Animal of the Week -- January 28, 2008

Hello Ani-freaks!

Go see a wonderful post-it comic featuring animals (and other things) called When Pigeons Weep, on Jan 16 there is a troglobyte!

This week's animal of the week is a bane of the lives those two guardian-occupations of the UK landscape: farmers and gardeners. Although these two groups of people are renowned for their compassion and tolerance towards wildlife, nothing gets their backs up so much as this week's animal Talpa europaea (European mole) -- well, except maybe mice, rats, mealy bugs, birds of prey, slugs, deer, pigeons, badgers, rooks, aphids, pheasants, cats, and vine weevils. And foxes.

Their habit of digging extensive underground tunnels terminating in small mounds of earth has pitted moles the world over against lawn-proud gardeners. But actually the moles' toils not only aerate and break up soil, but their prodigious consumption of leatherjackets and other pests of crops and garden plants are actually a benefit to people who work the land. And while they may eat those other great processors of soil, earthworms, they cannot consume enough to affect the latter's benefit to gardeners and farmers.

Immortalised in Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows as home-loving, timid fellows, moles may be nearly blind but they are voracious predators, consuming nearly two-thirds their own body weight a day in grubs and worms. They have toxic saliva that paralyses their invertebrate prey enabling them to build up a larder for lean times. It was a pondering about the nature of toxic mammals that started animal of the week some3 and a bit years ago, turns out loads of insectivorous mammals have toxic saliva.

Among all the crocodiles, mosquitoes, tigers, sharks, tyrannosaurs, and snakes that have been animal of the week, European moles are only the second to be blamed for the death of an English king. William III, of Orange, was out riding in the early 18th century when his horse trod in a mole tunnel and threw its rider. The resulting broken collarbone led to pneumonia (ED: can that happen? PH: ED, who is ED?), and the pneumonia led to the accession of Queen Anne, prior to which the Jacobites, hoping to seize the opportunity to reinstate a Scottish monarch, were commonly heard to toast "the little man in his velvet jacket". The other regicidal AOTW is, of course, the lamprey

Want to help people find out about moles? Join the People's Trust for Endangered Species in their MOLEWATCH. Report sighting of moles or more likely molehills here: http://www.ptes.org/molewatch/. Though not endangered, changing land use and increasing floods may threaten moles. When I was a kiddywink on the farm, if the river flooded the moles would gather on the small patches of unsubmerged ground, the dogs -- Goldie, Shelly, and Bella -- would like nothing more than unearthing the stranded moles. The carnage was a horrific sight. I am sorry moles. I couldn't stop it!

All the best!

Animal of the Week -- January 21, 2008

Word!

I am again amazed by the early appearance of a harbinger of spring, but I fear that I bang on about this every year, so I'll skirt around the issue by not mentioning the full name of the animal -- despite it being mid January, I saw five or six "Bs" this weekend just gone! But anyway, this sign of climate change has nothing to do with this week's animal of the week, or does it? This week's animal is Boulengerula niedeni (the Sagalla caecilian).

This limbless animal has been picked as one of ten amphibians to be the focus of conservation efforts in the next wave of the EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct & Globally Endangered) programme, which is run by the Zoological Society of London to protect the most vulnerable and evolutionary isolated animals, drawing attention to some of the less glamorous species. Caecilians may look like earthworms, but they are actually a highly specialised offshoot of the amphibian family tree inhabiting the leaf litter and top soil of equatorial forests.

Sagalla caecilians are found in a 30 km square region of southern Kenya, and while they might be quite numerous in that small area, being found nowhere else, they are incredibly sensitive to changes in or degradation of that environment. In a marvellous coincidence with last week's animal, Sagalla caecilians have tentacles beneath their eyes, or rather below where their eyes should be, for they, like many other caecilians are blind. A close relative of the Sagalla caecilian, Boulengerula taitanus, has a bizarre maternal habit -- females brooding a clutch of eggs develop a thick layer of skin on which the young, unable to eat other foods, nourish themselves without apparent detriment to their mother's wellbeing.

Turns out AOTW has featured EDGE species since the start, the first edition was one of their highlighted mammals, the solenodon (http://animal-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2004/10/animal-of-week-october-25-2004-first.html), and several others flop, slither or flounder around my backfiles in the webzoo (the baiji http://animal-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2004/10/animal-of-week-october-25-2004-first.html; and the giant salamander http://animal-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2005/05/animal-of-week-may-30-2005-giant.html).

Let's just hope that the Sagalla caecilian fares better than the baiji, which is now presumed extinct. I suppose this amphibian has family on its side. You don't want to mess with caecilians, you do and you'll wake up with a horse's head in your bed.

Animal of the Week -- January 21, 2008

Word!

I am again amazed by the early appearance of a harbinger of spring, but I fear that I bang on about this every year, so I'll skirt around the issue by not mentioning the full name of the animal -- despite it being mid January, I saw five or six "Bs" this weekend just gone! But anyway, this sign of climate change has nothing to do with this week's animal of the week, or does it? This week's animal is Boulengerula niedeni (the Sagalla caecilian).

This limbless animal has been picked as one of ten amphibians to be the focus of conservation efforts in the next wave of the EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct & Globally Endangered) programme, which is run by the Zoological Society of London to protect the most vulnerable and evolutionary isolated animals, drawing attention to some of the less glamorous species. Caecilians may look like earthworms, but they are actually a highly specialised offshoot of the amphibian family tree inhabiting the leaf litter and top soil of equatorial forests.

Sagalla caecilians are found in a 30 km square region of southern Kenya, and while they might be quite numerous in that small area, being found nowhere else, they are incredibly sensitive to changes in or degradation of that environment. In a marvellous coincidence with last week's animal, Sagalla caecilians have tentacles beneath their eyes, or rather below where their eyes should be, for they, like many other caecilians are blind. A close relative of the Sagalla caecilian, Boulengerula taitanus, has a bizarre maternal habit -- females brooding a clutch of eggs develop a thick layer of skin on which the young, unable to eat other foods, nourish themselves without apparent detriment to their mother's wellbeing.

Turns out AOTW has featured EDGE species since the start, the first edition was one of their highlighted mammals, the solenodon (http://animal-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2004/10/animal-of-week-october-25-2004-first.html), and several others flop, slither or flounder around my backfiles in the webzoo (the baiji http://animal-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2004/10/animal-of-week-october-25-2004-first.html; and the giant salamander http://animal-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2005/05/animal-of-week-may-30-2005-giant.html).

Let's just hope that the Sagalla caecilian fares better than the baiji, which is now presumed extinct. I suppose this amphibian has family on its side. You don't want to mess with caecilians, you do and you'll wake up with a horse's head in your bed.

Animal of the Week -- January 14, 2008

Good morrow good women and gentlefolk,

It was a most pleasing moment last week when a colleague forwarded me a link to a news story, not about a pair of twins getting married (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7182817.stm), but about a Pacific giant octopus playing with a Mr Potato head (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/7179368.stm). The giant mollusc loves his toy, mostly because it's got crab meat inside it (which is a feature I don't recall from the Mr Potato Head that I had), but also its bright colours and moving parts. Now, as you might guess, the Pacific giant octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) is a big octopus, reports of a 272 kg, 9 m, specimen are highly doubtful, but a 71 kg live specimen is confirmed. But it turns out that this size record is rivalled among the octopodes by a bizarre freak of the molluscan world -- this week's animal of the week is Haliphron atlanticus (the seven-arm octopus). Of which a dead specimen weighed in at 61 kg, giving an estimated live weight of 75 kg, and had a mantle length (the head-like bit) of 40 cm.

What? I hear you cry. How can there be such a thing? Surely this septapode octopus is a contradiction in terms, and cephalopod oxymoron, a lie, a fabrication, a genetic freak or frankenstein fish. No, I tell you, it is real, a proper species.

The truth is that the distaff representatives of the species have the full complement of octopus legs; but once more, in the face of all we expect to be true about the natural world, the males are missing a limb. In octopuses (please, not octopi) and other cephalopods (squids, cuttlefish, and nautili), the males have a specially adapted limb, the hectocotylus, which is used to deliver sperm to the female. In many other octopuses this arm is larger than the others, but in the seven-arm octopus, this sperm arm is small and coiled up in a small pouch underneath the right eye. During the act, the male unfurls his arm from beneath his eye and makes a special delivery to a cavity under the female's gelatinous mantle. So I guess, "giving her the eye", means something much more intimate in octopus courtship than in human relations.

Bye then!

Peter Hayward
Head Keeper
Animal of the Week