Animal of the Week -- September 25, 2009

So, apparently, according to naturalist and film maker, Chris Packham, the money we spend conserving this week's animal of the week is wasted and that the species be consigned to the rubbish bin of extinction. And when you think about it, a bear that eats bamboo, mushing up tough grass with it's slicing teeth and trying to digest cellulose with a stomach designed to handle flesh, fruit, and insects Ailuropoda melanoleuca (giant panda) might be said to not do themselves any favours.

But rather than put them down, Packham, perhaps we should celebrate their bold decision. Rather than go the easy route, eating all the usual old stuff that other bears eat, these chaps have struck out on their own. They're bear mavericks. And anyway, you can't conserve species forever, so yeah, they will die out eventually, inevitably, so will rats, so will mosquitoes, so will humans, but isn't it the innovators that might evolve rather than simply fizzle out? The last common ancestor of whales, dolphins, and hippos was probably a vegetarian, now look at dolphins whizzing 'round the oceans eating fish -- they'd have never got there if they'd just stuck to the veg. And then the ancestor of the blue whale, the largest animal ever, made the bold move to start eating krill -- the only thing so abundant and tasty as to allow it's mammoth size.

So perhaps the panda should be protected; maybe, from this monochrome ursid miracle of existence a whole new future family of herbivores will arise. Maybe not, but who is to know? Packham suggested that we need to preserve the habitats rather than the creatures. But what are the habitats without the creatures? What are the creatures without the habitats? We need to preserve the opportunities for evolution. And anyway, pandas may be a bit ridiculous, but at least they didn't spend the eighties and early nineties dressing a hybrid of Billy Idol and Limahl.

Animal of the Week -- September 7, 2009

Time flies when one is having fun, also when one is flying oneself. It's been so long largely because I have been doing my bit to entice tropical animals into the temperate zones, to increase habitat for drought tolerant plants in the tropics, and to make the Maldives substantially damper. But the upside to my enormous carbon footprint is that I have seen loads of amazing animals -- from right whales in Cape Town to marmots in the Swiss Alps. So what wonder is this week's animal? What can possibly be remarkable enough to beat whales and marmots out of the AOTW title?

Well, this week's animal, the first for a good many months is Parus major (great tit). This small and typically insectivorous bird has sealed the prestigious AOTW slot following the observations made of Hungarian tits published in Biology Letters this week. During the cold, Hungary, winter months, when other food were scarce, some Hungarian birds were seen to turn on bats for food. Preying on hibernating pipistrelles, the tits would the aerial mammals to death then eat the tastiest bits. There is a video of the birds in action in this news story (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8245165.stm), although for all the fidelity of the video the bird could be pecking a child's shoe. The photo further down the page of the aftermath is much more graphic.

This behaviour does not appear to be that widespread, perhaps a singular quirk of that particular Hungarian population of tits.

Great tits can be found from western Europe to south Indonesia. Residents of the UK will be more than familiar with great tits, as they are one of the most common garden birds. With their green back and bright yellow underparts (or underpants as I always read it), they are instantly recognisable and can easily be distinguished from their relatives in the UK because they are the largest in the group... although I always thought the Royal Family were the biggest tits in the UK.

Animal of the Week -- May 29, 2009

Well, it's been a while, but I can't resist reintroducing Animal of the Week on this auspicious day. For yes, today, May 29, 2009, European beavers (Castor fiber) are once again, after an absence of 400 years, living wild in the UK. A momentous occasion indeed.

Or is it? Contained beaver releases have been done on several sites in the UK, and rumours abound of illegal releases in Scotland over the past few years. This official trial of beaver reintroduction in the remote and wild Knapdale forest will determine whether Scottish authorities will spread beavers more widely over the country. English and Welsh authorities are both investigating the potential for bringing back beavers.

It's been quite a while since I have been near a beaver, and much as I am excited by the prospect of encountering the world's second largest rodent wild in the UK, I can't help but think their reintroduction is a bit of a folly. With no natural predators in the UK, and the likelihood of wolves, bears, or lynxes being brought back slim at best, if the reintroduction is a success the country could soon be overrun with beavers. Perhaps people could turn to them as a source of food to combat their spread, as some have with grey squirrels, the great rodent invader of the UK. But really, squirrel I could probably manage, but I'm not sure how I feel about eating beaver.

What?!

Animal of the Week -- April 6, 2009

Good-day to you all,

Imagine an earthworm, colour it brown-grey with a little iridescence. Add to each of its segments, on either side (as much as a cylinder has sides), a fleshy appendage, part tentacle, part leg. Surround each appendage with bristles. To the simple opening that is the mouth of your earthworm add sensory tentacles and wide snapping pincer-like jaws. Sounds pretty gross right? .... Now, scale it up to over a metre in length. Hold that thought. Now imagine you work in a provincial aquarium where mysteriously coral has been being devoured in your reef tank, and fish in that display have been found with large chunks missing from them. You can't for the life of you work out what is causing the damage, so gradually, piece by piece, you dismantle the display. One evening, on lifting up a lump of coral, the giant worm leaps out at you -- mouth tentacles flailing, mucus dripping from its snapping jaws, fleshy appendages undulating.

Argh!

Thank your lucky stars you've got a sofa to hide behind, because the hapless workers at Newquay's Blue Reef Aquarium had no such comfort when they found the 4 ft long polychaete worm, which they have since nicknamed Barry.

Polychaetes are a huge class of animals of more than 10 000 species, including free-living predators, tiny zooplankton, sedentary tube worms, and fan worms. So, I don't hold out too much hope that I should accurately identify the species in question here. However, a little online research shows that the size and habits of Barry match worms of the genus Eunice. Searching further -- the new google autocomplete function trying to direct me to Gladiators star of the 1990s, Eunice Huthart -- it seems that a very likely species is Eunice aphroditois //New text (sand striker). //*

After mating, the female worms often use their lightning attack to bite off and devour their mates' private parts. You might think the allusion to Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, in the species name something of an odd choice for a creature that looks and behaves the way of a Dr Who monster. However, one of the stories of Aphrodite's origin is that Gaia, sick of Uranus imprisoning the children she had with him, gave her son Cronos a sickle and ordered him to seek revenge by castrating his father. Dutifully Cronos carried out his mother's wishes and threw his father's parts into the sea, from the discarded tackle grew beautiful Aphrodite who was born to shore on briny foam, or perhaps a clam shell.

Happy easter,


Peter Hayward
Head Keeper
Animal of the Week

*Following text contains references that some people may find upsetting:

One sentence was removed, I do not have the text. The common name of this worm was once for a piece of shit sexual abuser. The text has been edited to remove reference to one of life's worst.

Animal of the Week -- March 30, 2009

So yeah, I realise that over the past two years I have been about as regular as a Russian gymnast. I guess since I last sent one out you'll all have new jobs and new emails and won't get this. I know I have, and won't.

Anyway, I am going to plough on, but as I try to revive this whole animal of the week thing -- bringing it back from the brink of extinction by transplanting the DNA from hair follicle found stuck to a bottle of gin in my freezer into the nucleus of a closely related blog and hoping that the resulting embryos survive to term -- I'll try to keep this brief.

For one reason or another this Sunday, I missed Yellowstone, the BBC series about the world's first national park, but when I got home that evening I went straight to the iPlayer thinking I would find it there. But on the front page of said tool was an invitation I couldn't resist. Fish! A Japanese Love Story. Part of BBC4's Japan season, this hour and a half documentary followed a British angler exploring the Japanese passion for fish. From a flayed snapper flapping on a plate of its own sushi, to koi carp worth millions and a whale barbecue, the show was a real delight -- if somewhat gruesome.

One of the most highly prized food fish in Japan is this weeks animal of the week, Takifugu rubripes (fugu, Japanese pufferfish). So highly poisonous that, like his forefathers into the mists of time, Emperor Akihito is not allowed to eat it lest he succumb, the flesh of fugu can only be prepared by licensed sushi chefs, and several people every year die from having eaten poorly prepared fugu. Assimilating neurotoxins from bacteria in the animals it eats, the livers and ovaries of these fish, if eaten, leave the victim completely conscious but totally paralysed until he or she dies of asphyxiation -- the toxin is several times more potent than cyanide. But the small amounts of the toxin found in the skin and flesh of the fish produce a pleasant numbness when eaten.

Farmed fugu that are completely non-toxic, are now available, although the Japanese Fugu Association apparently still bans the consumption of their livers, and the emperor has yet to taste. Fugu are a model organism in genetics with their genomes having been entirely sequenced. For some reason, fugu lack much extraneous genetic material and have about the bare minimum DNA for a vertebrate to function.

Be warned that various bits of the excellent BBC documentary (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00jdw5k/Fish!_A_Japanese_Obsession/) are quite gruesome, especially the sections on preparing snapper and fugu -- while the Japanese clearly love fish, cultural views of the importance of animal welfare vary throughout the world. Sounds a bit too much for you to stomach? Whenever I think of fugu, I think of the episode of the Simpsons in which Homer eats some and is convinced he will die; the restaurant in which he eats the fugu naturally has a karaoke bar, in which Bart and Lisa do an excellent rendition of the Theme From Shaft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPTyLnVcsL4).

I thought I was keeping it brief? Oh!

Peter Hayward
Head Keeper
Animal of the Week

Animal of the Week -- February 2, 2009

Time for the familiar refrain of "Sorry about the gap"

But January was full of taxes. I have never done my self-assessment tax-return before, so it was all a bit new. But you know what? Moira Stewart and the rest of them may well be right -- taxes don't have to be taxing. They do, however, have to be blindingly tedious. It was like doing revision for GCSEs again, sit down to do it and then drift off into a private reverie, try to learn Yankee-Doodle on an out of tune ukelele, wash-up, eat, wash-up, eat, go out for dinner -- anthing to avoid the tax and largely avoid looking at a computer screen. All I seem to have thought about for the past month is tax: the fact that I had to do my tax return, the fact that I had not yet done my tax return, the fact that when actually sat at the computer "doing my tax return" I was spending more time reading the individual wikipedia pages on ancient Hollyoaks characters than I was doing my tax. Tax tax tax tax TAX. So here I am, a stone heavier and a hefty wedge of my bank account lighter.

Anyway, the walk (or more appropriately skate) to work this morning, dodging the falling penguins and musk ox on the way to Kennington station, inspired me to finally put the nightmare of tax behind me and get back on track with AOTW. So, without a further thought for tax and the tediousness of January, and the tax bill I just paid so that all public infrastructure can grind to a halt with a dusting of snow; no, with no thought of tax, this week's animal is the leech.

Related to earthworms, leeches are a huge group of squidgy worms, renowned for sucking the very lifeblood of humans. Some of them provide useful medical services, but mostly they are just a waste of time and space.