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Submit ReviewThanks to Max for suggesting Titanoboa!
Further reading:
This Nearly 50-Foot Snake Was One of the Largest to Slither on Earth
Meet Vasuki indicus, the ‘crocodile’ that was a 50ft snake
Titanoboa had really big bones compared to its modern relatives:
Vasuki had big bones too:
Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
Almost exactly two years ago now, Max emailed to suggest we talk about titanoboa. The problem was that we had covered titanoboa in episode 197, and even though there’s always something new to learn about an animal, in this case since titanoboa is extinct there wasn’t much more I could share until new studies were published about it. But as the years passed I felt worse and worse that Max was waiting so long. A lot of listeners have to wait a long time for their suggested episode, and I always feel bad. But still there were no new studies about titanoboa!
Why am I telling you all this? Because we’re finally going to talk about titanoboa today, even though by now Max is probably old and gray with great-grandkids. But we’re only going to talk about titanoboa to compare it to another extinct snake. That’s right. Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a snake that was even longer than titanoboa!
Let’s start with Titanoboa, because it’s now been a really long time since episode 197 and all I remember about it is that it’s extinct and was way bigger than any snake alive today. Its discovery is such a good story that I’m going to include it too.
In 1994, a geologist named Henry Garcia found an unusual-looking fossil in Colombia in South America, in an area that had been strip-mined for coal. Fifty-eight million years ago the region was a hot, swampy, tropical forest along the edge of a shallow sea.
Garcia thought he’d found a piece of fossilized tree. The coal company in charge of the mine displayed it in their office along with other fossils. There it sat until 2003, when palaeontologists arranged an expedition to the mine to look for fossil plants. A researcher named Scott Wing was invited to join the team, and while he was there he poked around among the fossils displayed by the mining company. The second he saw the so-called petrified branch he knew it wasn’t a plant. He sent photos to a colleague who said it looked like the jawbone of a land animal, probably something new to science.
In 2007, the fossil was sent for study, labeled as a crocodile bone. But the palaeontologists who examined the fossil in person immediately realized it wasn’t from a crocodile. It was a snake vertebra—but so enormous that they couldn’t believe their eyes. They immediately arranged an expedition to look for more of them, and they found them!
Palaeontologists have found fossilized remains from around 30 individual snakes, including young ones. The adult size is estimated to be 42 feet, or 13 meters. The largest living snakes are anacondas and reticulated pythons, with no verified measurements longer than about 23 feet long, or 7 meters. Titanoboa was probably twice that length.
Because titanoboa was so bulky and heavy, it would be more comfortable in the water where it could stay cool and have its weight supported. It lived in an area where the land was swampy with lots of huge rivers. Those rivers were full of gigantic fish and other animals, including a type of lungfish that grew nearly ten feet long, or 3 meters. Studies of titanoboa’s skull and teeth indicate that it probably mostly ate fish.
So if titanoboa was so huge that until literally a few days ago as this episode goes live, we thought it was the biggest snake that had ever existed, how big was this newly discovered snake? It’s called Vasuki indicus and while it wasn’t that much bigger than titanoboa, estimates so far suggest it could grow almost 50 feet long, or over 15 meters. It’s named after a giant serpent king called Vasuki from Hindu folklore, who symbolizes strength and prosperity.
Vasuki indicus was discovered in a mine in India in 2005. The original discovery consisted of 27 vertebrae, including some that were still articulated. That means they remained in place after the rest of the body decayed and were preserved that way, which helps palaeontologists better estimate the snake’s true size.
Like titanoboa, the fossils were misidentified at first. They were labeled as a known giant crocodile and set aside in the discoverer’s lab for decades. In 2022, paleontologist Debajit Datta joined the lab, and one of the things he wanted to study were these giant crocodile fossils. He started preparing them for study by removing the rock matrix from around them, and almost immediately realized they belonged to a snake, not a crocodile.
The fossils have been dated to about 47 million years ago in what is now India, in Asia. Titanoboa lived about 58 million years ago in what is now Colombia, in South America. The two snakes are related, although not closely, and this helps scientists determine how snakes spread across the world as the continents moved into their current positions.
Both snakes lived in what were then very similar habitats, a tropical, swampy area near the coast. The researchers think Vasuki spent most of its time on land, unlike titanoboa. It wasn’t as bulky as titanoboa and could probably maneuver on land a lot more easily.
Until titanoboa was described in 2009, a snake called Gigantophis was thought to be the largest snake that ever lived. It lived around 40 million years ago in what is now the northern Sahara desert and could grow over 35 feet long, or almost 11 meters. It turns out that Vasuki was closely related to gigantophis.
As it stands now, until more fossils are found and more studies are conducted and published, Vasuki is estimated to be slightly longer than titanoboa at maximum, making it the longest snake known, but titanoboa is still estimated to be the heaviest snake known. So they both win the largest snake award, but the real winner is us.
You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.
Thanks for listening!
Thanks to Khalil for suggesting the horny toad, also called the horned lizard or horned toad!
Further reading:
Roth-Phrynosoma-ditmarsi-the-Case-of-the-Lost-Lizard.php">The Case of the Lost Lizard
The Texas horned lizard:
horned-lizard-texana-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200">Texas Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum)
The rock horned lizard [photo taken from article linked above]:
Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
This week we’re going to learn about a reptile suggested by Khalil, who is Leo’s friend, so a big shout-out to both. Khalil wants to learn about the horny toad, also called the horned toad or horned lizard.
We talked about it briefly back in episode 299. The horny toad is actually a lizard that lives in various parts of North America, especially western North America, from Canada down through much of the United States and into Mexico. The largest species is the Texas horned lizard, with a big female growing about 5 inches long, or almost 13 cm, not counting its tail.
The horny toad does actually resemble a toad in some ways. Its body is broad and rounded and its face has a blunt, froglike snout. Its tail is quite short. It’s also kind of sluggish and spends a lot of time just sitting in the sun, relying on its mottled coloration to camouflage it. If it feels threatened, it will actually just freeze and hope the predator doesn’t notice it. It’s covered with little pointy scales, and if a predator does approach, it will puff up its body so that the scales stick out even more and it looks larger. It also has true horns on its head, little spikes that are formed by projections of its skull, and if a predator tries to bite it, the horny toad will jerk its head up to stab its horns into the predator’s mouth.
Horny toads mainly eat a type of red ant called the harvester ant. The harvester ant is venomous but the horny toad is resistant to the venom and is specialized to eat lots and lots of the ants. Its esophagus produces lots of mucus when it’s eating, which collects around the ants and stops them from being able to bite before they die.
Because it eats so many venomous ants, many scientists think the horny toad stores some of the toxins in its body, especially in its blood. Its blood tastes especially bad to canids like coyotes that are common in the areas where it lives. But it does the horny toad no good to have bad-tasting blood if a predator has to bite it to find out, so the horny toad has a way to give a predator a sample of its blood in the weirdest way you can imagine.
If a horny toad is cornered by a predator and can’t run away, and puffing up isn’t helping deter the predator, the lizard has one last trick up its sleeve. It increases the blood pressure in its head by restricting some of the blood vessels carrying blood back to the heart, and when the blood pressure increases enough, it causes tiny blood vessels around the eyelids to rupture. It doesn’t just release blood, it squirts blood up to five feet away, or 1.5 meters. As if that wasn’t metal enough, the horny toad can aim this stream of blood, and it aims it right at the predator’s eyes.
Imagine for a moment that you are a hungry coyote. You’re young and don’t know that horny toads taste bad, you just know you’ve found this plump-looking lizard that doesn’t move very fast. It keeps puffing up and looking spiky, but you’re hungry so you keep charging in to try and grab it with your teeth in a way that won’t hurt your tongue on those spikes. Then, suddenly, your eyes are full of lizard blood that stings and makes it hard to see, and the blood drips down into your mouth and it tastes TERRIBLE. It doesn’t matter how hungry you are, this fat little lizard is definitely off the menu. Meanwhile, the horny toad is fine.
Scientists aren’t sure if every species of horny toad can squirt blood. Some species probably can’t, while some do it very seldom. It also doesn’t help against some predators, like birds, who don’t have a great sense of taste and aren’t affected by the toxins in the horny toad’s blood.
The horny toad relies on the harvester ant for most of its specialized diet, although it does eat other insects too. It can’t survive without eating harvester ants. The problem is, the harvester ant is in decline after fire ants were introduced to North America from South America. The horny toad doesn’t eat fire ants, and the fire ants out-compete the local harvester ants, leaving the horny toad with less and less food.
Humans really don’t like fire ants, which can cause damage to homes when they dig their huge underground nests, and which inflict really painful bites. When people try to get rid of fire ants, sometimes the treatments also kill harvester ants. Incidentally, some animals that really love to eat fire ants include armadillos, black widow spiders, wolf spiders, and bobwhites.
The Texas horned lizard lives throughout a fairly large range, so although its numbers are in decline along with its ant food, it’s still doing okay for now. But not every horny toad is so lucky.
The rock horned lizard, also called Ditmars’ horned lizard, is only found in one small part of Sonora in northern Mexico. It was first discovered by science in 1891, when an archaeological expedition caught one. The lizard was described in 1906 but by then it hadn’t actually been seen in the wild since 1897, when two more were caught by a man who donated them to the New York Zoological Park. Those were the only three specimens that had ever been collected. Herpetologists worried that the rock horned lizard had gone extinct.
The main issue was that no one was exactly sure where those three specimens had been collected and no one knew exactly where the 1891 expedition had traveled. The man who caught the two lizards in 1897 didn’t say exactly where he’d caught them, just that it was in northern Sonora. But what a scientist named Vincent Roth realized when researching the lizard is that the three preserved specimens probably still contained undigested and partially digested food in their bodies, and that if the insects the lizards had eaten could be identified, it could give an important clue as to where the lizards had lived.
Dr. Roth requested that the gut contents be removed from the 1891 specimen for study, and also from one of the 1897 specimens. The third specimen had been taxidermied and the guts discarded. Dr. Roth cleaned the gut contents with alcohol and examined them microscopically, and found the remains of 14 insects, the seeds of three different species of grass, and some pebbles. All this happened in 1970, so instead of emailing a bunch of experts for help, Dr. Roth had to write physical letters to specialists throughout the world for help identifying the insects.
The specialists were happy to help, and they determined that the pebbles and grass seeds would have been eaten by accident when the lizard slurped up ants carrying them. The lizards had the remains of several different ants in their digestive tracts, including harvester ants, along with weevils, jumping spiders, grasshoppers, and other insects. These were identified, including some rare ones only ever found in certain areas of Sonora. Even the grass seeds and the pebbles were identified.
It all pointed to a particular mountain range in northern Sonora, and an expedition was arranged by Dr. Roth to search for the lizard. But they didn’t find it! They made plans to return, but asked the local people to keep an eye out for a specific type of horned lizard. In 1971 a report came of a rock horned lizard discovered by a local, followed soon by a few others. The lizard was safe, although it’s rare. Scientists had just been looking in the wrong place for it.
Since the rock horned lizard is only a few inches long and blends in so well with its surroundings, it’s no wonder it was hard to find. Fortunately it’s been rediscovered so that scientists can study it and keep it safe. The next step is to keep the harvester ants safe so that all the horny toads have plenty of yummy ants to eat.
You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.
Thanks for listening!
Thanks to Elijah and an anonymous listener for suggesting that we talk about some more species of praying mantis!
Further reading:
The luring mantid: Protrusible pheromone glands in Stenophylla lobivertex (Mantodea: Acanthopidae)
Dragons and unicorns (mantises) spotted in Atlantic forest
12-citizen-scientists-mantis-species.html">Citizen scientists help discover new mantis species
The dragon mantis [photo from first article linked above]:
The possibly new species of unicorn mantis [picture from second article linked above]:
Inimia nat, or I. nat, discovered after a citizen scientist posted its photo to iNat [photo from third article linked above]:
Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
This week we’re going to revisit a popular topic that we’ve covered before, especially in episode 187, but which has been suggested by a couple of listeners who want to know more. It’s the praying mantis. Thanks to Elijah and an anonymous listener who suggested it. Elijah even keeps mantises as pets and sent me some pictures of them, which was awesome.
The praying mantis gets its name because it holds its spiny front legs forward and together, which sort of resembles someone holding their hands together while praying. That’s the type of praying spelled p r a y ing, not p r e y ing, which refers to killing and eating other organisms, but the praying mantis does that too. It’s a predator that will eat anything it can catch, including birds, fish, mice, lizards, frogs, and of course lots of insects.
There are thousands of mantises, also called mantids, with most species preferring tropical and subtropical climates. In general, a mantis has a triangular head with large eyes, an elongated body, and enlarged front legs that it uses to catch prey. Most species have wings and can fly, some don’t. Most are ambush predators.
We talked about several species of mantis in episode 187, and some more in episode 201. You can go back to those episodes to find out general information about mantises, such as how their eyes work and whether they have ears and whether they actually eat their mates (they do, sometimes). This week we’re going to focus on some findings about mantises that are new since those episodes came out.
The dragon mantis, Stenophylla lobivertex, was only discovered in the year 2000. Its body is covered with gray-green or green-brown lobes that help it blend in with the leaves in its forest home, but that also kind of make it look like a tiny dragon covered with scaly armor. Even its eyes are spiky. It lives in the tropics of South and Central America where it’s quite rare, and it usually only grows about an inch and a half long, or 4 cm. It spends most of the time in treetops, where it hunts insects, spiders, and other small animals.
Unlike many mantis species, the dragon mantis is mostly nocturnal. That’s one of the reasons why we don’t know a lot about it. In late 2017 through mid-2018, one member of a team of scientists studying animals in Peru noticed something weird in a captive female dragon mantis. Frank Glaw isn’t an expert in insects but in reptiles and amphibians, but he happened to observe what looked like two tiny maggots emerge from the mantis’s back, roughly above her last pair of legs, but then disappear again into her back. He thought he was seeing the results of parasitism, but a mantis expert suspected it was something very different.
Some praying mantis females release pheromones from a gland in about the same place on the back. Pheromones are chemicals that can be sensed by other insects, usually ones in the same species. They’re most often used to attract a mate. It turns out that the female dragon mantis has a Y-shaped organ that’s up to 6 mm long that can release pheromones in a particular direction. The mantis can even move the prongs of the Y around if she wants to. Because she only does this at night when she’s sure she’s safe, and only when she hasn’t found a mate yet, and because this species of mantis is really rare, no one knew that any mantis had this specific organ. It’s possible that other mantis species have the organ too, but that scientists just haven’t seen it yet.
As we learned in our previous mantis episodes, not only are there well over 2,000 known species of mantis alive today, there are more being discovered all the time. In 2019, Project Mantis went to Brazil to look for mantises, and not only did they find two of the extremely rare dragon mantises, they discovered what may be a species new to science. It hasn’t been described yet as far as I can find, but it appears to be a member of a group called unicorn mantises because it has a spike sticking up from the top of the head. Scientists have no idea what the spike is for, but it’s funny that they found unicorn mantises and dragon mantises in the same forest.
Late in 2023, two new species of Australian mantis were described, one of which is so different from other known species that it was placed in its own genus. They’re small mantises that live on tree trunks and are camouflaged to look like pieces of bark, so they’re hard to spot. Luckily, a citizen scientist named Glenda Walter noticed them and posted pictures to iNaturalist. A lot of scientists watch iNaturalist posts, and it’s a good thing because Glenda’s mantises turned out to be completely new to science. One of them has been named Inimia nat, which is abbreviated I. nat, which is also the abbreviation for iNaturalist. A citizen scientist is anyone who is interested in science and works to help improve scientific knowledge in general, for instance by taking pictures of interesting bugs and posting them to iNat.
The praying mantis has been around since at least the early Cretaceous, around 120 million years ago. The oldest remains found don’t look that much like modern mantises, though. They look more like cockroaches, which isn’t too surprising since mantises are closely related to cockroaches. By about 110 million years ago mantises had started to evolve the deadly front legs that they have now. Most fossilized mantis remains are actually impressions of wings, but experts can learn a lot from just the wings. Baby praying mantises have even been found preserved in amber from up to 87 million years ago.
A lot of people are scared of praying mantises because they look dangerous. They’re not dangerous to humans or pets at all, though. If you get pinched or nipped by a mantis, just wash your hands to clean out the wound and you’ll be fine. Mantises are extremely beneficial insects, especially in the garden, because they eat other insects that eat plants that humans don’t want eaten, like flowers and vegetables. Some people release mantises in the garden as a natural way to control insect pests. And, as Elijah can tell you, mantises actually make really interesting pets.
You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.
Thanks for listening!
Thanks to River for suggesting this week’s topic, the pufferfish!
Further reading:
Grass puffer fish communicate with each other using a non-toxic version of their deadly toxin
Mystery pufferfish create elaborate circular nests at mesophotic depths in Australia
Pufferfish, puffed:
A starry puffer, un-puffed [picture by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116912671]:
A grass puffer, un-puffed:
The mystery structure that turns out to be made by pufferfish:
Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
This week we’re going to learn about a weird fish suggested by River, the pufferfish!
Lots of fish have the name pufferfish, and sometimes they’re also called balloonfish, swellfish, bubblefish, or globefish. You might be able to guess from the names what they can do, but just in case you don’t know, the pufferfish can puff up to make itself big and round. The question you might have at this point is why, and how do they do this?
There are lots of pufferfish in various genera, all of them in the family Tetradontidae. Tetradontidae means “four teeth,” because obviously when you find an incredibly poisonous fish that can blow itself up like a balloon, sometimes with spikes that emerge from the skin, of course you’re going to name it after its teeth.
Most pufferfish live in the ocean, although some live in places where freshwater mixes with ocean water, and some species even live in rivers. It prefers warm, shallow water and eats invertebrates and plant material. Larger pufferfish can use their four big front teeth to crush the shells of mollusks, like clams and mussels.
Most pufferfish are quite small and often brightly colored with spots, stripes, and other markings. You’d think the biggest pufferfish has to be the one called the giant freshwater pufferfish, but while it is big, it’s not the biggest. The giant freshwater pufferfish can grow up to 26 inches long, or 67 cm, which is over two feet long. But the starry puffer is almost twice that length, up to 47 inches long, or 120 cm. That’s almost four feet long!
The starry puffer lives in tropical and subtropical parts of the Pacific Ocean, especially in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. It has a big head, two pairs of nostrils, and is a mottled gray and white in color with little black spots all over. It mostly eats crustaceans and mollusks, but will also eat algae, sponges, coral, urchins, and other invertebrates.
The pufferfish is a slow swimmer, but it has two really good defenses. If it feels threatened—for instance if a big fish tries to catch it, or it’s caught in a fishing net and hauled to the surface, or if a diver tries to make friends, the pufferfish will swell up until it looks like a balloon with fins. It does so by gulping air or water into its elastic stomach until it’s completely full.
If you’re wondering how this can help the fish, not only does this make the pufferfish look much larger, it also makes it harder to swallow. Not only that, the pufferfish has spines that may be hidden in the skin most of the time, but when the skin tightens as the fish expands into balloon shape, the spines poke out. Suddenly a potential predator isn’t just trying to swallow a fish way bigger than its mouth is, it’s pointy.
The pufferfish’s second defense is that its body contains a deadly poison. You may have heard about fugu, which is considered a delicacy even though it’s so poisonous that in Japan and some other countries, chefs have to be specially trained and licensed to prepare the fish to eat. It contains tetrodotoxin, or TTX, a neurotoxin that stops your nerves from sending the tiny electrical signals that allow muscles to move. If you’re poisoned with TTX, you start to feel dizzy and sick, then you start having difficulty speaking and moving, then you have trouble breathing, and then, ultimately, you’re paralyzed and can’t breathe, at which point you die. Since the toxin doesn’t affect your brain, you remain completely aware of what’s happening to you but there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no antidote. Fortunately, you have the option of not eating fugu.
Not all pufferfish are poisonous, although most are, and in many species the amount of toxins in the fish’s body can vary according to the time of year and the individual fish. People who have eaten their local pufferfish many times with no problem can suddenly get sick or die from eating the same type of fish. That’s the bad type of surprise.
At least some pufferfish use their toxins for a surprising purpose. In late 2022, a study was published about the grass puffer, also called the grey-spotted puffer. It’s a small fish that grows not quite 10 inches long, or 25 cm, and is gray with tiny white spots. It’s extremely toxic but its body also contains a non-toxic version of TTX, called TDT. Scientists studying the fish determined that other grass puffers can smell TDT in the water so they can find each other. Not only that, other animals found in the same environment where the grass puffer lives also contain both TTX and TDT, and the pufferfish eats those animals. Naturally, it can find its prey by smell.
Let’s finish with a pufferfish mystery that’s been solved. In 1995, divers in southern Japan noticed a series of mysterious underwater structures in the sand. They were about six feet across, or close to two meters, round in shape, and looked sort of like someone had packed sand into a giant one of those fancy decorative cake pans that make designs around the cake, and turned it out upside down underwater. No one could figure out what they were, how they’d been made, or why they were there. People started calling them underwater crop circles.
It wasn’t until 2011 that the mystery was solved, when a diver saw one of the circles being formed by a little pufferfish. The fish turned out to be new to science and was described in 2014, and is popularly known as the white-spotted pufferfish. The male builds the structure by waving his fins to move sand into geometric shapes and concentric rings, a process that takes over a week. Since water keeps moving the sand, he has to keep working on the structure to keep it looking good, and he wants it to look good because that’s how he attracts a mate. The specific patterns he creates direct water currents to the center of the structure, where it deposits fine, soft sand. If a female likes the structure, she will lay her eggs in the soft sand in the middle so that the male can fertilize them.
In 2018, similar nests were discovered off the coast of western Australia, but so far no one knows whether the nests are built by a known species of pufferfish or a species new to science.
You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.
Thanks for listening!
Thanks to Carson, Mia, Eli, and Pranav for their suggestions this week!
Further reading:
RNA for the first time recovered from an extinct species
Study finds ongoing evolution in Tasmanian Devils’ response to transmissible cancer
Tasmanian devil research offers new insights for tackling cancer in humans
The Tasmanian devil looks really cute but fights all the time [picture by JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0]:
The Thylacine could opens its jaws verrrrrrry wide:
Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
This week we’re going to cover two animals that a lot of people have suggested. Carson and Mia both want to learn about the Tasmanian tiger, and Eli and Pranav both want to hear about the Tasmanian devil. We talked about the Tasmanian tiger, AKA the thylacine, in episode 1, and I thought we’d had a Tasmanian devil episode too but it turns out I was thinking of a March 2019 Patreon bonus episode. So it’s definitely time to learn about both!
The thylacine was a nocturnal marsupial native to New Guinea, mainland Australia, and the Australian island of Tasmania, and the last known individual died in captivity in 1936. But thylacine sightings have continued ever since it was declared extinct. It was a shy, nervous animal that didn’t do well in captivity, so if the animal survives in remote areas of Tasmania, it’s obviously keeping a low profile.
The thylacine was yellowish-brown with black stripes on the back half of its body and down its tail. It was the size of a big dog, some two feet high at the shoulder, or 61 cm, and over six feet long if you included the long tail, or 1.8 meters. It had a doglike head with rounded ears and could open its long jaws extremely wide. Some accounts say that it would sometimes hop instead of run when it needed to move faster, but this seems to be a myth. It was also a quiet animal, rarely making noise except while hunting, when it would give frequent double yips.
A 2017 study discovered that the thylacine population split into two around 25,000 years ago, with the two groups living in eastern and western Australia. Around 4,000 years ago, climate change caused more and longer droughts in eastern Australia and the thylacine population there went extinct. By 3,000 years ago, all the mainland thylacines had gone extinct, leaving just the Tasmanian population. The Tasmanian thylacines underwent a population crash around the same time that the mainland Australia populations went extinct—but the Tasmanian population had recovered and was actually increasing when Europeans showed up and started shooting them.
Because the thylacine went extinct so recently and scientists have access to preserved specimens less than a hundred years old, and since the thylacine’s former habitat is still in place, it’s a good candidate for de-extinction. As a result, it’s been the subject of many genetic studies recently, to learn as much about it as possible. It’ll probably be quite a while before we have the technology to successfully clone a thylacine, but in the meantime people in Australia keep claiming to see thylacines in the wild. Maybe they really aren’t extinct.
The Tasmanian devil is related to the thylacine. It’s about the size of a small to average dog, maybe a bulldog, which it resembles in some ways. It’s compact and muscular with a broad head, relatively short snout, and a big mouth with prominent lower fangs. It’s not related to canids at all, of course, and if you just glanced at a Tasmanian devil, your first thought wouldn’t be “dog” or “thylacine,” it would probably be “giant mouse.”
The Tasmanian devil is black or grayish-brown, usually with patches of white on the chest and rump. It also has rounded pinkish ears, long whiskers, paws with relatively long toes, and a long tail. Since the devil stores fat in its tail, a fat-tailed devil is a happy, healthy devil.
It’s mainly a scavenger and will eat roadkill and other dead animals, although it will also kill and eat small or even large animals, and will also eat plant material and insects. It often eats every trace of a carcass, including bones and fur. This is good for other animals and for ranchers, since it reduces the presence of insects attracted to dead animals and reduces the spread of disease. Its digestion is extremely fast and efficient, and its jaws are extremely strong.
The Tasmanian devil is usually solitary, but it does get together with other devils to socialize and fight while eating. When a devil finds a carcass, it will make extremely loud calls to alert other devils to come share its meal. Then, because they’re called devils and not angels for a reason, the animals will fight over the food.
Tasmanian devils fight a lot. Researchers think the white markings help direct other devils to attack parts of the body that are less vulnerable to injury. The white fur is more visible in the dark, giving other devils a target. The white markings are usually on the devil’s chest, sides, and rump, with none on the face or legs. Males fight each other during breeding season, and the females pick the winners to mate with. If a female doesn’t like a male, she’ll fight him.
Devils are marsupials, which means babies are born very early and finish developing in their mother’s pouch. The Tasmanian devil’s pouch is rear-facing and contains four teats. The problem is, the mother has 20 or even 30 babies at a time. They’re born about the size of a jellybean and the only part that’s developed at that point is the forelegs so it can crawl into the mother’s pouch. The legs have claws and—you guessed it—the little squidge babies fight for a teat. Once one gets to a teat, it clamps on and doesn’t let go for the next three months. Babies that don’t get a teat die.
Like the thylacine, the Tasmanian devil once lived on mainland Australia but is now restricted to the island of Tasmania. Also like the thylacine, it shows low genetic diversity and was once killed for bounty by early settlers. It’s affected by habitat loss like many other animals, and it’s especially vulnerable to being run over by cars because it eats so much roadkill.
But the devil’s biggest issue today is a disease called devil facial tumor disease, or DFTD. DFTD is spread when an infected animal bites another one, which causes cancerous growths in and around the mouth. After a few months the tumors get so big that the devil can no longer eat and starves to death. Since devils bite each other all the time, the disease spreads quickly throughout a population.
In 2019 some researchers predicted the Tasmanian devil would be extinct by 2024. But here it is 2024 and not only is the devil not extinct, it’s actually doing a lot better now than it was just a few years ago.
Part of that is due to conservation efforts, where healthy devils are quarantined from infected ones in captive breeding programs. But part of it is natural. In 2018 a small population of devils was discovered that appeared to have developed a natural resistance to DFTD. Genetic studies done since then revealed some surprises. Not only are younger devils showing a genetic resistance to DFTD, there’s evidence that resistance to other transmissible cancers has developed in the past. Researchers think the Tasmanian devil might be especially prone to transmissible cancers but is also able to develop resistance relatively quickly. The devils with this resistance start growing tumors, but then the tumors stop growing and soon just disappear. Naturally, scientists are looking at the genetics of this trait to see if it can be applied to humans with certain types of cancer.
While Tasmanian devils fight each other, they don’t actually fight humans. Scientists report that it’s actually quite easy to work with. This makes it a lot easier to check the health of a captured animal. Hopefully it won’t be long before the entire population of Tasmanian devils is healthy and its numbers start to increase again.
You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.
Thanks for listening!
Thanks to Will and Måns for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about some mystery bovids, or cows and cow relations!
Further reading:
Kouprey: The Ultimate Mystery Mammal
A musk ox (top) and a wild yak (bottom):
A young kouprey bull from the 1930s:
Sculpture of two grown kouprey bulls [photo by Christian Pirkl – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73848355]:
A banteng bull (with a cow behind him) [photo taken from this site]:
A qilin/kilin/kirin looking backwards:
The “purple” calf:
The Milka purple cow:
Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
This week we’re going to learn about some mystery bovids, or cow relations, suggested by Will and Måns, whose name I am probably mispronouncing.
We’ll start with a mystery about the musk ox, which is not otherwise a mysterious animal. Måns emailed about reading a children’s book about animals that had a picture of a musk ox in the part about the Gobi Desert. The problem is, the musk ox is native to the Arctic and was once found throughout Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. So the question is, was the book wrong or are there really musk oxen in the Gobi Desert?
We’ll start by learning about the musk ox and the Gobi Desert. The musk ox can stand up to 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters. It has thick, dense, shaggy fur all over, a tiny tail only about four inches long, or 10 cm, and horns that curve down close to the sides of its head and then curve up again at the ends.
The musk ox is well adapted to the cold, which isn’t a surprise since it evolved during the ice ages. Its ancestors lived alongside mammoths, woolly rhinos, and other Pleistocene megafauna. Like many cold-adapted animals, its fur consists of a thick undercoat that keeps it warm, and a much longer layer of fur that protects the softer undercoat. The undercoat is so soft and so good at keeping the animal warm in bitterly cold temperatures that people will sometimes keep musk oxen in order to gather the undercoat in spring when it starts to shed, to use for making clothing and blankets. But it’s definitely not a domesticated animal. It can be aggressive and extremely dangerous.
A warm coat isn’t the musk ox’s only cold adaptation. The hemoglobin in its blood is able to function well even when it’s cold, which isn’t the case for most mammals. It lives in small herds that gather close together in really cold weather to share body heat, and if a predator threatens the herd, the adults will form a ring around the calves, their heads facing outward. Since a musk ox is huge, heavy, and can run surprisingly fast, plus it has horns, if a wolf or other predator is butted by a musk ox it might end up fatally injured.
The main predator of the musk ox is the human, who hunted it almost to extinction by the early 20th century. It was completely extirpated in Alaska but was reintroduced there and in parts of Canada in the late 20th century. Similarly, it was reintroduced to parts of Siberia and even parts of northern Europe, although not all the European introductions were successful.
So what about the Gobi Desert? It’s nowhere near the Arctic. Not all deserts are hot. A desert just has limited rainfall, and the Gobi is a cold desert. Parts of the Gobi are grasslands and parts are sandy or rocky, and it covers a huge expanse of land in central Asia, mainly divided between northern China and southern Mongolia. Some parts of it do get limited rainfall in the summer and limited snowfall and frost in the winter, but for the most part it’s dry and therefore has limited vegetation for animals to eat.
Animals do live in the Gobi, though. The wild Bactrian camel, which has two humps, is found nowhere else in the world and is critically endangered. The Mongolian wild ass lives in parts of the Gobi, as do several species of antelope and gazelle, wild sheep, and ibex. The Gobi bear, which is the rarest bear in the world, also lives in the Gobi, along with smaller animals like hares, foxes, polecats, marmots, and various lizards, snakes, and birds. Occasionally wolves and snow leopards visit parts of the Gobi. So do humans, specifically nomadic herders who travel through parts of the desert to find food for their animals.
Of all the animals found in the Gobi, and in central Asia in general, the musk ox is not listed on any scholarly site I could find. Despite its name, it’s not actually closely related to other cattle and is instead most closely related to goats and sheep. However, a close relation of the domestic cow and its ancestors is the wild yak, the ancestor of the domestic yak. The wild yak lives mostly in the Himalayas these days but was once much more widespread, and the domestic yak is farmed by nomadic herders in the colder, more mountainous parts of the Gobi.
The yak isn’t closely related to the musk ox, but it does have a very similar-looking long, shaggy coat. Its horns point forward and up like cattle horns, but to someone who doesn’t really know much about yaks or musk ox, it would be easy to get the two confused. This seems to be what has happened in the case of the children’s book Måns read and in various non-academic websites. I think we can call this mystery solved.
Next, let’s go on to Will’s suggestion of mystery bovids. The family Bovidae includes not just the domestic cow and its relations but goats, sheep, antelopes, and many other animals with cloven hooves who chew the cud as part of the digestive process–but not deer or giraffes, and not the pronghorn even though people call it an antelope. Many bovids have horns, usually only two but sometimes four or even six, and those horns are never branched. Sometimes only the male has horns, sometimes both the male and female. Bovids don’t have incisors in the front of the upper jaw, only in the lower jaw, and instead has a tough dental pad that helps it grab plants.
One mystery bovid is a creature from Madagascar, called the habeby. It’s supposed to look like a big white sheep with brown or black spots. It has cloven hooves and droopy ears but not horns, and it’s supposed to be nocturnal and never seen in the daytime. Its eyes are very large and staring. It’s shy and fortunately not dangerous. Bovids are almost always diurnal, so a nocturnal bovid would be quite unusual.
Since sheep and other bovids aren’t native to Madagascar, it’s much more likely that the habeby is a type of large lemur that looks enough like a sheep at a distance that people thought it was a sheep. Either it’s extinct now or it lives in such remote areas that it’s never seen anymore.
Another Madagascar mystery animal is called the songòmby, which either looks like a wild ox or a horse depending on the story. Like the habeby it has floppy ears, a spotted coat, and hooves. Some stories say it has a single horn, some stories say it has a pair of horns, and other stories say it has no horns at all. It lives in mountainous areas and can run incredibly fast uphill, but is much slower downhill because its long ears flop over its eyes and it has trouble seeing where it’s going. This is fortunate, because it’s also supposed to eat people.
One clue to the songòmby’s possible real identity comes from some stories that state it always looks backwards over its back, and is only ever seen from the side. This is reminiscent of how the Chinese kilin is often represented, and also explains why the songòmby has a varying number of horns and looks like a cow or horse but is supposed to eat people. The kilin is often depicted as having both hooves and fangs, and may have a single horn, a pair of horns, or no horns at all. Arab traders began stopping in Madagascar around a thousand years ago and would have brought Chinese goods, including some items decorated with kilins. It’s possible that the kilin artwork inspired the story of the songòmby, but it’s also so similar to the habeby in some ways that details of that animal may have been incorporated into the story of the songòmby, or vice versa.
Way back in episode 100 we talked briefly about an animal called the kouprey. It’s a wild ox native to southeast Asia, sometimes called the forest ox. It can stand over six feet tall at the shoulder, or two meters, and while bulls are dark brown, cows and calves are a lighter brownish-gray. Both have white lower legs with a dark stripe down the front of the front legs. The bull’s horns look like those of a domestic cow or wild yak, but are extremely large and curve forward, but the cow’s horns grow up and back, more like an antelope’s horns. As a bull ages, the tips of his horns start to fray and end up looking almost tassled. A bull also develops a large dewlap as he ages, which in older bulls can actually be so big it touches the ground.
By 1937, when a kouprey was sent to a zoo in Paris, the animal was probably mostly restricted to the forests of Cambodia. Before then it had been completely unknown to science, but after that, European big game hunters went to Cambodia to kill as many as possible. It was already rare and by the 1950s there were probably fewer than 500 individuals left alive. By the 1960s, there were probably no more than 100 animals left alive. The last verified sighting of one was in 1983.
Recently, some scientists have questioned whether the kouprey actually existed at all. Its description sounds a lot like another bovid, the wild banteng. A bull banteng is dark brown or black while the cows are light brown or reddish-brown. Both have white lower legs and a white patch on the rump. Some scientists started to think that either the kouprey was a misidentification of the banteng or the hybrid offspring of a banteng and a domestic cow.
A 2006 genetic study suggested that this was the case, that the kouprey was just a hybrid animal. But a follow-up study, including genetic testing of a kouprey skull that dated back to before cattle were domesticated, came to a different conclusion. The kouprey was a distinct species, not a hybrid animal. The real mystery now is whether it’s still alive or if it has gone extinct in the last 40 years.
We’ll finish with a domestic cow that’s a little bit of a mystery. A popular brand of chocolate in Europe is Milka, and since 1973 many of its advertisements have included a light purple and white cow with a bell around her neck. Well, in 2012 a calf was born in Serbia that actually looked like the Milka purple cow. It was a purple cow!
In January of 2012 a bull calf was born on a small farm in Serbia. There’s not a lot of information available about it, but it looks like it was a breed of cattle called the busa, or maybe a busa cross. The busa is mainly raised in the mountainous parts of Serbia and mostly raised as a meat animal. It’s rare these days but was once extremely popular in the area, so a lot of cattle raised in Serbia have at least some busa ancestry. The busa can be white with darker markings, or a solid color with no white or very little white. It can be red-brown, black, or gray.
In pictures, the purple calf’s mother looks to be black and white. The calf itself is white with markings that look pale blue-gray, almost lilac. The pictures aren’t very good so it’s hard to tell. The farmer was surprised when he saw the calf and called a veterinarian to make sure it was healthy, which it was. The veterinarian suggested the calf’s strange coloration was just a rare color mutation.
As it happens, a blue-gray coloration is common in a variety of busa cattle raised in Macedonia. It’s also a common coloration in other breeds of cattle. A pale version of this color can look almost like a shade of lilac. Since I can’t find a follow-up to the 2012 articles about the calf, it’s probable that as he grew up, his spots darkened to look more gray than purple. The farmer said that he would be keeping the little purple cow instead of slaughtering him to make steaks and hamburgers, so hopefully there’s still a handsome purple and white bull living his best life in the mountains of Serbia.
You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.
Thanks for listening!
Thanks to Ari for suggesting this week’s episode, about the peacock!
Further reading:
Peacock tail feathers shake at resonance and hold eye-spots still during courtship displays
Indian peafowls’ crests are tuned to frequencies also used in social displays
An ocellated turkey (not a peacock but related):
An Indian peacock male:
An Indian peahen with chicks [photo from hen.htm">this site]:
Close-up of a male Indian peacock’s crest [photo by Jatin Sindhu – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49736186]:
A male Indian peacock with train on display [photo by Thimindu Goonatillake from Colombo, Sri Lanka – Peacock Dance, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19395087]:
A green peacock [photo from this site]:
The mysterious Congo peacock [photo by Terese Hart, taken from this site]:
Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
This week we’re going to talk about a beautiful bird that almost everyone has seen pictures of, and a lot of people might have seen in zoos and parks. It’s a suggestion by Ari, who wants to learn about the peacock!
The name peacock is technically only used for the male bird, with the female called a peahen and the birds all together referred to as peafowl. Most people just say peacocks, though, because the male peacock has such a fabulous tail that it’s what people think of when they think of peafowl. I’m happy to report that baby peafowl are called peachicks.
The peacock most people are familiar with is native to India, specifically called the Indian peafowl. It’s a surprisingly large bird, with a big male weighing more than 13 lbs, or 6 kg. Females are smaller. It’s the size of a wild turkey and in fact it’s related to the turkey, along with pheasants, partridges, and chickens. Back in episode 144 we talked about a bird called the ocellated turkey, a brightly colored turkey that lives in the Yucatan Peninsula, which is part of Mexico. The male’s tail feathers have the same type of colorful eyespots seen on a peacock’s tail.
But the peacock’s tail is way bigger than any turkey’s tail. It’s called a train and most of the time it’s folded so that it’s not in the way. A big male can grow a train that’s much longer than the rest of his body, more than five feet long, or 1.5 meters. Most of the train’s elongated feathers end in a colorful eye-spot, around 200 of them in total. The eyespot pattern really does resemble a big eye, with a dark blue spot in the middle surrounded by a ring of blue-green and a bigger ring of bronze. The bronze color is surrounded by pale green and the rest of the feather is a darker green. As far as we know, the eyespots aren’t supposed to look like eyes the way some animal markings are. A leopard or other predator doesn’t attack the tail thinking it’s a peacock’s head. It’s just a pattern.
For a long time scientists were divided as to what the peacock’s train was really used for. Not everyone thought it was for showing off for peahens. Some thought it was just for camouflage in the jungle. The main confusion was why the peacock would grow such a long, conspicuous train, which can be a hindrance to him in thick undergrowth and can attract the attention of predators. But many male birds have long, ornamental tails that may impede their mobility, such as various bird of paradise species, that are definitely meant to show off for females. This appears to be the case for the peacock too.
During mating season, male peacocks gather at what’s called a lekking site, where they hang out waiting for females. When a female approaches a male, he spreads his train into a fan and shivers it, which rattles the feathers together and also shows off the iridescent colors. The male struts around, showing off his tail, and the female may ignore him completely or take a good look at his tail. In studies where scientists snipped all the eyespots off a male’s train feathers, females never bothered to even look at the male, but since immature males don’t have eyespots, it could be the females thought the eyespot-less male was just a kid.
A 2016 study took a closer look at the shivering motion that the male produces during displays. Not only does the sound interest the female, the study discovered that the eyespots are locked together with microscopic hooks that help them stay still while the remainder of any particular feather moves, since it isn’t locked with other feathers. This makes it look like the eyespots are floating against a shimmery green background. Who wouldn’t love watching that? The brighter the eyespot’s iridescence, the more attractive the male is to females.
The rest of the Indian peacock is bright too. His back and most of his body is bronze, while his long neck is a brilliant green-blue. He has white markings on his face and a crest growing from the back of his head. The crest consists of a bundle of mostly bare feather shafts, with a little tuft of blue-green at the end. The female has a similar crest but it’s brown in color along with most of the rest of her feathers, although she does have some metallic green on her neck. She doesn’t have a long train, but she will sometimes spread her tail feathers and rattle them to communicate warnings to other peafowl. A 2018 study learned that the crests of both male and female peafowl are sensitive to vibrations, specifically to the sound frequencies produced by tail rattling.
Peafowl eat plant materials like seeds, fruit, and flower buds, but they also eat a lot of worms, insects, frogs, and other small animals, including small snakes. Because they’re so beautiful and do well in captivity, lots of zoos and parks keep peacocks. They’ve even been selectively bred to produce different colors, including a white peacock and a mostly black peacock.
Ari specifically mentioned hearing that peacocks cry happy tears. Crying tears as a result of emotions, whether happy or sad, is very specific to humans, and scientists aren’t sure why we do it. It seems to be a visual signal to other humans that the person crying needs help or support in some way. Other animals sometimes have weepy eyes, but that’s due to simple eye discharge, not emotions.
The idea that peacocks cry tears dates back many centuries. Medieval bestiaries published in Europe said that the peacock was vain of his beauty and strutted around proudly, but whenever he noticed his ugly feet he would cry. Similar proverbs date back at least several thousand years from ancient Rome and India. Some proverbs say that the peacock tries to hide his feet and that’s why he doesn’t fly very often, or that he cries first thing every morning when he first wakes up, either because he sees his feet and thinks they’re ugly, or because he’s worried he’s lost his beautiful feathers overnight. Some proverbs say that when the peacock cries at his ugly feet, the peahen will swallow one of his tears and that’s how her eggs are fertilized instead of in the usual way.
These stories are interesting, but they don’t have any basis in fact. The peacock doesn’t care what his feet look like because he’s a bird, not a human. Anyway, he has big, handsome feet that let him walk around as much as he wants. The peacock also doesn’t actually cry tears, whether happy or sad.
What he does do, though, is make a wailing noise that can sound like someone crying. It sounds like this:
[peacock sound]
Most of the time it’s only the male bird that makes these calls, as a way to attract a mate or just announce that he’s around. It’s also an alarm call if the peacock spots a potential predator. People in the olden days observed this behavior and thought the peacock might really be crying. That led to the stories about his supposedly ugly feet, because the rest of the bird is so beautiful that he couldn’t possibly be crying about the rest of his appearance.
There’s another species of peacock that’s just as spectacular as the Indian peacock, although it’s less well known because it’s harder to keep in captivity. The green peafowl lives in many parts of southeast Asia and is endangered due to habitat loss, poaching, and capture for the illegal pet trade. It’s more lightly built than the Indian peacock but the male can have an even longer train, over six and a half feet long, or 2 meters. The male is green and blue all over. The female is also mostly green, but with coppery speckles on her neck. Both have crests, although they point straight up instead of back.
That brings us to a mystery peacock, although fortunately it’s not a mystery anymore, or not as much of one.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Congo basin in central Africa was colonized by Belgium, and Belgian authorities kept hearing interesting reports from local people and colonizers alike about a strange, shy animal that lived in the forest. In 1913 a small expedition was sent to find the animal, but it failed. Eventually the animal was discovered by scientists, and we know it by the name okapi. We talked about it in episode 218. (It’s not a peacock, it’s a relative of the giraffe.) One of the scientists in the expedition was James Chapin, and while he was in Africa he bought some feather headdresses from local people and took them home to examine the feathers.
He was able to identify all but one of the feathers. The mystery feather looked like it came from a guineafowl or pheasant, but it was too big and didn’t quite match any known species. Chapin set the mystery feather aside to look at again when he had more time.
Twenty-one years later, in 1936, Chapin visited a museum in Belgium to study a big collection of taxidermied birds that had been donated in 1914. The museum specialized in items and animals from central Africa, so when Chapin noticed two stuffed birds that looked like pheasants, he knew there was something weird going on with them. True pheasants aren’t found in Africa. The card attached to the specimens said they were young peacocks, and that didn’t make sense either. Peacocks are only found in Asia.
Chapin examined the birds and realized that they really were an unusual type of peacock. Not only that, he recognized the feathers. His mystery feather from 1915 matched the mystery peacock.
The following year, Chapin traveled to the Congo to look for the bird in the wild. Sure enough, it was there!
The Congo peacock looks a lot like a turkey at first glance, or a big guineafowl. Instead of a long train, the male has a more turkey-like fan of tail feathers, but they’re deep blue and black in color. He also has blue on his wings and his neck is red, with a black head with a black and white crest. The female has a red neck with a red crest, and her back is green while the rest of her is a soft brown. We don’t know a whole lot about the bird, but it’s increasingly threatened by habitat loss and hunting.
The Congo peacock isn’t a true peacock, although it’s very closely related. While the male does fan his tail during courtship displays, he’s actually fanning a different set of feathers than true peacocks. A peacock’s train is actually made up of the upper tail coverts, a set of feathers near the tail but not actually making up the tail. A peacock’s actual tail feathers are shorter and bronzey-brown in color.
All peacocks can fly, even males with the longest trains, although they prefer to spend most of the time on the ground. Outside of mating season, males shed the long feathers of their train and regrow them the following year. Many zoos that keep peacocks will collect these shed feathers and sell them so that people can use them in crafts and decorations, because everyone loves peacock feathers.
You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.
Thanks for listening!
Let’s look at some of the most interesting animals discovered last year!
Further reading:
Newly-discovered ‘margarita snails’ from the Florida Keys are bright lemon-yellow
Tiny spirits roam the corals of Japan—two new pygmy squids discovered
populi-11671.html">Strange New Species of Aquifer-Dwelling Catfish Discovered in India
reisi-11946.html">Bizarre New Species of Catfish Discovered in South America
Unicorn-like blind fish discovered in dark waters deep in Chinese cave
marshallae-12140.html">New Species of Hornshark Discovered off Australia
arcanus-12359.html">Cryptic New Bird Species Identified in Panama
orientalis-12509.html">New Species of Forest Hedgehog Discovered in China
speak-up-to-save-voiceless-african-frog.html">New species of voiceless frog discovered in Tanzania
The weird new spiny katydid:
Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
It’s time for our annual discoveries episode, where we learn about some animals discovered in the previous year! There are always lots more animals discovered than we have time to talk about, so I just choose the ones that interest me the most.
That includes the cheerfullest of springtime-looking marine snails discovered in the Florida Keys. The Florida Keys are a group of tropical islands along a coral reef off the coast of Florida, which is in North America. A related snail was also discovered off the coast of Belize in Central America that looks so similar that at first the scientists thought they were the same species with slightly different coloration. A genetic study of the snails revealed that they were separate species. The one found in the Keys is a lemony yellow color while the one from Belize is more of a lime green.
The snails have been placed into a new genus but belong to a group called worm snails. When a young worm snail finds a good spot to live, it sticks its shell to a rock or other surface and stays there for the rest of its life. Its shell isn’t shaped like an ordinary snail shell but instead grows long and sort of curved or curly. The snail spreads a thin layer of slime around it using two little tentacles, and the slime traps tiny pieces of food that float by.
The new snails are small and while the snail’s body is brightly colored, its shell is drab and helps it blend in with the background. Scientists think that the colorful body may be a warning to potential predators, since its mucus contains toxins. It mainly lives on pieces of dead coral.
Another invertebrate discovery last year came from Japan, where two new species of pygmy squid were found living in seagrass beds and coral reefs. Both are tiny, only 12 mm long, and are named after little forest spirits from folklore. Despite its small size, it can eat shrimp bigger than it is by grabbing it with its little bitty adorable arms. Both species have been seen before but never studied until now. The scientists teamed up with underwater photographers to find the squid and learn more about them in their natural habitats.
As for invertebrates that live on land, an insect called the blue-legged predatory katydid was discovered in the rainforests of Brazil. It’s a type of bush-cricket that’s dark brown in color except for the last section of its legs, which are greenish-blue. Those parts of its legs are also really spiny. That is literally all I know about it except for its scientific name, Listroscelis cyanotibiatus, but it’s awesome.
Let’s leave the world of invertebrates behind and look at some fish next. This was the year of the catfish, with new species discovered in both India and South America. Catfish can be really weird in general and both these new species are pretty strange.
The first is tiny, only 35 mm long at most, or a little over an inch, and it has four pairs of barbels growing from its face. It looks red because its blood shows through its skin, because its skin doesn’t have any pigment. The fish also doesn’t have any eyes. If this makes you think it’s a cave-dwelling fish, you’re exactly right, but instead of an ordinary cave it actually lives in an aquifer.
An aquifer is a source of water underground. It’s actually a layer of rock that’s broken up or otherwise permeable so that water can get through it, but with a non-permeable layer underneath. The water is trapped in the layer, sometimes far underground. If you’ve ever seen a spring, where water bubbles up from the ground, that water comes from an aquifer that has found its way to the surface. If you’ve ever drunk water pumped or dipped up from a well, the well-water also comes from an aquifer. The water gets into the aquifer in the first place when rain soaks into the ground, but it takes a long time to fill up.
There are really deep aquifers that are completely sealed off from the surface, created thousands or even millions of years ago. As far as we know, nothing lives in those, although we could be wrong. Aquifers that are closer to the surface with some surface openings develop unique ecosystems, including animals that are found nowhere else on earth. That’s the case with the tiny red catfish found in the state of Kerala in India.
Scientists asked people in the area to watch out for any unusual animals when they had a new well dug or cleaned, and before long people from four towns reported finding the little red fish. Three other related species had previously been found in the state.
On the other side of the world, in South America, a much different type of catfish was discovered in Bolivia and Brazil. This one is an armored catfish, and the male actually grows short dermal teeth on the sides of his head that he uses to fight other males. Dermal teeth are teeth that grow on the skin instead of in the mouth, and it’s surprisingly common in fish, especially armored catfish.
The new catfish has been named Sturisoma reisi and it grows about 8 inches long, or 20 cm. It’s actually been known to scientists for a long time, but until recently no one realized it wasn’t one of five other catfish in the genus Sturisoma. They all look kind of similar. It’s a slender, active catfish with a long tail and a pointy rostrum that lives in swift-moving rivers. It was actually described in 2022, not 2023, but I only just realized I have the wrong year so let’s just move along quickly to another fish.
This one isn’t a catfish but it looks like one at first glance since it has barbels around its mouth. These are the whisker-like feelers that give the catfish its name. The newly discovered fish needs feelers because it doesn’t have working eyes, and it also doesn’t have scales or pigment in its skin. It was found in a cave in China, and in fact it’s only been found in a single pool of water in a single cave. The pool is only about 6 feet across, or 1.8 meters, and about two and a half feet deep, or 80 cm, but it’s home to a perfectly healthy population of fish. The fish grow about 5 inches long on average, or 13 cm.
The fish is a new member of the genus Sinocyclocheilus, and of the 76 known species in the genus, most live in caves. The new fish has been named S. longicornus because of a structure on its head that kind of looks like a unicorn horn, if the unicorn was a pink cave fish and its horn was shaped sort of like the tip of a ballpoint pen, also called a biro.
Some other species in this genus also have a so-called horn, although the new fish’s is larger than most. It juts forward and extends above what we can describe as the fish’s forehead. Scientists have absolutely no idea what it’s for. Since the fish can’t see, it can’t be to attract a mate. It’s also not likely to be a navigational aide since the fish has its barbels and a well-developed lateral line system to find its way around. Besides, it lives in a pool of water not much bigger than the desk I’m sitting at. It doesn’t exactly travel very far throughout its life.
Scientists have a lot of other questions about the fish, including how it survives in such a tiny pool of water.
Speaking of fish with horns, a new species of hornshark was discovered last year off the northern coast of Australia. Hornsharks live in shallow warm waters throughout much of the Pacific and Indian oceans, where they spend most of the time at the bottom looking for small invertebrates like crustaceans to crunch up, although sea urchins are their favorites. They’re also called bullhead sharks because they all have short snouts and broad heads with prominent brows. The name hornshark comes from the fins, some of which have spines.
One species of hornshark is the zebra hornshark, which lives in the Indo-Pacific, from southern Japan down to northern Australia. As you may guess from the name, it has stripes, which makes it popular in aquariums and zoos. It only grows to about 4 feet long, or 1.25 meters. Until last year, scientists thought that all the zebra hornsharks around Australia belonged to the same species. Then they noticed that one population that lives off of northwestern Australia has a different stripe pattern and only grows about two feet long, or 60 cm. After a genetic study, it turns out that it’s a totally different species.
A lot of animal discoveries are like this, where everyone thinks an animal is one species, but after close study and genetic testing they find out it’s two or more species that just look very similar. That’s one of the great things about DNA testing being so effective and quick these days, but it’s not always as cut and dried as it sounds. There’s no easy way to determine for sure if animals are different species, subspecies, or just the same species with population variants. Scientists can’t just rely on genetics, but they also can’t always rely on observations of the animal’s physical traits or its behavior in the wild. They have to look at all the data available, and then they still argue about the best interpretation of the data.
The notion of a separate species or subspecies is an artificial one that gives us a way to better understand a natural process. If a population of animals is separated from another population, eventually both will develop separately until they’re two related but very different animals. There’s no way to point at a specific generation and say, “well, NOW they’re different from the last generation” because the process is so slow and the changes are usually so small. It’s like looking at a rainbow and trying to determine exactly the point where red turns into orange and orange turns into yellow.
Take the slaty-backed nightingale-thrush as an example. It’s a dark gray songbird with a short tail and bright orange legs and beak, and it lives in the mountains of Central and northern South America. It spends most of its time in thickets where it’s hard to see but easy to hear, since it has a lovely song. This is an example of what it sounds like, although its song varies depending on where it lives.
[bird song]
It turns out that there’s a lot of variation in the bird’s song because the slaty-backed nightingale-thrush probably isn’t all one species. In late 2023 a team of researchers published a ten-year study of the bird, looking at everything from song variations to genetics. They determined that not only was it not a single species, it was most likely seven different species and four subspecies. Because the bird lives in the mountains and doesn’t fly very far during its lifetime, populations that are separated by steep mountains and valleys have developed into separate species.
Naturally, not everyone agrees with these findings, but it’s always good when a little-studied animal gets some attention. Until last year, no one knew much about this shy little bird, and the controversy of whether it’s one species or lots of closely related species will hopefully lead us to learn even more about it. One population of the bird discovered in Panama had never been documented before, too.
This episode is getting pretty long for someone who just got over a cold, so let’s cover one newly discovered mammal and a newly discovered frog. A new species of forest hedgehog was discovered in China last year and it’s adorable! It’s related to the hedgehogs found in Europe and other areas, but is most closely related to four known species of forest hedgehog that live mostly in central Asia. The new species was discovered in eastern China, over 1,000 km away from the nearest population of other forest hedgehogs. Another species was only discovered in 2007 from southwestern China.
Unlike most hedgehogs, the new species is sexually dimorphic, meaning that males and females don’t look identical. Males are mostly gray while females are more reddish-brown in color.
Let’s finish with another adorable animal, a little frog from Tanzania, a country in east Africa. It’s a type of spiny-throated reed frog, which are all rare and increasingly threatened. They’re also very small, not much bigger than an inch long, or about 30 mm. The male has tiny little spines on his throat that researchers think might be a way that females recognize the males of their own species during mating season instead of by a distinctive croaking sound. That’s because spiny-throated reed frogs can’t make sounds, leading to their other common name of the voiceless frog.
In 2019, researchers were in the Ukaguru Mountains in Tanzania looking for a completely different frog, the beautiful tree toad, which may be extinct. While they didn’t find any of the toads, they did find a little greenish-brown frog with copper-colored eyes that turned out to be completely new to science. It was found in a nature reserve and appears to be common locally, which is good, but the nature reserve is also very small, which is not so good. Hopefully now that we know the little frog exists, it will lead to further protections of the area that will help all the other animals and plants where it lives, including the beautiful tree toad.
This is what the voiceless frog sounds like:
[silence]
You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.
Thanks for listening!
Sorry to my Patreon subscribers, since this is mostly a rerun episode from April 2019. It’s a fun one, though!
The teensy pumpkin toadlet [photo by Diogo B. Provete – http://calphotos.berkeley.edu, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6271494]:
The electromagnetic spectrum. Look how tiny the visible light spectrum is on this scale! [By NASA – https://science.nasa.gov/ems/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97302056]:
Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
This was supposed to be the 2023 discoveries episode, but not only have I had a really busy week that’s kept me from finishing the research, I’m also coming down with a cold. My voice still sounds okay right now but considering how I feel, it’s not going to sound good for long, and I need to finish the March Patreon episode too! I decided to rerun a very old Patreon episode this week to allow me time to finish the March Patreon episode before my voice turns into an unintelligible croak. I did drop in some fresh audio to correct a mistake I made in the original episode and add some new information.
This is one of my favorite Patreon episodes and I hope you like it too. It’s about animals that can see ultraviolet light.
I was going to make this a frog news episode, but I started writing about a tiny frog from
Brazil called the pumpkin toadlet and the episode veered off in a very interesting direction. But let’s start with that frog.
It’s called the pumpkin toadlet because it’s an orangey-yellow color that is just about the same color as pureed pumpkin. It’s poisonous and lives in the forests of Brazil. During mating season, the pumpkin toadlet comes out during the day, walking around making little buzzing noises. Researchers assumed those were mating calls until they started studying how the pumpkin toadlet and its relations process sounds. It turns out that the pumpkin toadlet probably can’t even hear its own buzzing noise. But they did discover that the pumpkin toadlet fluoresces brightly under UV light.
We’ve talked about this phenomenon before, back in the Patreon episode about animals that glow. Quite a lot of frogs turn out to fluoresce in ultraviolet light, which is a component of daylight. That explains why the pumpkin toadlet comes out during the day in mating season. It wants to be seen by potential mates. It’s actually the frog’s bones that fluoresce, but since it has very thin skin without dark pigment cells, the ultraviolet light can light up the bones.
I wanted to make sure I gave everyone the correct information about ultraviolet light, so I started researching it…and that led me down this rabbit hole. What animals can see in ultraviolet light? Can any humans see ultraviolet light? What does it look like?
Light is made up of waves of varying lengths. The retina at the back of your eyeball contains two types of cells, rods and cones, which are named for their shapes. Rods are for low-light vision and cones are for detail and color vision.
Humans have more cones than rods because we’re diurnal animals, meaning we’re most active during the day. Animals that are mostly nocturnal have more rods than cones, which help them see in low light although they don’t see color as well or sometimes at all as a result.
Most humans can see any color that’s a mixture of red, green, and blue, since we have three types of cone cells that react to wavelengths roughly equivalent to those three colors. Some people have what’s called red-green color blindness, which means either the person doesn’t have cones that sense the color red or cones that sense the color green. Various shades of green and red look alike for these people. Red-green color blindness is much more common in men than in women, with as many as 8% of men having the condition. A lot of times they don’t even know it. When I did my student teaching in a first grade class, one day I prepared a math lesson for the students that involved them sorting a little cup of candy into colors, and after they did the math problems associated with the different colors, they got to eat the candy. One little boy kept sorting certain colors of Skittles into the same column, and when I asked him, he didn’t realize they were different colors. They looked the same to him. So that day I learned to be careful about what kind of candy I used for sorting lessons, and he learned that he had red-green color blindness. My own dad was color blind too. It’s pretty common. Occasionally a person is born without the ability to see colors at all, but that’s extremely rare.
The visible light spectrum, also sometimes called the color spectrum, runs from violet to red. Just below violet is the wavelength referred to as ultraviolet. Many insects and birds can see ultraviolet, but typically an animal that can see ultraviolet can’t see infrared, which is the wavelength of light just past red. Birds that can see ultraviolet can usually see red, but not infrared.
In the original Patreon episode, this is where I said that humans can see ultraviolet light a little, but I was actually wrong. I thought blacklights worked by allowing us to see ultraviolet light, but that’s not the case. Blacklights are lamps that emit mostly ultraviolet light, but we only see a dark purple or blue that the blacklight’s filter allows through. While very few humans can see anything but the purple or blue, insects can see ultraviolet light and are attracted to it. That’s why bug zappers include blacklights. People also like blacklights because the ultraviolet light makes some things glow, which is fun to play with. It can also be useful in surprising ways. A lot of countries print paper money and other important documents with ink patterns that only show up under ultraviolet light. It’s easy to tell if the money or document is a fake if those hidden patterns don’t glow under a blacklight. Some diseases cause the sick person’s urine to glow specific colors under ultraviolet light, which helps a doctor determine what’s wrong with the person so they can be treated. If you have access to a blacklight, remember that even though you can’t see most of the light it emits, it can still hurt your eyes, so don’t stare into it.
Sometimes a person’s eye is diseased or damaged so they have to have the lens replaced with an artificial lens. Very rarely when that happens, the person wakes up after surgery and discovers they’re seeing ultraviolet way more than the rest of us. They report that the color is a pale purplish shade. This sounds cool, except that they have to wear special glasses that block ultraviolet light when they’re outside, since ultraviolet light can damage the eyes. It’s also the spectrum of light that causes sunburns. That’s what the UV means in products that say they block UV light; UV just means ultraviolet.
Many birds have a special cone cell that reacts specially to ultraviolet wavelengths. Urine reflects ultraviolet light, which allows predatory birds to track their prey by following urine trails. Some rodents and marsupials also have this cone cell. Researchers think having four types of cone cells, the three humans have plus the ultraviolet one, used to be the default in all animals, but some have evolved to not have the ultraviolet cone cell since they don’t need it. Some animals only have two types of cone cells, like mice, who can’t see as many colors as humans.
Researchers are just learning that many mammals are able to see ultraviolet much more than the typical human can. Reindeer, for instance, and some common animals like dogs, cats, and ferrets. Since power lines give off ultraviolet light, sometimes in bursts called coronal discharges, researchers now realize animals are affected by the light even though humans can’t see it. Reindeer have always avoided power lines, and now we know why. To them, the coronal discharges are a blaze of bright color that probably hurts their eyes, especially when it reflects off snow. Conservationists are calling for better shielding on power lines to cut down on the light they give out.
Some humans are born with ultraviolet-sensing cone cells, a condition called tetrachromacy. Since the lens of the human eye naturally filters out most ultraviolet light, people can have this extra cone cell and not even know it. They just tend to be better at differentiating colors than people without it. Some studies suggest that as many as 50% of women and 8% of men may be tetrachromatic—and that tetrachromatic women are also carriers of the trait of red-green color blindness. Since my dad was colorblind, that means I carry that trait from the genetic material I inherited from him, but I see colors really well…so maybe I have those extra cone cells! That’s exciting! Maybe you have it too!
But before we all get too excited, think about the mantis shrimp. Instead of four types of cone cells, it has up to 16 types.
Ultraviolet lightwaves are short. Shorter than that are X-rays, and shorter than those are gamma rays, which are ridiculously teeny. If your eyes could see X-rays, it basically just means you’d see a lot of skeletons walking around and it would feel bright all the time even if you closed your eyes, since X-rays penetrate less dense material like skin. If you could see gamma rays, all it would mean is that you could see stuff that was radioactive. Useful, yes, but not everyday useful.
Infrared is a different case, since infrared wavelengths are extremely long. Some animals can see infrared, but mostly they actually sense heat signatures given off by other animals. Night vision goggles work like this, basically allowing whoever wears them to see in infrared. Wavelengths longer than infrared are microwaves and radio waves, which nothing can see because it would pretty much just overwhelm the vision and you could see nothing but light, much of it the afterglow of the Big Bang, when the universe came into being.
A few years ago, a team of scientists working with an infrared laser started reporting occasionally seeing flashes of light where there shouldn’t be visible light. They were scientists, so of course they investigated with a scientific study of the infrared laser on human vision. This was a powerful laser that only emitted infrared light, and emitted it in quick pulses that released a set number of photons at a time. A photon is one particle of light, something along the lines of an atom. I’m not a physicist and don’t really understand it. The study revealed that sometimes, when the laser’s pulses were extremely close together, two photons would be absorbed by a single photopigment in the eye, which was enough to activate the pigment and allow the person to see a flash of light. But because the eye combined the photons, the eye reacted as though the wavelength of the light was half its length, which made it look green.
By the way, rod cells, the ones that help us see in low light, take a few minutes to achieve full sensitivity. That’s why it takes a few minutes for your eyes to adjust after you turn the light out at night.
It’s mind-blowing to think that light is an actual physical thing that actually physically goes into your eyeballs to let you see. There’s more to it than that, of course—nerves and the brain have a lot to do with how we are able to make sense of visual images. If something goes wrong with the eyeball, the nerves that connect it to the brain, or the part of the brain that deals with vision, it can lead to blindness of one kind or another. But at the very basic level, when you see, for instance, a hedgehog, it’s because light photons bounced off that hedgehog and into your eyeball. And that also means that when you look up at the night sky and see stars, you’re seeing the actual physical lightwaves given off by stars millions of light years away that physically go into your eyeball and bounce off the cone and rod cells, activating them and allowing your brain to form an image. That’s amazing, no matter if you can see ultraviolet or if you get the colors of candy mixed up because they look alike to you.
You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.
Thanks to Jason for suggesting this week’s topic, the bison!
Further reading:
New research documents domestic cattle genetics in modern bison herds
bison-hybrid-cave-art-04285.html">Higgs Bison: Mysterious Hybrid of Bison and Cattle Hidden in Ice Age Cave Art
A cave painting of steppe bison and other animals:
An American bison [photo by Kim Acker, taken from buffalo-bison-bison.htm">this site]:
Some European bison [photo by Pryndak Vasyl, taken from this site]:
The bison sound in this episode came from bison.htm">this site.
Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
This week we’re going to learn about the bison, a suggestion from Jason. There are two species of bison alive today, the American bison and the European bison. Both are sometimes called buffalo while the European bison is sometimes called the wisent. I’m mostly going to call it the wisent too in this episode so I only have to say the word bison 5,000 times instead of 10,000.
Bison are herd animals that can congregate in huge numbers, but these big herds are made up of numerous smaller groups. The smaller groups are made up of a lead female, called a cow, who is usually older, other cows, and all their offspring, called calves. Males, called bulls, live in small bachelor groups. The American bison mostly eats grass while the European bison eats a wider selection of plants in addition to grass.
The bison is a big animal with horns, a shaggy dark brown coat, and a humped shoulder. The American bison’s shoulder is especially humped, which allows for the attachment of strong neck muscles. This allows the animal to clear snow from the ground by swinging its head side to side. The European bison’s hump isn’t as pronounced and it carries its head higher. The bison looks slow and clumsy, but it can actually run up to 35 mph, or 55 km/hour, can swim well, and can jump obstacles that are 5 feet tall, or 1.5 meters.
The American bison can stand over six and a half feet high at the shoulder, or 2 meters, while the European bison stands almost 7 feet tall at the shoulder, or 2.1 meters. This is massively huge! Bison are definitely ice age megafauna that once lived alongside mammoths and woolly rhinos, so we’re lucky they’re still around. Both species almost went extinct in recent times and were only saved by a coordinated effort by early conservationists.
The American bison in particular has a sad story. Before European colonizers arrived, bison were widespread throughout North America. Bison live in herds that migrate sometimes long distances to find food, and many of the North American tribes were also migratory to follow the herds, because the bison was an important part of their diet and they also used its hide and other body parts to make items they needed. The colonizers knew that, and they knew that by killing off the bison, the people who depended on bison to live would starve to death. Since bison were also considered sacred, the emotional and societal impact of colonizers killing the animals was also considerable.
In the 19th century, colonizers killed an estimated 50 million bison. A lot of them weren’t even used for anything. People would shoot as many bison as possible from trains and just leave the bodies to rot, and this practice was actually encouraged by the railroads, who advertised these “hunting” trips. The United States government also encouraged the mass killing of bison and even had soldiers go out to kill as many bison as possible. Bison that escaped the coordinated slaughter often caught diseases spread by domestic cattle, and the increased plowing and fencing of prairie land reduced the food available to bison. By 1900, the number of American bison in the world was probably only about 300.
As early as the 1860s people started to sound the alarm about the bison’s impending extinction. Some ranchers kept bison, partly as meat animals and partly to just help stop them from all dying out. The Yellowstone National Park had been established in 1872, and 25 bison survived there, although many others were poached by hunters. Members of various Plains tribes, who had been forced onto reservations by the United States government so the government could give their land to colonizers, collected as many bison as they could to keep them safe.
These days the American bison is out of immediate danger, although its numbers are still very low. Because there were so few bison when conservation efforts started, the genetic diversity is also low. Bison will also hybridize with domestic cattle and the resulting female calves are fertile, so the main goal of modern conservationists is to genetically test herds to determine which bison have a larger percentage of cattle genes, and mainly only breed the ones that have the least. A 2022 study determined that there is no population of American bison alive today that doesn’t have at least a small percentage of cattle genes. Cattle are domesticated animals, and it’s never a good thing when a wild animal ends up with the DNA of a domestic counterpart. Bison need their wildness in order to survive and stay safe.
There are two living subspecies of American bison, the wood bison and the plains bison. I’m happy to report that the scientific name of the plains bison is Bison bison bison. The wood bison mainly lives in Canada, where it’s classified as threatened.
As for the European bison, or wisent, it was once common throughout much of Europe and Asia. As the human population increased after the ice age, the wisent’s numbers decreased until it was mostly restricted to a few areas of Russia, Transylvania, Poland, and Lithuania. Even as early as the 16th century, people were aware it was endangered. Local rulers declared it a protected animal in most of its range.
During World War I, German troops occupying Poland killed hundreds of wisents, and as the troops retreated at the end of the war, they shot as many of the bison as they could find and left them to rot. Only nine individuals remained alive and by 1921 they had died too. By 1927, the very last wisent in the wild was killed by a poacher.
But 12 animals remained, kept in various zoos. In 1923 a preservation society was set up, modeled after the one in the United States that had helped save the American bison from extinction. Poland in particular worked hard to increase the wisent’s numbers and re-introduce it to its forest home, although its efforts were interrupted by World War II. These days the wisent is out of danger of extinction, although like the American bison its numbers are still relatively low.
American and European bison are related and can crossbreed, but they’re not as closely related genetically as was once thought. Genetic studies are ongoing, but it appears that the wisent is most closely related to domestic cattle while the American bison is most closely related to the yak.
We recently talked about the steppe bison in episode 357, which is about mammoth meat. The steppe bison is an ancestor of the American bison and lived throughout Europe and Asia across to North America, during the Pleistocene when Asia and North America were connected by the land bridge Beringia. It only went extinct around 3,000 years ago. It had much larger horns than modern bison, with a horn spread of almost seven feet across, or over 2 meters.
About 17,000 years ago, in a cave in what is now France, an ancient artist picked up a stick of charcoal and made a drawing of a bison alongside many other bison drawings made by many artists over the years. According to a study published in 2016, there are two different types of bison depicted in the cave. One type is the steppe bison, but the other is distinctly different. After a genetics study of bison in Europe, researchers made a surprising discovery. The second type of bison depicted in the cave is actually a hybrid animal. Hybrids come about when two species of closely related animals interbreed. The more closely related the species are, the more likely they are to interbreed where their territories overlap, and the more likely that the offspring will be fertile. This is exactly what happened toward the end of the Pleistocene, when climate change made it harder for the steppe bison to survive. Instead, a hybrid of steppe bison and the aurochs, the wild ancestor of the domestic cow, not only became common throughout much of Europe, eventually the hybrid species was so numerous that it became a distinct species of its own.
This hybrid bison had small horns and a smaller hump than the steppe bison, although it was still a really big animal. Eventually it gave rise to the modern European bison while the steppe bison gave rise to the antique bison, which itself is the direct ancestor of the American bison. So many bison!
This is what a bison sounds like, specifically an American bison recorded in Yellowstone National Park:
[bison sound]
You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.
Thanks for listening!
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