Further reading:

I Can Has Mutant Larvae?

200-Year-Old ‘Monster Larva’ Mystery Solved

‘Snakeworm’ mystery yields species new to science

Hearkening back to the hazelworm

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

A few weeks ago when I was researching big eels, I remembered the mystery eel larva we talked about back in episode 49, and that led me down a fun rabbit hole about other mystery larvae.

Let’s start with that eel larva. Eel larvae can be extremely hard to tell apart, so as a catchall term every eel larva is called a leptocephalus. They’re flattened side to side, which is properly referred to as laterally compressed, and transparent, shaped roughly like a slender leaf, with a tiny head at the front. Depending on the species, an eel may remain in its larval form for more than a year, much longer than most other fish, and when it does metamorphose into its next life stage, it usually grows much longer than its larval form. For instance, the larvae of conger eels are only about 4 inches long, or 10 cm, while an adult conger can grow up to 10 feet long, or 3 meters.

On January 31, 1930, a Danish research ship caught an eel larva 900 feet deep, or about 275 meters, off the coast of South Africa. But the larva was over 6 feet long, or 1.85 meters!

Scientists boggled at the thought that this larva might grow into an eel more than 50 feet long, or 15 meters, raising the possibility that this unknown eel might be the basis of many sea serpent sightings.

The larva was preserved and has been studied extensively. In 1958, a similar eel larva was caught off of New Zealand. It and the 1930 specimen were determined to belong to the same species, which was named Leptocephalus giganteus.

In 1966, two more of the larvae were discovered in the stomach of a western Atlantic lancet fish. They were much smaller than the others, though—only four inches and eleven inches long, or 10 cm and 28 cm respectively. Other than size, they were pretty much identical to Leptocephalus giganteus.

The ichthyologist who examined them determined that the larvae were probably not true eels at all, but larvae of a fish called the spiny eel. Deep-sea spiny eels look superficially like eels but aren’t closely related, and while they do have a larval form that resembles that of a true eel, they’re much different in one important way. Spiny eel larvae grow larger than the adults, then shrink a little when they develop into their mature form. The six-foot eel larva was actually a spiny eel larva that was close to metamorphosing into its adult form.

Not everyone agrees that Leptocephalus giganteus is a spiny eel. Some think it belongs to the genus Coloconger, also called worm eels, which are true eels but which have large larvae that only grow to the same size as adults. But worm eels don’t grow much bigger than about two feet long, or 61 cm. If the mystery larvae does belong to the genus Coloconger, it’s probably a new species. Until scientists identify an adult Leptocephalus giganteus, we can’t know for sure.

Another mystery larva is Planctosphaera pelagica, which sits all alone in its own class because the only thing it resembles are acorn worms, but scientists are pretty sure it isn’t the larva of an acorn worm. It’s not much to look at, since the larva is just a little barrel-shaped blob that grows about 25 mm across. This sounds small compared to the eel larva we just discussed, but it’s actually quite large compared to similar larvae. Acorn worm larvae are usually only about a millimeter long.

Planctosphaera has been classified as a hemichordate, which are related to echinoderms but which show bilateral symmetry instead of radial symmetry. Hemichordates are also closely related to chordates, which include all vertebrates. They’re marine animals that resemble worms but aren’t worms, so it’s likely that Planctosphaera is also wormlike as an adult.

Planctosphaera isn’t encountered very often by scientists. It has limited swimming abilities and mostly floats around near the surface of the open ocean, eating tiny food particles. One suggestion is that it might actually be the larva of a known species, but one where an occasional larva just never metamorphoses into an adult. It just grows and grows until something eats it. So far, attempts to sequence DNA from a Planctosphaera hasn’t succeeded and attempts to raise one to maturity in captivity hasn’t worked either.

Some people have estimated that an adult Planctosphaera might be a type of acorn worm that can grow nine feet long, or 2.75 meters, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility. The largest species of acorn worm known is Balanoglossus gigas, which can grow almost six feet long, or 1.8 meters, and not only is it bioluminescent, its body contains a lot of iodine, so it smells like medicine. It lives in mucus-lined burrows on the sea floor.

Another mystery larva is Facetotecta, which have been found in shallow areas in many oceans around the world. Unlike the other larvae we’ve talked about, they’re genuinely tiny, measured in micrometers, and eleven species have been described. They all have a cephalic shield, meaning a little dome over the head, and scientists have been able to observe several phases of their development but not the adult form. The juvenile form was observed and it looked kind of like a tiny slug with nonfunctioning eyes and weak muscles.

Scientists speculate that facetotecta may actually be the larva of an endoparasite that infests some marine animals. That would explain why no adult form has been identified. Genetic testing has confirmed that Facetotecta is related to a group of parasitic crustaceans.

DNA has solved some mysteries of what larvae belong to which adults. For instance, Cerataspis monstrosa, a larval crustacean that was first described in 1828. It’s over a cm long, pinkish-purple in color with stalked eyes, little swimming leg-like appendages, and neon blue horn-like structures on its head and back which act as armor. The armor doesn’t help too much against big animals like dolphins and tuna, which love to eat it, and in fact that’s where it was initially discovered, in the digestive tract of a dolphin. But scientists had no idea what the monstrous larva eventually grew up to be.

In 2012 the mystery was solved when a team of scientists compared the monster larva’s DNA to that of lots of various types of shrimp, since the larva had long been suspected to be a type of shrimp. It turns out that it’s the larval form of a rare deep-sea aristeid shrimp that can grow up to 9 inches long, or 23 cm.

Let’s finish with another solved mystery, this one from larvae found on land. In 2007, someone sent photos and a bag of little dead worms to Derek Sikes at the University of Alaska Museum. Usually when someone sends you a bag of dead worms, they’re giving you an obscure but distressing message, but Sikes was curator of the insect collection and he was happy to get a bag of mystery worms.

The worms had been collected from an entire column of the creatures that had been crawling over each other so that the group looked like a garden hose on the ground. Sikes thought they were probably fly larvae but he had never heard of larvae traveling in a column. If you’ve listened to the hazelworm episode from August 2018, you might have an idea. The hazelworm was supposed to be a snake or even a dragon that was only seen in times of unrest. It turns out that it the larvae of some species of fungus gnat travel together in long, narrow columns that really do look like a moving snake. But that’s in Europe, not Alaska.

Sikes examined the larvae, but since they were dead he couldn’t guess what type of insect they would grow up to be. Luckily, a few months later he got a call from a forester who had spotted a column of the same worms crossing a road. Sikes got there in time to witness the phenomenon himself.

The larvae were only a few millimeters long each, but there were so many of them that the column stretched right across the road into the forest. He collected some of them carefully and took them back to the museum, where he tended them in hopes that they would pupate successfully.

This they did, and the insects that emerged were a little larger than fruit flies and were black in color. Sikes identified them as fungus gnats, but when he consulted fungus gnat experts in Germany and Japan, they were excited to report that they didn’t recognize the Alaskan gnats. It was a new species, which Sikes described in late 2023. His summer students helped name the species, Sciara serpens, which are better known now as snakeworm gnats. He and his co-authors think the larvae form columns when they cross surfaces like roads and rocks, to help minimize contacting the dry ground. Fungus gnats live in moist areas with lots of organic matter, like forest leaf litter and the edges of ponds.

So the next time you see a huge long snake crossing the road, don’t panic. It might just be a whole lot of tiny, tiny larvae looking for a new home.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

BONUS: here's the Hazelworm episode too!

The hazelworm today is a type of reptile, although called the slow worm, blind worm, or deaf adder. It lives in Eurasia, and while it looks like a snake, it’s actually a legless lizard. It can even drop and regrow its tail like a lizard if threatened. It spends most of its time underground in burrows or underneath leaf litter or under logs. It grows almost 2 feet long, or 50 cm, and is brown. Females sometimes have blue racing stripes while males may have blue spots. It eats slugs, worms, and other small animals, so is good for the garden.

But that kind of hazelworm isn’t what we’re talking about here. Back in the middle ages in central Europe, especially in parts of the Alps, there were stories of a big dragonlike serpent that lived in areas where hazel bushes were common. Like its slow-worm namesake,...

It's the annual discoveries episode! Thanks to Stephen and Aryeh for their corrections and suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Salinella Salve: The Vanishing Creature That Defied Science for Over a Century

Three new species of the genus Scutiger

Baeticoniscus carmonaensis sp. nov. a new Isopod found in an underground aqueduct from the Roman period located in Southwest Spain (Crustacea, Isopoda, Trichoniscidae)

A new species of supergiant Bathynomus

Giant ‘Darth Vader’ sea bug discovered off the coast of Vietnam

A New Species of easter egg weevil

Bizarre 'bone collector' caterpillar discovered by UH scientists

Researchers Discover 'Death Ball' Sponge and Dozens of Other Bizarre Deep-Sea Creatures in the Southern Ocean

1,500th Bat Species Discovered in Africa's Equatorial Guinea

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about some animals discovered in 2025! We’ll also make this our corrections episode. This is the last new episode we’ll have until the end of August when we reach our 500th episode, but don’t worry, until then there will be rescheduled Patreon episodes every single week as usual.

We’ll start with some corrections. Shortly after episode 452 was published in September, where we talked about the swamp wallaby and some other animals, Stephen emailed to point out that I’d made a major mistake! In that episode I said that not all animals called wallabies were actually members of the family Macropodidae, but that’s actually not the case. All wallabies are macropodids, but they aren’t all members of the same genus in that family. I corrected the episode but I wanted to mention it here too so no one is confused.

Stephen also caught another mistake in episode 458, which is embarrassing. I mentioned that marsupials didn’t just live in Australia, they were found all over the world. That’s not actually the case! Marsupials are found in North and South America, Australia, New Guinea and nearby areas, and that’s it. They were once also found in what is now Asia, but that was millions of years ago. So I apologize to everyone in Africa, Asia, and Europe who were excited about finding out what their local marsupials are. You don’t have any, sorry.

One update that Aryeh asked about specifically is an animal we talked about in episode 445, salinella. Aryeh emailed asking for more information if I could find any, because it’s such a fascinating mystery! I looked for some more recent findings, unfortunately without luck. I do have an article linked in the show notes that goes into detail about everything we covered in that episode, though, dated to mid-January 2026, and it’s a nice clear account.

Now, let’s get into the 2025 discoveries! There are lots more animals that were discovered last year, but I just chose some that I thought were especially interesting. Mostly I chose ones that I thought had funny names.

Let’s start with three new species of frog in the genus Scutiger. Species in this genus are called lazy toads and I couldn’t find out why. Maybe they don’t like to move around too much. Lazy toads live in mountains in some parts of Asia, and we don’t know very much about most of the 31 species described so far. Probably the most common lazy toad is the Sikkim lazy toad that lives along high altitude streams in the Himalaya Mountains. It’s mottled greenish-brown and yellowish in color with lots of warts, and while its feet have webbed toes, it doesn’t have webbed fingers on its little froggy hands. This is your reminder that every toad is a frog but not every frog is a toad. The Sikkim lazy toad grows about two and a half inches long, or about 65 mm, from nose to butt. It seems to be pretty average for a lazy toad.

The three new species of lazy toad are found in Yunnan Province in China, in a mountainous region where several species of lazy toad were already known. Between 2021 and 2024, a team of scientists collected 27 lazy toads from various places, then carefully examined them to see if they were species already known to science. This included genetic analysis. The team compared their findings with other lazy toad species and discovered that not all of the specimens matched any known species. Further comparison with each other revealed that the team had discovered three new species, which they described in December of 2025.

Next, isopods are common crustaceans that live throughout the world. You have undoubtedly seen at least one species of isopod, because an animal with lots of common names, including woodlouse, pill bug, roly-poly, and sowbug, is a terrestrial isopod. That’s right, the roly-poly is not a bug or a centipede but a crustacean. The order Isopoda contains more than 10,000 species, and there are undoubtedly thousands more that haven’t been discovered by scientists yet. About half the species discovered so far live on land and the other half live in water, most in the ocean but some in fresh water. They don’t all look like roly-polies, of course. Many look like their distant crustacean cousins, shrimps and crayfish, while others look more like weird centipedes or fleas or worms. There’s a lot of variation in an animal that’s extremely common throughout the world, so it’s no surprise that more species are discovered almost every year.

In 2021 and 2022, a team of Spanish scientists took a biological survey of an ancient Roman tunnel system beneath Carmona, Spain. The tunnels were built around 2,000 years ago as a water source, since they capture groundwater, but it hasn’t been used in so long that it’s more or less a natural environment these days.

The scientists quickly discovered plenty of life in the tunnels, including an isopod living in cracks in some ancient timbers. It grows about two and a half millimeters long and actually does look a lot like a tiny roly-poly. It has long antennae and its body mostly lacks pigment, but it does have dark eyes. Most animals that live in total darkness eventually evolve to no longer have functioning eyes, since they don’t need them, but that isn’t the case for this new isopod. Scientists think it might take advantage of small amounts of light available near the tunnel entrances.

As far as the scientists can tell, the Carmona isopod only lives in this one tunnel system, so it’s vulnerable to pollutants and human activity that might disrupt its underground home.

Another new isopod species that’s vulnerable to human activity, in this case overfishing, lives off the coast of Vietnam. It’s another isopod that looks a lot like a roly-poly, which I swear is not what every isopod looks like. It’s a deep-sea animal that hunts for food on the ocean floor, and it’s a popular delicacy in Vietnam. Remember, it’s a crustacean, and people say it tastes like another crustacean, lobster. In fact, scientists discovered their specimens in a fish market.

Deep-sea animals sometimes feature what’s called deep-sea gigantism. Most isopods are quite small, no more than a few cm at most, but the new species grows almost 13 inches long, or over 32 cm. It’s almost the largest isopod known. Its head covering made the scientists think of Darth Vader’s helmet, so it’s been named Bathynomus vaderi.

Next we have a new species of Easter egg weevil, a flightless beetle found on many islands in Southeast Asia. Easter egg weevils are beautiful, with every species having a different pattern of spots and stripes. Many are brightly colored and iridescent. The new species shows a lot of variability, but it’s basically a black beetle with a diamond-shaped pattern that can be yellow, gold, or blue. Some individuals have pink spots in the middle of some of the diamonds. It’s really pretty and that is just about all I could find out about it.

Another new insect is a type of Hawaiian fancy case caterpillar, which metamorphose into moths. They’re only found on the Hawaiian islands, and there are over 350 species known. The new species has been named the bone collector, because of what the caterpillar does.

Fancy case caterpillars spin a sort of shell out of silk, which is called a case, and the caterpillar carries its case around with it as protection. Some of the cases are unadorned but resemble tree bark, while many species will decorate the case with lichens, sand, or other items that help it blend in with its background. Some fancy case caterpillars can live in water as well as on land, and while most caterpillars eat plant material, some fancy case caterpillars eat insects.

That’s the situation with the bone collector caterpillar. It lives in spider webs, which right there is astonishing, and decorates its case with bits and pieces of dead insect it finds in the web. This can include wings, heads, legs, and other body parts.

The bone collector caterpillar eats insects, and it will chew through strands of the spider’s web to get to a trapped insect before the spider does. Sometimes it will eat what’s left of a spider’s meal once the spider is finished.

The bone collector caterpillar has only been found in one tiny part of O’ahu, a 15-square-km area of forest, although researchers think it was probably much more widespread before invasive plants and animals were introduced to the island.

Next, the Antarctic Ocean is one of the least explored parts of the world, and a whole batch of new species was announced in 2025 after two recent expeditions. One of the expeditions explored ocean that was newly revealed after a huge iceberg split off the ice shelf off West Antarctica in early 2025. That’s not where the expedition had planned to go, but it happened to be nearby when the iceberg broke off, and of course the team immediately went to take a look.

Back in episode 199 we talked about some carnivorous sponges. Sponges have been around for more than half a billion years, and early on they evolved a simple but effective body plan that they mostly still retain....

Thanks to Aila, Stella, George, Richard from NC, Emilia, Emerson, and Audie for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Creature Feature: Snipe Eel

How removing a dam could save North Carolina's ‘lasagna lizard’

Why Has This North Carolina Town Embraced a Strange Salamander?

Scentists search for DNA of an endangered salamander in Mexico City's canals

An X-ray of the slender snipe eel:

The head and body of a slender snipe eel. The rest is tail [picture by opencage さん http://ww.opencage.info/pics/ - http://ww.opencage.info/pics/large_17632.asp, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26595467]:

The hellbender:

A wild axolotl with its natural coloration:

A captive bred axolotl exhibiting leucism:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to talk about some amphibians and fish. Thanks to Aila, Stella, George, Richard from NC, Emilia, Emerson, and Audie for their suggestions!

We’ll start with Audie’s suggestion, the sandbar shark. It’s an endangered shark that lives in shallow coastal water in the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific Oceans. A big female can grow over 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters, while males are smaller on average. It can be brown or gray in color, and its dorsal fin is especially big for a shark its size.

The sandbar shark eats fish, crustaceans like crabs, cephalopods like octopuses, and other small animals. It spends a lot of time near the bottom of the seabed, looking for food, and it will also swim into the mouths of rivers. Since it resembles a bull shark, which can live just fine in rivers for quite a while and which can be dangerous to swimmers, people are sometimes afraid of the sandbar shark, but it hardly ever bites people. It just wants to be left alone to find little fish to eat.

Emilia and Emerson both asked to learn more about eels. Eels are fish, but not every animal that’s called an eel is actually an eel. Some are just eel-shaped, meaning they’re long and slender. Electric eels aren’t actually eels, for instance, but are more closely related to catfish.

The longest eel ever reliably measured was a slender giant moray. That was in 1927 in Queensland, Australia. The eel measured just shy of 13 feet long, or 3.94 meters. We talked about some giant eels in episode 401, but this week let’s talk about a much smaller eel, one that Emerson suggested.

That’s the snipe eel, the name for a family of eels consisting of nine species known so far. They live in every ocean in the world, and some species are deep-sea animals but most live a little nearer the surface. The largest species can grow an estimated 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, but because all species of snipe eel are so incredibly thin, even the longest individual weighs less than a football, either American or regular, take your pick.

The snipe eel gets its name from its mouth, which is long and slightly resembles the beak of a bird called the snipe. The snipe is a wading bird that pokes its long, flexible bill into mud to find small animals like insect larvae, worms, and snails. But unlike the bird’s bill, the snipe eel’s jaws have a bend at the tip. The upper jaw bends upward, the lower jaw bends downward so that the tip of the jaws are separated. It doesn’t look like that would be very helpful for catching food, but scientists think it helps because the fish’s mouth is basically always open. Since it mainly eats tiny crustaceans floating in the water, it doesn’t even need to open its mouth to catch food. It has tiny teeth along the jaws that point backwards, so when a crustacean gets caught on the teeth, it can’t escape.

The slender snipe eel is especially unusual because it can have as many as 750 vertebrae in its backbone. That’s more than any other animal known. Most of its length is basically just an incredibly long, thin tail, with its organs bunched up right behind its head. Even its anus is basically on its throat.

We don’t know a whole lot about the snipe eel, since it lives deep enough that it’s hardly ever seen by humans. Most of the specimens discovered have been found in the stomachs of larger fish.

Now, let’s leave the world of fish behind and look at some amphibians. First, George wanted to learn about the hellbender, and points out that it’s also called the snot otter or lasagna lizard. I don’t understand the lasagna part but it’s funny.

The hellbender is a giant salamander that lives in parts of the eastern United States, especially in the Appalachian Mountains and the Ozarks. It can grow nearly 30 inches long, or 74 cm, and is the fifth heaviest amphibian alive today in the whole world. It spends almost all its life in shallow, fast-moving streams hiding among rocks. As water rushes over and around rocks, it absorbs more oxygen, which is good for the hellbender because as an adult it breathes through its skin. To increase its surface area and help it absorb that much more oxygen, its skin is loose and has folds along the sides.

The hellbender is flattened in shape and is brown with black speckles on its back. It mostly eats crayfish, but it will also eat frogs and other small animals. Its skin contains light-sensitive cells, which means that it can actually sense how much light is shining on its body even if its head is hidden under a rock, so it can hide better.

Aila and Stella suggested we talk about the axolotl, and a few years ago Richard from NC sent me a lot of really good information about this friendly-looking amphibian. I’d been planning to do a deep dive about the axolotl, which we haven’t talked about since episode 275, but sometimes having a lot of information leads to overload and I never did get around to sorting through everything Richard sent me.

Richard also suggested we talk about a rare mudpuppy, so let’s learn about it before we get to the axolotl. It’s called the Neuse river waterdog, although Richard refers to it as the North Carolina axolotl because it resembles the axolotl in some ways, although the two species aren’t very closely related.

The mudpuppy, also called the waterdog, looks a lot like a juvenile hellbender but isn’t as big, with the largest measured adult growing just over 17 inches long, or almost 44 cm. It lives in lakes, ponds, and streams and retains its gills throughout its life.

The mudpuppy is gray, black, or reddish-brown. It has a lot of tiny teeth where you’d expect to find teeth, and more teeth on the roof of its mouth where you would not typically expect to find teeth. It needs all these teeth because it eats slippery food like small fish, worms, and frogs, along with insects and other small animals.

The Neuse River waterdog lives in two watersheds in North Carolina, and nowhere else in the world. It will build a little nest under a rock by using its nose like a shovel, pushing at the sand, gravel, and mud until it has a safe place to rest. If another waterdog approaches its nest, the owner will attack and bite it to drive it away.

The mudpuppy exhibits neoteny, a trait it shares with the axolotl. In most salamanders, the egg hatches into a larval salamander that lives in water, which means it has external gills so it can breathe underwater. It grows and ultimately metamorphoses into a juvenile salamander that spends most of its time on land, so it loses its external gills in the metamorphosis. Eventually it takes on its adult coloration and pattern. But neither the mudpuppy nor the axolotl metamorphose. Even when it matures, the adult still looks kind of like a big larva, complete with external gills, and it lives underwater its whole life.

The axolotl originally lived in wetlands and lakes in the Mexico Central Valley. This is where Mexico City is and it’s been a hub of civilization for thousands of years. A million people lived there in 1521 when the Spanish invaded and destroyed the Aztec Empire with introduced diseases and war. The axolotl was an important food of the Aztecs and the civilizations that preceded them, and if you’ve only ever seen pictures of axolotls you may wonder why. Salamanders are usually small, but a full-grown axolotl can grow up to 18 inches long, or 45 cm, although most are about half that length.

Most wild axolotls are brown, greenish-brown, or gray, often with lighter speckles. They can even change color somewhat to blend in with their surroundings better. Captive-bred axolotls are usually white or pink, or sometimes other colors or patterns. That’s because they’re bred for the pet trade and for medical research, because not only are they cute and relatively easy to keep in captivity, they have some amazing abilities. Their ability to regenerate lost and injured body parts is remarkable even for amphibians. Researchers study axolotls to learn more about how regeneration works, how genetics of coloration work, and much more. They’re so common in laboratory studies that you’d think there’s no way they could be endangered—but they are.

A lot of the wetlands where the axolotl used to live have been destroyed as Mexico City grows. One of the lakes where it lived has been completely filled in. Its remaining habitat is polluted and contains a lot of introduced species, like carp, that eat young axolotls as well as the same foods that axolotls eat. Conservationists have been working hard to improve the water quality in some areas by filtering out pollutants, and putting up special barriers that keep introduced fish species out.

Even if the axolotl’s habitat was pristine, though, it wouldn’t be easy to repopulate the area right away. Axolotls bred for the pet trade and research aren’t genetically suited for life in the wild anymore, since they’re all descended from a small number of individuals caught in 1864, so they’re all pretty inbred by now.

Mexican scientists and conservationists are working with universities and zoos around the world to develop a breeding program for wild-caught axolotls....

Thanks to Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Extinct Hippo-Like Creature Discovered Hidden in Museum: ‘Sheer Chance’

The golden lion tamarin has very thin fingers and sometimes it's rude:

The golden lion tamarin also has a very long tail:

The cotton-top tamarin [picture by Chensiyuan - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153317160]:

The pangolin is scaly:

The pangolin can also be round:

The East Siberia lemming [photo by Ansgar Walk - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52651170]:

An early painting of a mammoth:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to look at some mammals suggested by Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris. Let’s jump right in, because we have a lot of fascinating animals to learn about!

We’ll start with suggestions by Cillian and Eilee, who both suggested a monkey called the tamarin. Tamarins live in Central and South America and there are around 20 species, all of them quite small.

Cillian specifically suggested the golden lion tamarin, an endangered species that lives in a single small part of Brazil. It has beautiful golden or orange fur that’s longer around the face, like a lion’s mane but extremely stylish. Its face is bare of fur and is gray or grayish-pink in color, with dark eyes and a serious expression like it’s not sure where it left its wallet. It grows about 10 inches long, or 26 cm, not counting its extremely long tail.

The golden lion tamarin spends most of its time in trees, where it eats fruit, flowers, and other plant material, along with eggs, tree frogs, insects, and other small animals. It has narrow hands and long fingers to help it reach into little tree hollows and crevices where insects are hiding, but if it can’t reach an insect that way, it will use a twig or other tool to help.

The golden lion tamarin lives in small family groups, usually a mated pair and their young children. A mother golden lion tamarin often has twins, sometimes triplets, and the other members of her family help take care of the babies.

Because the golden lion tamarin is endangered, mainly due to habitat loss, zoos throughout the world have helped increase the number of babies born in captivity. When it’s safe to release them into the wild, instead of only releasing the young tamarins, the entire family group is released together.

Eilee suggested the cotton-top tamarin, which lives in one small part of Colombia. It’s about the same size as the golden lion tamarin, but is more lightly built and has a somewhat shorter tail. It’s mostly various shades of brown and tan with a dark gray face, but it also has long white hair on its head. Its hair sticks up and makes it look a little bit like those pictures of Einstein, if Einstein was a tiny little monkey.

Like the golden lion tamarin, the cotton-top tamarin lives in small groups and eats both plant material and insects. It’s also critically endangered due to habitat loss, and it’s strictly protected these days.

Next, both Tim and Stella suggested we learn about the pangolin. There are eight species known, which live in parts of Africa and Asia.

The pangolin is a mammal, but it’s covered in scales except for its belly and face. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein that makes up fingernails, hair, hooves, and other hard parts in mammals. When it’s threatened, it rolls up into a ball with its tail over its face, and the sharp-edged, overlapping scales protect it from being bitten or clawed. It has a long, thick tail, short, strong legs with claws, a small head, and very small ears. Its muzzle is long with a nose pad at the end, it has a long sticky tongue, and it has no teeth. It’s nocturnal and uses its big front claws to dig into termite mounds and ant colonies. It has poor vision but a good sense of smell.

Some species of pangolin live in trees and spend the daytime sleeping in a hollow tree. Other species live on the ground and dig deep burrows to sleep in during the day. It’s a solitary animal and just about the only time adult pangolins spend time together is when a pair comes together to mate. Sometimes two males fight over a female, and they do so by slapping each other with their big tails.

Unfortunately for the pangolin, its scales make it sought after by humans for decoration. People also eat pangolins. Habitat loss is also making it tough for the pangolin. All species of pangolin in Asia are endangered or critically endangered, while all species of pangolins in Africa are vulnerable. Pangolins also don’t do well in captivity so it’s hard for zoos to help them.

Next, Conner wants to learn about the lemming, a rodent that’s related to muskrats and voles. Lots of people think they know one thing about the lemming, but that thing isn’t true. We’ll talk about it in a minute.

The lemming grows up to 7 inches long, or 18 cm, and is a little round rodent with small ears, a short tail, short legs, and long fur that’s brown and black in color. It eats plant material, and while it lives in really cold parts of the northern hemisphere, including Siberia, Alaska, northern Canada, and Greenland, it doesn’t hibernate. It just digs tunnels with cozy nesting burrows to warm up in, and finds food by digging tunnels in the snow.

Lemmings reproduce quickly, which is a trait common among rodents, and if the population of lemmings gets too large in one area, some of the lemmings may migrate to find a new place to live. In the olden days people didn’t understand lemming migration. Some people believed that lemmings traveled through the air in stormy weather and that’s why a bunch of lemmings would suddenly appear out of nowhere sometimes. They’d just drop out of the sky. Other people were convinced that if there were too many lemmings, they’d all jump off a cliff and die on purpose, and that’s why sometimes there’d be a lot of lemmings, and then suddenly one day not nearly as many lemmings.

Many people still think that lemmings jump off cliffs, but this isn’t actually true. They’re cute little animals, but they’re not dumb.

Next, let’s learn about two extinct animals, starting with PJ’s suggestion, the woolly mammoth. We actually know a lot about the various species of mammoth because we have so many remains. Our own distant ancestors left cave paintings and carvings of mammoths, we have lots of fossilized remains, and we have lots of subfossil remains too. Because the mammoth lived so recently and sometimes in places where the climate hasn’t changed all that much in the last 10,000 years, namely very cold parts of the world with deep layers of permafrost beneath the surface, sometimes mammoth remains are found that look extremely fresh.

The woolly mammoth was closely related to the modern Asian elephant, but it was much bigger and covered with long fur. A big male woolly mammoth could stand well over 11 feet tall at the shoulder, or 3.5 meters, while females were a little smaller on average. It was well adapted to cold weather and had small ears, a short tail, a thick layer of fat under the skin, and an undercoat of soft, warm hair that was protected by longer guard hairs. It lived in the steppes of northern Europe, Asia, and North America, and like modern elephants it ate plants. It had long, curved tusks that could be over 13 feet long, or 4 meters, in a big male, and one of the things it used it tusks for was to sweep snow away from plants.

The woolly mammoth went extinct at the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, although a small population remained on a remote island until only 4,000 years ago.

Our last animal this week is Morris’s suggestion, and it’s actually not a single type of animal but a whole order. Desmostylians were big aquatic mammals, and the only known order of aquatic mammals that are completely extinct.

When you think of aquatic mammals, you might think of whales, seals, and sea cows, or even hippos. Desmostylians didn’t look like any of those animals, and they had features not found in any other animal.

Desmostylians lived in shallow water off the Pacific coast, and fossils have been found in North America, southern Japan, parts of Russia, and other places. They first appear in the fossil record around 30 million years ago and disappear from the fossil record about 7 million years ago. They were fully aquatic animals that probably mostly ate kelp or sea grass, similar to modern sirenians, which include dugongs and manatees.

Let’s talk about Paleoparadoxia to find out roughly what Desmostylians looked and acted like. Paleoparadoxia grew about 7 feet long, or 2.15 meters, and had a robust skeleton. It had short legs, although the front legs were longer and its four toes were probably webbed to help it swim. It probably acted a lot like a sirenian, walking along the sea floor to find plants to eat. Its nostrils were on the top of its nose so it could take breaths at the surface more easily, and it had short tusks in its mouth, something like modern hippos. It may have looked a little like a hippo, but also a little like a dugong, and possibly a little like a walrus.

One really strange thing about Desmostylians in general are their teeth. No other animals known have teeth like theirs. Their molars and premolars are incredibly tough and are made up of little enamel cylinders. The order’s name actually means “bundle of columns,” referring to the teeth, and the bundles point upward so that the tops of the columns make up the tooth’s chewing surface. Actually, chewing surface isn’t the right term because Desmostylians probably didn’t chew their food. Scientists think they pulled plants up by the roots using their teeth and tusks, then used suction to slurp up the plants and swallow them whole.

...

Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions this week! Sorry this episode is late--the site was down. :(

Further reading:

Bobolinks

A frill-neck lizard showing off:

A bobolink:

The great-eared nightjar [picture by Venkata Shreeram Mallimadugula, taken from this site]:

Another great-eared nightjar [Picture by Nigel Voaden from UK - Great Eared-Nightjar, Tangkoko, Sulawesi, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39857392]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have an episode about some birds and reptiles. Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions! If this episode showed up later than usual in the podcast feed, it’s because I’ve been having trouble with the website and couldn’t get it uploaded until it was fixed.

We’ll kick off the episode with an animal that can’t kick, because snakes don’t have any legs. Audie suggested we learn about the scaleless rat snake, which means that first we have to learn about the rat snake, the ordinary one with scales.

Rat snakes are constrictors and are common throughout many parts of Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East, and they’re called rat snakes because they eat rats and other small animals like lizards, frogs, and baby birds.

Rat snakes are popular pets because they’re so pretty and they aren’t dangerous to humans. Different species are different colors and patterns, and the rhinoceros rat snake, also called the Vietnamese longnose snake, even has a little hornlike projection on the tip of its nose that points forward. I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about that particular rat snake before on the podcast, but I can’t look up which episode because the website is down.

Most rat snakes don’t grow much bigger than 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, but a few species can get longer than that. The black rat snake, which lives in North America, can grow over 8 feet long, or more than 2.5 meters. It’s black with small white markings on the head, but snakes bred for sale as pets are sometimes white all over or partially white, or even albino, meaning an individual has a mutation where its body doesn’t produce pigment. Pet black rat snakes are also bred that don’t have scales.

That brings us to the scaleless rat snake. It’s an ordinary rat snake but it has a mutation that causes it to have very few scales. This is a mutation that happens occasionally in the wild since it’s a recessive trait, and while it can make the snake a little more vulnerable to injury, scaleless snakes can survive just fine in the wild. They do have belly scales like a normal snake, which are the ones that allow them to move around, and they may have a scattering of scales on other parts of the body too. A scaleless snake still sheds its skin once a year like an ordinary snake, since it’s actually the outer layer of skin that sheds along with the scales.

Scaleless rat snakes are popular as pets because they’re so soft and because their coloration is usually very bright. A snake’s coloration comes from pigments in its skin. A snake’s scales are actually transparent, so without a layer of scales, a scaleless snake looks even more colorful than a regular snake. Many species of snake have been found in the wild that are scaleless, but it seems to be a little more common in rat snakes.

Next, Dylan and Emily wanted to learn about the frill-neck lizard, which is found in northern Australia and the very southern part of New Guinea. It’s a big lizard that can grow almost three feet long, or 90 cm, including its incredibly long tail. Males are larger than females on average, with a bigger frill.

The frill is a flap of skin around the head and neck, and most of the time it’s folded back over the neck and shoulders so it’s not that noticeable. The lizard is pretty ordinary-looking that way, just a big gray or brown animal with a big head. But when the lizard feels threatened, or if it comes across another frill-neck lizard, it can extend the frill by moving the small bones and cartilage that act as struts, which also requires the lizard to open its mouth.

When extended, the frill is as much as a foot across, or 30 cm, and it’s marked with bright colors. Different individuals have different colored frills, red, orange, yellow, or white, or a mixture of colors and patterns. The size and color of the frill opening up so quickly will often startle a potential predator, allowing the lizard to escape. The frill-neck lizard can even run on two legs if it needs to, although it has to run with its head pointing straight up in the air.

The frill-neck lizard mostly eats insects, especially termites. It spends most of its time in trees and some people believe it can use its frill as a parachute, but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case.

Let’s move on to a few birds next. Maryjane suggested we learn about the bobolink, a type of blackbird native to the Americas. In summer the male bobolink is black with a pale yellow nape and white markings, and in winter he molts into a drab outfit of brown to help him hide. The female is brown with black streaks and stripes.

In the summer the bobolink flies to the northern United States and Canada to nest and raise babies, and it migrates to southern South America in winter. This is a huge distance for such a little songbird to travel, but it’s a strong flyer and can travel over a thousand miles, or 1,800 km, in a single day. It navigates using the stars at night and can sense the earth’s magnetic field too, which helps it find its way.

The bobolink prefers prairies and grassy areas. It eats seeds and insects, and especially likes rice and a type of caterpillar called the armyworm. It’s sometimes considered a pest because it eats so much rice, but then again armyworms are also considered pests and the bobolink eats so many of them that it has probably saved a lot of crops that way. While the bobolink is still numerous, its numbers have been in decline for years due to habitat loss.

The bobolink is most famous for its song. Both males and females sing, and males not only sing while perched, they sing while flying. The bobolink’s songs are varied and lovely. This is what the bobolink sounds like, first a song recorded while the bird was flying:

[bobolink song]

And here’s another song recorded while a different bird in a different place was perched and singing:

[bobolink song]

Finally, both Katie and Eilee wanted to learn about the great-eared nightjar, also called the dragon bird or the baby dragon.

Nightjars are nocturnal birds, and the great-eared nightjar is found in parts of southern and Southeast Asia. It can grow up to 16 inches long, or 41 cm, and is a chonky bird with big dark eyes and a broad bill that can open very wide. The “ears” in its name are tufts of feathers on the top of its head that look like ears or little horns. It can raise the ears if it wants to, but most of the time they just stick out backwards. Like other nightjars, the great-eared nightjar’s head looks flattened most of the time, and the bird itself spends a lot of time crouched down looking like a very flat bird, but then it sits up and pricks up its ear tufts, and it looks more like a thin owl with a long tail. The bird is brown with black markings, which makes it almost invisible at night.

During the day, the great-eared nightjar sits in a tree or just on the forest floor, so well camouflaged by its feathers that it blends in with the leaf litter or kind of looks like a piece of stump or broken-off branch. At night it flies around catching insects on the wing like a bat.

Instead of building a nest and laying eggs in it like other birds, the great-eared nightjar just lays a single egg among dead leaves on the ground. The egg, and the baby when it hatches, are so well camouflaged that it’s as safe on the ground as it would be in a nest way up in a tree.

The great-eared nightjar has an eerie call. This is what it sounds like:

[great-eared nightjar call]

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected].

Thanks for listening!

Here's the big invertebrate episode I've been promising people! Thanks to Sam, warbrlwatchr, Jayson, Richard from NC, Holly, Kabir, Stewie, Thaddeus, and Trech for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Does the Spiral Siphonophore Reign as the Longest Animal in the World?

The common nawab butterfly:

The common nawab caterpillar:

A velvet worm:

A giant siphonophore [photo by Catriona Munro, Stefan Siebert, Felipe Zapata, Mark Howison, Alejandro Damian-Serrano, Samuel H. Church, Freya E.Goetz, Philip R. Pugh, Steven H.D.Haddock, Casey W.Dunn - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1055790318300460#f0030]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Hello to 2026! This is usually where I announce that I’m going to do a series of themed episodes throughout the coming year, and usually I forget all about it after a few months. This year I have a different announcement. After our nine-year anniversary next month, which is episode 470, instead of new episodes I’m going to be switching to old Patreon episodes. I closed the Patreon permanently at the end of December but all the best episodes will now run in the main feed until our ten-year anniversary in February 2027. That’s episode 523, when we’ll have a big new episode that will also be the very last one ever.

I thought this was the best way to close out the podcast instead of just stopping one day. The only problem is the big list of suggestions. During January I’m going to cover as many suggestions as I possibly can. This week’s episode is about invertebrates, and in the next few weeks we’ll have an episode about mammals, one about reptiles and birds, and one about amphibians and fish, although I don’t know what order they’ll be in yet. Episode 470 will be about animals discovered in 2025, along with some corrections and updates.

I hope no one is sad about the podcast ending! You have a whole year to get used to it, and the old episodes will remain forever on the website so you can listen whenever you like.

All that out of the way, let’s start 2026 right with a whole lot of invertebrates! Thanks to Sam, warbrlwatchr, Jayson, Richard from NC, Holly, Kabir, Stewie, Thaddeus, and Trech for their suggestions this week!

Let’s start with Trech’s suggestion, a humble ant called the weaver ant. It’s also called the green ant even though not all species are green, because a species found in Australia is partially green. Most species are red, brown, or yellowish, and they’re found in parts of northern and western Australia, southern Asia, and on most islands in between the two areas, and in parts of central Africa. The weaver ant lives in trees in tropical areas, and gets the name weaver ant because of the way it makes its nest.

The nests are made out of leaves, but the leaves are still growing on the tree. Worker ants grab the edge of a leaf in their mandibles, then pull the leaf toward another leaf or sometimes double the leaf over. Sometimes ants have to make a chain to reach another leaf, with each ant grabbing the next ant around the middle until the ant at the end of the chain can grab the edge of a leaf. While the leaf is being pulled into place alongside the edge of another leaf, or the opposite edge of the same leaf, other workers bring larvae from an established part of the nest. The larvae secrete silk to make cocoons, but a worker ant holds a larva at the edge of the leaf, taps its little head, and the larva secretes silk that the workers use to bind the leaf edges together. A single colony has multiple nests, often in more than one tree, and are constantly constructing new ones as the old leaves are damaged by weather or just die off naturally.

The weaver ant mainly eats insects, which is good for the trees because many of the insects the ants kill and eat are ones that can damage trees. This is one reason why farmers in some places like seeing weaver ants, especially fruit farmers, and sometimes farmers will even buy a weaver ant colony starter pack to place in their trees deliberately. The farmer doesn’t have to use pesticides, and the weaver ants even cause some fruit- and leaf-eating animals to stay away, because the ants can give a painful bite. People in many areas also eat the weaver ant larvae, which is considered a delicacy.

Our next suggestion is by Holly, the zombie snail. I actually covered this in a Patreon episode, but I didn’t schedule it for next year because I thought I’d used the information already in a regular episode, but now I can’t find it. So let’s talk about it now!

In August of 2019, hikers in Taiwan came across a snail that looked like it was on its way to a rave. It had what looked like flashing neon decorations in its head, pulsing in green and orange. Strobing colors are just not something you’d expect to find on an animal, or if you did it would be a deep-sea animal. The situation is not good for the snail, let me tell you. It’s due to a parasitic flatworm called the green-banded broodsac.

The flatworm infects birds, but to get into the bird, first it has to get into a snail. To get into a snail, it has to be in a bird, though, because it lives in the cloaca of a bird and attaches its eggs to the bird’s droppings. When a snail eats a yummy bird dropping, it also eats the eggs. The eggs hatch in the snail’s body instead of being digested, where eventually they develop into sporocysts. That’s a branched structure that spreads throughout the snail’s body, including into its head and eyestalks.

The sporocyst branches that are in the snail’s eyestalks further develop into broodsacs, which look like little worms or caterpillars banded with green and orange or green and yellow, sometimes with black or brown bands too—it depends on the species. About the time the broodsacs are ready for the next stage of life, the parasite takes control of the snail’s brain. The snail goes out in daylight and sits somewhere conspicuous, and its body, or sometimes just its head or eyestalks, becomes semi-translucent so that the broodsacs show through it. Then the broodsacs swell up and start to pulse.

The colors and movement resemble a caterpillar enough that it attracts birds that eat caterpillars. A bird will fly up, grab what it thinks is a caterpillar, and eat it up. The broodsac develops into a mature flatworm in the bird’s digestive system, and sticks itself to the walls of the cloaca with two suckers, and the whole process starts again.

The snail gets the worst part of this bargain, naturally, but it doesn’t necessarily die. It can survive for a year or more even with the parasite living in it, and it can still use its eyes. When it’s bird time, the bird isn’t interested in the snail itself. It just wants what it thinks is a caterpillar, and a lot of times it just snips the broodsac out of the snail’s eyestalk without doing a lot of damage to the snail.

If a bird doesn’t show up right away, sometimes the broodsac will burst out of the eyestalk anyway. It can survive for up to an hour outside the snail and continues to pulsate, so it will sometimes still get eaten by a bird.

Okay, that was disgusting. Let’s move on quickly to the tiger beetle, suggested by both Sam and warblrwatchr.

There are thousands of tiger beetle species known and they live all over the world, except for Antarctica. Because there are so many different species in so many different habitats, they don’t all look the same, but many common species are reddish-orange with black stripes, which is where the name tiger beetle comes from. Others are plain black or gray, shiny blue, dark or pale brown, spotted, mottled, iridescent, bumpy, plain, bulky, or lightly built. They vary a lot, but one thing they all share are long legs.

That’s because the tiger beetle is famous for its running speed. Not all species can fly, but even in the ones that can, its wings are small and it can’t fly far. But it can run so fast that scientists have discovered that its simple eyes can’t gather enough photons for the brain to process an image of its surroundings while it runs. That’s why the beetle will run extremely fast, then stop for a moment before running again. Its brain needs a moment to catch up.

The tiger beetle eats insects and other small animals, which it runs after to catch. The fastest species known lives around the shores of Lake Eyre in South Australia, Rivacindela hudsoni. It grows around 20 mm long, and can run as much as 5.6 mph, or 9 km/hour, not that it’s going to be running for an entire hour at a time. Still, that’s incredibly fast for something with little teeny legs.

Another insect that is really fast is called the common nawab, suggested by Jayson. It’s a butterfly that lives in tropical forests and rainforests in South Asia and many islands. Its wings are mainly brown or black with a big yellow or greenish spot in the middle and some little white spots along the edges, and the hind wings have two little tails that look like spikes. It’s really pretty and has a wingspan more than three inches across, or about 8.5 cm.

The common nawab spends most of its time in the forest canopy, flying quickly from flower to flower. Females will travel long distances, but when a female is ready to lay her eggs, she returns to where she hatched. The male stays in his territory, and will chase away other common nawab males if they approach.

The common nawab caterpillar is green with pale yellow stripes, and it has four horn-like projections on its head, which is why it’s called the dragon-headed caterpillar. It’s really awesome-looking and I put it on the list to cover years ago, then forgot it until Jayson recommended it. But it turns out there’s not a lot known about the common nawab, so there’s not a lot to say about it.

Next, Richard from NC suggested the velvet worm. It’s not a worm and it’s not made of velvet, although its body is soft and velvety to the touch....

Thanks to Holly for suggesting this week's topic!

Further reading:

Mermaids: Myth, Kith and Kin [this article is not for children]

Feejee Mermaid

A manatee:

A female grey seal, looking winsome:

A drawing of the "original" Fiji (or Feejee) mermaid:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Let’s close out the year 2025 with a mystery episode! Holly suggested we talk about mermaids!

Mermaids are creatures of folklore who are supposed to look like humans, but instead of legs they have fish tails. These days mermaids are usually depicted with a single tail, but it was common in older artwork for a mermaid to be shown with two tails, which replaced both legs. Not all mermaids were girls, either. Mermen were just as common.

Cultures from around the world have stories about mermaid-like individuals. Sometimes they’re gods or goddesses, like the Syrian story of a goddess so beautiful that when she transformed into a fish, only her legs changed, because her upper half was too beautiful to alter, or the Greek god Triton, who is usually depicted as a man with two fish tails for legs. Sometimes they’re monsters who cause storms, curse ships, or lure sailors to their doom. Sometimes they can transform into humans, like the story from Madagascar about a fisherman who catches a mermaid in his net. She transforms into a human woman and they get married, but when he breaks a promise to her, she turns back into a mermaid and swims away.

In 2012, a TV special aired on Animal Planet that claimed that mermaids were real, and a lot of people believed it. It imitated the kind of real documentaries that Animal Planet often ran, and the only disclaimer was in the credits. I remember how upset a lot of people were about it, especially teachers and scientists. So just to be clear, mermaids aren’t real.

Many researchers think at least some mermaid stories might be based on real animals. The explorer Christopher Columbus reported seeing three mermaids in 1493, but said they weren’t as beautiful as he’d heard. Most researchers think he actually saw manatees. A few centuries later, a mermaid was captured and killed off the coast of Brazil by European scientists, and the careful drawings we still have of the mermaid’s hand bones correspond exactly to the bones of a manatee’s flipper.

Female manatees are larger than males on average, and a really big female can grow over 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters. Most manatees are between 9 and 10 feet long, or a little less than 3 meters. Its body is elongated like a whale’s, but unlike a whale it’s slow, usually only swimming about as fast as a human can swim. Its skin is gray or brown although often it has algae growing on it that helps camouflage it. The end of the manatee’s tail looks like a rounded paddle, and it has front flippers but no rear limbs. Its face is rounded with a prehensile upper lip covered with bristly whiskers, which it uses to find and gather water plants.

The manatee doesn’t look a lot like a person, but it looks more like a person than most water animals. It has a neck and can turn its head like a person, its flippers are fairly long and resemble arms, and females have a pair of teats that are near their armpits, if a manatee had armpits, which it does not. But that’s close enough for Christopher Columbus to decide he was seeing a mermaid.

Seals may have also contributed to mermaid stories. In Scottish folklore, the selkie is a seal that can transform into human shape, usually by taking off its skin. There are lots of stories of people who steal the selkie’s skin and hide it so that the selkie will marry the person—because selkies are beautiful in their human form. Eventually the selkie finds the hidden skin and returns to the sea.

Similar seal-folk legends are found in other parts of northern Europe, including Sweden, Iceland, Norway, and Ireland. Many of the stories overlap with mermaid stories. Seals do have appealing human-like faces, have clawed front flippers that sort of resemble arms, and have rear flippers that are fused to act like a tail, even if it doesn’t look much like a fish tail.

The grey seal is a common animal off the coast of northern Europe, and a big male can grow almost 11 feet long, or 3.3 meters, although 9 feet is more common, or 2.7 meters. It has a large snout and no external ear flaps. Males are dark grey or brown, females are more silvery in color. It mainly eats fish, but will also eat other animals, including crustaceans, octopuses, other seals, and even porpoises.

While I don’t think it has anything to do with the mermaid or selkie legends, it is interesting to note that seals are good at imitating human voices. We learned about this in episode 225, about talking mammals. For instance, Hoover the talking seal, a harbor seal from Maine who was raised by a human after his mother died. Imagine if you were walking along the shore and a seal said this to you:

[Hoover the talking seal saying “Hey get over here!”]

Let’s finish with the Japanese legend of the ningyo and a weird taxidermy creature called the Feejee mermaid. The ningyo is a being of folklore that dates back to at least the 7th century. It was a fish with a head like a person, usually found in the ocean but sometimes in freshwater. If someone found a ningyo washed up on shore, it was supposed to be a bad omen, foretelling war and other disasters.

If you remember the big fish episode a few weeks ago, if an oarfish is found near the surface of the ocean around Japan, it’s supposed to foretell an earthquake. The oarfish has a red fin that runs from its head down its spine, like a mane or a comb, and the ningyo was also supposed to have a red comb on its head, like a rooster’s comb, or sometimes red hair. Some people think the ningyo is based on the oarfish. The oarfish is a deep-sea fish so it’s rare, usually only seen near the surface when it’s dying, and it has a flat face that looks more like a human face than most fish, if you squint and really want to believe you’re seeing a mythical creature.

These days, artwork of the ningyo usually looks a lot more like mermaids of European legend, but the earliest paintings don’t usually have arms, just a human head on a fish body. But by the late 18th century, a weird type of artwork had become popular among Japanese fishermen, a type of crude but inventive taxidermy that created what looked like small, creepy mermaids.

They looked like dried-out monkeys from the waist up, with a dried-out fish tail instead of legs. That’s because that’s exactly what they were. Japanese fishermen made these mermaids along with lots of other monsters, and sold them to travelers for high prices. The fishermen told tall tales about how they’d found the monster, killed it, and preserved it, and pretended to be reluctant to sell it, and of course that meant the traveler would offer even more money for it.

The most famous of these fake monsters was called the Fiji Mermaid, and it got famous because P.T. Barnum displayed it in his museum in 1842 and said it had been caught near the Fiji Islands, in the South Pacific. It was about three feet along, or 91 cm, and was probably made from a young monkey and a salmon.

The original Fiji mermaid was probably destroyed in a fire at some point, but it was such a popular exhibit that other wannabe showmen either bought or made replicas, some of which are still around today. People still sometimes make similar monsters, but they use craft materials instead of dead animals. They’re still creepy-looking, though, which is part of the fun.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected].

Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Emily, Jo, and Alexandra for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Highland Cattle Society

Mongolian Sheep

The Donkey Sanctuary

The Highland cow is so cute (picture taken from the first site linked above):

Some fat-tailed sheep (picture taken from the sheep article linked above):

Donkeys:

A happy donkey and a happy person (photo taken from the Donkey Sanctuary's site, linked above):

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

After last week’s giant fish episode, this week we’re going to have a shorter episode of animals you’ve probably seen, especially if you live in the countryside. But first, I forgot to credit two people from last week’s episode, Dylan and Emily, who both wanted to hear about mudskippers along with Arthur! I had so many names I missed some.

This week we’ll talk about some domestic mammals, suggested by Alexandra, Jo, and Emily. Let’s start with Emily’s suggestion, the Highland cow.

Cows are classified in the family Bovidae, which includes not just the domestic cow and its relations but goats, sheep, antelopes, and many other animals with cloven hooves who chew the cud as part of the digestive process--but not deer or giraffes, and not the pronghorn even though people call it an antelope. It is confusing. Many bovids have horns, usually only two but sometimes four or even six, and those horns are never branched. Sometimes only the male has horns, sometimes both the male and female. Bovids don’t have incisors in the front of the upper jaw, only in the lower jaw. Instead, a bovid has a tough dental pad that helps it grab plants.

The Highland cow is a breed of domestic cow that originated in Scotland, although it’s now popular in many other places too. It’s a tough animal with a long outer coat of fur and a short, fuzzy undercoat that helps it survive harsh winters. Most are reddish-brown, but some are black, silvery-white, dun, or other shades. It has long, wide horns and its long fur usually falls over its face, which protects its eyes and also looks incredibly cute.

Not only can the Highland cow thrive on pasture that’s considered poor, meaning the plants aren’t as nutritious, it’s also disease resistant, even-tempered, and intelligent. It’s a compact, relatively small cow, but it’s not a miniature cow. Like, you can’t pick it up like a dog, although you could probably hug one if the farmer says it’s okay. A bull can stand about 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters, while cows are smaller overall.

The Highland cow is raised for its meat, which is naturally lean and delicious. But because they also happen to be small for cows, and so even-tempered, and so cute, many small farms and petting zoos keep a few just as pets. Since the Highland cow likes eating plants that other cow breeds won’t touch, it’s also helpful for clearing overgrown land.

Next, Alexandra wanted to learn more about the fat-tailed sheep, another bovid. The sheep is one of the oldest domesticated animals in the world, with some experts estimating that it was first domesticated at least 11,000 years ago and possibly over 13,000 years ago, around Asia and the Middle East. Sheep are especially useful to humans because not only can you eat them, they produce wool.

Wool has incredible insulating properties, as you’ll know if you’ve ever worn a wool sweater in the snow. Even if it gets wet, you stay nice and warm. Even better, you don’t have to kill the sheep to get the wool. The sheep just gets a haircut every year to cut its wool short. Wild sheep don’t grow a lot of wool, though. They mostly have hair like goats. Humans didn’t start selecting for domestic sheep that produced wool until around 8,000 years ago.

The fat-tailed sheep isn’t a single breed but a type of sheep, most common in central Asia, northern Africa, and the Middle East. It’s adapted for life in arid conditions, where there isn’t a lot of water. The fat deposits on both sides of the tail act like a camel’s hump, allowing the animal to absorb the stored fat if it can’t find enough food and water.

The fat-tailed sheep can have a really huge tail, so big it can make up almost a third of its body weight. Because the fat mostly collects on either side of the tail bones, the tail’s shape has two lobes, which makes the sheep look like it has an extra butt on its butt. In some breeds, the tail gets wider as the fat deposits grow, while in other breeds, the tail just gets longer, sometimes so long it actually brushes the ground.

The tail fat helps the sheep, but it’s also considered a delicacy to people. Wherever the fat-tailed sheep is raised, there are special recipes to cook the tail. Many breeds of fat-tailed sheep also produce long, coarse wool that’s used to make carpets and felt.

We’ll finish with Jo’s suggestion, the domestic donkey. Donkeys are equids, and instead of cloven hooves like bovids, they have solid hooves. They’re closely related to horses and zebras, and more distantly related to rhinoceroses and tapirs.

The domestic donkey is descended from the African wild ass. Researchers estimate it was domesticated around five to seven thousand years ago by the ancient nomadic peoples of Nubia in Africa, and quickly spread throughout the Middle East and into southern Asia and Europe.

The domestic donkey is a strong, sturdy animal that’s usually fairly small. One of the biggest breeds is the American Mammoth Jackstock, and another is the French Baudet du Poitou, which has long fur. Both breeds can be as big as a horse. Big donkey breeds like these were mostly developed to cross with horses, to produce even larger, stronger mules. Mules are hybrid animals and are infertile, but they’re very strong.

The donkey is usually gray or brown and has long ears. Most have a darker stripe down the spine, called an eel stripe, and another stripe across the shoulders. Many have a lighter-colored nose, belly, and legs. The donkey’s mane is short and stands upright.

The donkey’s small size and big strength has made it a popular working animal throughout the world. It can carry loads, can be ridden, and can pull carts and plows. It’s famously tough and can be stubborn if it doesn’t feel like it’s being treated well, and it can even be dangerous when it kicks and bites. Sometimes farmers keep donkeys with their sheep or other animals, because the donkey will look out for danger and warn the herd by braying if it sees a predator. If the predator gets too close, the donkey will attack it instead of running away.

In many places in the world, the donkey is an important work animal even today. Not everyone is lucky enough to afford a tractor or truck, so donkeys do the same work for people that they’ve done for thousands of years. The problem is that when a donkey gets old or is injured, and can’t work anymore, sometimes they’re killed for meat or just abandoned. Luckily there are donkey rescues who do their best to help as many donkeys as they can, especially the Donkey Sanctuary.

The Donkey Sanctuary started in England in 1969, but it now has sanctuaries throughout Europe, and it runs programs that offer free veterinary care and education about donkeys for people in many parts of the world. One important thing the Donkey Sanctuary does, and other donkey rescues do too, is give a home to elderly donkeys who can’t work anymore. It’s only fair that a hard-working donkey gets to retire and have a peaceful old age.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at [email protected].

Thanks for listening!

It's an episode just absolutely full of fish! Thanks to Arthur, Yuzu, Jayson, Kabir, Nora, Siya, Joel, Elizabeth, Mac, Ryder, Alyx, Dean, and Riley for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Study uncovers mechanics of machete-like 'tail-whipping' in thresher sharks

Business end of a sawfish:

Giant freshwater stingray!

The frilled shark looks like an eel:

The frilled shark's teeth:

The thresher shark and its whip-like tail [photo by Thomas Alexander - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50280277]:

The Halmahera epaulette shark, looking a little bit like a long skinny koi fish [photo by Mark Erdmann, California Academy of Sciences, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30260864]:

A mudskipper, which is a fish even though it kind of looks like a weird frog [photo by Heinonlein - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44502355]:

The red-lipped batfish wants a big kiss:

The male blue groper is very blue [photo by Andrew Harvey, some rights reserved (CC BY) - https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/62196538, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=157789928]:

The giant oarfish is very long:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have a big fish episode! I mean, it’s a big episode about a lot of different fish, not necessarily fish that are big—although some of them sure are! Thanks to Arthur, Yuzu, Jayson, Kabir, Nora, Siya, Joel, Elizabeth, Mac, Ryder, Alyx, Dean, and Riley. I told you this is a big fish episode.

Let’s jump right in with a fish suggested by Jayson, the sawfish. There are five species of sawfish alive today. The smallest can still grow over 10 feet long, or 3 meters, while the biggest species can grow over 20 feet long, or 6 meters. The largest sawfish ever reliably measured was 24 feet long, or 7.3 meters.

The sawfish lives mostly in warm, shallow ocean waters, usually where the bottom is muddy or sandy. It can also tolerate brackish and even freshwater, and will sometimes swim into rivers and live there just fine.

The sawfish is a type of ray, and rays are most closely related to sharks. Like sharks, rays have an internal skeleton made of cartilage instead of bone, but they also have bony teeth. You can definitely see the similarity between sharks and sawfish in the body shape, although the sawfish is flattened underneath, which allows it to lie on the ocean floor. There’s also another detail that helps you tell a sawfish from most sharks: the rostrum, or snout. It’s surprisingly long and studded with teeth on both sides, which makes it look like a saw.

The teeth on the sawfish’s saw are actual teeth. They’re called rostral teeth and the rostrum itself is part of the skull, not a beak or a mouth. It’s covered in skin just like the rest of the body. The sawfish’s mouth is located underneath the body quite a bit back from the rostrum’s base, and the mouth contains a lot of ordinary teeth that aren’t very sharp.

Since the sawfish has plenty of teeth in its mouth, you may be wondering how and why it also has extra teeth on both sides of its saw. It’s because the rostral teeth evolved from dermal denticles.

Dermal denticles look like scales but they’re literally teeth, they’re just not used for eating. Sharks have them too, along with some other fish. In the case of the sawfish, the rostral teeth grow much larger than an ordinary dermal denticle, and stick out sideways.

Both the rostrum and the head are packed with electroreceptors that allow the sawfish to sense tiny electrical charges that animals emit as they move. This might mean a school of fish swimming through muddy water, or it might mean a crustacean hiding in the sand. The sawfish sometimes uses its rostrum to dig prey out of the sand, but it also uses it to slash at fish or other animals. Then the sawfish can either grab the injured or dead animal with its mouth or pin it to the sea floor with its rostrum to maneuver it into its mouth. Its mouth is relatively small and it prefers to swallow its food whole, head-first, so it can only eat fish that are smaller than its mouth. That’s also why it doesn’t want to eat people. Its mouth is too small.

Yuzu wanted to learn about another shark relation, the giant freshwater stingray, which lives in rivers in southeast Asia. It’s dark gray-brown on its back and white underneath, and it has a little pointy nose at the front of its disc. It also has dermal denticles on its back.

The giant freshwater stingray has a rounded, flattened body, and it’s really big. A big female can grow over 7 feet across, or 2.2 meters. Its tail is long and thin with the largest spine of any stingray known, up to 15 inches long, or 38 cm. Its tail is so long that if you measure the giant freshwater stingray by length including its tail, instead of by width of its disc, it can be as much as 16 feet long, or about 5 meters. Some researchers think there might be individuals out there much larger than any ever measured, possibly up to 16 feet wide. The length and thinness of the tail gives the ray its other common name, the giant freshwater whipray, because its tail looks like a whip.

While we’re talking about shark relations, let’s go ahead and talk about a few actual sharks. Kabir wanted to learn about the frilled shark, which looks and acts more like an eel than a shark. A big female can grow up to 6 and a half feet long, or 2 meters. Males are a little shorter on average. The frilled shark has the same anatomy found in ancient sharks from the fossil record, dating back at least 95 million years. It’s found a body type that works for it.

The frilled shark lives on the continental shelf in many parts of the world, and while it technically lives near the sea floor, at night it migrates closer to the ocean surface to find fish, squid and other cephalopods, and other food. There are two species known, with the southern African frilled shark only discovered in 2009.

The frilled shark is dark brown or gray, and its jaws are long and contain clusters of teeth in little rows. Each tooth has three sharp points, and there are 300 teeth, so a frilled shark has 900 points in its mouth. The points are so sharp that scientists examining dead sharks have gotten cut on the teeth, which would be really embarrassing if you’re a shark expert that was bitten by a dead shark. The frilled shark can open its jaws extremely wide to swallow fish and other animals that are up to about half the size of the shark itself. It even eats other sharks.

Next, Joel wanted to learn about the thresher shark. It’s a truly big fish that can grow up to 20 feet long, or over 6 meters. It’s a fast, slender shark with a tail fin that can be as long as its body. It eats a lot of other animals, including birds and crustaceans, but it specializes in hunting fish that travel in schools, like tuna, sardines, and mackerel. It uses its incredibly long tail as a whip, slapping a fish to stun it so the shark can eat it. When it whips its tail, its body flexes so that its head points downward in the water with the tail snapping forward over it. A 2024 study determined that the thresher shark’s vertebral column is fortified to allow it to work like a catapult. The thresher shark can also use its long tail to help it leap out of the water completely, although scientists don’t know why it wants to do that.

There are three species of thresher shark known to science, but in 1995 a genetic analysis revealed the possible presence of a fourth species. Scientists think it lives in the eastern Pacific and may look similar to the bigeye thresher, enough that it gets misidentified as that species when it’s seen. The three known species of thresher shark are hard to tell apart at a distance as it is.

And for our last shark, Siya asked about the Halmahera epaulette shark. It’s light brown with darker and lighter spots, and is a slender shark that can grow a little over 2 feet long, or 68 cm. It lives around Indonesia, and it might live in other places too. We don’t know yet, because it was only discovered in 2013 and only two specimens have ever been found.

Epaulette sharks are also called walking sharks, because they use their fins to walk along the sea floor and explore crevices in rocks. Some species can even walk short distances on land to enter tidal pools and other places where they can find food. They live in warm, shallow water, usually near reefs or islands, and they eat whatever small animals they can find. There are nine species known, but there are undoubtedly more than haven’t yet been discovered by science. You might think this is strange for a shark that can walk on land, but walking sharks are nocturnal and not very big, so it’s easy to miss them when they’re out and about.

That brings us to Arthur’s suggestion, the mudskipper. The mudskipper also uses its fins to walk. Its pectoral fins are muscular and allow it to climb out of the water and onto land, climb into low branches, and even jump. Its pectoral fins look like little arms, complete with an elbow. The elbow is actually a joint between the actual fins and the radial bones, which in most fish are hidden within the body but which stick out of the mudskipper’s sides a short distance. This helps it move around on land more easily. Its pelvic fins are also shaped in such a way that they act as little suction cups on land.

The mudskipper is so good at living on land that it’s actually considered semi-aquatic. It lives in mudflats, mangrove swamps, the mouths of rivers where they empty into the ocean, and along the coast, although it prefers water that’s less salty than the ocean but more salty than ordinary freshwater. It only lives in tropical and subtropical areas because it needs high humidity to absorb oxygen through its skin and the lining of its mouth a

Thanks to Måns, Sam, Owen and Askel for this week's suggestions!

Further reading:

Shingleback Lizard

What controls the colour of the common mānuka stick insect?

The mossy leaf-tailed gecko has skin flaps that hide its shadow. There's a lizard in this photo, I swear! [photo by Charles J. Sharp - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92125100]:

A shingleback lizard, pretending it has two heads:

The beautiful wood nymph is a beautiful moth but also it looks like a bird poop:

The Indian stick insect (photo by Ryan K Perry, found on this page):

The buff tip moth mimics a broken-off stick. This person has a whole handful of them:

A cuttlefish can change colors quickly [photo by Σ64 - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77733806]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to talk about a few types of camouflage, a suggestion by Måns, and we’ll also talk about some camouflaged animals suggested by Sam, Owen and Aksel, Dylan, and Nina.

There are lots of types of camouflage, not all of it visual in nature. Back in episode 191 we talked about some toxic moths that generate high-pitched clicks that bats hear, recognize, and avoid. Naturally, some non-toxic moths also generate the same sounds to mimic the toxic moths.

Måns specifically suggested cryptic coloration, also called crypsis. It’s a type of camouflage that allows an animal to blend into their surroundings, which can involve multiple methods.

Some animals have cryptic coloration mainly along the edges of the body, to defeat a skill many predators use called edge detection. A lot of amphibians and reptiles have patches surrounded by an outline, with dark patches having a darker outline and light patches having a lighter outline. This acts as disruptive camouflage, hiding the outline of an animal’s body as it moves around. Some animals take this camouflage even further, with a way to hide their own shadow.

This is the case with the mossy leaf-tailed gecko, which is native to the forests of eastern Madagascar. It can grow up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm, not counting its tail, and it’s nocturnal. Its tail is flat and broad, sort of shaped like a leaf, but it doesn’t disguise itself as a leaf.

The mossy leaf-tailed gecko has a complicated gray and brown pattern that looks like tree bark, and it can change its coloration a little bit to help it blend in even more. At night it’s well hidden in tree branches as it climbs around looking for insects, but in the day it needs to hide really well to avoid becoming some other animal’s snack while it’s sleeping.

It does this by finding a comfortable branch and flattening its body and tail against it so that it just looks like another part of the branch. But to make it even more hidden, it has a flap of skin along its sides that wraps even farther around the branch. Not only do these skin flaps hide its edges, it hides its shadow, since the flaps are really flat and there’s no curved edge of a lizard belly pressed against a branch that a predator might notice.

The most common kind of cryptic coloration is called countershading, and it’s so common that you might not even have noticed it although you see it almost every time you see a fish, amphibian, reptile, and many birds and mammals. Countershading is an animal that’s darker on top and lighter underneath, like a brown mouse with a white belly. It’s even found in some insects and other invertebrates.

Countershading is another way to hide a shadow. If a dolphin, for instance, was gray all over, its underside would look darker because of shadows, since sunlight shines down from the sky and makes shadows underneath the body. That would make its body shape look rounder, meaning it stands out more and a predator would notice it more easily. But most dolphins are pale gray or even white underneath. There’s still a shadow, but it’s no longer darker than the rest of the body. The lighter colored underside makes the shadow paler, and as a result, from a distance the dolphin looks almost the same shade all over, which makes it appear flat and the edges of its body harder to see. We even know that some dinosaurs were countershaded, with lighter colored bellies.

Countershading is so common in animals that it’s almost impossible to pick one example. Dylan suggested we learn about the shingleback lizard, an amazing animal found in many parts of Australia. It’s also called the stumpy-tailed lizard, the bobtail lizard, or the two-headed lizard. All three of those names refer to the animal’s tail, which is short and fat and actually looks like a second head. This is an example of automimicry, similar to animals that have markings that look like eyes. The lizard is brown with darker and lighter speckles and it sometimes has yellow spots too. Its belly is pale with dark spots. Its scales are large and overlap each other, and its eyes are tiny, like little black beads. It grows about a foot long, or 30 cm.

The shingleback lives in arid and desert areas, and its tough skin and overlapping scales help reduce water loss. It eats snails, insects, flowers, and other small animals and plants. When threatened, it will open its mouth wide and stick out its large, dark blue tongue. It is an impressively blue, impressively big tongue, and the inside of the shingleback’s mouth is bright pink, so the lizard has a chance to escape while its predator is startled and wondering if the lizard is dangerous. The shingleback can give a painful bite, although it’s not venomous.

The shingleback mates for life, and the female gives birth to two or three live young every year instead of laying eggs. In many reptiles that give birth to live young, the eggs basically remain in the mother’s body until they hatch, and then she gives birth. But in the shingleback’s case, her babies develop in placentas in a process very similar in many ways to placental mammals. The babies eat the placenta after they’re born, giving them a quick first meal, and they’re born ready to take care of themselves.

Sam suggested we talk about animals that can be confused with inanimate objects, which is a type of camouflage referred to as mimicry. Mimicry of all kinds is a really common type of camouflage, like all those harmless insects that have yellow and black stripes to mimic bees and wasps that can sting.

My favorite inanimate object mimic is a moth we talked about in episode 191, the beautiful wood nymph of eastern North America. It has a wingspan of 1.8 inches, or 4.6 cm, and it is indeed a beautiful little moth. Its front wings are mostly white with brown along the edges and a few brown and yellow spots, while the rear wings are a soft yellow-brown with a narrow brown edge. It has furry legs that are white with black tips. But when the moth folds its wings to rest, suddenly those pretty markings make it look exactly like a bird dropping. It even stretches out its front legs so they resemble a little splatter on the edge of the poop.

If you think about it, it makes sense that a tiny animal like an insect would want to resemble something common in its environment that’s also not eaten by very many other animals. For instance, a stick.

Owen and Aksel wanted to learn more about the walking stick, since it’s been a long time since we talked about it, episode 93. Walking stick insects are also called stick insects or phasmids. When I was a kid I was terrified of the whole idea of a stick insect, although I don’t know why. I think I thought one day I’d climb a tree and discover that some of those sticks were not actually part of the tree. I guess I spent a lot of time climbing trees, but I never actually saw a walking stick insect. Maybe that’s because they were so well camouflaged that I thought they were sticks!

Walking sticks live in trees and bushes, naturally, especially in warm areas, but they’re found on every continent except Antarctica. They’re long, thin insects with long, thin legs and they really do look like sticks. Some are green, some are brown or gray, and many have little patterns, projections, and ridges that make them look even more like real sticks. They’re closely related to another type of phasmid called a leaf insect, which as you may have already guessed, mimics a leaf. All phasmids eat leaves and other plant material and most are nocturnal.

Some phasmids can even change colors to help blend in with their background. The Indian stick insect, which is indeed found in southern India although it’s been introduced in many other parts of the world and is considered invasive in some places, grows up to about 4 inches long, or 10 cm. It’s usually brown, but it can change its color in response to light levels by moving pigment granules in its cuticle that absorb and scatter light. The Indian stick insect has many other ways to hide in plain sight. If it feels threatened, it will stretch out with its rear legs folded flat against its body and its front pair of legs stretched forward to make it look even longer. It will stay perfectly stiff even if someone picks it up, but if it thinks it’s in danger, it will spread its front legs to show a patch of red at the base of the legs. This can startle or frighten a potential predator long enough to let the stick insect get away.

One interesting thing about the Indian stick insect is that almost all individuals are females. Females don’t need to mate with a male to reproduce. The female’s babies are little clones of herself, and she drops an egg every so often onto the ground. It looks like a tiny seed, and ants think it’s a seed and will collect it and take it back to the nest to be stored for later. The egg is then protected until it hatches, when the larval insect leaves the ant nest and finds a tree or bush to hide in.

The buff tip moth also looks like a twig or branch when its wings are