Strange Animals Podcast

• Episode 454: Bats!

  This week we're going to learn about a bunch of bats! Thanks to John, Murilo, and Alexandra for their suggestions! Further reading: Why Bats Can’t Walk: The Evolutionary Lock That Keeps Them Flying On a Wing and a Song—Bats Belt out High-Pitched Tunes to Woo Mates Why some bats hunt during the day Puzzling Proto-Bats A pekapeka just walking around catching bugs on the ground [photo by Rod Morris, from link above]: BLOOOOOOD! but a really cute smile too: The western red bat looks ready for Halloween! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week as monster month continues, we’re going to learn about bats! We’ve talked about bats in lots of previous episodes, but we have a lot of really neat information in this one that we’ve never covered before. Thanks to John, Alexandra, and Murilo for their suggestions! John suggested we learn about diurnal bats and also asked if there are any flightless bats, maybe ones that live on islands. There are lots of island-living bats, and many birds that live on islands evolve to be flightless. It makes sense that bats might do the same thing--but I couldn’t find any information about any known bat that has lost the ability to fly. The reason seems to be how highly derived bats are. That means they’re specialized, the only mammal known that has ever evolved true flight. Unlike birds, which don’t need to use their legs when flying, bats’ legs are actually part of the wings. The wing membranes, called patagia, stretch not just between the elongated finger bones of the bat’s hands, they also stretch between the arms and legs, and connect the legs too. A January 2025 study comparing bat skeletons to the skeletons of birds determined that unlike in birds, where the size of the legs doesn’t have anything to do with the size of the wings, in bats the leg size and the wing size are closely related. If a bat evolves smaller wings, its legs also evolve to become smaller. That’s why there are no bats that resemble ostriches, with tiny wings but really long legs. Another possible reason is that bat legs have evolved to point backwards compared to other animals. It’s not just the feet, the knees are also rotated backwards. That’s why bats hang upside-down when they’re not flying. Many species of bat never land on the ground, because they literally can’t walk at all. But there are a few species of bats that can walk quite well. One is the increasingly threatened New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat. It lives in a few places in both the North and South Islands, as well as some small islands off the coast, although it used to be much more widespread. It’s also called by its Maori name, the pekapeka. The pekapeka mainly lives in forested areas and is quite small. It’s brown with a lighter belly, and it has big ears, as do most bats. Its eyes are small and its vision isn’t very good, but it has a good sense of smell. Its wings are small so its legs are correspondingly small too, but its legs are also strong despite their size. It has a clawed thumb toe on its feet and on its wings that helps it climb around in trees when it needs to, and it also spends about half of its time on the ground. It walks just fine, crawling with its wings folded so that the ends point up and back, out of the way. And yes, its legs are rotated backwards as you’d expect in a bat, and it roosts by hanging from its feet in trees. The pekapeka flies normally and catches insects using echolocation, just like other microbats throughout the world. It especially likes moths. Unlike almost all other bats, it finds a lot of its food on the ground too, using its sense of smell to track down spiders, insects and larvae, and other small invertebrates. It will actually dig into the dirt and leaf litter to find food. It also eats nectar and flowers, and is an important pollinator of some plants. One great thing about the pekapeka is that the males sing to attract a ma...

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• Episode 453: The Skeleton Coast

  It's October, AKA Monster Month! Let's learn about some animals of the Skeleton Coast--which sounds spooky, but actually isn't. Lots of brown fur seals [photo by Robur.q - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]: The desert plated lizard [photo by redrovertracy, some rights reserved (CC BY) - https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/45483586, CC BY 4.0]: Rüppell’s korhaan [photo by By Charles J. Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]: The pearl spotted owlet is cute rather than spooky, but it has a haunting call [photo by Charles J. Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s October at last, and that means monster month! To start us off this year, we’re going to learn about animals of the Skeleton Coast, which sounds a lot more spooky than it actually is. The Skeleton Coast is a stretch of coastline 310 miles long, or 500 km, on the Atlantic coast of Africa. It’s part of Namibia, a huge country in southern Africa that’s mostly quite dry, with two deserts within its borders. Because the country gets so little rainfall, it has to conserve water for its people, animals, and crops, so the government is serious about conservation and natural resources. It’s home to one of the most cutting-edge water treatment plants in the world, and since the government’s establishment in 1993, it’s been working to help farmers and citizens in general to practice sustainable natural resource management. It’s also a beautiful part of the world, with amazing geography, and animals and plants found nowhere else in the world, so eco-tourism has been increasing, which helps the economy. Namibia is also home to the San people, who call the Skeleton Coast “the land god made in anger.” The northern part of the coast is blocked off from land by huge sand dunes, while the southern part is rocky. To get there, you have to cross a desert, and then cross a treacherous marsh that’s hundreds of miles across. Then to get home, you have to go back the way you came across the marsh and the desert, because launching a boat from the Skeleton Coast is impossible if you don’t have a powerful engine. The sea along the Skeleton Coast is treacherous, with lots of rocks offshore, extremely heavy surf, and frequent thick fogs. There are around a thousand shipwrecks visible along the coast, with the oldest dating to the 1530s, and thousands more documented that aren’t visible or haven’t been found yet. Ships still wreck there sometimes. Animals do live along the Skeleton Coast, especially seals. The brown fur seal, also called the Cape fur seal, has a huge colony in the northern part of the coast, which is a national park. The brown fur seal lives in various parts of southern Africa, with a subspecies that also lives on some islands off southeastern Australia and Tasmania. A big male can grow 7 ½ feet long, or 2.3 meters, and as you can probably guess from its name, it’s mostly brown in color. Males have a short mane on the neck that’s usually darker than the rest of its fur. It has magnificent long whiskers, especially males. The brown fur seal mainly eats fish, but it also likes squid and will eat other animals like crustaceans and even birds. It can dive deeply and stay underwater for over seven minutes. It spends most of its life in the water, mainly only coming out on land to breed, give birth, and take care of the babies. The seals used to be killed for their fur, but this was outlawed in Namibia in 1990 except by special permit, which has allowed the seals’ numbers to increase. The Skeleton Coast is named that mainly because of the massive amounts of seal bones that fur hunters left behind after killing and skinning seals. Unfortunately, something the rocks around the Skeleton Coast collect are plastic debris, especially fishing debris like nets.

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• Episode 452: Rare Wallabies and Two Hoofed Beasts

  Thanks to Brody, Oz, and Sam for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Chasing gold Two spectacled hare-wallabies hanging out under a spinifex bush [picture from this site]: A regular swamp wallaby [photo by jjron - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4022233]: The glorious golden swamp wallaby [photo by Jack Evershed, taken from the first article linked above]: The takin can also be golden: The gaur is so incredibly big! It's so big, honestly, it's just ridiculous: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have suggestions from Oz, Sam, and Brody, with some interesting mammals! Let’s start with Brody’s suggestion, the wallaby! It’s been a while since we talked about the wallaby, which is an adorable marsupial closely related to the kangaroo. It’s native to Australia and New Guinea, part of the family Macropodidae. One thing everyone knows about kangaroos, which is also true for wallabies, is that they hop instead of running. Their hind legs are extremely strong with big feet, and in fact the word Macropodidae means big feet. The animal hops by leaning forward and jumping, with its big hind feet leaving the ground at about the same time, and landing at the same time too before it bounces again. Its big tail helps it balance. We talked about the wallaby last in episode 390, so let’s learn about some species of wallaby that we didn’t talk about then. For example, the spectacled hare-wallaby. It’s a small species that’s common in northern Australia and parts of Papua New Guinea. It’s active at night and is mostly solitary, so unless you’re wandering around at night you might not have seen one. It’s called the spectacled hare-wallaby because it has orange-colored fur around its eyes so that it looks sort of like it’s wearing glasses. The rest of its fur is brown, gray, and golden. Its ears are small and its tail and hind legs are very long, with short little front legs. It’s very cute. The spectacled hare-wallaby prefers sandy or stony areas, like dunes and shrubland, where it can find lots of plants to eat but can easily hop away if it spots a predator. It’s smaller than a domestic cat, but it can travel incredibly fast when it wants to. If you live along the eastern part of Australia, you might have seen the swamp wallaby, also called the black wallaby because it’s mostly dark gray or gray-brown in color, often with a white tip to the tail. It’s stocky and much larger than the spectacled hare-wallaby, almost three feet tall, or 85 cm, when it’s sitting up. It doesn’t just live in swamps but also likes forests and other areas with lots of places to hide. Unlike the spectacled hare-wallaby, it’s not that fast and can’t always outrun potential predators, but it’s good at hiding because its fur is so dark. Most wallabies are grazers, meaning they mainly eat grass, but the swamp wallaby is a browser. Instead of having grinding teeth to break down grass, its teeth are sharper for cutting through plant material like bushes, shrubs, and ferns. The swamp wallaby will even use its front legs to pull branches into reach so it can eat the leaves. Wallabies are marsupials, meaning the babies are born extremely early by our standards, crawl into the mother’s pouch and clamp onto a teat, and continue to develop in the pouch. Wallabies usually only have one baby at a time, but the mother swamp wallaby has two babies in its pouch almost all its adult life. The swamp wallaby has two uteruses, and a few days before the first baby is ready to be born, the female comes into estrus again, meaning she’s ready to mate. By the time her first baby is born, she’s already pregnant with her second baby. When the second baby is born, the first baby is old enough that’s it doesn’t spend all the time in the pouch—but by then, she’s already pregnant with her third baby. By the time the third baby is born,

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• Episode 451: the Stellar Jay and the Gulper Eel

  Thanks to Joelle, Jacob, and Anna for their suggestions this week! Further reading/watching: Gulper Eel Balloons Its Massive Jaws Watch rare footage of a shapeshifting eel with 'remarkably full tummy' swimming in the deep sea The beautiful stellar jay: The maybe not quite as beautiful but really awesome gulper eel (with its mouth full of water, image taken from first video linked above): The same eel as above but with its mouth open so you can see just how big it is! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about a bird suggested by Joelle, Jacob, and Anna, and a weird fish also suggested by Jacob. Let’s start with the bird, the stellar jay, also called Steller’s jay! In the last few years there has been a push among bird enthusiasts to change the common names of birds named after people to names that are more general. While Steller’s jay hasn’t officially been renamed to the stellar jay, a lot of people are calling it that already so that’s what we’ll call it here. The word stellar means outstanding, and that’s definitely a good description of this bird. The stellar jay is a beautiful bird that lives in western North America down into parts of Central America. It’s closely related to the blue jay found in eastern North America, and if you saw it from the middle down you might think it was a blue jay, except that it doesn’t have white markings on its tail and wings. It has a blue tail and wing feathers with dark bars, but from about the shoulders up it looks very different from the blue jay. It’s silvery-gray, brownish, or black on its head, neck, and back. Some populations have a white eyebrow marking that makes the bird look like it’s frowning. It has a crest like the blue jay, but its crest is bigger, spikier like it hasn’t brushed its hair yet, and the bird itself is bigger overall than its eastern cousin. The stellar jay lives in forests, especially coniferous forests, where it eats pretty much anything it can find. It’s an omnivore that likes insects and other invertebrates, eggs and baby birds of other species, and even small animals like lizards and mice, but it also eats lots of nuts, berries, seeds, and other plant material. It will visit bird feeders, and especially likes sunflower seeds and raw peanuts. The stellar jay is a corvid, distantly related to crows and magpies, and it shares the corvid trait of being intelligent, sometimes aggressive, and loud. It will imitate hawks in order to scare other birds away from food, and it will often chase smaller birds away from feeders. During nesting season, the birds get a lot quieter, and the male will sneak his way to and from the nest to feed his mate while she’s sitting on the eggs. The stellar jay prefers to build its nest in a conifer, either in a hollow in the trunk or on branches close to the trunk. This is what the stellar jay sounds like: [bird calls] Jacob also suggested we learn about the gulper eel, which is sort of the opposite of the stellar jay. It’s a deep-sea fish with a lot of names, including pelican eel and my favorite, the umbrella-mouth. It’s black or sometimes dark brown and can grow up to about three feet long, or 90 cm. Much of its length consists of a long, whip-like tail. The gulper eel’s mouth is ENORMOUS, ridiculously enormous, especially considering how slender the rest of the fish is. Its lower jaw is hinged and is extremely long, with a stretchy pouch of skin that forms its mouth and I guess you can call them cheeks. It is a very weird fish. Most of the time it keeps its jaw folded down against its sides, so that the jaws are barely visible and it looks more or less like a regular eelh. But when it wants to, the gulper eel can unfold its jaw and gulp in water to inflate its pouch, which makes it look like a black balloon with a tail. It sometimes does this if it feels threatened so that it looks bigger,

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• Episode 450: Geckos and the Snow Leopard

  Thanks for Preston and Pranav for suggesting this week's topics! Further reading: DNA has revealed the origin of this giant ‘mystery’ gecko Snow Leopards Dispersed Out of Tibetan Plateau Multiple Times, Researchers Say Conquest of Asia and Europe by snow leopards during the last Ice Ages uncovered The crested gecko AKA the eyelash gecko: The fluffy snow leopard: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a couple of suggestions from Preston and one from Pranav! This is the first episode I’ve recorded in my new apartment, so let’s make it a good one. First, Preston wanted to learn more about the crested gecko, mainly because he has a pet crested gecko named George Washington. That is one of the best gecko names ever! The crested gecko is also called the eyelash gecko. We’ve talked about it a few times, but not recently at all. It’s native to a collection of remote Pacific islands called New Caledonia, where it spends most of its time in trees, eating insects and other small animals, but also fruit, nectar, and lots of other food. It’s an omnivore and nocturnal, and can grow more than 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It gets its names from the tiny spines above its eyes that look like eyelashes, and more spines in two rows down its back, like a tiny dragon. It can be brown, reddish, orange, yellow, or gray, with various colored spots, which has made it a popular pet. These days all pet crested geckos were bred in captivity, since it’s now protected in the wild. The crested gecko has tiny claws on its toes, which is unusual since most geckos don’t have claws. It can drop its tail like other geckos if a predator is after it, but the tail doesn’t grow back. Since its tail is prehensile and helps it climb around in trees, you’d think the gecko would have trouble climbing after it loses its tail, but it doesn’t. Maybe that’s because in addition to claws, like other geckos it has basically microscopic hairlike structures on its toes that allow it to climb smooth surfaces like windows and walls and the trunks of smooth trees. It can also jump long distances to get to a new branch. The crested gecko was discovered by science in 1866, but wasn’t seen after that in so long that people thought it was extinct. Then in 1994, a German herpetologist out looking for specimens after a tropical storm found a single crested gecko. It turns out that the geckos had been fine all along, but because they’re nocturnal and mostly live in trees, scientists just hadn’t spotted any. While we’re talking about geckos, Pranav requested that we revisit Delcourt’s giant gecko with some updated information. We did mention the new findings back in episode 389, but it’s really interesting so let’s go over it again. Way back in episode 20 we talked about Delcourt’s giant gecko, which is only known from a single museum specimen donated in the 19th century. In 1979 a herpetologist named Alain Delcourt, working in the Marseilles Natural History Museum in France, noticed a big taxidermied lizard in storage and wondered what it was. It wasn’t labeled and he didn’t recognize it, surprising since it was the biggest gecko he’d ever seen—two feet long, or about 60 cm. He sent photos to several reptile experts and they didn’t know what it was either. Finally the specimen was examined and in 1986 it was described as a new species. No one knew anything about the stuffed specimen, including where it was caught. At first researchers thought it might be from New Caledonia since a lot of the museum’s other specimens were collected from the Pacific Islands. None of the specimens donated between 1833 and 1869 had any documentation, so it seemed probable the giant gecko was donated during that time and probably collected not long before. More recently there was speculation that it was actually from New Zealand, since it matched Maori lore about a big lizard called the kawekaweau. In June of 2023,

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