I don’t know about any of you, but I don’t give shrimp much thought. Sure, they’re an essential part of ocean ecosystems, but I don’t even enjoy eating them, and I certainly don’t want them anywhere near my cocktails, so for the most part they’re not even on my radar, so to speak. If I’m thinking about the oceans I’m usually pondering the terrifying threat of jellyfish, so shrimp don’t even rate a mention. This was clearly an oversight on my part; I’ve been learning lately about a few sorts of shrimp that are packing some deadly firepower. (They may be useful allies when the jellyfish come for us, let us all take note.)
Still from BBC’s “Invisible World”
The Alpheidae are a family of shrimp commonly known as “snapping shrimp,” and the Pistol Shrimp is perhaps the family’s most famous member. It’s a tiny animal, only a few inches long, but it’s packing some serious firepower in the form of a claw with a specialized snapping mechanism that allows it to “shoot” a high-velocity air bubble through the water. That might not sound so intimidating, coming from a tiny shrimp, but trust me when I tell you it’s seriously bad-ass. The Pistol Shrimp’s claw has a jointed “hammer” mechanism which snaps shut with such force that it vaporizes the water in front of it, forming a bubble. The bubble doesn’t go far, only about 4 centimeters, but it travels at speeds up to 60 miles per hour, generating enough force to kill fish, break glass, and knock well-armored opponents on their proverbial asses. The bubble’s real power, though, is in its collapse; in a process known as cavitation, the bubble essentially implodes under the pressure of the water around it, and that implosion not only produces sonoluminescence — a short burst of light which in the Pistol Shrimp’s case is invisible to the human eye — but also generates temperatures nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. The Pistol Shrimp was the first animal that was ever demonstrated to produce sonoluminescence (in a future featured creature we’ll take a look at the Mantis Shrimp — not actually a shrimp — which packs a similar punch and has also been found to generate sonoluminescence).
Still from BBC’s “Invisible World”
The noise of the Pistol Shrimp’s bubble collapsing is brief, less than a millisecond, but the sound produced can reach a staggering 218 decibels; when there are a lot of them in one place, the cacophony is loud enough to interfere with underwater communications and submarine sonar. (The voiceover narration on this video is completely terrible, but it gives you a great sense of exactly how noisy the ocean really is — skip to about 6:00 for some great audio — and snapping shrimp are a major contributor to the noise.)
The Pistol Shrimp uses its awesome firepower to stun, disable, or even outright kill its prey, which it usually hunts from the comfort of its own burrow; it detects passing meals with its antennae, stuns its meal with a bubble blast, and then drags it into the burrow to devour. Lazy bastard. It can also use its pistol-claw in self defense and to communicate with its fellow shrimp. Not quite cool enough for you? Okay, how about this: if a Pistol Shrimp’s gun-claw is torn off, not only will it grow a new limb to replace the missing one, its other claw — which is typically smaller, while its shooting arm is half the size of its body — will grow to become its new shooting hand. It can grow back missing parts and it’s ambidextrous. If you don’t seriously love this shrimp right now, I can only assume it’s because you’re jealous.
Some varieties of Pistol Shrimp have also learned to live cooperatively with another species, which is more than I can even say for me and my dog. Pistol Shrimp build their own burrows, but they’ve been known to share their space with goby fish, which have superior eyesight and act like watchdogs for the shrimp. The fish alerts the shrimp to danger, and then they both retreat into the burrow together. Presumably they also snuggle. I’m guessing the fish is the little spoon.
My dog Trudeau is a constant source of bewilderment to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty good with animals. At least, I think I am, if I judge myself by the standards I’ve developed from watching It’s Me or the Dog and My Cat From Hell. Admittedly, I might be skewing my sample about what constitutes an average pet owner by only comparing myself to people who are in such desperately bad situations with their pets that they have to go on television before the nation and admit that they’re the worst pet owners ever. At least it’s good for my self-esteem.
It’s just that reading an animal, at least on a basic level, isn’t that hard. I’ve always thought it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between a horse’s “oh yes, please scratch me there” face and its “if you touch me there I am seriously going to bite you in your most sensitive and squishy bits” face. A cat will clearly tell you whether it is pleased with your attentions as its minion or whether it’s about to scratch your face off as punishment for your impertinence, and it can communicate that with nothing but the tip of its tail. Dogs are even easier, because their happiness involves full-body wriggling and tail-wagging while their “I am so freaked out I might try to bite your jugular” body posture tends to be unsettling in a way that our human hindbrains can recognize as an impending wolf attack.
This is the expression that means he’s pining for the fjords.
It’s not like Trudeau himself should be all that complex a puzzle, anyway. He’s not by nature neurotic or hyper or mean or moody. Sure, with some of those ultra-intelligent herding breeds you end up expending so much energy just trying to keep them busy that eventually you find yourself thinking that it wouldn’t be that hard to teach your dog to play Scrabble. And anyway, Scrabble is the last of your worries because you’re starting to suspect that while you’re at work, he’s building a nuclear reactor in the basement. Trudeau is decidedly not one of those dogs. He’s mild-mannered, eager to please, quite trainable, and overall pleasant (unless you’re another dog, in which case he’d like for you to come closer so he can punch you in the face but he might warm up when he gets to know you better). He’s usually pretty low-maintenance. Usually.
The problem is simply that we don’t speak the same language, and this leads to frustration on everybody’s part. Like, sometimes I’ll be doing my thing, chilling on the couch with my laptop watching cat videos on the Internet or whatever it is people do (people being me, it usually involves staring at pictures of Tom Hiddleston and making whimpering noises), and Trudeau will come stick his head all up in my business, which I’m pretty sure he finds funny because of the squawking sounds I make while I’m desperately trying to keep his drool and my keyboard from meeting one another. In any event, this sort of aggressive affection is international Trudeau-speak for “I want something and I want it too badly to be polite about it right now so can we just set aside the Canadian prime minister jokes and please get on this issue right now.” I’m totally magnanimous, I can rise to the occasion and refrain from making cracks about Canadians and politeness, obviously. The problem is working out what the “something” is that he’s so desperate for.
Most of the time it’s not complicated: he wants to go out, or he thinks it’s his mealtime regardless of whether it’s anywhere near his actual mealtime. (He recognizes that time is not linear and is rather a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey… stuff. Which means it should always be dinner time.) But when he’s just been for a nice long walk an hour ago, followed up by a trick-training session to exercise his mind, a rousing game of “find the treats I have hidden around the house,” and a delicious supper, it’s kind of hard to think of what else he might need. And since he doesn’t actually speak English, except for a few key words like “sit,” “stay,” “roll over,” and “outside,” he can’t even give me the nod when I’ve hit the right item on a whole list of potential answers. I usually rattle them off aloud anyway, because it makes me feel like I’m being proactive about the situation. When “outside” fails to elicit any sort of obviously enthusiastic response, I’m forced to get more creative.
He may try to convince you that he’s never been on a walk before while you are in fact still in the middle of taking him for a walk. Do not believe his lies.
Does he want a snuggle? Is he just trying to weasel his way onto the couch? Maybe he’s distressed that I’ve moved the ottoman to where I can put my feet up on it and have therefore screwed up the room’s feng shui? Is Timmy down the well? Is he concerned about the situation in Gaza? Am I neglecting him? Does he feel like his life is passing him by and he’s not achieving any of his dreams and he’s only just realized that he’s never going to be able to start that woodworking business he’s always dreamed of because he doesn’t have thumbs? Is it just a general sense of ennui? Does he want to discuss his feelings? Do we need to hug it out?
Usually I end up trying at least a few of my more practical suggestions, like giving him a hug or relocating to the floor so I’m in a better position for snuggling if that’s he needs. I’d offer to buy him a lathe or something so he could hone his woodworking skills but honestly I think it would all just end in tears. I try explaining that to him gently while he just stares at me, getting more and more frustrated, expressing his dire and all-consuming need for something by decorating me with streaks of drool.
Once we’ve dispensed with this ritual, I’m usually flabbergasted enough to try the things I’ve already ruled out, and since he’s never actually succeeded in convincing me that I haven’t actually given him dinner yet, I usually end up taking him outside, where it quickly becomes apparent that at some point he has slurped down his entire very large bowl full of water and does, indeed, need to relieve himself again. Or he just needed a nice wallow on his back in the grass. Or he was dying to try to make friends with a neighborhood squirrel. (Not normal friends, though. Murder friends. Trudeau is not pro-squirrel.)
Mostly, I think it’s just a test he likes to conduct occasionally, to make sure my obedience training is coming along: he wants to make sure that he’s still able to convince me to take him outside on demand for no apparently obvious reason. Which actually is okay with me, because I live in fear of the day that he truly realizes how quickly he can get me off the couch and out the door just by hacking like he’s about to toss his proverbial cookies. I don’t think my nerves could take it.
I love the Internet. I love the Internet so much that I try not to remember the world before we had constant access to information at our literal fingertips, because as much as I love libraries, before the Internet it was quite difficult to find an answer to a question like “do pigs have half-hour orgasms?” in under thirty seconds, and I feel like we ought to be justifiably proud in our achievements in this area. The bizarre reproductive systems of animals should be information we can access in the blink of an eye, by god!
Unfortunately, this glorious system has its downsides, particularly if you’re on Facebook or if you have a gullible relative who sees fit to forward you any email which has clearly already been forwarded at least twenty times. Because our ability to share information at lightning speeds means we also have the ability to disseminate completely false information with equal rapidity. Sometimes even with greater rapidity, because what’s easier than hitting the “share” button and watching all those “likes” roll in? (It’s sort of like playing with Monopoly money, except you can’t even buy imaginary assets with it.) Why would anyone complicate this process by Googling to find out whether what you’re sharing is accurate?
This is on my mind in particular this morning because of a chain message that’s been making the rounds on Facebook which has been making my inner fact-checker twitch, and since my Googling didn’t turn up any handy collection of clarifications on these points, I thought instead of a featured creature this week, I’d run down this list for my own satisfaction. Because I kind of can’t help myself. So, here’s the entire text that’s going around Facebook, and then we’ll address each point one at a time. Doesn’t that sound like a fun learning experience? I thought so too.
A pig’s orgasm lasts 30 minutes. (O.M.G.!!!) A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death. (Creepy. I’m still not over the pig.) The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male’s head off. (Honey, I’m home . What the…?) The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It’s like a human jumping the length of a football field. (30 minutes. Lucky pig! Can you imagine?) The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds. (What could be so tasty on the bottom of a pond?) Some lions mate over 50 times a day. (I still can’t believe that pig …quality over quantity.) Butterflies taste with their feet. (Something I always wanted to know.) Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump. (Okay, so that would be a good thing.) A cat’s urine glows under a black light. (I wonder how much the government paid to figure that out.) An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. (I know some people like that.) Starfish have no brains. (I know some people like that, too.) Polar bears are left-handed. (Talk about a southpaw.) Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure. (What about that pig? Do the dolphins know about the pig?)” – Unknown
So, there it is. I expect that many of these will turn out to be partially true, and I know some are not really correct at all, but we’ll see what we can find, and we’ll certainly all be better informed at the end of the process.
Awwwww yes, this is how we do it in Denmark. Girl, I’mma inseminate you so good.
A pig’s orgasm lasts 30 minutes.
As far as I can discern, this item is possibly true but somewhat disingenuous. I can’t really find any research that indicates 30 minutes as average rather than the absolute upper range of time for pig sex, but also because it implies that both parties are having a similarly good time, like pigs are having amazing tantric sex or something. We can assume that this 30-minutes idea is based on a boar’s ejaculation, which really can go on at great length (5-10 minutes seems to be an average, though 30 minutes would certainly seem possible with multiple ejaculations) and can produce a staggering half-litre of fluid. Good lord, pigs. In her TED Talk “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Orgasm,” Mary Roach discusses an interesting fact on why we ought to also be concerned with more than just the boar’s pleasure: pig farms in Denmark have found that when artificially inseminating sows, they can prompt the sows to produce more offspring by sexually stimulating the sows while they’re being inseminated. (The five-point stimulation plan for sows is seriously hilarious. Just watch the TED Talk, it is so worth it, I am not even kidding.) It’s not all bad for the sow, at least; while it’s fair to assume that she probably doesn’t enjoy the sex act with quite the vigor that the boar does, she at least gets something out of the deal, since her clitoris is in fact located inside her vagina, and thus she does get to experience an orgasm herself, which is more than many poor women of our own species can say. So I’m going to call this item partially true, but exaggerated; the sex lives of pigs are undoubtedly fascinating, but a half-hour orgasm seems to be more of a remarkable feat than a regular event.
A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death. True, but this factoid underestimates the ability of cockroaches to keep creeping us out even after being decapitated, because nine days is nothing. They can, in fact, continue to live for weeks after losing their heads. They don’t breathe through their heads, nor do they bleed out the way mammals do, nor do they need to have a brain for the body to continue functioning. Starvation would eventually spell the end for a headless cockroach, but if they’ve had a good meal recently, pre-decapitation, the body can keep on for quite some time, moving around and reacting to touch. And if that wasn’t creepy enough, the decapitated head can go on about its business for some hours, too.
Here we have a male praying mantis, enjoying himself some copulation, with his head still attached. Whether he managed the dismount without being eaten is not noted. (Photo by Zwentibold, used under Creative Commons license from WikiCommons.)
The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male’s head off. Totally not true. While female praying mantises do sometimes cannibalize their mates, it certainly isn’t the case that mating isn’t possible without decapitation. The origins of this misconception are most likely a series of old studies in which scientists observed female mantises devouring their mating partners, but later studies didn’t offer up the same results; in fact, it’s likely that the females in the original study were stressed by laboratory conditions or were not fed enough. How frequently the males perish when mating naturally in the wild is difficult to say, because the disturbance of being observed seems to have a serious impact on the behavior of the mantises in question. The incidence of sexual cannibalism in mantises seems to still be a subject of some debate among entomologists, but apparently males are able to recognize when they stand a risk of being eaten and are suitably cautious, while a female who is well-fed before mating will usually show no interest at all in biting anybody’s head off. It is true, however, that even once a female has bitten his head off, the male’s body will continue to mate with her — more vigorously, even — despite his state of headlessness. He probably learned that trick from the cockroaches.
The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It’s like a human jumping the length of a football field. False, I think? Most of the sources I’ve found say they can jump about 200 times their body length, which isn’t as impressive, and isn’t a terribly accurate measurement either. On average they can manage about 13 inches with a single leap which is still pretty awesome, if only they weren’t such horrible, horrible little creatures. Biomechanically speaking they’re pretty mind-blowing though, as this article on BBC Earth News explains:
It was known that the energy to catapult a flea over a distance up to 200 times its body length lay in a spring-like structure in its body.
But scientists did not understand how they transferred this energy to the ground in order to jump.
High-speed footage now reveals that the secret lies in the way fleas use their hind legs as multi-jointed levers.
This “lever-effect” allows fleas to drive their feet onto the ground, and the sudden release of the “coiled spring” hurls the insect forwards and upwards, scientists report in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds. True. This inadequately explains how rad that is, because their tastebuds are distributed all over their bodies, so they’re sort of like a giant, swimming tongue. Which really is a great argument for why we probably shouldn’t dump so much crap in our rivers, it probably tastes awful. Save the waterways, people. For the sake of the catfish.
Some lions mate over 50 times a day. Okay, before we even get to the frequency of mating I want to point out something about lion mating, which is that the male lion’s penis is fucking barbed. Barbed. I mean Jesus, what is this shit. Animal kingdom, why don’t you do something for the ladies for once? Why is nature all about screwing the women over? As far as the fifty times a day claim, they saved themselves on that one with “some lions.” Average is apparently 20-40 times a day so I’d imagine some overachievers manage fifty times a day. They must be exhausted when they’re through, and the lionesses ought to be rewarded with like a spa day at the end of it all.
The female lion does not appear to be amused by this shit. (Photo by Bob Fabry, used under Creative Commons license, from WikiCommons.)
Butterflies taste with their feet. True fact, in fact. When butterflies are trying to figure out where to lay their eggs, they can tell just by landing on a leaf whether their eventual caterpillar offspring would find it delicious. It’s probably a time-saver, since they don’t have to sit around chewing bits off of leaves like they’re sampling wedding cakes. It’s probably kind of a rad superpower to have, until you landed on like a manure pile or something. But it’s not quite as impressive when you consider that during chrysalis they turn themselves into a cell soup and then make themselves into an entirely new organism. What is this witchcraft?!
Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump. Apparently it’s true that elephants can’t jump; they just aren’t built for it, and it wouldn’t help them escape predators when instead of jumping they can just trample you to death. But any statement that claims “X is the ONLY animal that…” automatically makes me suspicious, and saying that elephants are the only creatures in all the animal kingdom that can’t jump is simply too broad a claim for me. How about snails? Clams? Sloths? Starfish? Jellyfish? Blobfish? It’s difficult to find any definitive statements on which animals may be physically incapable of jumping since so many of them simply don’t jump, ever, because it would be pointless and also silly, but I do think assigning the sole honor of a non-acrobatic life to elephants is going to too far. Speaking of silly, if you’d like to see what it might look like if elephants did jump, you can watch this lovely animated short of an elephant on a trampoline. Just tell everyone that it’s for science.
A cat’s urine glows under a black light. This is true, and actually kind of handy if you’re trying to rid a house of the horrific odor of cat urine. However, it’s not that terribly interesting a fact because it’s also true of many other fluids, both animal and non-animal in origin. Human urine will also glow in damning brightness under blacklight — as Chef Ramsay often likes to demonstrate — so I don’t know what makes cats think they’re so special. A UV light may also reveal traces of semen, blood, saliva, or sweat, and many objects and substances will fluoresce under UV light for any number of reasons, but these include petroleum jelly, laundry detergent, tonic water, and all sorts of other boring things. It does look good on crime shows, though.
Baby, you got such big beautiful eyes that allow you to see predators from a great distance thus ensuring your longevity and the continuation of your damn fine genes. (Photo by A. Kniesel, under Creative Commons license.)
An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. True! This is not so much a statement on the ostrich’s intelligence — though they aren’t renowned for their remarkable brain power — but rather on the environment in which it is most suited to survive. While its eye-to-brain ration isn’t that bad in comparison to other birds, try not to think of it as incredibly small-brained so much as incredibly large-eyed (the largest eye on any land vertebrate, apparently); the size of its eyes (each is about two inches in diameter) gives it great long-range vision, combined with the heightened vantage point of its long neck, helps it immensely in its quest to not be eaten and die a horrible, horrible death. Which frankly seems like an admirable pursuit to me. (And while we’re on the subject of ostriches, I hope everybody realizes by now that they don’t actually hide their heads and think you can’t see them. That myth was probably started by Roman “historian” Pliny the Elder, who as far as I can tell spent most of his writing time drunk off his ass because nothing that jerk says is ever true.) Ostriches get kind of a bad rap, let’s be honest. Everybody thinks they’re stupid and we find it hilarious to watch people ride them, but just for perspective’s sake, you should know that they can run faster than you, the male ostrich has a scientifically important 8-inch phallus, and they are pretty much epic kickboxers. So I’m just saying, laugh all you like, but I wouldn’t fuck with an ostrich because they will mess your shit up.
Starfish have no brains. Not entirely true, and not very fair to the starfish. True, if you were facing an army of zombie starfish and you were trying to destroy their brains so they couldn’t feast on you, you might have a hard time knowing where to aim, but really I don’t think zombie starfish should be very high on your list of things to worry about. In essence, a starfish’s entire nervous system acts as its brain, which if you think about it is kind of awesome. Let us take a moment to just appreciate the humble starfish, okay? Because starfish do not need to take this bullshit. If you cut off a starfish’s arm, it can grow a new one. They can grip onto things using their very own adhesive chemicals, so basically they make their own glue. They don’t need to have sex to make babies because sex is so totally passé. They have their own internal hydraulics to move around with. When a starfish is hungry it doesn’t have to eat things smaller than its mouth — instead it can devour shit like clams and fish — because it can eject one of its stomachs and turn its prey into delicious prey-soup. That’s how badass they are. So let’s give a little respect to the starfish before they decide to join the jellyfish army and put an end to us all, okay?
Polar bears are left-handed. That is just fucking ridiculous. What do we think polar bears do with their time, anyway? It’s not like they can hold a fountain pen. They’re not out there on the polar ice practicing their fastball. They don’t even have hands. God, why are we even having this conversation? Okay, here are actual facts: there is no science to support this idea, nor has anyone managed to hunt down whoever started that stupid rumor and kill them with a trained polar bear, more’s the pity. (It was probably the asshole Pliny the Elder. That guy’s definition of “facts” was “shit I made up because I was too busy doing other stuff to actually learn anything.”) In fact, the only research I could find on the subject indicates that injuries seem to be more common to the right forelimb, which might indicate more of a tendency toward right-pawedness, or might indicate nothing at all because that study is actually about vitamin deficiencies in captive bears so who the fuck knows. In case you’re secretly harboring any other ridiculous ideas about polar bears, Polar Bears International actually has an entire page just about myths and misconceptions regarding polar bears, so please read it. You will find it enlightening and fascinating, and if you don’t, you can instead go watch this video of a baby polar bear riding around on its mom’s back and experience a drastic reduction in your stress levels. Because I’m sure that you, too, feel frustrated and annoyed by the persistence of stupid made-up “facts” about polar bears.
Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure.
So. Patently. Untrue. This is so untrue it makes me sad. Like, if the first item on this list were completely true and pigs actually had glorious 30-minute orgasms you’d think they’d be having sex for pleasure too. In fact, all sorts of animals have been demonstrated to have sex for what we would call pleasure, which for simplicity’s sake I will call non-reproductive. Just about every permutation of sexuality and sexual behavior that has been seen in humans has also been documented somewhere, somehow, in animals. Bisexuality, orgies, self-stimulation, homosexuality, heterosexuality, autoeroticism, stimulation with objects, rape, sex with dead animals, prostitution, fetishism, the list goes on on and on and on. Literally. This Wikipedia entry on animal sexual behavior is a pretty good place to start if you’d like to have your mind blown. Since dolphins are particularly mentioned here, I feel like it’s also my duty to point out that a dolphin’s idea of pleasure usually involves gang rape and sexual slavery. They also enjoy long swims near the beach and some nice infanticide.
But since we’re talking about sex for pleasure, let’s talk specifically about bonobos. Because how in the name of all that is holy can you talk about sex for pleasure without talking about bonobos? Bonobo chimps have sexual practices for every occasion. There’s sex to say hello or to resolve conflicts or to say I’m sorry. If they find an awesome new food source they’ll have a celebratory orgy. Bonobos are not at all monogamous and don’t particularly care what age or gender their sexual partners are, either. Aside from all the homosexual contact, which clearly is not for purposes of reproduction, they also enjoy all sorts of sexual positions that don’t result in offspring, either. They enjoy kissing with tongue and oral sex and occasionally the males like to do something called “penis fencing.” Yeah, it’s really called that. I won’t link you to any of the youtube videos with bonobos having enthusiastic and undoubtedly pleasurable sex, but I’m sure you can find them on your own, if you’re so inclined.
And it’s not just sex, either. We like to think of animals as slightly mindless and driven by their various urges for survival and perpetuation of the species, but I hope we’ve all realized by now — particularly since science is providing us with solid proof — that all sorts of animals engage in all sorts of behaviors just for the fun of it. They have rich, complex lives of their own, and it’s not like they stop existing when we aren’t watching, so let’s all just take a moment to get over ourselves.
And sure, maybe my idea of fun is exhaustive Internet fact-checking, which is decidedly less exciting than a bonobo’s idea of a good time, but I hope that you’ve found this excursion into pedantry entertaining, and I do hope you’ll think about doing a little research of your own the next time you feel inclined to hit the share button this kind of bullshit. I mean Jesus, how could they forget about the bonobo orgies? Fucking amateurs.
My local zoo recently opened a new “Rocky Shores” exhibit, which was enough of an excuse for me to go again and take some more pictures. The new exhibit, which houses the sort of animals you might see at various points on the Pacific coastline, including otters, seals, and polar bears, is a pretty sweet set-up, particularly with the various underwater views it offers. Hogle Zoo is a very small zoo and I remember it from my childhood with a kind of horror — it wasn’t that awful and I remember the animals being in good shape, but it was a small zoo of its era, complete with big cats in little cages, the elephants on a nearly featureless concrete pad, and other habitats completely unsuitable, and going there on school field trips kind of put me off zoos in general for the next ten years — but I’m incredibly pleased with the efforts they’ve made since to update the zoo and improve the exhibits for the animals. Rocky Shores is a step in the right direction, and the concept drawings for the African Savannah exhibit they’re planning to open in 2014 looks quite good, as well. I have very little commentary to offer, but I did take a lot of pictures of the new exhibit and around the zoo in general, so I should like to present them without further ado:
One of the zoo’s extremely handsome tigers.
A golden lion tamarin
I seriously like golden lion tamarins. They look so silky and cuddly.
OH NO LOOK OUT SEAL YOUR FRIEND IS GOING TO EAT YOUR FACE
Yeah, I think the underwater seal viewing at Rocky Shores is pretty freaking sweet.
I don’t actually know what sort of animal this is. Maybe that’s why he was making that face at me.
The polar bear likes to entertain himself by diving into the water and swimming up right where the little kids gather at the glass to watch him. It’s obviously an incredibly compulsive repetitive behavior so it’s kind of simultaneously adorable and depressing.
I could’ve gotten some seriously sweet photos if it weren’t for reflections on the glass. So much regret. So much.
OTTERS. YOU GUYS. OTTERS.
The bald eagles now live in what looked like a slightly bigger enclosure than their old one, and they’ve been relocated to the Rocky Shores exhibit. Otherwise they’re basically the same as always. I can’t really remember from the interpretive signage but I’m fairly certain both are in the zoo because they’re severely injured in some way and won’t ever fly again.
The spoonbills live in the bird exhibit at the center of the small animal building. I just love them for some reason. They’re very photogenic.
Another of the birds in the small animal building. This one is apparently building something, or else he’s planning to use that leaf to repair somebody’s radiator or something like MacGyver.
Bighorn sheep are just kind of awesome. I was wondering about those things in front of his eyes so I looked them up and apparently they’re preorbital glands which the sheep use to secrete pheromones and other chemicals that they use for marking and communication. Rad.
This extremely large seal lives in the new Rocky Shores exhibit and is in fact larger than their resident polar bear. (To be fair, the polar bear is on the small side and I think he’s just a youngster still.) He’s blind and spends his day swimming in the same circle over and over again, since he knows the dimensions of the space.
Finally, I’ve managed to see the Amur Leopard! She’s beautiful. Or he. I don’t actually know. But beautiful, still.
Last week I featured another bizarre caterpillar, Hawaii’s carnivorous Eupithecia, and I thought perhaps this week you’d like to meet a larva that is somehow, impossibly, even more bad-ass.
Denmark’s beautiful Alcon Blue butterfly looks about like you’d expect, for a butterfly. It has lovely blue wings and eats flowers and is about as intimidating as a nice decoupage. But don’t let them fool you. These lepidoptera are devious little bastards.
You see Jimmy, when a mommy and daddy butterfly love each other very much, they put their abdominal regions together and get nasty. Don’t pretend you’re scandalized. I know you’re familiar with the mating habits of butterflies. I’ve seen your browser history, buddy.
For the most part, the Alcon Blue’s reproductive cycle looks pretty normal. They get it on, as butterflies do, and then the female lays her eggs on a specific flower that she’s terribly fond of, and then the larvae hatch and hang around eating plants for awhile, and then shit starts getting real. You see, when the larvae are large enough, they drop down to the ground and sit around waiting, while emitting a delicious pheromone-y perfume that makes them smell irresistible to ants. And I’m not talking irresistibly delicious, either.
The scent that the larva emits convinces the ants that the larva is one of their own offspring, and they’ll pick it up and carry it right into their own home. In fact, they are so freaking stoked about this larval caterpillar that they will protect and preserve it at the cost of their own offspring. They feed it, they keep it clean, they make it the happiest little larva in all the land, and they don’t even mind that these faux-ants they’re tending to are eating not only the food they bring in but also they’re devouring the ants’ own larvae, because hey, who needs their own offspring when they can use all their resources caring for the freaking bad seed, instead?
Did you want another cheeseburger, sweetie? How about some Cheesy Poofs? No, don’t get up, I’ll make some snacks for you and all of your friends! Oh, you want to eat my other children? Okay, honey, that sounds fine!
Although this may sound like basically the perfect life for a larva, wherein they are fed and cared for and presumably get to spend all of their time playing Call of Duty, their gambit is not without risks. For one, the ants who are being parasitized might just figure the whole thing out, as this BBC article explains:
By looking at the patterns of infection/resistance and the genetics of different populations, the team was able to describe how the separate chemistries of the butterflies and the ants co-evolve in what amounts to an ongoing “arms race” – giving each animal periods and locations of dominance in their relationship.
So essentially, the ants change their chemical scent to help them recognize the butterfly larvae, and the larvae change their scent to adjust to the new situation, and on and on forever and ever. But that isn’t the only risk the Alcon takes inside the ants’ brood. They’re also preyed upon by a wasp called Ichneumon eumerus. The wasp, upon discovering Alcon larvae within an ant nest, will spray a chemical concoction that causes the ants to become confused and attack one another. Then it will seriously screw up the Alcon’s life; to wit:
When the wasp detects an Alcon caterpillar inside an ant colony, it charges inside and sprays a pheromone cocktail that makes the ants attack each other. The wasp slips through the confusion, lays its eggs inside the caterpillar and leaves. After the caterpillar turns into a chrysalis, the eggs hatch and consume the it from the inside.
Pleasant, no? And this is all while the little beggars are still just little pink slug-looking things. If they survive the wasps long enough to actually pupate — which may take up to two years in the ants’ care, being total freeloaders — their chemical defenses no longer protect them from being seen by the ants as intruders. They then get to run the gauntlet out of the ants’ brood chamber and out into the world. They aren’t without defenses, however; they’re covered in loose scales which detach when grabbed by angry ants, allowing them to make their escape.
You might think that this sounds like a horribly convoluted way to reproduce, and frankly you’d be right; the Alcon Blue lives a very specific life which requires specific plants (they feed from and lay their eggs only on Marsh Gentians and Willow Gentians) and needs ant colonies (though it is somewhat non-specific in which ants will do) to perpetuate its life cycle. Both the butterflies and the wasps that prey on them are considered endangered, which is too bad because there are some scientists who would dearly like to leverage their brand of chemical warfare, but you’d probably think it was pretty good news if you were an ant; it probably gets tiresome being caught in the crossfire between butterfly and wasp.
I was flipping through a few photos today from my last visit to Hogle Zoo, and came across a few that seemed appropriate for a Monday, in that they are cute, fluffy, and made of snuggles. So without further ado, I present some awwwww therapy.
Meerkats understand the value of hugs.
The brown bears were sleeping in a comfortable pile. I would’ve felt an urge to climb in and join the mass snuggle if only they weren’t bears. I know better than to get close to bears since they’re normally #1 on Stephen Colbert’s Threatdown.
Bat-eared foxes are probably the cutest of all foxes. That one on the left has a case of the Mondays.
Your childhood readings of The Very Hungry Caterpillar will do little to prepare you for today’s featured creature, because these particular caterpillars are not the cute, fuzzy, slow, living-bootbrush kind of creatures that you’re thinking of. These ones are quite rare specimens among caterpillars, even though their genus Eupithecia are found around the world, and they’re a terrific example of the stunning specificity of survival adaptions that occur on isolated islands. Because unlike their seed- and plant-eating cousins, these caterpillars eat meat.
Just imagine this slow-motion scene accompanied by the theme music from Jaws and you’re on the right track. OMG FLY THE SERIAL KILLER IS ABOUT TO GET YOU I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO INTO THE BASEMENT. (All photos on this post are stills from the BBC’s South Pacific, which is linked to below. Please buy it and support Benedict Cumberbatch’s documentary-narration career.)
The grappling inchworm chilling out in its FREAKING HANDCRAFTED SNIPER NEST.
These hunting Eupithecia — which have been given the excellent common name of “grappling inchworms” — have a pair of hair-like appendages on the abdomen which, when touched by prey like the common fruit fly, cause the inchworm to arch itself backwards, deploying its frankly bad-ass-looking grappling arms to grab the insect before it can escape. Then it eats it, because delicious, right? They also employ some pretty ingenious techniques — like the “looking like a stick” technique and the “just the edge of a leaf, nothing to see here” technique — to disguise themselves, so hapless prey won’t know what hit them until, well… it hits them. And even then they might not know, because they’re flies and if we’re honest, flies just don’t seem like the most well-read species to me.
Because Hawaii lacks many of the other forms of predatory insects that are found elsewhere, these inchworms apparently found a vacant ecological niche — and a very plentiful food source — and adapted to fill it. By being awesome. Less than 1% of the planet’s known 160,000-odd species of butterflies and moths eat other insects, and no other Eupithecia do outside of Hawaii.
The following absolutely gorgeous video from the absolutely fantastic BBC documentary series South Pacific is kind enough to offer you excellent video footage of this caterpillar in action, with the added bonus of narration by Benedict Cumberbatch:
(If the embedded video isn’t working for you, just click here.)
(On a side note, I can’t recommend this documentary series highly enough; it’s beautifully filmed, beautifully produced, beautifully narrated, and endlessly fascinating. You can purchase a copy from the BBC America shop, the BBC UK shop, or I would imagine from any major DVD retailer. You can also rent the discs on Netflix, though tragically as of this writing it isn’t available to stream.)
For more on these inchworms from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, I’d like to highly recommend this blog post from the fantastic Bioblog.
You guys. You guys, this is a snake. You guys, this is a snake THAT FLIES.
All my nightmares are coming to life.
I’ve always wondered exactly how skills like this develop in nature. I mean, I understand natural selection and adaptive evolution and all of that, but to me this looks like the sort of skill set that could only have come from a long line of severely depressed snakes. They were trying to end it all when they discovered that actually they can be kind of wing-shaped. Maybe they discovered a new purpose in life as accidental pilots and stuck around long enough to breed whole new generations of ridiculous flying snakes.
Or maybe they were just minding their own business, flying the old fashioned way on an airliner — perhaps on their way to a vacation destination far from their native southeast Asia — when Samuel L. Jackson started exterminating all of their friends, and they had to risk jumping just to survive the slaughter. (Now they’re just trying to get over the post-traumatic stress and are planning to bring a court case.)
Their gliding abilities are said to rival those of flying squirrels, and if you ask me they do the job with more style, too. And they come in some pretty swell colors, as you can see here. In addition to flying, they also have available to them a venom that’s powerful enough to paralyze the small lizards and mammals that they prey on but not really powerful enough to hurt humans badly, so at least we don’t have to worry about like… flying acid attacks or anything. They’re also pretty freaking cute. Just look at those adorable little nose-holes! Awww!
It seems only appropriate that today’s featured creature should be one that, at first glance, seems a little boring. Hermit crabs are pretty common animals — there are 1100 different species and many of them are kept as pets. Of course, as pets, they’re about on par with seamonkeys or beta fish, the kind of pet that people impulse buy for a couple bucks and expect to be dead within a week. (With proper care, of course, these sorts of animals can live a long time — some species of hermit crabs, for instance, have been known to live over 20 years in captivity.)
Naked hermit crabs kind of look like what would happen if H.R. Giger had been in charge of creating Hello Kitty. (Photo by Arnstein Rønning, 2011, by way of Wikimedia. Used under Creative Commons license.)
Hermit crabs just don’t get a lot of credit for being complex animals with intricate social — yeah, they’re not very hermit-y — behaviors. And frankly, I don’t think we’re appreciative enough of the hermit crab’s particular form of body armor/performance art; unlike true crabs, hermit crabs have no shell of their own, and instead acquire or improvise a suitable home. You’ll find them living in snail shells, stones, driftwood, broken bottles, crab shells, glass shells, and even, apparently, Legos.
Without a shell, they’re vulnerable and also a little funny-looking when they’re naked, just like people. Which is why they armor themselves with the detritus of the sea floor. Basically, they’re like the Iron Man of the sea, if Iron Man was kind of timid and spent all of his time eating tiny things in the ocean.
Which he doesn’t. Because he’s Iron Man. And that’s neither here nor there.
In cases of shell shortage, hermit crabs will fight over shells the same way humans will fight for a decent neighborhood and a jacuzzi bathtub. But give them shells in abundance and they’re practically socialists, as this article in Scientific American explains:
When a lone crab encountered one of the beautiful new shells, it immediately inspected the shelter with its legs and antennae and scooted out of its current home to try on the new shelter for size. If the new shell was a good fit, the crab claimed it. Classic hermit crab behavior. But if the new shell was too big, the crab did not scuttle away disappointed—instead, it stood by its discovery for anywhere between 15 minutes and 8 hours, waiting. This was unusual. Eventually other crabs showed up, each one trying on the shell. If the shell was also too big for the newcomers, they hung around too, sometimes forming groups as large as 20. The crabs did not gather in a random arrangement, however. Rather, they clamped onto one another in a conga line stretching from the largest to smallest animal—a behavior the biologists dubbed “piggybacking.”
I guess that it’s a bit like when you’re a kid and all you get to wear is your siblings’ hand-me-downs (so speaks the youngest child of the family…), but the hermit crabs at least seem happy about it. And sometimes intensely competitive. Here’s a sweet video from Blue Planet with a terrifyingly huge snail, plus some hermit crab combat. The first rule of Fight Club is, you don’t talk about Fight Club.
Speaking of hermit crabs, did you know that coconut crabs are also sort of a hermit crab? In addition, they’re the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world (that means land-dwelling creepy-as-shit crab-thing). They can and do climb trees, live for decades, and have pincers so powerful they can crack coconuts. When the mommy crab and daddy crab love each other and decide to have a family, the female crab releases her eggs into the ocean, where the young ones start out as plankton. As juveniles they do the usual hermit crab thing and find random shells to live in, then when they get older and toughen up a bit they get by with just a thick sort of leathery exoskeleton and put away childish things like shells. Eventually crawl their way back onto land. Despite being the sort of creature you might imagine dwelling in the sea, adult coconut crabs actually drown if they’re left in the water, and so they generally prefer to dwell in your nightmares.
OH MY GOD HOW ARE YOU SO ENORMOUS AND WHY DO I SEE YOUR TERRIFYING PINCERS EVERY TIME I CLOSE MY EYES.
Back in the days of yore, when I was just an idealistic young student taking my first conservation biology course, I remember my professor bemoaning the state of modern conservation. People, she said, were only interested in “charismatic megafauna” — all those big, popular, well-known animals that you expect to see in every zoo ever, like elephants, giraffes, lions, wolves, bears, tigers, and so on. I guess having a problem with this is a lot like being a biology hipster, but I could see her point; while donors pour millions into conservation and research for a handful of these “popular” species, hundreds or even thousands more are much more desperately in need of aid… or even just in need of understanding. It’s tough to raise money for the conservation of a spider because people hate spiders. It’s tough to raise money for the conservation of a jellyfish because, as we all know, jellyfish are the enemy. Try telling people that you want to save the monkfish and they’ll run away screaming. I mean, once you show them a picture. Nobody knows what a monkfish is right off the bat except maybe monkfish enthusiasts, if such people exist in the first place.
Still, I think there are perfectly valid reasons for scientists and animal lovers to choose their favorite species the way they do. Take E.O. Wilson, for instance. When he was a boy he suffered an unfortunate accident involving a needlefish and its close proximity to his eyeball which left him blind in one eye. Naturally this would put anyone off the study of fish, and Wilson’s passion for ornithology was rather nixed when partial deafness set in during his adolescence. (It’s kind of hard to find birds when you can’t see them because your depth perception is screwed up and you also can’t hear them laughing at you from their treetop perches.) He turned instead to entomology and became the world’s foremost expert on ants and a pioneer in the study of insect sociobiology, among other things. And all because birds weren’t an option.
This slightly laborious story is all in aid of explaining why I myself tended toward the study of rather large animals: because it’s difficult to study something you can’t see. In school I took an interest in ungulates — wild horses specifically, but also elk and moose and bighorn sheep and generally just anything with hooves because I find them kind of marvelous — mostly because they’re awesome but also, in part, because it’s easier to study something when you can actually see it. Despite an early interest in birds — no doubt springing from my early obsession with dinosaurs — I always knew that I was never going to be an ornithologist, or even a hobbyist birder, because while other, normal people would point to the sky or a tree or whatever and delightedly exclaim over some bird they saw there, I could only squint, perplexed, seeing nothing and wondering whether they were just messing with me. My own childhood brush with blindness was not — thank you nature — courtesy of a needlefish; rather, I was mysteriously struck blind and, after a period of time spent calmly baffling medical professionals, I just as mysteriously regained my sight. This episode was, apparently, as damaging to my eyes as you might expect, and it’s the reason that today I’m not the sort of person you’d want to join your badminton team. Without my glasses, I can see things fairly clearly at a distance of about six inches from my face; beyond that, it’s all impressionist painters. With my glasses, I’m at least legal to drive, but if you expect me to help you read street signs from a distance, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Of course, I’m not a big believer in limiting myself based on things like reality, which is why after I got a membership to Red Butte Garden here in Salt Lake and discovered that this meant I could do things like free birding walks, I was all over it. A nice walk in the garden with my trusty camera and a bunch of other people who have nothing better to do on a Saturday morning? SIGN ME UP. Oh, and please capture the birds so you can hold them very close to my face.
Now that I have been birding, of course, I am extremely knowledgeable. This is a… uh… Blue-Headed… Something.
Apparently hummingbirds like to hang around right at the very tops of pine trees. Who knew?
The nice thing about birding when you are not even remotely a birder is that you get to be delighted by things you probably shouldn’t be delighted by, like this robin who apparently is also a tradesman of some kind, judging by the way he’s building things. Around the fifth time everyone stops to see what you’re photographing, only to find it’s a bee or a robin or a flower, they finally realize you’re an idiot and stop paying you any mind at all. It’s only a shame it takes them so long.
This next animal proved to be a testament to my fellow birders’ kindness and patience toward their fellow man. The conversation with one kind soul in particular went something like this:
Me: I don’t see it. Where is it?
Her: Okay, do you see that sort of bare area in the middle of the tree, where you can see through to the trunk and there aren’t any leaves?
Me: Yes…
Her: Focus on that, then go directly to your right. He’s on that main branch, right out in the open. Really easy to spot.
Me: ….
Her: He’s bright yellow.
Me: Er….
Her: Okay. Do you see the bare area on the tree?
We went on like that for a good five minutes until the bird himself, clearly exasperated, relocated himself essentially to the front and center of the tree, offering us a fantastic view of his yellowness, at which point it took me probably another five minutes to finally see him. I told my long-suffering new friend that obviously I hadn’t been able to see him, there are leaves on that tree bigger than that bird. And he’s more creamy than bright yellow. I mean, seriously. He looks like a delicious well-toasted marshmallow, is what he looks like.
I was going to declare a moratorium on trying to spot any bird smaller than a pelican, but then this guy flew right in front of me, like he was trying to help a girl out. Thanks, angry-looking eyebrows bird.
FINALLY, some birds I can actually see. And as an added bonus, they’re cute and fluffy. You’re a pal, momma duck.
We saw several more birds at a distance, which for me personally was not very helpful, but whatever. This one looked like maybe a finch to me, which I only guessed because I’d seen Darwin’s sketches of course, but I was assured that it was not, in fact, a finch. I have no idea what it is. I hope you weren’t expecting this anecdote to end with some sort of useful information.
My favorites were the most obvious birds, like this quail, because at least on those occasions I could name the bird and indulge for one brief moment in a magical fantasy-land where I wasn’t completely clueless.
Of course, just because I had no idea what I was talking about and indeed no real idea of what I was even doing there among those very enthusiastic and keen-eyed birders, didn’t mean I was outside the reach of good fortune. While the rest of our company were gazing through their binoculars at some distant thing that as far as I could tell was a pinecone on top of a shrub, I wandered off a short distance down a side path to take some more pictures of flowers, as you do, and then I heard that tell-tale hum and turned around to see this kind gentleman stopping for a snack about two feet away from me.
Hummingbird, you are an officer and a gentleman. Or at least you would be, if it were possible to be those things while also being a bird.
Sure, he might’ve been super-tiny, but at least he recognized my handicap and got right up close… I actually had to step back to put him in focus with my zoom lens on. I might be a frustratingly awful birder — in fact, I think I might take up an interest in elephants, mostly because in order to study something bigger like blue whales I’d have to go into the sea and there are jellyfish in there — but every now and again, at least, fortune chooses to smile on me.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post, with more photos from Red Butte Garden, this time with flowers and bees and… well, that’s pretty much it actually. Flowers and bees. But both of those are pretty much rad.
