Animal of the week, February 1, 2017—Is it a mouth, is it an anus?

It's so hard to tell these days with all the crap some people speak. But is seems that the problem of telling mouthpiece from arsehole stems back over half a billion years in our evolutionary history.

This week's Animal of the Week Saccorhytus hit the headlines for being perhaps the earliest known example of the major group of animals that includes humans—the deuterostomes.

S Conway Morris / Jian Han

These tiny blighters lived among grains of sand 540 million years ago in what is now China, but was then under the sea. Despite their tiny size, they had muscles, skin, and features that place them firmly in the deuterostomes, which include all animals with backbones, alongside echinoderms (starfish and that lot), and a few other things I won't go into now. What it didn't have, which is somewhat unusual among complex animals, is an anus.

Saccorhytus likely swallowed mouthfuls of sand and algae, squashed out the water through cone like structures that scientists believe might have been precursors of gills, and then spat out waste and unwanted particles.

I won't go into the developmental biology and phylogenetics now, because I'll probably get it wrong and trying to do so will only bring back distant unhappy memories of undergraduate hangovers. But I will mention that the name deuterostome has something to do with developing the anus first and the mouth second. Saccorhytus seems to have made do with just one. When you're a millimetre long, why bother with both?


Researchers' analyses suggest that Saccorhytus was actually most closely related to a long extinct major lineage of deuterostomes and was not a direct ancestor of either humans and other vertebrates or sea cucumbers and other echinoderms, but it does give us the best indication of what the earliest members of this major grouping might have looked like—but then, perhaps it was actually very specialised and unlike other early deuterostomes in its adaptations to living a tiny life.

The mind does boggle at the number of other microscopic fossils that might have been overlooked previously and could offer clues about the evolution of major animal lineages, and anuses. It seems like 2017 might be the year to take a long hard look and really reflect on how we've ended up with the aresholes we've got.

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.

Animal of the Week, January 26, 2016 — sperm whales

A sperm whale washed up at Beverwijk in the Netherlands in the 1600s

Bloody typical, you wait for a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) to come along and five come along at once. The east coast of England has seen five of the magnificent beasts stranded this week, all dead on discovery but likely beached alive. And these five come just a week after another 12 washed up on the shores of Germany and the Netherlands.

As an adolescent I was drawn to them by their delightfully suggestive name—not actually named for some prodigious testicular function, their names comes from spermaceti, an oily substance that fills their bulbous heads and was once highly prized for use in cosmetics manufacturing, leather production, and for making candles. The demand for spermaceti was so great that sperm whales were one of the most highly prized species in the whaling industry of the 1800s, as immortalised in the Melville classic Moby Dick, which I love.

But there are many other fairly stupendous things about these animals—the largest animals with teeth alive today, the whales bigger than them (blue, fin, and bowhead all lack teeth and use baleen plates to obtain food). They are also some of the deepest diving whales, regularly diving over 2000 metres in search of giant squid and colossal squid (its preferred prey). You may wonder how an animal with such a bulbous head would dive so deep, but during dives the spermaceti becomes solid, reducing in volume and streamlining the whale.

Sperm whales have the largest brains of any animal and are the loudest animals on the planet. When hunting, sperm whales use a pair of lips inside their head (known as monkey lips) to generate clicks that are focussed through the spermaceti organ to enable precise echolocation of their prey with sounds reaching up to 230 decibels—a jet engine at take off comes in at a mere 150 decibels (loud enough to cause ear rupture). It's possible that these incredibly loud clicks are used to stun the squid, octopus, and rays the whales hunt.

No one really knows wherefore these strandings occurred—people have speculated links with shipping, sonar, even wind farms, but potentially its nothing half so sinister and just an unfortunate accident. The pod of young male whales made a wrong turn into the north sea and as they headed into the shallower waters they became confused, disorientated, hungry, and eventually dehydrated. Perhaps a little panicked and confused they strayed far too close to shore and once trapped on sandbanks little could be done, as with such large whales, once out of water their great mass (males up to 45 tons) crushes their internal organs.

Sad that at least 17 young males have died in the North Sea, yes. But I always say, you don't see dead animals if there aren't live ones around: so strangely a good sign that there are healthy populations around the British Isles and further out in the deep oceans, making one hell of a racket and dining on the largest calamari there are.

Animal of the Week March 3, 2015 — weasel on a woodpecker

The most amazing picture I've ever seen.

This week's animal is a double-header (quite literally for a few moments): Mustela nivalis (weasel) and Picus viridis (green woodpecker). Martin Le-May was out with his camera in Hornchurch County Park in east London when he witnessed this amazing sight—and more importantly captured it on camera.

Although it looks like the weasel and the woodpecker are joined in their purpose, zooming off on some vital mission of life and death. What's probably happening is that the weasel pounced on the woodpecker hoping to have it for its lunch, but unaccustomed to how hard green woodpeckers are (they usually eat small rodents and rabbits) the weasel was lifted in the air as the bird took flight. The woopecker eventually landed and managed to shake off its hungry passenger.

Weasels, or if you're outside the UK 'least weasels', are the smallest members of the mustelid family (the largest in the family being sea otters and wolverines) and in fact the smallest carnivore—weighing between 30 g for the smallest females and 250 g for a really fat constipated male after lunch (that's 1 ounce to 8 ounces in old money). But they are also double-hard bastards, frequently taking out animals much bigger than they are including rats and rabbits.

Green woodpeckers are the largest woodpeckers found in the UK. Contrary to what you might think they don't peck at trees to find food, rather green woodpeckers feed mostly on ants on the ground. Green woodpeckers do hollow out next holes in dead wood, but they also drum on trees to advertise their presence to rivals for territory and to attract mates. They are a common sight in the parks of London, but don't look up in the trees to see them, look to the ground. They might be confused with the similarly sized parakeets, although have shorter tails, are less noisy, and have a bright red cap to set them apart. An old folk name for the green woodpecker was the 'yaffle'—and Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss was a carved green woodpecker.

I've only seen three weasels in my life.

Not been a great many AOTWs of late, but I can't not have this mentioned on the blog in some way. Perhaps it's the jetlag, but I can't recall ever having felt so happy as when I first saw the image posted here (even though I had been forced to hold my nose and click on a Daily Mail link to see it). I do think it might be the most amazing picture I have ever seen.

Animal of the Decade -- marking 10 years of erratic animals of the week with one of the most terrifying animals ever

Hard to imagine that it's 10 years since I first emailed my friend Lucy on what must have been a busy day at work about an unusual animal I had been reading about on the internet, the solenodon. A few weeks later and a new species of macaque hit the news...and for the next 3 years animal of the week was a pretty regular feature, first Lucy forwarded it to a couple of friends, and then I started sending it to more and more people, who signed up their friends. It was a mailout then. At its peak over 250 people were on the mailing list—and only a few people got pissed off.

As time went on, the world changed. A blog seemed more sensible than a mailout. My MSc in evolutionary biology at the Natural History Museum seemed, ironically, to rob me of my fervour for disseminating animal info. And the pressures of freelance work, love, life, and generally being a louche gad-about got in the way. But I keep it up occasionally for some amusement—and I also do AOTW every once in a while.

Of the 230 odd posts, the most viewed AOTW is the starling from February 2013, which is pleasing as it was based on personal experience. The next most viewed was in defense of the shoebill. My personal favourite is probably the mountain beaver because it contains a pun referencing an art critic.



This week, as it's Hallowe'en, I thought I'd post this video of an animal featured on Wonders of the Monsoon, and excellent BBC series about the wildlife of countries affected by the monsoon. Mimobdella buettikofer (giant red leech), lives on Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Borneo, it's not a blood sucking leech, rather it feeds on the giant blue earthworms (Pheretima darnleiensis) that also live on Borneo's highest peak. There's not really a great deal to add to the video... so yeah, have a look, and sweet dreams.

Animal of the Week September 22, 2014 -- World Rhino Day: a primer

White winos

After almost 10 years of Animal of the Week (admittedly often not weekly), it's a bit of a surprise to me that I have never featured a rhino. So in one fell swoop, I'll do the whole lot, in honour of world rhino day!

What is a rhino?
Rhinoceroses are represented by five species alive today. They are odd-toed ungulates (hoofed mammals). Their closest living relatives are the other odd-toed ungulates—horses and tapirs. More distantly they are related to the even-toed ungulates including cows, camels, hippos, and whales (yes whales, but that's another story).

African rhinos

Black rhinos

Two species, the white rhino (Ceratotherium simum) and black rhino (Diceros bicornis) are found in Africa. The largest of all rhinos, white rhinos are animals of grassland, with broad mouths designed for cropping grass at ground level (the 'white' in their names is a misinterpretation of the Afrikaans word for 'wide', in reference to their lips). The wide, square lip of white rhinos contrasts with the hooked lips of black rhinos designed for browsing shrubs, taller grasses, and low trees.

Indian rhino

Asian rhinos
Three species are found in Asia. The largest and most numerous Asian species is the Indian rhino (Rhinoceros unicornis), the smallest and hairiest of all the rhinos is the Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis), and the one in the middle, but the most endangered mammal species in the world is the Javan rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus).






I thought rhinos were all extinct now

A Javan rhino (seen better days)

The northern subspecies of the white rhino, the west African species of the black rhino, continental representatives of the Javan rhino...all gone. There are about 15 000 white rhinos left in southern and eastern Africa. They outnumber representatives of all other species put together: about 5000 each of the black and Indian rhinos, and just a couple of hundred Sumatran rhinos. As few as 40 Javan rhinos remain on the western tip of Java...the last remnant of a species that once had a range extending from Pakistan, to China, to Java. All species experienced massive declines in recent centuries as firearms and transport meant that poachers could capitalise on the east Asian penchant for rhino-horn in traditional 'medicine'.

Horn, what is it good for?
Absolutely nothing. Rhino horn is made of the same stuff as fingernails and hair...so any claims of medical benefit are utter bunk. If rhino horn was good for you in anyway, you could achieve an equal benefit from chewing on your fingernails...so it's certainly not good for your nerves.

A matter of style
In The Lancet style guide, there is a picture of a Sumatran rhino with the instruction that it should always be referred to as the hairiest of all the rhinos on first mention...it's been there for a decade now...perhaps it's older than animal of the week.