Creature Feature: Australian Rabbits.

Hoppy Easter, everyone! Hope you all had lots of good times with your family, fun egg hunts, and, of course, candy!

Of course, bunnies aren't always fun. Wait, what?

Like The Birds, only with fluffy bunnies.

 

Australia has serious issues with invasive wildlife. Much of its ecosystem evolved in isolation from the rest of the world. So, when something prolific like a rabbit gets brought over by Europeans as a game animal on an island with plenty of resources, guess what happens?

Backing up a little, rabbits were brought to Australia by Europeans in the 1770's. In that day and age, colonists didn't particularly care that Australia had unique wildlife or indigenous people. They wanted to make everything in Australia as European as possible. That meant introducing rabbits as game animals.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to eradicate a population of rabbits. Some of the original 24 brought for hunting escaped and began running around Australia.  With no real natural predators and plenty of grass, the rabbits did what they do best: Eat, spread, and, most importantly, get it on. 

Disclaimer: Found on Photobucket. May or may not be in Australia.

Let's put it this way: In an ecological system not used to dealing with mid-sized mammals that reproduce, well, like rabbits, bunnies wreak havoc. They attack plants - the base of the food web in many cases - leading many local species to go hungry. Predators often aren't equipped to handle bunnies, either. Those feet and teeth can seriously hurt. Yes, we're still talking about rabbits.

With no predators and plenty of food, the rabbits spread from Victoria to New South Wales and into the rest of Western Australia. People tried to build fences in the 1990's to keep the bunnies out, but they had already crossed the line. What started as 24 rabbits in the 1700's had ballooned to 10 billion in the 1920's.

Silly humans, rabbits can't read!

 

The rabbits have been causing havoc in Australia ever since. They reduce native plant species by nibbling sprouts as soon as they bloom. They invaded the burrows of native species. There just aren't enough hunters to keep them at a stable level. Hell, bunnies are bacteria with spinal cords in terms of how versatile they are.

There have, of course, been attempts to stop the killer rabbits. The most successful of these has been a virus that specifically targets rabbits, causing them to develop mucus-filled lesions (myxomatosis). They die of hemorrhages and seizures within ten days. This virus, as with most things that target bacteria, eventually lost its effectiveness. Now the bunnies are on the rise again, ready to terrorize Australia with their cute, fluffy...yeah, it's hard to make rabbits sound intimidating. They're a big deal, OK?

 

So, when you open your chocolate rabbits (I know you have some left over), please think of Australia. Then go nuts biting that sugary rabbit's head off.

Creature Feature: Spix's Macaw.

For the last two weeks or so, I've been reading The Lizard King. Long story short, it's a book on the dark side of the exotic pet industry - smuggling. Virtually every animal in Petco was, at some point in its history, taken from the wild and smuggled into captivity. A lot of common pets actually come from Australia, a place known for strict wildlife laws. Thank smugglers for every cockatiel, budgerigar, and bearded dragon outside of Oz.

Most people would, off the top of their heads, say that taking animals from their wild habitats is a bad thing. Businesspeople and zoos aren't stupid; they know that, to have a future in their business, they have to sustain populations of these animals. For all the ill smuggling brings, there is a silver lining to the cloud: Sometimes, a captive-bred population is all an animal has.



Enter the Spix's Macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii). Native to only to the Bahia state of Brazil, this bird was cited in The Lizard King as being extinct in the wild, but having three members in one man's captive collection. It is small as macaws go, being up to 2 feet in length. It is so endangered that we are not sure whether or not it has any wild relatives. 

In this case, the Spix's Macaw was hit two-fold. Not only was the Amazon rainforest already under threat (do you like hamburgers? You just killed a parrot if you said yes), but the Spix nested in only one type of tree: the Caribbean Trumpet Tree (Tabebuia aurea). These trees were unsustainable for timber. The Africanized bee and exotic pet collection did not help, either. Ironic that captive breeding is the only thing keeping this species alive.



Currently, the only known Spix's Macaws are in captivity. Various zoos have been able to breed them largely thanks to animal smugglers. It is becoming more and more the situation that zoos are evolving into "living museums." We're living unsustainably, and, knowing how humans work, we will continue to do so. There are somewhere around 85 of these birds in captivity. Until its natural habitat can be restored, the Spix's Macaw must join the Scimitar-Horned Oryx on the list of "extinct in the wild."

From the movie. Yeeep.

Aside from The Lizard King, the only other media outlet that has really covered these birds is the movie Rio. Although the movie says Rio and his mate are "blue macaws," their rarity and scientific name point to Spix's. Subtle reference is subtle, but still there.

Creature Feature: Pterodaustro.

Looking at the pterosaur poster in my room, I say to myself "man, there need to be more monsters made out of these." Seriously, with the skulls pterosaurs have, one could make a whole new legion of Hell. We've already covered a few with interesting crests like Nyctosaurus and Tapejara, but the bills of some pterosaurs are worth a look, too.

Along with weird crests, a lot of pterosaurs had weird teeth. Several species had teeth at the end of their long bills. One had teeth that seriously looked like long combs. Basically, they made mergansers, the 'toothy' gangsta punks of the duck world, drop their spray cans and hide.

Which brings us to this:

From www.baystatereplicas.com

 

That skull belongs to Pterodaustro ("southern wing"). Pterodaustro was a pterosaur discovered in 1969 in Argentina. It lived in the Cretaceous a little bit earlier than less-freakish pterosaurs like Pterandon and cool dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor. It survives today only as an example of one of the freakiest pterosaurs ever.

Let's start with the obvious: The bill of Pterodaustro was lined with thousands of slender, long teeth. It is hypothesized that these were used for filter feeding, much like modern day flamingos. A single Pterodaustro would have consumed thousands of these tiny organisms in a single scoop. Fossils of such tiny creatures have been observed around Pterodaustro, so this flamingo parallel is not from the beak alone. The resemblance is uncanny; remember that birds and pterosaurs aren't even closely related.



Speaking of flamingos, by the way, Pterodaustro may well have been pink. It's unknown how pterosaur pigments worked, but this one shared a diet with flamingos. Flamingos get their bright colors from eating a lot of crustaceans. In the worst-case scenario, its fur may have been black on bright pink skin. Yes, your worst nightmares now come in pink. 

Creature Feature/They Actually Eat That: Honeypot Ants.

This blog has covered eating insects more times than we care to count. They are one of those foods that make Americans go "I'm glad our nation is rich enough that we don't have to eat bugs." The fact is, insects are nutritious, economical, and, if prepared right, darn tasty.

So what happens when nature makes an insect with an "eat me" sign stamped on its rear? Only one thing:

The honeypot ant (Myrmecocystus et al.) is one of the few insects that begs to be eaten.  There are several genera with the one cited here being native to North America. Other honeypot ants can be found in Australia and South Africa. These ants are most common in dry environments where food and water are scarce.

The term "honeypot ant' can refer to a number of species of ants that have exactly one thing in common: Certain members of their colony store food in their bodies for others. This can be something sweet, like sugar, or a concentrate of various fluids and pieces of whatever the workers happened to come across. Whatever the source, the result is always the same:

From NASA, of all places.

Unlike most animals, who will either cache or store food in their nests for when the time is right, honeypot ants store food in their abdomens. The tiny ant's rear end can easily swell to the size of a grape if it gets enough food in there. This hinders the ant's mobility considerably; if they get too swollen, they cannot move. They are thus usually found underground in the nests, being mined and fed by the workers. Hello, easy lunch!



In all seriousness? These ants are designed to be eaten by other members of their colony. When food sources get low, they're the emergency rations. Their proper name is "repletes." Hell, other ant colonies will also raid nests with honeypots - they're that valuable in terms of water and nutrients. Remember, ants wage war for the same reasons humans do: resources.

Humans have found out that these ants are good eatin', too. They aren't high cuisine, but the Warlpiri Aborigines in Australia have taken quite a shine to them. No preparation is required - just bite the sweet-tasting abdomen and go. Nature is a free buffet if you know where to look.

Creature Feature: Megatherium.

Sloths are one of the most pathetic, yet adorable, creatures found in nature. They're so slow that algae has the chance to grow on their shaggy fur. The great majority of their time is spent asleep. They don't even have enough energy to properly be considered warm-blooded, making them right alongside naked mole rats in the "mammals that could be considered cold blooded" category.

Would you believe that sloths were once among the largest mammals on the planet?



Ah, Pleistocene megafauna, how we miss you. Megatherium was one of several giant ground sloths. All ground sloths are extinct, living roughly 2 million years ago. Rumor has them surviving all the way into the 1500's. Megatherium was native to South America- the same place where extant sloths live today. Different giant sloths lived in North America.

Megatherium was a giant sloth. By giant, we mean "as big as an elephant." No, seriously; people casually call this beast "elephant-sized." It weighed up to eight tons, and, if on its hind legs, stood at twice the size of an elephant. Mammoths were among the few things larger than Megatherium.  It was a big sloth.



Know what's really scary? This thing could have eaten meat. Paleontologists debate over whether this massive mammal ate meat or not, either by killing the prey itself or by scavenging kills of mega-preds like Smilodon. The bite indicates that its teeth cut as opposed to ground, and there are some limb attachments that make one wonder if it was really an herbivore. Most people think it ate leaves like a rather bulky giraffe. We could compromise and suppose that it was a sort of omnivore, but naahh. Let's stick with plant-eating behemoth for now.

Nobody really knows why Megatherium went extinct. As with nearly every giant mammal, human intervention is likely. A cataclysmic event like a meteor strike may also be to blame. Whatever the cause, the end result is just depressing:

Bio-Art: Hooved Shoes et al.

A little personal entry, this time: Ever since last semester, I have been interested in making wearable shoes out of real cow hooves. I still need to get some heels, some red fur, and a good way to cut solid, thick keratin, but the hooves I spray-painted gold are at my current apartment. Yes, I will make them into shoes that hopefully look fabulous; my last attempt at this was a spectacular failure. The only reason I ever go shoe shopping of my own volition is to make crazy art.

That said, I'm not the one who did shoes using real animal hooves first. The unofficial queen of hoof shoes is German taxidermist Iris Schieferstein. She loves mixing taxidermy and fashion...like this:

Source.

Schieferstein's first pair of hoof shoes were made of horse hooves. Although not as impressive as her pair of cow shoes, these are still pretty neat.  They cost around 5,500 USD, though, and can only be worn for a couple of hours.

Moo.

The "Vegas Showgirl" hoof shoes use cow hooves, fur, and toy pistols. They look snazzy, but I doubt they're actually wearable.  Apparently the horse ones are, however, so I would totally give these a shot. Someone with 12 years of creative taxidermy experience has to know how long they last, too.

If hooves are not your thing, how about doves?

Link.

Schieferstein has also done full-body snake mounts on shoes. Just sayin'.

He come to town (credit).

The idea of hoof-like shoes has since caught on in the fashion world. There have been shoes that I can only describe as "camel toe" showing up. Designers like Alexander McQueen made 'hoof shoes' that really look more like platforms with a narrow toe than actual hooves. One German company, Kronier, at least has the ankle length required for hooves about right. When designers start using actual animal parts in their works, then I might listen. Until then, I am avoiding all heels not made with real hooves.

Mythbusters: Mothman.

There should really be a sequel to this week. Too many cryptids exist for us to cover in one week. It was a tossup between black-eyed kids and Mothman for this final entry...and look at who pulled out on top!

Standing a little over the height of a man,  Mothman is known worldwide as a flying, red-eyed harbinger of doom. He - it, we're not sure about this thing's junk, thank you - has been sighted in West Virginia, the last place in which one would expect a legendary beast. Forget Clover - Mothman is the American monster. 

Reports of this weird creature began in the 1960's. Now, before you start making hippie jokes, there were several eyewitnesses to these accounts. The first event on November 12, 1966, happened when five men preparing a grave suddenly saw a giant flying creature take flight from the trees. They said it resembled a "man with wings." That was only the beginning.



The most famous sighting occurred shortly after that. On November 15th of that same year, two married couples were driving by an abandoned TNT plant near Point Pleasant, West Virginia. They saw a winged creature a little bigger than a man with glowing red eyes going into the plant as they were driving past. They shrugged it off, probably wondering what it was and not saying anymore, and drove right on by. The same creature was soon found on a hillside along the road...and it could keep right up with a 100 m.p.h car. Yes, this creature was flying right alongside the newlyweds, who had their pedal to the metal.


Sightings of Mothman remained steady for a year. At least 100 people witnessed Mothman in that time. Its home base was the TNT plant and the forested area around it. Many other stories can be found here. You'll get the gist: the Mothman comes, scares the living crap out of people, and may kill a dog or two. There may even be a chance that he can take human form, or that UFOs and men in black are involved. Creepy.



Just as Point Pleasant was over Mothman, another strange incident occurred. On December 17th, 1967, the Silver Bridge connecting Point Pleasant to Ohio collapsed. Dozens of people caught in rush-hour traffic fell to their doom. Witnesses near the TNT plant saw the red lights en masse that night. A few people had even dreamt of that bridge collapsing after seeing Mothman. I'm not going to dive too deeply into The Mothman Prophecies, but things like doomsday prophecies tend to inspire movies.

Since then, disasters have been associated with Mothman's appearance.  Natural and manmade events alike have been linked to seeing giant, flying creatures in the sky. Some have even seen flying beasts far too large to be any bird in shots of 9/11. Nobody is sure what Mothman is, but it is definitely not a hoax.

If I say any more, the men in black might come for me. Peace.