If you thought that breeding two species of big cat yesterday was dangerous, how about trying it with bears? Better yet, in the case of pizzlies, nature has already done it for you; no drugs required for this idea!
A pizzly (which SOUNDS like another word for bear urine, but whatever, scientific naming system) is a hybrid between a male polar bear (Ursus maritimus) and a female grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis). Pizzlies generally act more like polar bears than grizzlies, stamping like polar bears do ice and sleeping like throw rugs. They have at least some coloration from both species; generally speaking, they have light bodies with darker paws. It looks almost like a Siamese (or Himalayan) cat in bear form:
Meow?
Numerous hunters have found strange-looking bears in Alaska and Canada, but the pizzly was the first confirmed wild hybrid. DNA testing proved its mixed parentage in 2006. Had it been a pure grizzly, hunter Jim Martell would have been arrested. (For some reason, he had a license to kill the FAR more endangered polar bear, but that's another issue entirely.)
If only they would have stuck with "prizzly." "Grolar bear" indicates that the specimen had a grizzly father and polar bear mother, but "pizzly" is the real name for polar x grizzly (with the father's name coming first). "Nanulak," a portmanteau of Inuit words for the two bears, is a fine replacement. "Pizzly" deserves to be pissed on; science, HOW did you manage to make a hybrid of two of the most badass bears in the world sound so lame?
No, these big cat crosses were not bred for their skills in magic as Napoleon Dynamite would suggest. The liger is a real creature with a lion (Panthera leo) father and tigress (Panthera tigris) mother. The opposite combination, a tiglon, rarely lives past birth. Both of these hybrids are fertile. The two species would never meet or mate in the wild, but in captivity, accidents happen.
Normally, lions and tigers are kept separately. Since ligers like Hercules have become huge (seriously!) draws, however, more zoos have deliberately crossed the two. If reptile breeders cross giant snakes for the hell of it, why not do the same for giant cats?
Pictured: SCIENCE. No booze involved.
A pairing between a lion and a tiger results in the biggest of the big cats known to mankind. Ligers can get up to 900 pounds and, when standing on their hind legs, reach up to 12 feet in height. This is, at least partially, because lionesses have a growth-inhibiting gene. No lioness in there means that the liger is one big kitty.
Don't try this at home. As the video says, big cats need a lot of food, and there are already a fair amount of homeless Panthera specimens. Let the big cats stay with people who are licensed to handle them. (No, I do not know how one gets 'started' with big cats...but it probably involves working at a zoo.)
You can, however, get a robotic liger with absolutely no prior training. Just like kids in Japan!
This is probably WAY off, but I think I prefer "Pretty Green Onions." Or "Caramelldansen."
So you like fish, but you don't like the possibility of getting tapeworms, mercury, or other types of food poisoning. Luckily for you, the creative people in Scandanavia (Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark) have found a way to clean up your food.
This was once a fish.
They call it 'lutefisk.' It is, in short, whitefish preserved in a substance called lye. This makes the fish taste "slippery," and also cuts down the protein content by about 50%. The end result is more jelly-like than the fresh fish found in sushi.
They actually eat that?
Yep. Brace yourselves for some serious fridge horror.
I looked up exactly what "lye" was. This was what I found, as per Wikipedia:
"Both solid dry lye and lye solutions are corrosive and will degrade organic tissue."
"Lye may react with various sugars to generate carbon monoxide, which is a poisonous gas; mixing sodium hydroxide and sugar in a closed container is therefore dangerous."
The soaking process that goes into lutefisk is the only thing keeping it from burning one's throat on the way down. By the time all is said and done, the lutefisk has a pH of 11-12 (strong enough to cause chemical burning). Lye is normally used to clear out drains, make soap, and produce biodiesel. Yes, high-quality lye can be used to preserve food, but lutefisk is an extreme example.
The lutefisk is eating the fork as I speak.
Why the hell do they do it? Some say that it goes back to Viking times. Traditional lore holds that, for whatever reason, a fish got into some lye; since the people at the time were so poor that they could not let a single fish go to waste, they had to eat the slimy, gelatinous mess that the fish had become. For whatever reason, people persisted in eating the corrosive mixture, and it is now a staple of Scandinavian tradition. They claim eating lutefisk once a year is the secret to their awesome health and longevity.
Can we add ABBA and Ace of Base to that list, too? More research must be done.
I once asked a Finnish artist what lutefisk tasted like. She said that it tasted like slippery. I proceeded to wonder exactly how that was possible, but she assured me that lutefisk did indeed taste like slippery. If something is so bizarre that it redefines whether something can be a taste or not, is it really worth trying? Judge for yourself; it's already in Canada and America. In fact, we eat more of it than the people in Europe.
There is only one thing that would make me eat lutefisk:
Yes, the infamous man-faced fish is a variety of koi. Y'know, the same oriental fish that people keep in ponds in their backyards. There are some seriously weird things going on with koi, including scalelessness and the man-faced fish up there.
Koi are one of the main symbols of Japanese culture. Like arowanas, carp are believed to have some similarities to dragons. A carp can supposedly become a dragon by jumping over the Dragon Gate; this is why fish can be found everywhere on the Japanese holiday Boys' Day. Koi in particular are also thought of as symbols of harmony and friendship because 'koi' is a homophone for another word for 'love.' (This is kinda weird; the Greek word for 'carp' also sounds like one of the epithets of Aphrodite. Maybe the Japanese were onto something.)
Not even all of them.
The Japanese certainly do love their koi. There are over twenty morphs of koi, yet this was not enough to fit them into breed week. The reason why makes a lot more sense if one knows how fish mate.
The male forces the eggs out of a female in a sticky mass. They stick wherever they can. Afterward, one or more males may fertilize the mass. It's pretty much an orgy, albeit one that's a LOT less fun than it sounds.
That's a lotta fish.
This process makes it almost impossible to guarantee physical attributes of the offspring. Koi, unlike mammals and reptiles, have thousands of offspring. The undesirable fry are usually used as food for other fish. They are said to enhance the color of arowana in particular.
O hai, I can has ur koi baybees?
In short, it's impossible to guarantee the attributes of the offspring, which is one of the criteria for a breed. Koi are just common carp with pretty colors, and revert back into their wild nature within a few generations. Seeing as carp are large, hardy fish, this can cause a lot of ecological problems if they are released outside of the pond.
Oh, and they can also live over 200 years - even longer than a Galapagos tortoise. Have fun maintaining your koi pond postmortem!
Sorry to disappoint any of you, but there will be no particularly awesome videos this entry. No Youtuber has ever captured this animal alive on film.
That's because it's extinct.
If you do not already know what an aurochs is, you will probably be surprised to learn that it is, of all things, a cow. THE first cow.
It kicked ASS.
Aurochs first appeared in the Pleistocene era, covering much of the Eurasian continent. Like much of the Pleistocene megafauna, humans contributed to their extinction. That's right: cows used to be big enough to be considered dangerous megafauna. It makes one wonder who, exactly, had the bright idea to take their milk.
Don't. Even. THINK about it.
The aurochs was domesticated around 6000 B.C. and still widespread enough in Europe to be used in the Roman battle arena. After that, they were over-hunted to extinction - even when hunting later became restricted, it was too little, too late. The last aurochs, a female, died in the forests of Poland of natural causes in 1627.
The aurochs is the origin of all European (taurine) cattle breeds. It is well-recorded in art going all the way back to cave paintings. Possibly because of this close relationship and early domestication, the first character of the Phoenician alphabet was an image of a bull's head.
Why the hell am I talking about a dead animal, then? It's pushing up daisies. It has ceased to be. IT is an EX-bovine!
(Oh, it's just pinin' for the fjords!)
There are a number of parties trying to, in some way, shape or form, resurrect the aurochs. The German Heck brothers attempted to make a breed of cattle phenotypically similar to the aurochs of old, but many say that truly breeding back is an exercise in futility. Poland also has an institute devoted to resurrecting the aurochs, making it the only cool thing they've ever donr.
However, this begs the question: As with Jurassic Park, do we really want to have cattle a little smaller than elephants? Sure, in this case it was our bad, but cattle are already big animals. There would be little point in recreating a nigh-mythical animal except for, well, profit. That is a cash cow.
When I say "nigh-mythical," I mean it. The aurochs, now extinct, has been a religious figure ever since humans started drawing things on cave walls. Its curved horns were seen as a representation of the lunar crescent and a bull's skull resembles the female reproductive tract. (Seriously, check that one out - it's freaky.) The constellation Taurus has always been seen as a bull's head. The Golden Calf mentioned in the Bible probably refers to the many pagan bull idols.
Humans have also been using it in Magic:the Gathering since the dawn of time.
"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." - This may be from a novel about pedophilia, but when a cow is put up there alongside angels and art, you know it's special.
A while back, I encountered a cat that cost over ten thousand USD called an Ashera (pictured above). It was listed on a news site as the "largest, rarest, most expensive domestic cat in the world." Small wonder; the Ashera could be leash trained, stretched over a meter from head to tail, ate more than the average cat, and had an amazingly exotic look (with a 'guarantee' that all kittens would look alike).
Almost immediately following the news post, breeders of cats called Savannahs were calling it an overpriced, overmarketed hybrid. This later turned out to be true - the Ashera was no different from an F1 Savannah, a hybrid that already existed. The owner of Lifestyle Pets, Simon Brodie, promptly changed his name and started a different company.
Did you think that cats, of all domesticated animals, had escaped hybridization? There are a fair few crosses with small wildcats, such as servals, Geoffrey's cats, and Asian Leopard Cats (ALCs). There seem to be many more deliberate crosses between wild and domestic felines than with wild and domestic canines, and each and every one of them has different requirements. These all have dramatic effects on a cat's appearance, temperament, and even eating habits. This brings us to the Bengal, one of the more popular exotic crosses.
This cat probably could have fit into Freak Week if it had not been a hybrid. Despite having a registry with over 60,000 members, Bengals and all other hybrids are outcasted from the Cat Fanciers' Association. Other associations may or may not accept Savannahs, Bengals, and other hybrids based on their blood. As I said in my article addressing the differences between breeds and species,hybrids are not breeds.
Despite the orange coloration, the Bengal hybrid-breed does not derive its name from the Bengal tiger. Instead, it comes from the far lesser known Asian Leopard Cat's scientific name, Prionailurus bengalensis. They act like little wildcats until the F4 generation, at which point they are tame enough to be considered standard pets.
Since the birth of the first Bengal litter, breeders have been crossing its wild look into many projects. This includes the infamous, and adorable, Toygers - tabby cats with a little bit of Bengal in them for a 'wild' look. This was supposedly done to encourage the conservation of real tigers in the wild, but until I see 10% of every Toyger kitten profit going to wildlife preservation, I'm not buying it.
A piebald ball python - one of the more popular morphs, unsurprisingly.
Now that Freak Week is over, it's time for a few creatures that almost, but did not quite, make the cut. There is a fine line between breeds and captive-bred morphs. Captive-bred morphs are the ball python's (Python regius) specialty, but as of right now, snakes do not have any official breeds.
(Actually, it's just a REALLY nice coral glow...maybe with some pastel in there.)
Ball pythons are native to Africa, with most of the specimens in captivity coming from Ghana. They are quite popular in the exotic pet trade worldwide. They are small, docile, and exotic-looking constrictors that can be easily handled by a beginner, although corn snakes give balls a run for their money.
Be careful where you get your ball python if you choose to do so. Villagers in Ghana are paid for collecting eggs from, then releasing, female ball pythons. Most chain pet stores, in the true spirit of 'mart' and 'co.', get their ball pythons from Ghana, which leads to a host of problems with the snakes. One is far better off giving a breeder's 'reject' a new home; normal males are cheap enough to be sold in bulk by breeders.
Ball pythons have so many interesting variations that they could ALMOST have a week to themselves. There are so many traits (dominant, co-dominant, recessive...you name it!) and combos that breeders try whatever they can to make the new "it" ball python. Thus far, I am placing my bets on NERD; not only did they 'invent' the spider ball python, but some of the other morphs they have are simply eye-popping. If I ever needed a reason to go to the East Coast, NERD provided it.
Spider ball, spider ball. Does whatever a spider ball does.
The catch? Snakes are practically living art. It shows in their prices; a nice, clear blue-eyed leucistic ball python can run upwards of 1000 USD. Other morphs can soar higher, especially in combination.
Of course, I like my white with just a little bit of taint to it. ;) The Mojave x Mojave BEL looks a little bit different from the 'White Diamond' above:
(A super Mojave. Mojaves are also one of the ingredients in many more pure BEL projects.)
Your resident lover of weird creatures, foods, etc. Likes going outside and looking for faeries in whatever form they choose to take. Is fascinated by parasites, worms, snakes, and anything with wings.
