The Thoughtful Animal, one of my favorite blogs on the Scienceblogs network, has posted an interesting study on anteaters and how they determine which sort of ants or termites to feed on. Apparently, across their range, they feed on both, in varying combinations of species, depending on which sort of defense mechanisms the colonies use, the kind of mounds used, and their nutritional value. It’s illustrated with this photo, which appears to have originally come from here.

Salvador Dali and his pet anteater

It is, of course, Salvador Dali, one of my least Twentieth Century artists, walking his “pet” anteater. I really never cared much for his paintings (they just show up too often as dorm room posters, like his compatriot in camp, M. C. Escher) but photos of Dali are really interesting. Always perfectly posed, always aware of the camera, Dali is his own artwork. Notice how perfectly aware he is of the composition he’s posing into, with his cane and the taut leash of the anteater– it’s the kind of arrangement you’d see in one of his paintings, and it can’t be accidental. It’s commonly regarded as a truism that Andy Warhol started the “artist as celebrity as art” meme, but Dali kind of has to be in there too.

As for having a pet anteater, well, I can’t imagine you could do it without hired help. They pretty much only eat ants and termites, not exactly the thing you can pop down to Petco and pick up. I heard somewhere that they could get by on hamburger, and that’s how some zoos do it, but it can’t be nutritionally good for them. I can only imagine that unless Dali really, really loved his anteater enough to cater financially to its odd diet, it’s got to be one unhappy critter. Of course, how would we even know– how do you tell if an anteater is smiling?

Update, 8 August. My friend Joy, who is a zookeeper at the Houston zoo, tells me that anteaters do, in fact, eat other foods in captivity besides ants and termites. Apparently their staple diet in captivity is dog chow, pounded into a kind of mash, which they lap up with their sticky tongues the way they’d eat their normal diet. They also eat some kinds of produce, although she didn’t say what (cole slaw and pesto, perhaps?)

It’s like the Chapman Brothers meets Francis Fukuyama meets the Adams Family. BrewDog brewers has announced that their premier beverage is to be sold in limited edition bottles which come with their own “koozies” made from taxidermied animals. I was hoping to kind of ignore this, but since three different people have emailed me regarding this, it seems like I am some kind of “go to guy” when it comes to dead stuffed animals and I don’t want to disappoint…
What the gruesome choice of packaging has to do with the beer I have no idea, nor do I think 110 proof beer is worth trying at $771 per bottle (over $1000 if you want the squirrel one). But hell, it got them lots of publicity and it got the BBC to call them perverse. Which must have worked, because they’re all sold out.

Pieter Hugo, Mallam Galadima Ahmadu with Jamis, Nigeria 2005

From a haunting series of photographs by South African photographer Pieter Hugo, who has shown quite a bit in Johannesburg and in Europe, but whom I hadn’t heard of until now. These images are like my dreams- barren, haunting, unforgettable. It’s not only the immediate, gut-wrenching juxtaposition of wild animals that we usually associate with safaris with blasted urban wastelands on the edge of Third World cities, but the juxtaposition of the “threatening” black African male with his brutal hyena sidekicks. These are like gangster rappers without the bling.

But the truth of the situation is rather surprising. Hugo explains how he found out about these men:

These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption ‘The Streets of Lagos’. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me.

He travelled to Nigeria and tracked them down. Not only weren’t these men gangsters, they are actually a sanctioned part of Nigerian society:

It turned out that they were a group of itinerant minstrels, performers who used the animals to entertain crowds and sell traditional medicines. The animal handlers were all related to each other and were practising a tradition passed down from generation to generation. I spent eight days travelling with them.

It turns out that the men even have government licenses for the animals. Even so, as fascinating as these images are, I feel sorry for the hyenas. Even though hyenas are almost universally reviled, and they have a deserved reputation for brutality (unlike big cats, which kill their prey quickly, hyenas often eat their prey alive), they’re still animals.

My favorite image from another of Huffington Post’s stupid slideshows. Yeah, I know, it’s HuffingtonPost, but I can’t help myself. It’s funny, though, I remember hearing this conversation not too long ago sitting outside a Starbucks’ in Vancouver, there was a dog there and this woman said “I couldn’t have a dog with a curled up tail like that, I wouldn’t want to be staring at its butthole all the time.”

The doggie butthole cover. No, it's not a joke.

If you flip through the slideshow, what’s interesting is that half the products infantilize pets (the high chair), and the other half of them enable adult vices (like Bowser Beer and the doggie sex toy). My guess is that the former are aimed at female pet owners, the latter at male pet owners (with male dogs, apparently– are you gonna give Fifi a “bowser beer”?). So for women, dogs seem to serve as surrogate children, or extensions of your dolls when you were a kid, for men they are kind of like your “wing man.” Just sayin.

My other favorite: people crackers. I swear I had this same idea for a product, years ago in college, but never thought it would catch on.

If you watch the video in yesterday’s post, here, most of the way through, you’ll hear Douglas Adams talking about the kakapo, an endangered and quite flightless parrot from New Zealand:

It’s this big, soft, fluffy, lugubrious bird. It’s forgotten how to fly. Sadly it’s also forgotten that it’s forgotten how to fly… So, a seriously worried kakapo has been known to run up a tree and jump out of it… Opinion is divided on what happens next. Some people say it’s developed a rudimentary parachuting ability. Other people say it flies a bit like a brick.

He’s referring throughout that video to his adventures researching one of his best books, Last Chance to See, co-authored with Mark Carwardine, nearly twenty years ago. The BBC have made this book into a new documentary, in which Carwardine returns to re-visit many of the animals from the original book, and I have found at least one clip from it, below.

This is one of the funniest animal videos I have seen in a long time, I won’t spoil it for you.  But bear in mind Adams’ lengthy description of the kakapo mating ritual, from the video:

It turns out that the mating habits of the kakapo are incredibly long and drawn out, and fantastically complicated, and almost entirely ineffective. Some people will tell you that the mating call of the male kakapo actively repels the female kakapo.

For about 100 night of the year it goes through its mating ritual, and it finds some rocky outcrop on which to perform its mating call… It sits there night after night, performing the opening bars of “Dark Side of the Moon”. It’s a very deep bass sound… You more feel it, like a wobble in the pit of your stomach, rather than hear it. These deep bass sounds have two important characteristics: one is they travel great distances: great long, deep bass sound waves fill these great long valleys of the south island of New Zealand. And that’s good. But the other characteristic of bass sounds, which you may be familiar with, if you’ve have a subwoofer you know you can put it anywhere in the room you like, because the other characteristic of bass sounds, and remember we’re talking about a mating call here, is that you can’t tell where it’s coming from.

So just imagine if you will a male kakapo, making all this booming noise, and if there’s a female out there, which there probably isn’t, and she likes the sound, which she probably doesn’t, she can’t find the person who’s making it. And then, even if she finds him, she will only consent to mate if the podokuk tree is in fruit.

Now we’ve all had relationships like that…

All the lightheartedness aside, the kakapo is seriously endangered, even after a hundred years of conservation efforts. Only 123 individuals remain alive. (This is actually an improvement from their lowest point of about 40). The introduction of cats, rats, and stoats to New Zealand, animals which eat the birds and their eggs, has decimated their numbers. Two small islands just off the coast of New Zealand are maintained as predator-free zones  expressly for the purpose of keeping the kakapo refugees safe. Fortunately there’s good dedication in New Zealand to their preservation, and little black market demand for kakapo products, so they may just survive a bit longer.

Via my friend Craig, here is a long-lost classic TED talk by the late, great, and much-missed Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and a bunch of other very, very funny books. Adams is beloved by many in the scientific community (Richard Dawkins eulogized him at his funeral a few years ago), not only for his sense of humor but for his acute understanding of science. It’s well worth watching the whole thing:

He begins by telling a long and very story about a visit to Madagascar to search for a highly endangered species of lemur called the aye aye. I have been to Madagascar, and seen a variety of lemurs, but not the aye aye, which is found only on Nosy Mangabey off the north coast of the main island. But for those of you who haven’t seen photos of an aye aye, they’re worth seeing– easily one of the oddest looking animals in the world.  (From National Geographic, here):

Baby aye aye

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The other day, I came across  this link from the local paper in Manitowoc, Wisconsin:

An Asiatic black bear at Lincoln Park Zoo bit off all or parts of four fingers from the hand of a 47-year-old woman Friday after she went past barriers and was trying to feed the animal, a Manitowoc police captain said. “It appears that she suffered loss of some fingers,” specifically, all of her thumb and forefinger and parts of her middle and ring fingers, said Capt. Scott Luchterhand.

Stories like this pop up every once in a while– a few years ago, I think some very foolhardy zoo visitor in Europe was killed by a polar bear when he swam the moat and entered its enclosure. But I find this one particularly funny, because I lived for a couple years in Oshkosh, just down the road from Manitowoc. I can see this happening to any number of the intellectually challenged individuals I had to deal with 0n a daily basis (I am really hoping she was that woman from the testing center at UWO– yeah you know who you are). The schadenfreude is delicious and irresistable.

And the kicker?

In a similar incident, a wolf at the zoo chewed off the right arm of Jared Mraz of Manitowoc, then 2, on Dec. 20, 1994.

What the hell is wrong with people in Wisconsin?

Thylacine at the Hobart Zoo, Tasmania, in the 1930's.

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, so far has the dubious distinction of being one of the few animals to go extinct so recently that it has been captured in motion pictures before its demise. I have seen excerpts of the films here and there on television, but today I stumbled upon this good collection of them online, at a site called the Thylacine Museum.

They are haunting. The animal is familiar-looking at first– we see the small, delicately balanced feet of a carnivore, the pointy ears reminiscent of a coyote, the muzzle– but also so alien. Especially when it opens its mouth. Where is familiar pattern of incisors and canines? And how can it open so wide? It’s crocodile-like, and the long, long, wedge-like head and strangely expressionless eyes give it an eerie, prehistoric countenance that I find thrilling.

But, despite the constant hopes and occasional reports, the thylacine is gone for good. One of the more interesting books on the subject is Michael Crewdson’s Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger, illustrated by the great Alexis Rockman. Above all, it’s a story about desire and regret– regret that it’s gone, and desire for one of the many sighting reports to be true. Well worth the read– and funny as well.

The most interesting thylacine story I have ever come across was an article in the in-flight magazine of Air Niugini, the national airline of Papua New Guinea, from the early 90’s. It was a back issue that Ralf Stüttgen had kicking around his guest house in Wewak when I was there in ‘93. This missionary in the highlands of Irian Jaya, on the Indonesian side of the border, near Puncak Jaya, had brough a picture book of animals with him to show the children at the school where he taught. People in the village got to looking at it, and amongst the photos was one of a thylacine.

The villagers got quite excited, and said they knew this animal. The missionary, of course, pointed out that was impossible; they were from Australia and Tasmania, and the last of them died out decades ago. Not so, insisted the people, there were some in the general vicinity. Well, a couple expeditions were launched and turned up nothing, although it did turn out that the local people could describe the animal’s habits, footprints, and scat with uncanny accuracy.

And, let’s not forget, Australia and New Guinea were once a single land mass, up until very, very recently: about 8,000 years ago, with the final melting of the Pleistocene glaciers. In evolutionary terms, that’s like yesterday. Recently enough, one might even think, to be remembered.

Yeah, it's not a great photo. The cell phone's camera doesn't have a zoom.

This morning, as I was drinking my coffee and surveying the backyard from our top-floor kitchen window, wondering what needed to be done yet before spring, I caught sight of a coyote in our backyard. This is not uncommon in Seattle: coyotes are regularly spotted even downtown (a security camera once famously caught an image of a coyote trapped inside the elevator of Smith Tower), and in our wooded, fringe neighborhood of the city, near a large beach park, they are common as raccoons.

The neighbor’s golden retriever was in its yard, and it was at attention: it could smell the coyote, but not see it. The coyote popped over into our other neighbor’s yard for a moment, then circled back around, paying special attention to the blackberry thicket which grows over the fencerow in the back corner of our yard, where raccoons regularly sleep. I could see its breath steaming in the dawn light. Our crows circled overhead, making their alarm sound ( I say our crows because like most animals, they are territorial, and usually in the large fir tree in the corner of our lot).

A second coyote appeared a few moments later, as I went downstairs to summon my wife so she could have a look. Then the first re-appeared, this time with something dark and furry in its mouth. It turned out to be half of the neighbor’s cat. The front half, to be precise.

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The ancient Egyptians loved mummifying other things besides people. I remember visiting the Egyptian Museum in Cairo once, years and years ago, and, despite just being overwhelmed with the sheer amount of amazing things to see, somehow the mummified crocodile stuck in my mind. I found an image of one quite similar on Flickr:

Mummified crocodile. Apparently from a museum in Wien.

The Egyptians also mummified cats. The image here is funny and macabre at the same time. It looks as much like a homemade child’s doll from a pioneer homestead as it does an Egyptian mummy– or possibly a rejected prop from a Brothers Quay film.  So much attention is paid to the ears and eyes, they are rendered right in the cloth, and the pupils are even painted on. It’s cute and slightly eerie at the same time.

A mummified cat on display at the British Museum, London.

From this article in Scientific American on the origins of the domestic house cat:

By 2,900 years ago the domestic cat had become the official deity of Egypt in the form of the goddess Bastet, and house cats were sacrificed, mummified and buried in great numbers at Bastet’s sacred city, Bubastis. Measured by the ton, the sheer number of cat mummies found there indicates that Egyptians were not just harvesting feral or wild populations but, for the first time in history, were actively breeding domestic cats.

Apparently the export of live cats from Egypt was banned for centuries, but there was a thriving cottage industry in cat mummies, which were created as offerings to the goddess Bastet and, assumably, sold to pilgrims, who them presented them to the goddess at the temple. Which, I suppose, would explain the effort expended to make them look cute– who wants to go to church with an ugly kitty mummy tucked under one’s arm?