baby while it's still in the nest, and the baby continues to use its call its whole life, often with small changes. The study set up video cameras to monitor 16 nests of a large wild population of the parrots. The population has been well studied and is used to using nesting tubes that scientists have set up for them. This makes it easier for the scientists to monitor nesting behaviors. In this case, to test whether the names had something to do with genetics or not, the scientists sneakily moved half of the eggs from one nest to another, so that half the parents unknowingly raised some chicks that weren't actually related to them. Despite the egg switcharoo, all the chicks were given names that were similar to the parents' signature calls. The parents started using a specific signature call soon after the eggs hatched, and the babies started imitating it.

Thanks to Eilee and Alexis for their suggestions this week, two amazing frogs! Further reading: Paradoxical frog: The giant tadpole that turns into a little frog Fungus is wiping out frogs. These tiny saunas could save them. How to build a frog sauna The paradoxical frog [photo by Mauricio Rivera Correa - http://calphotos.berkeley.edu, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6703905]: The Vietnamese mossy frog [photo by H. Zell - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81804225]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Let's start 2025 off right with an episode about frogs! Thanks to Alexis and Eilee for their suggestions. Let's start with Eilee's suggestion, the paradoxical frog. The paradoxical frog is a type of tree frog that lives in South America. Like other frogs, it likes ponds and shallow lakes. Some individuals are green and some are brown, and a frog may have darker stripes or splotches, or might just be plain. The tadpoles eat algae and other tiny food, while the adults eat insects. As with most frogs, the paradoxical frog hatches into a larval stage called a tadpole or pollywog, which is fully aquatic. It later metamorphoses into its adult form as a frog. Most tadpoles start out very small and grow larger, then metamorphose into a juvenile frog which then grows to fully adult size. But while the paradoxical frog's tadpole starts out small, it can grow to as much as 11 inches long, or 28 centimeters! It's the largest tadpole in the world as far as we know. So how big is the adult frog if the tadpole is so enormous? About 3 inches long, or 7.5 cm, from snout to vent. That's why it's called the paradoxical frog, because a paradox is something that seems contradictory to expectations. Instead of the ordinary way of things, where a small tadpole grows into a bigger frog, in this case a big tadpole grows into a smaller frog. It's sometimes called the shrinking frog. One interesting detail is that not all of the tadpoles are that big. If a female lays her eggs in a small body of water that's likely to dry up, or that doesn't have a lot of food available, or if there are a lot of predators in the water, the tadpole metamorphoses quickly and doesn't grow very big. But if the tadpole is in a better location it matures much more slowly, which allows it to reach much larger size before metamorphosing. I should also mention that the 11-inch-long tadpole that is the largest ever measured was actually raised in captivity. In the wild, the largest paradoxical frog tadpole ever measured was 6 ½ inches long, or almost 17 cm. That's still really big, but not that ridiculously big. But the confusing thing is that the tadpole is big and bulky, up to four times the size of the adult frog. Where does all that mass go after it transforms? Early scientists who learned about the paradoxical frog wondered the same thing. They were so confused that they suggested that the frog actually came first and later metamorphosed into the tadpole, which then metamorphosed into a fish. But the main reason the tadpole is so long is its tail. When it metamorphoses into a frog, it absorbs the tail and therefore appears to shrink. The bulkiness of the tadpole's body matches the bulkiness of the frog's body. And unlike most frogs, which metamorphose into juvenile frogs that still have some growing to do, the paradoxical frog metamorphoses into a completely adult frog. It's as big as it will ever get and fully mature, ready to mate and lay eggs. Next, Alexis wanted to learn about the Vietnamese mossy frog. It lives in parts of Vietnam, Laos, and other nearby areas. It prefers mountainous rainforests and the female often chooses to lay her eggs in a tree hollow or even a rock cavity where water has collected. Instead of laying her eggs in the actual water, though, she lays them on rocks or branches above the water.

Thanks to Pranav for suggesting this week's massive topic! Further reading: When did the Isthmus of Panama form between North and South America? Florida fossil porcupine solves a prickly dilemma 10-million years in the making Evidence for butchery of giant armadillo-like mammals in Argentina 21,000 years ago Glyptodonts were big armored mammals: The porcupine, our big pointy friend: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week, at long last, we're going to learn about the great American interchange, also called the great American biotic interchange. Pranav suggested this topic ages ago, and I've been wanting to cover it ever since but never have gotten around to it until now. While this episode finishes off 2024 for us, it's the start of a new series I have planned for 2025, where every so often we'll learn about the animals of a particular place, either a modern country or a particular time in history for a whole continent. These days, North and South America are linked by a narrow landmass generally referred to as Central America. At its narrowest point, Central America is only about 51 miles wide, or 82 km. That's where the Panama Canal was built so that ships could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and vice versa without having to go all around South America. It wasn't all that long ago, geologically speaking, that North and South America were completely separated, and they had been separated for millions of years. South America was part of the supercontinent Gondwana, while North America was part of the supercontinent Laurasia. We've talked about continental drift before, which basically means that the land we know and love on the earth today moves very, very slowly over the years. The earth's crust, whether it's underwater or above water, is separated into what are called continental plates, or tectonic plates. You can think of them as gigantic pieces of a broken slab of rock, all of the pieces resting on a big pile of really dense jelly. The jelly in this case is molten rock that's moving because of its own heat and the rotation of the earth and lots of other forces. Sometimes two pieces of the slab meet and crunch together, which forms mountains as the land is forced upward, while sometimes two pieces tear apart, which forms deep rift lakes and eventually oceans. All this movement happens incredibly slowly from a human's point of view--like, your fingernails grow faster than most continental plates move. But even if a plate only moves 5 millimeters a year, after a million years it's traveled 5 kilometers. Anyway, the supercontinent Gondwana was made up of plates that are now South America, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and a few others. You can see how the east coast of South America fits up against the west coast of Africa like two puzzle pieces. Gondwana actually formed around 800 million years ago, then became part of the even bigger supercontinent Pangaea, and when Pangaea broke apart around 200 million years ago, Gondwana and Laurasia were completely separate. North America was part of Laurasia. But Gondwana continued to break apart. Africa and Australia traveled far away from South America as molten lava filled the rift areas and helped push the plates apart, forming the South Atlantic Ocean. Antarctica settled onto the south pole and India traveled past Africa until it crashed into Eurasia. By about 30 million years ago, South America was a gigantic island. It's easy to think that all this happened just like taking puzzle pieces apart, but it was an incredibly long, complicated process that we don't fully understand. To explain just how complicated it is, let's talk for a moment about marsupials. Marsupials are mammals that are born very early and finish developing outside of the mother's womb, usually in a special pouch. Kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, wombats, and Tasmanian devils are all marsupials, and all from Australia.

Thanks to Elizabeth, Alexandra, Kimberly, Ezra, Eilee, Leon, and Simon for their suggestions this week! Further reading: New population of blue whales discovered in the western Indian Ocean An Endangered Dolphin Finds an Unlikely Savior--Fisherfolk The humpback whale: The gigantic blue whale: The tiny vaquita: The Indus river dolphin: The false killer whale: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to have a big episode about various dolphins and whales! We've had lots of requests for these animals lately, so let's talk about a bunch of them. Thanks to Elizabeth, Alexandra, Kimberly, Ezra, Eilee, Leon, and Simon for their suggestions. We'll start with a quick overview about dolphins, porpoises, and whales, which are called cetaceans. All cetaceans alive today are carnivorous, meaning they eat other animals instead of plants. This includes the big baleen whales that filter feed, even though the animals they eat are tiny. Cetaceans are mammals that are fully aquatic, meaning they spend their entire lives in the water, and they have adaptations to life in the water that are simply astounding. All cetaceans alive today belong to either the baleen whale group, which filter feed, or the toothed whale group, which includes dolphins and porpoises. The two groups started evolving separately about 34 million years ago and are actually very different. Toothed whales are the ones that echolocate, while baleen whales are the ones that have extremely loud, often beautiful songs that they use to communicate with each other over long distances. It's possible that baleen whales also use a limited type of echolocation to navigate, but we don't know for sure. There's still a lot we don't know about cetaceans. Now let's talk about some specific whales. Ezra wanted to learn more about humpback and blue whales, so we'll start with those. Both are baleen whales, specifically rorquals. Rorquals are long, slender whales with throat pleats that allow them to expand their mouths when they gulp water in. After the whale fills its mouth with water, it closes its jaws, pushing its enormous tongue up, and forces all that water out through the baleen. Any tiny animals like krill, copepods, small squid, small fish, and so on, get trapped in the baleen. It can then swallow all that food and open its mouth to do it again. The humpback mostly eats tiny crustaceans called krill, and little fish. The humpback grows up to 56 feet long, or 17 meters, with females being a little larger than males on average. It's mostly black in color, with mottled white or gray markings underneath and on its flippers. Its flippers are long and narrow, which allows it to make sharp turns. The humpback is closely related to the blue whale, which is the largest animal ever known to have lived. It can grow up to 98 feet long, or 30 meters, and it's probable that individuals can grow even longer. It can weigh around 200 tons, and by comparison a really big male African elephant can weigh as much as 7 tons. Estimates of the weight of various of the largest sauropod dinosaurs, the largest land animal ever known to have lived, is only about 80 tons. So the blue whale is extremely large. The blue whale only eats krill and lots of it. To give you an example of how much water it can engulf in its enormous mouth in order to get enough krill to keep its massive body going, this is how the blue whale feeds. When it finds an area with a lot of krill floating around, it swims fast toward the krill and opens its giant mouth extremely wide. When its mouth is completely full, its weight—body and water together—has more than doubled. Its mouth can hold up to 220 tons of water. Since the whale is in the water, it doesn't feel the weight of the water in its mouth. Blue whales live throughout the world's oceans, but a few years ago scientists analyzing recordings of whale song from the we...

Thanks to David and Jayson for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Unveiling the lionfish invasion in the Mediterranean Sea DeepCCZ: The Weird and Wonderful Megafauna of the Abyssal CCZ The red lionfish is beautiful but does not look like a lion [photo by Alexander Vasenin - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25523559]: The sea squirrel is yellow above and red underneath (pictures from article linked above): Under side of a gummy squirrel photographed on shipboard showing its bright red feeding palps (flower-like structure) and underbelly. Gummy squirrel (“Psychropotes longicauda”) at 5100 m depth on abyssal sediments in the western CCZ. This animal is ~60 cm long (including tail), with red feeding palps (or “lips”) visibly extended from its anterior end (right). Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about two interesting marine animals suggested by Jayson and David. Let's start with David's suggestion, the lionfish. The lionfish doesn't actually look like a lion although it is a fish. It lives in shallow tropical water in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, especially around coral reefs. There are twelve species of lionfish known, but they're mostly fairly similar. The lionfish is brown or dark red in color with white stripes, fan-like fins, and lots of long spines, all of which are striped black and white or red and white to make them more visible. When a fish or other animal has markings that make it stand out against the background, you can be pretty sure that it's dangerous, and that's the case for the lionfish. The lionfish's spines are venomous, especially the spines on the dorsal fin. If it feels threatened, it will point the dorsal fin at the predator and keep it pointed at it no matter which direction the predator moves. If the predator swims below the lionfish, the lionfish will turn upside-down in the water to keep the dorsal fin pointed at it. Most predators back off at that point, and I don't blame them because that sounds really scary. People have died from lionfish venom, but it's rare. Mostly it's just extremely painful and makes the person feel really sick for a day or two. Divers have to be careful when they're around lionfish, because lionfish can be aggressive and will point that dorsal fin at the diver as a warning. You don't want a lionfish to point at you. The lionfish eats smaller fish, including smaller lionfish, invertebrates, and other small animals. It confuses other fish by blowing water at them. The little fish turns to face into what it thinks is a weird water current, and suddenly, there's a lionfish that just gulps it down. As David points out, even though the lionfish is dangerous, it's definitely beautiful. Some people keep lionfish in saltwater aquariums, although they're hard to care for in captivity, and unfortunately sometimes the fish escape into the wild or are released. The red lionfish is especially invasive in the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf Coast, and off the southeastern coast of the United States. Lionfish have also been introduced to parts of the Mediterranean Sea, where they're becoming more and more invasive. Because invasive lionfish eat so many native fish, and because it's spreading rapidly and becoming extremely common, people have been trying to find ways to reduce the invasive population. It turns out that lionfish are good to eat if you're careful when handling the spines during cleaning, so people in areas where it's invasive are encouraged to catch lionfish to eat. Invasive lionfish are even served in fancy restaurants. Since the red lionfish can grow around 18 inches long, or 47 cm, there's lot a of meat on one. No one's sure why it's called a lionfish. It doesn't look remotely like a lion. It's also called the zebrafish because of its stripes. Next,

Thanks to Cosmo for suggesting this week's animal, the electric catfish! Further reading: The shocking truth about electric fish Efficient high-voltage protection in the electric catfish Gimme kiss [electric catfish photo from this site]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're finally going to talk about a fish Cosmo wanted us to learn about, the electric catfish! Catfish are really common fish that live throughout the world, except for Antarctica. We've talked about various types of catfish in lots of different episodes, since there are well over 3,000 known species and they're incredibly diverse. The electric catfish lives in freshwater in tropical areas in western and central Africa, as far north as the Nile River. All animals generate electric fields in their nerves and the contracting of muscles. Animals that can sense these fields are called electroreceptive. An electroreceptive animal can find hidden prey without using its other senses. Many electroreceptive animals can also generate weak electrical fields, usually less than a single volt—small electrical pulses or a sort of wave, depending on the species, that can give them information about their environment. Like a dolphin using echolocation, a fish using electro-location can sense where potential prey is, where predators, plants, and rocks are, and can even communicate with other fish of its same species. Of course, those same electric pulses can also attract electroreceptive predators. Some fish can generate an electric shock so strong it can stun or kill other animals. The most famous is the electric eel, which we talked about way back in episode 10, but the electric catfish falls in this category too. The electric catfish isn't a single species but several in the family Malapteruridae. Some are very small, but one grows as much as four feet long, or 1.2 meters, and can weigh over 50 lbs, or 23 kg. That's Malapterurus electricus, THE electric catfish. The electric catfish is grayish-brown mottled with black spots. Like a lot of catfish, it's a cylinder-shaped chonk, and has three pairs of barbels around its broad mouth. Barbels are the feelers that give the catfish its name, because they look sort of like a cat's whiskers. Sort of. Not actually very much like a cat's whiskers. The electric catfish also has what look like surprisingly kissy lips, which are often pale in color so they stand out, especially when the mouth is open, which is frankly hilarious. It doesn't have a dorsal fin and it's not a fast swimmer. It spends most of its time lurking in rocky areas in muddy, slow-moving water. It's also nocturnal. The electric catfish eats other fish, although it will also eat pretty much anything it can swallow. It likes muddy water because it doesn't want potential prey to see it, and of course it doesn't want any potential predators to see it either. That includes humans, who consider it a delicacy. Humans also sometimes keep electric catfish as aquarium fish, which is sort of the opposite of being killed and eaten. Contracting a muscle causes a tiny, tiny electrical impulse, as I mentioned earlier, but in electric fish certain muscles have developed the ability to generate much stronger electrical impulses. Instead of muscles, they're called electric organs. The interesting thing is that this is only found in fish, but that the ability evolved separately at least six times in different lineages of fish. The electric catfish uses its ability to generate electric shocks as a defense when it needs to, but mainly it uses it to stun or outright kill other fish, which it then gulps down. It can discharge up to 300 volts of electricity in pulses that last only a few milliseconds, but since it can generate up to 500 pulses in waves, that's a lot of electricity. That's not enough to kill a person, but you'd definitely feel it and try to get away. But,

Thanks to Mary, Mila, and Riley for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Comfortable and dermatological effects of hot spring bathing provide demonstrative insight into improvement in the rough skin of Capybaras Comfort of capybaras determined by SCIENCE: An especially attractive guinea pig: Guinea pigs come in lots of colors, patterns, and fur types [picture taken from this excellent site]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about two rodents, one small and one big. Thanks to Mary and Mila who both suggested the guinea pig, and thanks to Riley who suggested the capybara. This episode is a bit unusual because part of it comes from a Patreon episode from 2023. Like, literally a big chunk of this episode is the original audio from that one, and you'll be able to tell the difference in audio and know just how lazy I was this week. The episode actually came together in an unusual way too. Riley's parent emailed me last week with some new suggestions, including capybaras, but wasn't sure if we had already covered the topic. I thought we had, but of course there's always more to learn about an animal. Well, since this is the beginning of a new month I was on the Patreon page to upload the December episode, and while I was there I did a quick search for capybaras and discovered the episode I was thinking of. I decided to add some more information about guinea pigs to it since I already mention guinea pigs a lot in that episode, and here is the result! The capybara is a rodent, and a very big one. It is, in fact, the biggest rodent alive today. To figure out just how big the capybara is, picture a guinea pig. The guinea pig is also a rodent, native to the Andes Mountains in South America. No one's sure why the guinea pig is called that in English, since it doesn't come from Guinea and doesn't have anything to do with anything else called guinea, but as someone who had two pet guinea pigs when I was a kid, I know exactly why they're called guinea pigs. This is what an actual pig sounds like: [pig squealing] And this is what a guinea pig sounds like: [guinea pig squealing] Also, it's sort of shaped like a pig. The guinea pig is a chonky little animal with short legs, only a little stub of a tail, and little round ears. Its face is sort of blocky in shape and it has a big rounded rump, similar to that of a capybara. The guinea pig is actually closely related to the capybara, and is a pretty good-sized rodent in its own right. It grows about 10 inches long, or 25 cm, on average, and roughly half that size tall. The guinea pig has been domesticated for at least 7000 years, but it wasn't domesticated for people to keep it as a pet. In South America and many other places now, it's a very small farm animal raised for its meat. Guinea pig has been an important source of protein for all that time, so important that it was considered sacred in many cultures. In the early 16th century when Europeans started arriving in South America, sailors took guinea pigs with them on ships so they'd have fresh meat on the voyage. But when the cute little animals arrived in Europe, people started buying them as pets. Guinea pigs eat plants, mostly grass, and are social animals. If you want a pet guinea pig, make sure to get at least two. Like rabbits and some other animals, including the capybara, the guinea pig excretes special pellets that aren't poop, but are semi-digested pellets of food. The guinea pig eats the pellets so they can pass through the digestive system again and the body can extract as many nutrients as possible from it. What's left is then excreted as a regular poop pellet. Even in places where the guinea pig is routinely kept as livestock and eaten, people breed guinea pigs as pets too. The pet variety is smaller than the meat variety and has different markings and different colors.

Thanks to Lydia and "warblrwatchr" for this week's suggestions! Further reading: Sweet tooth: Ethiopian wolves seen feeding on nectar The African wild dog is not actually a dog and eats lots of things: The aardwolf is not a dog at all and eats insects: The Ethiopian wolf is not a dog (or a wolf or a fox) and eats rodents and nectar [photo by Adrien Lesaffre and taken from this page]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about three dog-like animals from Africa, suggested by Lydia and “warblrwatchr,” even though none of the three animals are dogs. We'll start with one of Lydia's suggestions, the African wild dog, also called the painted dog or painted wolf. Despite those names, it's not very closely related to dogs and wolves. It's the only species in its own genus, although it is a member of the family Canidae. Colonizers from Europe thought the animal was just a feral dog, not anything special that should be protected, and they also brought domestic dogs with them to Africa. Domestic dogs mean diseases that other canids can catch. Between introduced diseases, farmers killing the animals to keep them away from livestock, and habitat loss, the African wild dog is endangered. Luckily, these days conservation groups have been working to protect the animal, and its numbers are increasing slowly in Kenya's national parks in particular. The African wild dog is a tall, strong canid with great big ears and no dewclaws. It has a yellowish coat with black blotches and some white spots, including a white tail tip, although some subspecies have darker coats. Unlike most canids, its fur is bristly and doesn't have a soft undercoat, and as the dog ages, it loses its fur until old dogs are nearly bald. It's very social, as canids almost always are, and its varied coat pattern helps individuals recognize friends and pack-mates at a distance. The African wild dog prefers savannas and other open areas. It hunts in packs and mostly preys on antelopes, although it will also kill zebras and other large animals, and individual dogs will sometimes catch small animals like hares and rodents. The African wild dog pack isn't especially hierarchical. The males of the pack are mainly led by the dominant male, while the females are mainly led by the oldest female, who is usually the most dominant. The dominant pair is usually the only pair that has babies. A mother dog has up to 16 pups at a time but only one litter a year. In a lot of animals, as the babies grow up, the males are usually the ones who are driven out of the pack or leave on their own to find a new pack. In the African wild dog, females are the ones who leave as they grow up. Sometimes the females join a different pack and sometimes they start their own. Either way, it stops a pack from becoming inbred. The African wild dog is extremely vocal, making lots of different sounds to communicate with its pack-mates. It sounds a lot more like a bird than a dog. This is what African wild dogs sound like: [doggo sounds] Next, Lydia and warblrwatchr wanted to learn about the aardwolf, which lives in eastern and southern Africa. Unlike the African wild dog, which is mostly active during the day, the aardwolf is nocturnal. It spends most of the day in a burrow, sometimes one it digs itself, but more often one that another animal dug and abandoned at some point. The aardwolf has black stripes on a yellowish or reddish coat, a mane of long hair down its neck and back, large ears, and a bushy tail. It's about the size of a big dog, about 20 inches tall at the shoulders, or 50 cm, but it looks like a small, slender hyena. That's because it is actually a type of hyena, although it's not closely related to other hyenas. Hyenas look dog-like but they aren't canids at all. In fact, they're more closely related to cats than to dogs,

Thanks to Alyx for this week's suggestion, the cookie cutter shark! Further reading: If You Give a Shark a Cookie The business end of the cookie cutter shark: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about a little shark suggested by Alyx, but first let's learn about something else that might be related to the shark. In the 1970s, the U.S. Navy started having trouble with the navigation of their submarines. The Ohio-class submarine had what was called a sonar dome that was filled with oil, and the oil helped transmit sound. But repeatedly the subs would lose navigation abilities, and investigations turned up strange chunks removed from the electric cables, the oil lines, the sound probes, and the sonar dome itself—anywhere made of rubber that was soft enough for what looked like a hole saw to damage. The Navy thought they were dealing with a state-of-the-art weapon. The United States and the former Soviet Union were bitter enemies, so the Navy thought the USSR had invented a technologically sophisticated underwater stealth drone of some kind that could damage the subs and leave no trace—nothing but circular chunks removed from the sonar dome and its components. Thirty submarines were damaged before the Navy figured out the cause. It wasn't a super-secret weapon at all. It was just a little fish called the cookie-cutter shark. The cookie cutter shark doesn't look very scary. It only grows 22 inches long at most, or 56 cm, and is brown in color. It has lots of very sharp evenly spaced teeth on its lower jaw, but compared to a great white shark, it's nothing to worry about. But somehow it was able to disable 30 of the world's most advanced submarines at the time. That's because of how the cookie cutter shark eats, which is also how it gets its name. It picks a target fish or some other animal, such as a whale or a seal, or possibly the sonar dome of an Ohio-class submarine, and sneaks up to it. It's just a little fish and its coloration helps it blend in with its surroundings, so most animals barely notice it. It has lips that act like a suction cup, so quick as a wink it sticks itself to the animal, bites down, and spins around. In moments it's cut a circular chunk out of the animal's side like a horrible cookie, which it swallows, and by the time the animal even realizes it's hurt, the cookie cutter shark is long gone. The shark used to be called the cigar shark because of its shape. It wasn't until 1971 that experts realized how the cookie cutter shark eats. Until then the circular wounds on fish and whales and other animals were thought to be from lamprey bites or from some kind of parasite. The cookie cutter shark does have teeth in its upper jaw but they're much smaller than the lower teeth. When it sheds its lower teeth to replace them, instead of shedding just one tooth, it sheds them all at once. Like most sharks, it swallows its old teeth so it can reuse the calcium to grow new teeth. The shark also has photophores on the underside of its body that glow greenish, which is a common way that some fish escape predators from below. A big fish looking up toward the surface of the water high above it sees a lot of light shining down from the sun, so a fish with a glowing underside just blends in. But in the case of the cookie cutter shark, it has a strip of skin on its underside without photophores, and from below that strip shows up. It's a sort of collar that's actually darker brown than the rest of the fish. It looks, in fact, like a tiny fish silhouetted against the surface. The would-be predator fish approaches, expecting an easy meal. Instead, the cookie cutter shark darts around and takes a big bite out of the fish, then takes off. It's a remarkably fast swimmer, but most of the time it hangs almost motionless in the water waiting for another animal to approach.

Thanks to Riley and Dean, Elizabeth, and Leo for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Groundbreaking study reveals extensive leatherback turtle activity along U.S. coastline A bearded dragon: The tiny bog turtle: The massive leatherback sea turtle: The beautiful hawksbill turtle [photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about some reptiles suggested by four different listeners: Riley and Dean, Elizabeth, and Leo. We'll start with the brothers Riley and Dean. Dean wants to learn more about the bearded dragon, and that may have something to do with a certain pet bearded dragon named Kippley. “Bearded dragon” is the name given to any of eight species of lizard in the genus Pogona, also referred to as beardies. They're native to Australia and eat plants and small animals like worms and insects. They can grow about two feet long, or 60 cm, including the tail, but some species are half that length. Females are a little smaller than males on average. The bearded dragon gets its name because its throat is covered with pointy scales that most of the time aren't very noticeable, but if the lizard is upset or just wants to impress another bearded dragon, it will suck air into its lungs so that its skin tightens and the spiky scales under its throat and on the rest of its body stick out. They're not very sharp but they look impressive. Since the bearded dragon can also change color to some degree the same way a chameleon can, when it inflates its throat to show off its beard, the beard will often darken in color to be more noticeable. Both males and females have this pointy “beard.” Bearded dragons that are sold as pets these days are more varied and brighter in color than their wild counterparts, although wild beardies can be brown, reddish-brown, yellow, orange, and even white. Australia made it illegal to catch and sell bearded dragons as pets in the late 20th century, but there were already lots of them outside of Australia by then. Pet bearded dragons are mainly descended from lizards exported during the 1970s, which means they're quite domesticated these days and make good pets. Like some other reptiles and amphibians, the bearded dragon has a third eye in the middle of its forehead. If you have a pet beardie and are about to say, “no way, there is definitely not a third eye anywhere, I would have noticed,” the eye doesn't look like an eye. It's tiny and is basically just a photoreceptor that can sense light and dark. Technically it's called a parietal eye and researchers think it helps with thermoregulation. Next, Riley wants to learn about turtles, AKA turbles, and especially wants everyone to know the difference between a tortoise and a turtle. It turns out that while many turtles are just fine living on land, they're often more adapted to life in the water. Turtles have a more streamlined shell and often flipper-like legs or webbed toes. Tortoises only live on land and as a result they have shells that are more dome-shaped, and they have large, strong legs that resemble those of a tiny elephant. You can't always go by an animal's common name to determine if it's a tortoise or a turtle, but it's also not always clear whether an animal is a tortoise or a turtle at first glance. Take the eastern box turtle, for instance, which is common in the eastern United States. It has a domed carapace, or shell, but it's still a turtle, not a tortoise. And, I'm happy to say, it can swim quite well. This is a relief to find out because when I was about six years old, my mom visited someone who had kids a little older than me. I didn't know them but they were nice and showed me the swampy area near their house. At one point one of the older boys found a box turtle, took it over to a little bridge over a pond, and dropped it in the water. I screamed,

Thanks to Molly and Mila for suggesting the anteater and its relations this week! Further reading: How anteaters lost their teeth The giant anteater has a long tongue and a little mouth, and adorable babies: The giant anteater has a weird skull [photos by Museum of Veterinary Anatomy FMVZ USP CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72183871]: The tamandua is like a mini giant anteater that can climb trees: The silky anteater looks like a weird teddy bear [photo by Quinten Questel - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30287945]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about some unusual mammals, suggested by Molly and Mila. It's a topic I've been meaning to cover for almost two years and now we're finally going to learn about it! It's the anteater and its close relations, including a creepy anteater cryptid that would have fit in just fine during monster month. A lot of animals are called anteaters because they eat ants, but the anteaters we're talking about today belong to the suborder Vermilingua, meaning “worm tongue.” That's because they all have long, sticky tongues that they use to lick up ants, termites, and other insects. Anteaters are native to Central and South America and are closely related to sloths, and more distantly related to armadillos. The sloth and anteater share a common ancestor who lived around 60 million years ago, a little animal that mainly ate worms and insect larvae and probably lived in burrows. Because its food was soft and didn't need a lot of chewing, when a mutation cropped up that caused its teeth to be weak, it didn't matter. It wasn't using its teeth anyway. When the first anteaters evolved from this ancestral species, they didn't need teeth either, and gradually they lost their teeth entirely. Modern anteaters have no teeth at all. Sloths also evolved from this weak-toothed ancestor, and sloths eat plants. Plants need a lot of chewing, and most animals that eat plants have really strong teeth, but sloths retained the genetics for weak teeth. They don't even have an enamel coating on their teeth, and instead of grinding molars, their teeth are basically soft little pegs. Luckily for the sloth, the little peg teeth do continue to grow throughout its life, so it never wears its teeth down so far it can't chew. Anteaters, sloths, and their distant relation the armadillo all share the same type of vision from their shared ancestor too. They can't see colors at all but have good vision in low light, which is why scientists think they all evolved from an animal that spent most of its time underground hunting for worms. Anteaters have strong claws that allow them to dig into termite and ant nests, and armadillos spend a lot of time in burrows they dig. We don't actually know what the common ancestor of these related animals looked like because we haven't found any fossils of it yet. In the past, scientists thought that pangolins and aardvarks were related to anteaters because they all have similar adaptations to a similar diet, but that's just another example of convergent evolution. We talked about pangolins and aardvarks back in episode 65, as well as the giant anteater. The giant anteater is the one most people know about. It earns the name giant because it can grow almost eight feet long, or 2 1/2 meters, if you include the tail. Its fur is brown and cream with a distinctive black stripe from its chest to its back that scientists used to think acted as camouflage. Because the black fur is outlined with white, making it stand out, scientists now think it's used as a warning to potential predators, because the giant anteater can be dangerous. If it feels threatened, it will rear up on its hind legs, using its long tail as a prop, to slash at a predator. Its claws are so big that it knuckle-walks on its for...

Thanks to Ezra and Leo for suggesting these two sea monsters this week! Happy Halloween! Further reading: Legend of Chessie alive, well in Maryland Here be sea monsters: We have met Chessie and...is it us? Not actually a kraken, probably: Not actually Chessie but an atmospheric photo of a toy brontosaurus: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Just a few days remain in October, so this is our Halloween episode and the end of monster month for another year! We had so many great suggestions for Halloween episodes that I couldn't get to them all, but I might just sprinkle some in throughout the other months too. We have two great monsters to talk about this week, suggested by Ezra and Leo, the kraken and Chessie the sea serpent. First, as always on our Halloween episode, we have a few housekeeping details. If anyone wants a sticker, feel free to email me and I'll send you one, or more than one if you like. That offer is good all the time, not just now. I don't have any new stickers printed but I do have lots of the little ones with the logo and the little ones with the capybara. I also don't have any new books out this year, but you can still buy the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book if you like. I am actually working on another book about mystery animals, tentatively titled Small Mysteries since it's going to be all about mysteries surrounding small animals like frogs and invertebrates that often get overlooked. I'm hoping to have it ready to publish in early 2026 or so. I don't know that I'll do another Kickstarter for it since that was a lot of work, and I just finished a Kickstarter for more enamel pins and just can't even think about the stress of doing another crowdfunding campaign anytime soon. Also, I hate to keep asking listeners for money. Anyway, one of the things I don't like about Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie is that I didn't cite my sources properly, so for the Small Mysteries book I'm being very careful to have footnotes on pretty much every page so that anyone who wants to double-check my information can do so easily. But all that is in the future. Let's celebrate Halloween now with a couple of sea monsters! We'll start with Ezra's suggestion, the kraken. It's a creature of folklore that has gotten confused with lots of other folklore monsters. We don't know how old the original legend is, but the first mention of it in writing dates to 1700, when an Italian writer published a book about his travels to Scandinavia. One of the things he mentions is a giant fish with lots of horns and arms, which he called the “sciu-crak.” This seems to come from the Norwegian word meaning sea krake. “Krake” is related to the English word crooked, and it can refer to an old dead tree with crooked branches, or tree roots, or something with a hook on the end like a boat hook, or an anchor or drag, or various similar things related to hooks or multiple prongs. That has led to people naturally assuming that the kraken had many arms and was probably a giant squid, and that may be the case. But there's another possibility, because in many old uses of the word krake, it means something weak or misshapen, like a rotten old dead tree. In the olden days in Norway, people thought that if you spoke about an animal by name, the spirit that protected that animal would hear you. Some historians think that whale-hunters referred to whales as krake so the whale's protective spirit wouldn't guess that they were planning a whale-hunt. Who would refer to a huge, strong animal like a whale as weak and crooked, after all? Whatever its origins, the kraken's modern form is mainly due to a Danish bishop called Erik Pontoppidan. He wrote about the kraken in 1753, and embellished the story by saying the kraken could reach out of the ocean with its long arms to grab sailors or just pull an entire ship down into the water and sink it.

Thanks to Eesa for suggesting this week's topic, the pliosaur Predator X! Further reading: Predator X / Pliosaurus funkei [you can find lots of interesting pictures here, some artwork and some skeletal diagrams] Kronosaurus had a big skull with big teeth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. We're one week closer to Halloween, and that means the monsters are getting more monster-y, at least in name, although I wouldn't want to meet this one in person. It's referred to as Predator X, and thanks to Eesa for suggesting it! Fortunately for everyone who likes to swim and boat in the ocean, Predator X has been extinct for around 145 million years. It's a type of marine reptile called a pliosaur, Pliosaurus funkei, but there was nothing funky about it. It was huge, fast, and incredibly strong. Also, the funky part of the name comes from the couple who originally discovered the first specimen, who had the last name of Funke. We only have two Predator X specimens right now, both of them found in the same rock formation from a Norwegian island. The remains were first discovered in 2004 but the process of recovering them took many years. Because winters in Norway are very cold, the exposed rocks were subject to freezing temperatures that had broken a lot of the fossils into fragments, and some of the fossils crumbled into pieces as they dried out. All told, 20,000 pieces were recovered and painstakingly fit back together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle made of fossilized bones. Neither specimen is complete but we have enough bones that scientists can estimate the animal's size when it was alive—and it was huge! It probably grew up to 39 feet long, or 12 meters, and some individuals would certainly have been bigger. Initial estimates were even longer, up to 50 feet, or over 15 meters, but that was before the specimens were fully studied. Like other pliosaurs, predator X had a short tail and big teeth in its long jaws. Its head was massive, around 7 feet long, or 2 meters, and its front flippers were probably about the same length. It had four flippers, and researchers think its front flippers did most of the work of swimming, with the rear flippers acting as a rudder, but it could probably use its back flippers for a little extra boost of speed when it needed to. But it was a strong, fast swimmer no matter what, probably as fast as a modern orca, and very maneuverable. It had to be, because it ate other marine reptiles like plesiosaurs that were themselves very fast swimmers. It undoubtedly also ate sea turtles and fish, and probably pretty much anything else it could catch. It didn't eat whales because this was long, long before whales evolved. Predator X got its nickname from reporters back when the paleontologists thought it was 50 feet long. It didn't have a name yet so it got called Predator X because that sounded impressive (and it is), but it isn't the only giant pliosaur known. Kronosaurus was originally described in 1924 from fossils discovered in Australia, and current estimates of its size agree that it could probably grow to around 33 feet long, or 10 meters. This may be a low estimate, though, because the size of the biggest skull found might have been over 9 feet long, or 2.85 meters, although the skull isn't complete so its full size is just an estimate. Pliosaurs do have big heads, but if Kronosaurus's skull really is longer than predator X's skull, it was probably a bigger animal overall. Kronosaurus's fossils have only been found in an ancient inland sea that covered most of Queensland and Central Australia until about 100 million years ago. It was probably a relatively shallow, cold sea, and although it had all the marine animals you'd expect for the time, like sharks, ammonites, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, lungfish, sea turtles, and lots more, Kronosaurus was the apex predator. It was so big and deadly that a full-grown Kronosaurus didn't have to worry ...

Thanks to Nora and Richard from NC this week as we learn about some scary-sounding reptiles, including the hoop snake! Further reading: The Story of How the Giant “Terror Skink” Was Presumed Extinct, Then Rediscovered San Diego's Rattlesnakes and What To Do When They're on Your Property Snake that cartwheels away from predators described for the first time Giant new snake species identified in the Amazon The terror skink, AKA Bocourt's terrific skink [photo by DECOURT Théo - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116258516]: The hoop snake according to folklore: The sidewinder rattlesnake [photo taken from this article]: The dwarf reed snake [photo by Evan Quah, from page linked above]: The green anaconda [photo by MKAMPIS - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62039578]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. As monster month continues, we're going to look at some weird and kind of scary, or at least scary-sounding, snakes and lizards. Thanks to Nora and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week! We'll start with the terror skink, whose name should inspire terror, but it's also called Bocourt's terrific skink, which is a name that should inspire joy. Which is it, terror or joy? I suppose it depends on your mood and how you feel about lizards in general. All skinks are lizards but not all lizards are skinks, by the way. The terror or possibly terrific skink lives on two tiny islets, which are miniature islands. These islets are themselves off the coast of an island called the Isle of Pines, but in French, which I cannot pronounce. The Isle of Pines is only 8 miles wide and 9 miles long, or 13 by 15 km, and is itself off the coast of the bigger island of New Caledonia. All these islands lie east of Australia. Technically the islets where the skink lives are off the coast of another islet that is itself off the coast of the Isle of Pines, which is off the coast of New Caledonia, but where exactly it lives is kept a secret by the scientists studying it. The skink was described in 1876 but only known from a single specimen captured on New Caledonia around 1870, and after that it wasn't seen again and was presumed extinct. Colonists and explorers brought rats and other invasive animals to the New Caledonian islands, which together with habitat loss have caused many other native species to go extinct. But in December 2003, a scientific expedition studying sea snakes around the New Caledonian islands caught a big lizard no one recognized. Once the expedition members realized it was a terror skink, alive and well, they took lots of pictures and videos of it and then released it back into the wild. Since then, more specimens have been discovered during four different expeditions, but only on the islets, not on any of the bigger islands. It's so critically endangered that its location has to be kept secret, because if someone captures some of the lizards to sell on the illegal pet market, the species could easily be driven to extinction. The terror skink is gray-brown with darker stripes, a long tail, and a slightly downturned mouth that makes it look grumpy. It grows about 20 inches long, or 50 cm, including its tail. This is really big for a skink, so technically it's a giant skink. It gets the name terror skink from its size and from its teeth, which are large and curved like fangs. It mainly eats one particular species of land crab, which is why its jaws are so strong and its teeth are so sharp, so it can bite through the crab's exoskeleton. Another lizard with a spooky name that has been presumed extinct is the gray ghost lizard, suggested by Richard from NC. It's more properly called the giant Tongan ground skink, and it's native to some more South Pacific islands—specifically, the Tongan Islands.

Thanks to Murilo for suggesting El Gran Maja for our first monster month episode of 2024! Further reading: The Loch Ness Monster: If It's Real, Could It Be an Eel? Further watching: Borisao Blois's YouTube channel [I have not watched very many of his videos so can't speak to how appropriate they all are for younger viewers] El Gran Maja, YouTube star: The European eel [photo by GerardM - http://www.digischool.nl/bi/onderwaterbiologie/, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=284678]: A supposed 21-foot eel, a product of trick photography: The slender giant moray eel [photo by BEDO (Thailand) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40262310]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. It's monster month, where we talk about weird, mysterious, and sometimes spooky creatures! This year I've decided to be less spooky and more weird, so let's kick off the month with an episode all about gigantic eels. Thanks to Murilo for suggesting our first giant eel, El Gran Maja. El Gran Maja is an eel that is supposed to live off the coast of northern Puerto Rico, and it's supposed to grow 675 meters long. That's 2,215 feet, or almost half a mile. That is an excessive amount of eel. Obviously, an eel that big couldn't actually exist. By the time its front end noticed danger, its back end could already be eaten by a whole family of sharks. But maybe it was based on a real eel that grows really long. Let's take a look at some eels we know exist, and then we'll return to El Gran Maja and learn some very interesting things about it. 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. Most eels live in the ocean at the beginning and end of their lives, and freshwater in between. For example, the European eel has a life cycle that's pretty common among eels. It hatches in the ocean into a larval stage that looks sort of like a transparent leaf. Over the next six months to three years, the larvae swim and float through the ocean currents, closer and closer to Europe, feeding on plankton and other tiny food. Toward the end of this journey, they grow into their next phase, where they resemble eels instead of leaf-shaped tadpoles, but are still mostly transparent. They're called glass eels at this point. The glass eels make their way into rivers and slowly migrate upstream. Once a glass eel is in a good environment it metamorphoses again into an elver, which is basically a small eel. As it grows it gains more pigment until it's called a yellow eel. Over the next decade or two it grows and matures, until it reaches its adult length—typically around 3 feet, or about a meter. When it's fully mature, its belly turns white and its sides silver, which is why it's called a silver eel at this stage. Silver eels migrate more than 4,000 miles, or 6500 km, back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, lay eggs, and die. One place where European eels live is Loch Ness in Scotland, and 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 wate...

To donate to help victims of Hurricane Helena: Day One Relief - direct donation link World Central Kitchen - direct donation link It's the big 400th episode! Let's have a good old-fashioned mystery episode! Thanks to Richard from NC for suggesting two of our animal mysteries today. Further reading: A 150-Year-Old Weird Ancient Animal Mystery, Solved The Enigmatic Cinnamon Bird: A Mythical Tale of Spice and Splendor First ever photograph of rare bird species New Britain Goshawk Scientists stumbled onto toothy deep-sea "top predator," and named it after elite sumo wrestlers Bryde's whales produce Biotwang calls, which occur seasonally in long-term acoustic recordings from the central and western Pacific A stylophoran [drawing by Haplochromis - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10946202]: A cinnamon flycatcher, looking adorable [photo by By https://www.flickr.com/photos/neilorlandodiazmartinez/ - https://www.flickr.com/photos/neilorlandodiazmartinez/9728856384, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30338634]: The rediscovered New Britain goshawk, and the first photo ever taken of it, by Tom Vieras: The mystery fish photo: The yokozuna slickhead fish: The Biotwang maker, Bryde's whale: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. We've made it to the big episode 400, and also to the end of September. That means monster month is coming up fast! To celebrate our 400th episode and the start of monster month, let's have a good old-fashioned mysteries episode. We'll start with an ancient animal called a stylophoran, which first appears in the fossil record around 500 million years ago. It disappears from the fossil record around 300 million years ago, so it persisted for a long time before going extinct. But until recently, no one knew what the stylophoran looked like when it was alive, and what it could possibly be related to. It was just too weird. That's an issue with ancient fossils, especially ones from the Cambrian period. We talked about the Cambrian explosion in episode 69, which was when tiny marine life forms began to evolve into much larger, more elaborate animals as new ecological niches became available. In the fossil record it looks like it happened practically overnight, which is why it's called the Cambrian explosion, but it took millions of years. Many of the animals that evolved 500 million years ago look very different from all animals alive today, as organisms evolved body plans and appendages that weren't passed down to descendants. As for stylophorans, the first fossils were discovered about 150 years ago. They're tiny animals, only millimeters long, and over 100 species have been identified so far. The body is flattened and shaped sort of like a rectangle, but two of the rectangle's corners actually extend up into little points, and growing from those two points are what look like two appendages. From the other side of the rectangle, the long flat side, is another appendage that looks like a tail. The tail has plates on it and blunt spikes that stick up, while the other two appendages look like they might be flexible like starfish arms. Naturally, the first scientists to examine a stylophoran decided the tail was a tail and the flexible appendages were arm-like structures that helped it move around and find food. But half a billion years ago, there were no animals with tails. Tails developed much later, and are mainly a trait of vertebrates. That led to some scientists questioning whether the stylophoran was an early precursor of vertebrates, or animals with some form of spinal cord. The spikes growing from the top of the tail actually look a little bit like primitive vertebrae, made of calcite plates. That led to the calcichordate hypothesis that suggested stylophorans gave rise to vertebrates. Then, in 2014,

Thanks to Anbo, Murilo, Clay, and Ezra for their suggestions this week! Let's learn about some bears! Further reading: Snack attack: Bears munch on ants and help plants grow Extinct vegetarian cave bear diet mystery unravelled Ancient brown bear genomes sheds light on Ice Age losses and survival The sloth bear has shaggy ears and floppy lips [photo from this site]: An absolute unit of a Kodiak bear in captivity [photo by S. Taheri - zoo, own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1118252]: A polar bear: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're revisiting a popular topic, bears! We'll talk about some bears we've never covered before, with suggestions from Anbo, Clay, Ezra, and Murilo. We'll even discuss a small bear mystery which has mostly been solved by science. To start us off, Anbo wanted to learn about bears in general. We've had bear episodes before, but our last episode all about bears was way back in 2017, in episode 42. Some of our listeners weren't even born back then, which makes me feel super old. Bears live throughout much of the world today, but they evolved in North America around 38 million years ago. These ancestral bears were small, about the size of a raccoon, but they were successful. They spread into Asia via the land bridge Beringia, where they were even more successful than in North America, so successful that by around 30 million years ago, descendants of those earliest bear ancestors migrated from Asia back into North America. But it wasn't until the Pleistocene around 2 ½ million years ago that bears really came into their own. That's because bears are megafauna, and megafauna evolved mainly as an adaptation to increasingly cold climates. As the ice ages advanced, a lot of animals grew larger so they could stay warm more easily. Predators also had to grow larger as their prey became larger, since if you want to hunt an animal the size of a bison or woolly rhinoceros, you'd better be pretty big and strong yourself. Bears mostly weren't hunting animals that big, though. Modern studies suggest that overall, bears are omnivores, not fully carnivorous. Bears eat a lot of plant material even if you don't count the panda, which isn't very closely related to other bears. Even when a bear does eat other animals, they're not usually very big ones. Let's take Murilo's suggestion as an example, the sloth bear. The sloth bear lives in India and is increasingly vulnerable due to habitat loss and poaching. It's probably most closely related to the sun bear that we talked about in episode 234, which also lives in parts of South Asia. Both the sun bear and the sloth bear have long black hair and a white or yellowish V-shaped marking on the chest. The sloth bear's hair is especially long on its neck and shoulders, like a mane, and its ears even have long hair. The sloth bear stands around 3 feet high at the shoulder at most, or 91 cm, and a big male can be over 6 feet tall, or almost 2 meters, when he stands on his hind legs. This isn't gigantic for bears in general, but it's not small either. Scientists think the V-shaped marking on its chest warns tigers to leave the sloth bear alone, and tigers mostly do. If tigers think twice about attacking an animal, you know that animal has to be pretty tough. The sloth bear has massive claws on big paws. The claws can measure 4 inches long, or 10 cm, although they're not very sharp. The bear has an especially long muzzle but its teeth aren't very large. Like most bears, it's good at climbing trees and can run quite fast, and it swims well too. It even has webbed toes. With all this in mind, what do you think the sloth bear eats? I'll give you some more hints. It has loose, kind of flappy lips, especially the lower lip. It doesn't have any teeth in the front of its upper jaw. It mainly uses its huge claws to dig.

Thanks to Alexandra, Pranav, Eilee, Conner, and Joel for their suggestions this week! Velella velella, or by-the-wind-sailor [photo from this page]: Porpita porpita, or the blue button [photo from this page]: Cricetus cricetus, or the European hamster, next to a golden hamster: Nasua nasua, or the South American coati [photo from this page]: Mola mola, or the ocean sunfish: Quelea quelea, or the red-billed quelea [photo from this page]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn a little bit about scientific names, and along the way we're going to learn about several animals. Thanks to Alexandra, Eilee, Conner, Joel, and Pranav for their suggestions! Alexandra inspired this episode by suggesting two animals, the by-the-wind-sailor and the blue button. Both are marine invertebrates that look superficially like jellyfish, but they're actually colonial organisms. That means that although they look like a single animal, they're actually made up of lots of tiny animals that live together and function as one organism. The blue button is closely related to the by-the-wind-sailor and both are related to siphonophores. Both the blue button and the by-the-wind-sailor spend most of the time near or on the ocean's surface and have a gas-filled chamber that helps keep them afloat, with stinging tentacles that hang down into the water, but both are made up of a colony of tiny animals called hydroids. Different hydroids have different functions, and all work together to find tiny food that will benefit the entire colony. The blue button gets its name because its float is round and flat like a button, and often blue or teal in color. It's quite small, only a little over an inch across, or about 3 cm, and its tentacles are not much longer. The by-the-wind-sailor is a little larger than the blue button, with a blue sail-shaped float that's only a few inches across, or maybe 7 cm, with stinging tentacles of about the same size. The stings of both organisms aren't very strong and aren't dangerous to humans, but they do hurt, so it's a good idea not to touch one. Since both can be very common in warm ocean waters and they sometimes get blown ashore by the wind in large numbers, it can be hard to avoid them if you're visiting the beach at the wrong time. They can still sting you if they're dead, too. The by-the-wind sailor has the scientific name of Velella velella while the blue button's scientific name is Porpita porpita. The term for a scientific name that contains the same words is a repeating scientific name, also called a tautonym or tautonymous name, and that's the subject of this episode. A scientific name is something we mention a lot but if you're not sure what it means, it can sound confusing. Every organism with a scientific name has been described by a scientist, meaning it's been studied and placed somewhere in the great interconnected web of life. The system of giving organisms scientific names is called binomial nomenclature. The first word of the name indicates which genus the organism belongs to, while the second word indicates what species it is. These are called generic and specific names. Some organisms also have a third word in their scientific name which indicates its subspecies. The reason scientists use a complicated naming system is to make it easier for other scientists to know exactly what organism is being discussed. For example, let's say a scientist has been studying hamsters in the wild to learn more about them, and publishes a paper about her observations. If she just calls the animal a hamster, someone reading it might assume she was talking about the hamster found in their part of the world, when the paper is actually about a totally different, although closely related, hamster that lives somewhere else. And that brings us to Pranav's suggestion, the European hamster,

Thanks to Cosmo, William, and Silas for their fishy suggestions this week! You have until Sept. 13, 2024 to back the enamel pin Kickstarter! Further reading: The Handfish Conservation Project Researchers Look in Tank and See Promising Cluster of Near-Extinct Babies The unique visual systems of deep sea fish A red handfish: Another red handfish. This one is named Hector: The black dragon fish: The white-edged freshwater whipray [photo by Doni Susanto]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we return to the vertebrate world, specifically some strange and colorful fishies. Thanks to William, Cosmo, and Silas for their suggestions! We'll start with Silas's suggestion, the red handfish. We talked about it before back in episode 189, but it's definitely time to revisit it. When we last discussed it, scientists estimated there were fewer than 100 red handfish left in the wild, meaning it was in imminent danger of extinction. Let's find out how it's doing now, four years later. The handfish gets its name because its pectoral fins look like big flat hands. It spends most of its time on the sea floor, and it uses its hands to walk instead of swimming. It can swim, although it's not a very strong swimmer, and anyway if you had great big hands you might choose to walk on them too. It doesn't have a swim bladder, which helps most fish stay buoyant. All species of handfish are small, only growing to about 6 inches long at most, or 15 cm. This is surprising considering the handfish is closely related to anglerfish, and some anglerfish can grow over 3 feet long, or about a meter. As for the red handfish specifically, it generally only grows about 4 inches long at most, or 10 cm, and it once lived in shallow water around much of Australia. These days, it's only found on two reefs southeast of Tasmania. Some populations are bright red while some are pink with red spots. It has a wide downturned mouth that makes it look like a grumpy red toad with big hands. So how is the red handfish doing? Four years ago it was almost extinct in wild, with fewer than 100 individuals alive. These days the Handfish Conservation Project estimates that the wild population is probably about the same, although because the red handfish is so small and hides so well among sea grass, algae, and rocks that make up its home, it's hard to get a good count of how many are really alive. It's also under even more pressure than before as an overpopulation of urchins is overgrazing the plants where it lives, which may sound familiar to you if you listened to episode 395 a few weeks ago. But there is one fantastic change that gives conservationists hope that the red handfish won't go extinct after all. The red handfish is so endangered, and its remaining habitat is so small, that a few years ago scientists decided they needed to start a captive breeding program. But even though the fish did just fine in captivity, they didn't breed at first. Then, in November 2023, one of the fish laid 21 eggs and all 21 hatched safely. Hopefully it won't be long until the babies are old enough to release into the wild. The red handfish is one of very few fish that hatch into tiny baby fish instead of into a larval form. Newly hatched babies are only about 5 mm long. Most fish colonize new habitats after they float around aimlessly as larvae, until they grow enough to metamorphose into adults. Since the red handfish doesn't have this larval stage, and babies just walk around on the sea floor finding tiny worms and other food, it's hard for the fish to expand its range. Hopefully, as the captive breeding program continues and more young fish are released into the wild, scientists can start releasing red handfish into areas where they used to live. Next, William asked about the dragon fish. We've talked about a few dragonfish before, in episodes 193 and 231,

Thanks to Joel and an anonymous listener for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Dieback and recovery in poplar and attack by hornet clearwing moth The enormous and beautiful Atlas moth: A male hairy tentacle moth without and with coremata extended [photos from this site]: The hornet moth looks like a hornet but can't sting: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Welcome to September, where we're mere weeks away from Monster Month! Invertebrate August is over for another year, but what's this? An episode about moths?! Hurrah for one extra invertebrate episode, because they don't get enough attention on this podcast! Thanks to Joel and an anonymous listener for their suggestions. First, a listener who wants to remain anonymous suggested that we talk about moths in general, and the Atlas moth in particular. I like the Atlas moth because you can catch it in Animal Crossing. It's also beautiful and one of the largest moths in the entire world. Its wingspan can be well over 10 inches across, or about 27 cm, which is bigger than a lot of bird wingspans. The Atlas moth's wings are mostly cinnamon brown with darker and lighter spots. The upper wings have a curved sort of hook at the top that's lighter in color and has an eyespot. It looks remarkably like a snake head, and in fact if a predator approaches, the moth will move its wings so that it looks like a snake is rearing its head back to strike. Despite having such huge wings, atlas moths don't fly very well. That's okay because they only need to be able to fly for a few days, which they mostly do at night. They're only looking for a mate, not food, because they don't even have fully formed mouthparts. They don't eat as adults. Like many moths, they mate, lay eggs, and die. A few weeks later, the eggs hatch and the baby caterpillars emerge. The caterpillar is pale green with little spikes all over, and it eats plants until it grows to around 4 and a half inches long, or about 11 and a half cm. At that point it spins a cocoon attached to a twig, hidden from potential predators by dead leaves that the caterpillar incorporates into the cocoon's outside. The Atlas moth lives in forests in southern Asia, including China, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia, with a subspecies native to Japan. Its cocoons are sometimes collected to use for silk. The silk isn't as high a quality as the domesticated silk moth's, but it's very strong and since the cocoons are so big, they produce lots of silk. Sometimes people will collect a cocoon after the moth has emerged and use it as a little purse. Next, Joel suggested two interesting moths. The first is often called the hairy tentacle moth, which sounds absolutely horrifying. Its scientific name is Creatonotos gangis, and it lives in parts of Australia and southeast Asia. The hairy tentacle moth is also called the Australian horror moth and other names that inspire fear and disgust. But why? The moth is really pretty. Its wings are pale brown and white with dark gray stripes in the middle, and it has a black spot on its head. The abdomen is usually red with black spots in a row. The wingspan is about 40 mm. The issue comes with the way the male attracts a female. Inside his abdomen the male has four coremata, which are glands that emit pheromones. Pheromones are chemicals that other moths can detect, much like smells. When a male is ready to advertise for a mate, he perches on the edge of a leaf or somewhere similar and inflates the coremata so that they unfurl from inside the abdomen, like blowing up a balloon. Sometimes he only extends two of the coremata, sometimes all of them. Either way, the coremata are surprisingly large, sometimes longer than the entire abdomen. They're dark gray with feathery hairs and they do actually look like hairy tentacles. They're sometimes called hair pencils, but the term coremata is actually Greek for feath...

Thanks to Sy and Finn for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Creeping Crinoids! Sea Lilies Crawl to Escape Predators, New Video Shows New and Unusual Crinoid Discovered Sea otters maintain remnants of healthy kelp forest amid sea urchin barrens Sea urchins see with their feet A sea lily [photo from this page]: A feather star [still from a video posted on this page]: Purple urchins [photo by James Maughn]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week as we bring invertebrate August to a close, we're going to cover some animals suggested by Finn and Sy. We'll start with Sy's suggestion, crinoids, also called feather stars or sea lilies depending on what body plan a particular species has. We talked about them in episode 79 but it's definitely time to revisit them. Crinoids are echinoderms, a really old phylum of animals. Fossils of ancient echinoderms date back to the Cambrian half a billion years ago and they're still incredibly common throughout the world's oceans. Ancient crinoids had five arms the way many starfish do, which makes sense because crinoids are related to starfish. At some point each arm developed into two, so many crinoids have ten arms or even more, and many have arms that branch. The arms are used for feeding and have feathery appendages lined with sticky mucus that traps tiny bits of food floating in the water. There are two big divisions of crinoids today, the feather stars and the sea lilies. Feather stars are more common and can swim around as adults if they want to, although most stick to crawling along the sea floor. They swim by waving their feathery arms. Sea lilies look like flowers as adults, with a slender stem-like structure with the small body and long feathery arms at the top. I specify that sea lilies have stems as adults because a lot of feather stars also have stems as juveniles, but when they reach maturity they become free-swimming. Even though the sea lily looks like a plant, and some species even have root-like filaments that help it anchor itself to the sea floor or to rocks, it's still an animal. For one thing, it can uproot itself and move to a better location if it wants to, crawling with its arms and pulling its stem behind it, which is not something a plant can do except in cartoons. If a predator attacks it, the sea lily will even shed its stem completely so it can crawl away much faster. Since echinoderms in general are really good at regenerating parts of the body, losing its stem isn't a big deal. The biggest sea lilies today are deep-sea species, but even they only grow a stem up to about three feet long at most, or about a meter. This wasn't the case in the ancient past, though. The longest crinoid stem fossil ever discovered was 130 feet long, or 40 meters. Crinoids filter food particles from the water that flows through the feathery arms. Even though they look like feathers or petals, a crinoid's arms are actually arms. They have tiny tube feet on them that act sort of like fingers to help the crinoid hold onto pieces of food, and to do a better job of holding the food, the tube feet are covered with a sticky mucus. The mouth is in the middle of the arms on the top of the body. Crinoids absorb oxygen directly from the water. Its body contains a system of chambers and pores that are full of water, and by contracting special muscles, the crinoid moves water around in its body to transport nutrients and oxygen and to collect waste material. Crinoids are closely related to starfish, sea cucumbers, sand dollars, and sea urchins, which brings us to Finn's suggestion. Finn suggested urchins, which are also echinoderms. In fact, at the end of episode 79 I mentioned that one day I'd do an episode about urchins, and it only took me six years to get here! Many urchins look like living pincushions because they're covered in spines. That's where the name urchin comes from,

Thanks to Anbo and Siya for suggesting the mantis shrimp this week! The Kickstarter for some animal-themed enamel pins is still going on! Further reading: Rolling with the punches: How mantis shrimp defend against high-speed strikes The magnificent peacock mantis shrimp [picture by Cédric Péneau, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117431670]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. As invertebrate August continues, this week we have a topic suggested by Anbo and Siya. They both wanted to learn about the mantis shrimp! The mantis shrimp, which is properly called a stomatopod, is a crustacean that looks sort of like a lobster without the bulky front end, or a really big crayfish. Despite its name, it's not a shrimp although it is related to shrimps, but it's more closely related to lobsters and crabs. It can grow as much as 18 inches long, or 46 cm, but most are about half that size. Most are brown but there are hundreds of different species and some are various brighter colors like pink, blue, orange, red, or bright green, or a rainbow of colors and patterns. There are two things almost everyone knows about the mantis shrimp. One, it can punch so hard with its claws that it breaks aquarium glass, and two, it has 12 to 16 types of photoreceptor cells compared to 3 that humans have, and therefore it must be able to see colors humans can't possibly imagine. One of those things is right, but one is wrong, or at least partially wrong. We'll discuss both in a minute, but first let's learn the basics about these fascinating animals. The mantis shrimp lives in shallow water and spends most of its time in a burrow that it digs either in the sea floor or in crevices in rocks or coral, which it enlarges if necessary. Some species will dig elaborate tunnel systems while others just wedge themselves into any old crack that will hide them. It molts its exoskeleton periodically as it grows, like other crustaceans, and after that it either has to expand its burrow or move to a larger one. Most species live in tropical or subtropical areas, but some prefer more temperate waters. It has eight pairs of legs, which includes three pairs of walking legs, four pairs with claws that help it grasp items, and its front pair, which are hinged and look a little like the front legs of a praying mantis. That's where the “mantis” in mantis shrimp comes from, although of course it has lots of other names worldwide. In some places it's called the thumb splitter. The mantis shrimp has two eyes on stalks that move independently. Its brain extends into the eye stalks, and the section of the brain in the eye stalks, called the reniform body, is what processes vision. This allows it to process a lot of visual information very quickly. Reniform bodies have also been identified in the brains of some other crustaceans, including shrimp, crayfish, and some crabs. Scientists also think that the eyes themselves do a lot of visual processing before that information gets to the reniform body or the brain at all. In other words, part of the reason the mantis shrimp's eyes are so complicated and so unusual compared to other animals' eyes is because each eye is sort of a tiny additional brain that mainly processes color. The typical human eye can only sense three wavelengths of light, which correspond to red, green, and blue. The mantis shrimp has twelve different photoreceptors instead of three, meaning it can sense twelve wavelengths of light, and some species have even more photoreceptors. But while our brains are really good at synthesizing the three wavelengths of light we can see, combining them so that we see incredibly fine gradations of color in between red, green, and blue, the mantis shrimp doesn't process color the same way we do. So while its eyes can sense colors we can't, its brain doesn't seem to do anything with the color information.

Thanks to Siya, Zachary, Khalil, and Eilee for their suggestions this week! The enamel pin Kickstarter goes live on Wednesday, August 14, 2024!! Further reading: How spiders breathe under water: Spider's diving bell performs like gill extracting oxygen from water Aggressive spiders are quick at making accurate decisions, better at hunting unpredictable preys Into the Spider-Verse: A young biologist shares her love for eight-legged creatures A New Genus of Prodidominae Cave Spider from a Paleoburrow and Ferruginous Caves in Brazil The diving bell spider [photo from this paper]: Jumping spiders are incredibly cute, even the ones that eat other spiders [photo taken from this excellent site]: The spoor spider's web looks like a cloven hoofprint in the sand [photo by JMK - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39988887]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. I'm excited this week, because on Wednesday my little Kickstarter to fund getting more enamel pins made goes live, and also we're talking about some weird and fascinating spiders! Thanks to Siya, Zachary, Khalil, and Eilee for their spider suggestions! A lot of people are afraid of spiders, but don't worry. All the spiders in this episode are small and completely harmless unless you are a bug. Also, they probably live very far away from you. Personally, I think most spiders are cute. Let's start with a spider suggested by Siya, who pointed out that we don't actually have very many episodes about spiders. Siya suggested we learn about the diving bell spider, a tiny, remarkable animal that lives in parts of Europe and Asia. The diving bell spider gets its name because it mostly lives underwater but still needs to breathe air, so it brings air with it into the water. A diving bell made by humans is a structure shaped sort of like a big bell that can be lowered straight down into the water on a cable. If the diving bell doesn't tip to one side or another, the air inside it stays inside and allows a human diver to take breaths without coming to the surface. A diving bell made by spiders is made of silk but is shaped sort of the same, with an entrance at the bottom. The spider builds its bell among water plants to anchor it and keep it hidden. The spider brings air from the surface to replenish the supply of air inside the bell. The spider does this by surfacing briefly. Its belly and legs are covered with tiny water-repellent hairs, and after surfacing the hairs trap air, so that when it dives back into the water it's covered with little silvery bubbles. It swims down to its diving bell and rubs the bubbles off its body, which rise into the bell and are trapped there by the closely woven silk. Then it goes back to the surface for more air. Once the bell is full of air, the spider only needs to replenish the air supply about once a day under normal circumstances. That's because the bell itself acts as a sort of external gill. It's able to absorb oxygen from the water quite efficiently, but it still loses volume slowly because nitrogen from the air diffuses into the water. If not for that, the spider probably wouldn't need to come to the surface at all. The diving bell is the spider's home, especially for the female. Unlike most spiders, the female diving bell spider is much smaller than the male and she hunts differently. The male is an active hunter, swimming quickly to catch tiny animals like mosquito larvae, so he's large and strong but only has a small diving bell. The female spends most of her time in her diving bell and only swims out to catch animals that come too close, or occasionally to replenish the air in her bell. When the spider leaves its diving bell to hunt, air bubbles remain trapped on its abdomen, which allows it to breathe while it's hunting too. Then it can dart back to its bell to get more air or hide if it needs to.

Thanks to Kari and Joel for their suggestions this week! You can find Kari Lavelle's excellent book Butt or Face? Volume 2: Revenge of the Butts at any bookstore. Our Kickstarter for some enamel pins goes live in just over a week if you're interested! Further reading: Jellyfish size might influence their nutritional value History of Taiji Mantis Glowing octocorals have been around for at least 540 million years The moon jellyfish [photo by Alexander Vasenin - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32753304]: A Chinese mantis [photo by Ashley Bradford, taken from this site]: Also a Chinese mantis: A type of octocoral: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. It's finally Invertebrate August! We have some great episodes coming up this month, so let's get started. Thanks to Kari and Joel for their suggestions this week! First, we'll start with an invertebrate from Kari Lavelle's latest book, Butt or Face? Volume 2: Revenge of the Butts! It's a sequel to the hilarious and really interesting book we talked about last summer. Kari kindly sent me a copy of the book and it's just as good as the first one. Don't worry, I won't spoil the answer of whether the picture in the book is of an animal's butt or face, but let's talk about the moon jellyfish. We've talked about jellyfish in several previous episodes, most recently in episode 343. Moon jellyfish is the term for jellies in the genus Aurelia, all of which look so identical that it takes close study by an expert, or a genetic test, to determine which species is which. We're going to talk about a specific species in this episode, Aurelia aurita, but most of what we'll learn about it also applies to the other moon jelly species. Aurelia aurita lives in temperate, shallow water and is often found in harbors and close to shore. It's mostly transparent and can grow up to 16 inches across, or 40 cm, although most are smaller. It's sometimes called the saucer jelly because when its bell is open, it's shaped sort of like a saucer or shallow bowl, if the bowl was upside down in the water with pinkish-white internal organs inside and short stinging tentacles. That's most bowls, I think. Unlike a lot of jellyfish, the moon jelly doesn't have long tentacles that hang down from the middle of the bell. Instead, its tentacles are short and thin and line the edges of the bell. There are hundreds of them, but while the tentacles do have stinging cells, they're not very strong. If you were to pet a moon jelly, you probably wouldn't even feel the stings but you'd probably get sticky digestive mucus on your hands from the tentacles. The mucus is sticky to trap tiny pieces of food, which can include everything from fish eggs and various types of larvae to microscopic animals called diatoms and rotifers. The moon jellyfish can survive in water with low oxygen, and in fact it prefers low oxygen water. Since most larger marine animals that live near the surface need a lot of oxygen to survive, the moon jelly can safely find its tiny food in low-oxygen areas without worrying too much about predators. Actually the moon jellyfish doesn't worry about much of anything, because like other jellies, technically it doesn't have a brain, just a nerve net. Speaking of predators, for a long time scientists have wondered why anything bothers to eat jellies. They're mostly water, which makes them easy for other animals to digest, but they contain almost no nutritional value. A study published in March 2023 determined that the bigger the jellyfish is, the more fatty acids its body contains, and fatty acids are an important nutrient. The main difference between a little jelly and a big jelly (besides size) is what they eat, so scientists think the bigger jellies are eating prey that contain more fatty acids, which slowly accumulate in the jelly's body too. Next,

Follow the enamel pin Kickstarter here! Let's learn about some snakes this week! Thanks to Eilee, BlueTheChickenWing, and Richard from NC for their suggestions. Further Reading: Snake Island's Venomous Vipers Find a New Home in Sao Paulo 'Rarest Snake' in the U.S. Hatches at Tennessee Zoo The golden lancehead [picture from first article linked above]: The Martinique lancehead/fer-de-lance: The Louisiana pine snake, and a pine cone: Show Transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. After today, the next four weeks will be all about invertebrates, or animals without a backbone, because it's almost Invertebrate August! But this week let's learn about some animals that are basically nothing but backbones, snakes! Thanks to Eilee, BlueTheChickenWing, and Richard from NC for their suggestions! Also, if you like enamel pins even slightly as much as I do, I'm starting a Kickstarter in a few weeks to make some more. These will be bigger than the ones I made a few years ago and will include an aye-aye. Where else are you going to get an aye-aye enamel pin? There's a link in the show notes if you want to sign up for an email reminder when the campaign goes live in mid-August. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/familiar-friends-enamel-pins Anyway, let's start with Snake Island, suggested by Eilee. Snake Island is off the coast of Brazil in South America, and it's quite small, only about 106 acres total, or 43 hectares. It's hilly and a little over half of it is covered with a temperate rainforest, while the rest is grassy or just bare rocks. No one lives there these days and it's a protected area that only scientists are allowed to visit, with the exception of members of the Brazilian navy who occasionally stop by to maintain the lighthouse that keeps ships from smashing into the rocky coast. Lots of birds live on the island or visit there, but other than that it's mostly just snakes. Specifically, the critically endangered golden lancehead pit viper lives on Snake Island and nowhere else in the world. It can grow nearly four feet long, or 118 cm, and is pale gold or golden-brown in color with darker splotches. It's also incredibly venomous—but no one has ever been bitten by one as far as we know. If somehow you were bitten by one, it probably wouldn't be a pleasant situation but you also probably wouldn't die. That's mainly because the golden lancehead's venom is adapted to kill birds and reptiles, not mammals. And that's because there are no mammals living on Snake Island. The golden lancehead spends most of its time in trees or bushes, hunting for birds. It mainly eats two particular species of small bird that live on the island, although it will also eat other birds, lizards, and invertebrates like insects. Some reports say it will even eat smaller golden lanceheads. There's another snake that lives on the island, Sauvage's snail-eater, and the golden lancehead might occasionally snack on one of those. The snail-eater is also present on mainland Brazil and isn't venomous. You can probably guess that it mainly eats snails. It's small and thin, lives in trees, and is brownish-yellow with darker stripes and splotches. The issue with Snake Island and its snakes is that there isn't that much land available for the snakes to live on, and the forest has been damaged by human activity. Big chunks of forest were cleared by fire when people decided to try growing bananas on the island, which didn't work very well. No one lives there now, but poachers do occasionally visit the island to catch snakes for the illegal wildlife trade. The golden lancehead is starting to show signs of inbreeding and disease as a result. As if that wasn't bad enough, because the island is so close to the coast of Brazil, and mainland Brazil has its own problems with deforestation, fewer birds are migrating through the area every year.

Thanks to Jaxon and Lorenzo for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Rock-wallaby bite size 'packs a punch' Tiny Australian wallaby the last living link to extinct giant kangaroos Extraordinary Fossil of Giant Short-Faced Kangaroo Found in Australia Wiwaxia corrugata - The Burgess Shale The nabarlek: The banded hare-wallaby: Wiwaxia was a little less cute than wallabies are: An artist's rendition of what Wiwaxia might have looked like when alive [picture from last page linked above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Every so often I get an animal suggestion that I'm positive we've already covered, but then I'm flabbergasted when it turns out we haven't. That's the case for the animals we'll learn about this episode, with thanks to Jaxon and Lorenzo! A while ago, Jaxon left us a nice review and suggested we talk about wallabies. I was CONVINCED we'd talked about the wallaby repeatedly, but I think I was thinking about the wombat. We've hardly ever mentioned the wallaby, and it's such a great animal! The wallaby is a marsupial that basically looks like a miniature kangaroo, although some species grow pretty large. The resemblance makes sense because kangaroos and wallabies are closely related, but everything else about the wallaby family tree is confusing. That's because there are a lot of animals called wallabies that aren't actually the same type of animal. “Wallaby” is just a catchall term used by people to describe any animal that looks kind of like a miniature kangaroo. Wallabies are native to Australia and New Guinea, but various species have been introduced to other places where they're invasive, including New Zealand, France, England, Scotland, and Hawaii. Most of these non-native populations happened by accident when pets or zoo animals escaped into the wild, but some were introduced on purpose by people who didn't know they were causing damage to the local ecosystems. 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 name of the family they share, Macropodidae, means big feet. So, you know, Bigfoot exists but maybe doesn't look like most people think. 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. But there's a lot more to this hopping than you might think. While the wallaby or kangaroo has strong leg muscles, what's even more important is that it has very strong, very elastic tendons in its legs. These basically act like massively strong rubber bands. When you stretch a rubber band, it stores energy that it releases when you let go of it and it snaps back and whips you in the thumb and you wonder why you did that because it hurt. The tendons in the wallaby's legs store energy when it hops, and when it lands, the energy releases and helps bounce the animal right back into the next hop. Once it gets going, its muscles are only doing a fraction of the work to keep it hopping at high speed. Even better for the animal, a lot of its breathing is regulated by its movements when it's hopping, so it always has plenty of oxygen to power its body while moving fast. When it lands after a bounce, the impact pushes its breath out of its lungs, but the action of bringing its legs forward helps suck fresh air in. It's an incredibly efficient way to move, and allows the animal to travel long distances to find food and water without spending a lot of energy. Wallabies eat plants, and naturally the bigger species can eat bigger, tougher plants than smaller species. The exception is the dwarf rock-wallaby, according to a study published in March of 2024. There are over a dozen species of rock-wallaby,

It's our annual updates episode! Thanks to Kelsey and Torin for the extra information about ultraviolet light, and thanks to Caleb for suggesting we learn more about the dingo! Further reading: At Least 125 Species of Mammals Glow under Ultraviolet Light, New Study Reveals DNA has revealed the origin of this giant ‘mystery' gecko Bootlace Worm: Earth's Longest Animal Produces Powerful Toxin Non-stop flight: 4,200 km transatlantic flight of the Painted Lady butterfly mapped Gigantopithecus Went Extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 Years Ago, New Study Says First-Ever Terror Bird Footprints Discovered Last surviving woolly mammoths were inbred but not doomed to extinction Australian Dingoes Are Early Offshoot of Modern Breed Dogs, Study Shows A (badly) stuffed lava bear: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have our annual updates episode, and we'll also learn about a mystery animal called the lava bear! As usual, a reminder that I don't try to update everything we've ever talked about. That would be impossible. I just pick new information that is especially interesting. After our episode about animals and ultraviolet light, I got a great email from Kelsey and Torin with some information I didn't know. I got permission to quote the email, which I think you'll find really interesting too: “You said humans can't see UV light, which is true, however humans can detect UV light via neuropsin (a non-visual photoreceptor in the retina). These detectors allow the body to be signaled that it's time to do things like make sex-steroid hormones, neurotransmitters, etc. (Spending too much time indoors results in non-optimal hormone levels, lowered neurotransmitter production, etc.) “Humans also have melanopsin detectors in the retina and skin. Melanopsin detectors respond to blue light. Artificial light (LEDs, flourescents, etc) after dark entering the eye or shining on the skin is sensed by these proteins as mid-day daylight. This results in an immediate drop in melatonin production when it should be increasing getting closer to bedtime.” And that's why you shouldn't look at your phone at night, which I am super bad about doing. Our first update is related to ultraviolet light. A study published in October of 2023 examined hundreds of mammals to see if any part of their bodies glowed in ultraviolet light, called fluorescence. More than 125 of them did! It was more common in nocturnal animals that lived on land or in trees, and light-colored fur and skin was more likely to fluoresce than darker fur or skin. The white stripes of a mountain zebra, for example, fluoresce while the black stripes don't. The study was only carried out on animals that were already dead, many of them taxidermied. To rule out that the fluorescence had something to do with chemicals used in taxidermy, they also tested specimens that had been flash-frozen after dying, and the results were the same. The study concluded that ultraviolet fluorescence is actually really common in mammals, we just didn't know because we can't see it. The glow is typically faint and may appear pink, green, or blue. Some other animals that fluoresce include bats, cats, flying squirrels, wombats, koalas, Tasmanian devils, polar bears, armadillos, red foxes, and even the dwarf spinner dolphin. 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.

Further reading: Audubon's Bird of Washington: Unraveling the fraud that launched The Birds of America The Mystery of the Missing John James Audubon Self-Portrait Washington's eagle, as painted by Audubon: The tiny detail in Audubon's golden eagle painting that is supposed to be a self-portrait: The golden eagle painting as it was published. Note that there's no tiny figure in the lower left-hand corner: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This past weekend I was out of town, or to be completely honest I will have been out of town, because I'm getting this episode ready well in advance. Since July 4 was only a few days ago, or will have been only a few days ago, and July 4 is Independence Day in the United States of America, I thought it might be fun to talk about a very American bird, Washington's eagle. We talked about it before way back in episode 17, and I updated that information for the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book for its own chapter. When I was researching birds for episode 381 I revisited the topic briefly and realized it's so interesting that I should just turn it into a full episode. We only have two known species of eagle in North America, the bald eagle and the North American golden eagle. Both have wingspans that can reach more than 8 feet, or 2.4 meters, and both are relatively common throughout most of North America. But we might have a third eagle, or had one only a few hundred years ago. We might even have a depiction of one by the most famous bird artist in the world, James Audubon. In February 1814, Audubon was traveling on a boat on the upper Mississippi River when he spotted a big eagle he didn't recognize. A Canadian fur dealer who was with him said it was a rare eagle that he'd only ever seen around the Great Lakes before, called the great eagle. Audubon was familiar with bald eagles and golden eagles, but he was convinced the “great eagle” was something else. Audubon made four more sightings over the next few years, including at close range in Kentucky where he was able to watch a pair with a nest and two babies. Two years after that he spotted an adult eagle at a farm near Henderson, Kentucky. Some pigs had just been slaughtered and the eagle was looking for scraps. Audubon shot the bird and took it to a friend who lived nearby, an experienced hunter, and both men examined the body carefully. According to the notes Audubon made at the time, the bird was a male with a wingspan of 10.2 feet, or just over 3 meters. Since female eagles are generally larger than males, that means this 10-foot wingspan was likely on the smaller side of average for the species. It was dark brown on its upper body, a lighter cinnamon brown underneath, and had a dark bill and yellow legs. Audubon named the bird Washington's eagle and used the specimen as a model for a life-sized painting. Audubon was meticulous about details and size, using a double-grid method to make sure his bird paintings were exact. This was long before photography. So we have a detailed painting and first-hand notes from James Audubon himself about an eagle that…doesn't appear to exist. Audubon painted a few birds that went extinct afterwards, including the ivory-billed woodpecker and the passenger pigeon, along with less well-known birds like Bachman's warbler and the Carolina parakeet. He also made some mistakes. Many people think Washington's eagle is another mistake and was just an immature bald eagle, which it resembles. But here's the problem. Audubon wasn't always truthful. He painted some birds that he never saw but claimed he did, because another bird illustrator had painted them first. Once he claimed he went hunting with Daniel Boone in Kentucky in 1810, but at that time Boone would have been in his 70s and was living several states away. Audubon also claimed that he discovered a little bird called Lincoln's sparrow, but this wasn't the case.