Animal of the Week January 11, 2017 — Oh deer! Such monkey business!

If anything is likely to stir Animal of the Week out of hibernation it's unusual animal behaviour* of the kind shown by this week's animal, a particularly randy and misguided Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata).

Credit: Alexandre Bonnefoy

Reported in the journal Primates, a low-ranking monkey, frustrated by exclusion from females of his own species during the breeding season sought release by trying it on with two separate sika deer (Cervus nippon). The first deer accepted the primate's advances: the monkey mounted the deer without penetr
ation and displayed about 15 sexual movements over 10 seconds before dismounting. [Same.] A second deer did not allow the macaque to mount.

Such interspecific sexual behaviour is rare [outside Wales] and serves no known evolutionary purpose. However, in Japan, macaques and sika deer frequently associate with each other: deer often pick up food discarded by macaques and even eat their faeces. Macaques have previously been observed grooming the deer and occasionally riding them (in an innocent sense). It's possible, that this young male, flush with a hormone surge and excluded from access to female macaques by their preference for higher ranking males confused appropriate behaviour with the other species.

Japanese macaques (also known as snow monkeys) are famed for their love of sitting in pools fed by hot springs during blizzards, they are the most northerly living non-human primates, and they exhibit interesting cultural behaviour such as the washing of food and seasoning potatoes by dipping them in saltwater. Let's not let this aberrant behaviour by one monkey bring down the rep of the whole species.


*Remember this weasel riding a woodpecker from 2015? The glory days of interspecific animal of the week.

Animal of the Week Jan 4, 2017—Deeply, Dippy

Many young children (and older children well into their "adulthood") over the past four decades have been stopped in their tracks when the first enter the Natural History Museum in London. Arrested by the hollow, timeless gaze and colossal magnificence of one of the world's most famous skeletons: Dippy the diplodocus. But as of today, no more.

After 111 years in the NHM, and 37 in the Hintze Hall (that wonderful cavernous atrium through which most visitors enter the museum), the 292 bones will be dismantled and packed up. The skeleton will be replaced, by something even more enormous: the skeleton of a blue whale. But for so many people, the departure of Dippy is a poignant change.

As a boy, I was struck by the wonder of intricate articulation, taking what seemed like hours to inspect every joint, picking out bumps, lumps, processess, textures, and, indeed, the wires that held the thing together. And later, after leaving the museum, in all my dinosaur books, the pages with the diplodocuses were always the best thumbed. I would gaze for hours at the pictures: great grey colossal hunks, but imagining, at the core of them all, the bones I had seen in the NHM. My long-lasting interest in dinosaurs, animals, zoology, and evolution, cannot solely be attributed to that skeleton, but by god it played its part. And later, when studying at the NHM, it was still a thrill for me to walk the length of the skeleton, from nose to the whipping pencil thin bones at the tip of Dippy's tail.

Of course, I've learned that the "bones" are actually casts of fossils. London's Dippy is one of ten replicas of fossils excavated in Wyoming in 1898. For all its size, Diplodocus carnegii (the species represented by the cast), which weighed around 16 tons and grew up to 25 m in length, was dwarfed by more recently described sauropod relatives: Argentinosaurus grew up to 40 m long and weighted perhaps 100 tons. But these facts do not lessen the wonder and awe inspired by that most loved fossil.

But, the departure is not the end: Dippy is going on a tour of UK museums form 2018–20, meaning more people in new settings will get to stare in wonder at the skeleton in new settings. And, well, having stood next to the skull of a blue whale, that is no less awe inspiring and much as I will remember that childhood thrill of seeing Dippy with nostalgic fondness, I can't wait to see the new Hintze Hall display.