Nerd Animal Thread (Animal Facts you Know and Love)

Chou Toshio

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Since we have threads all-out about loving Cats and Dogs, I thought a general animal love thread would be fine-- but this one not just about mindless glomping over animals, but instead talking about "favorite animals" and all the weird animal facts you may have accumulated in your life.

Rules:
1) Fact posts should focus on one animal. (but response posts can be literally anything)
2) If you want to post more, make more posts-- feel free to post more. (read: double posting on animal fact posts is cool here)
3) No "pure glomp" posts please (jumping spiders are cute!-- they are though :3), post something intelligent.
(extinct animals are fair game too!)


With that, my first to get the thread started:



Almost looking like a miniature golden eagle, the Harris's Hawk is a beautiful bird. However despite its eagle-like facial features, the Harris Hawk is indeed, a hawk and a very unique one at that--

Harris Hawks are basically the only members of their own genus, Parabuteo-- and don't quite fit in with any of the four "standard groups" of diurnal raptors: (1) The largest, eagles, (2) The fastest, falcons, (3) The forest hunting "true hawks" (accipiters), and not quite like (4) The long-soaring meadow hunters, the buteos.

Its features (and genetics) are closest to buteo hawks (such as the red-tailed hawk and common buzzard), but it has features similar to an accipiter (true hawks), with thinner wings and a longer tail than most buteos (ie. it's faster and turns faster but is worse at soaring extended periods).

However, what's really unique about the Harris's Hawk is its social behavior.

Harris's Hawks live and hunt in social groups called packs (they are not called flocks). I believe they are the only pack hunting bird of prey.

Like wolf packs, Harris's Hawk packs use formations to flush out, corner, and attack prey. However, when a kill is made, there is a whole lot less organization in feeding order (frenzy!).

Harris's Hawks also mate abnormally-- with life a bit more complicated than the for-life breeding pairs formed by other raptors. Generally, there is one dominant breeding male and female in each pack (again, like wolves), but it's not uncommon for the dominant female to mate with multiple males; and nest duties are usually handled by 3 individuals at a time.


Truly, a unique and fascinating bird.
 
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Brambane

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Kangaroo rats aren't really a favorite animal of mine, but in my Intro to Zookeeping class at college we talked about them a fair amount when we got to exhibit design. Kangaroo rats are mostly seed-eaters from incredibly arid environments. They store seeds they forage in a cache in or near their burrow, where they spend the majority of the time. What is interesting is that kangaroo rats get the entirety of their water supply from the seeds they eat my metabolically breaking down the carbohydrates and making water. They never need to a drink a drop in their life. In fact, my professor told me that drinking water will actually kill the kangaroo rat because it will cause its kidneys to explode.
 

dwarfstar

mindless philosopher
There's enough weird and fascinating information about salticids out there to take up several posts, but I'm in a hurry, so I'll just focus on one for now. (Props to Chou for recognizing their glory.)



^These little cuties are Bagheera kiplingi, a species of Central American jumping spider first recorded in 1896. The first picture is of a female, and the second is of a male; both are holding Beltian bodies (fun fact: the female of the species was not observed for about 100 years after the male's discovery). What makes B. kiplingi so strange is its diet - it's the only known spider that's primarily herbivorous.

A little background: many species of acacia trees (most in the genus Vachellia) have developed structures called Beltian bodies, which are detachable nubs rich in proteins, sugars, and lipids that develop at the tip of the leaf and are thought to have evolved in symbiosis with ants. The ants live inside the tree's hollow thorns and defend it against herbivores, and get nutrition from the Beltian bodies in return. Bagheera kiplingi, which live on acacia trees, feed on the Beltian bodies (the exact mechanism by which they do so is unknown). The percentage of the spiders' diet that the Beltian bodies constitute appears to vary by location; they make up roughly 90% of the diet of B. kiplingi sampled in Mexico, but about 60% of the diet of individuals in Costa Rica (source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982209016261). The spiders supplement their diet with nectar, ant larvae, small flies, and occasionally other spiders (including fellow B. kiplingi).
One last fun fact: B. kiplingi exhibit some degree of parental care, as do many other salticid species. Females have been observed standing guard over hatchlings and clutches of eggs on numerous occasions.
 
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Imanalt

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As a zoology major, i have plenty of these, but since I'm too tired to write up a full through up post now, I'll just go ahead and talk about something I learned about working for a wildlife rehabilitator. Every spring right when birds came back from migrating, we had "drunken waxie season" in which cedar waxwings would run into issues where they eat berries that sat either on the ground or on branches all winter, and fermented. They proceed to get into all sorts of trouble, unsurprisingly, and despite being fairly rare to injure themselves severely enough to end up at a wildlife rehabbers about half the birds we got in for that one week would be waxwings. Why Waxwings do this and no other birds is unclear... I've seen speculation that waxwings intentionally look for old berries, intentionally getting drunk.
 

Cresselia~~

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The Chinese white dolphin (also known as Hong Kong dolphin) is actually pink when they are living adults.
THey turn white after they are dead.
Young dolphins are born black and gradually loose their pigment.
By puberty, they are pink with grey patches or spots and it looks like mold has grown on them. We call these locally as 'moldy' during dolphin surveys.
THey are regarded as sacred by local fisherman because they say the Goddess Tin Hau has 4 dolphins for pulling her cart. Although the fishermen hate them for eating off their nets, they don't kill them.
 


One of my favourite characteristics of dolphins is how perfect they are as aquatic creatures. This is partially attributable to their smooth skin. The top layer of skin is thin and constantly shedding cells; with the decreased drag, dolphins are super streamlined and swim very fast and easily. Under the top layer are a bunch of very small ridges that trap liquid molecules, further decreasing the resistance of the water around them. Similarly, their eyes are protected from water resistance by some kind of secretion.

Another more obvious feature is the shape of their body and the different functions of their fins. Their tails are very powerful propellers while their fins variously provide stability (after all, they can swim quite fast; bottlenose dolphins, with which you are probably most familiar, can achieve bursts of ~35km/h and has a sustained swimming speed of 5-11km/h, and you may also be aware that dolphins can speed along with the bow of boats for a boost).

Also, dolphins breathe 'consciously'! If you think about it, this makes sense, since they need to surface to breathe. But what I mean is that, in order to breathe (and not drown/for general safety against predators etc. maybe?), they are not fully unconscious when they sleep; one hemisphere of their brain (and accordingly the opposite eye) goes inactive at a time, while the other enters a lower state of activity. Such unihemispheric sleep has been observed in some other marine mammals and some birds. Their respiratory system is also way more efficient than ours (and they can slow their heart rate, which a number of other animals, such as hummingbirds, can also do to conserve energy... I should probably post about hummingbirds, or someone else can!) which is why they can spend time underwater not breathing for about 7 minutes, although there are dive records over twice this.

Speaking of sleep... Calves actually often sleep/swim in their mother's slipstream, slightly behind the mother's dorsal fin and a bit above, in a position called echelon swimming; it's much safer this way for the calf, allows the calf to swim faster (free ride, practically), and also stops the calf from sinking. Sorry, Chou, but that is really, really cute!!

I should also mention that other mothers in a pod have been observed to babysit calves while the calf's mother is getting food or whatever.

I'd love to ramble about the hearing and vision of dolphins but I think I've typed enough ... a lot of this also applies to whales, too.

What a great way to procrastinate my biology essay...
 

Cresselia~~

Junichi Masuda likes this!!


One of my favourite characteristics of dolphins is how perfect they are as aquatic creatures. This is partially attributable to their smooth skin. The top layer of skin is thin and constantly shedding cells; with the decreased drag, dolphins are super streamlined and swim very fast and easily. Under the top layer are a bunch of very small ridges that trap liquid molecules, further decreasing the resistance of the water around them. Similarly, their eyes are protected from water resistance by some kind of secretion.

Another more obvious feature is the shape of their body and the different functions of their fins. Their tails are very powerful propellers while their fins variously provide stability (after all, they can swim quite fast; bottlenose dolphins, with which you are probably most familiar, can achieve bursts of ~35km/h and has a sustained swimming speed of 5-11km/h, and you may also be aware that dolphins can speed along with the bow of boats for a boost).

Also, dolphins breathe 'consciously'! If you think about it, this makes sense, since they need to surface to breathe. But what I mean is that, in order to breathe (and not drown/for general safety against predators etc. maybe?), they are not fully unconscious when they sleep; one hemisphere of their brain (and accordingly the opposite eye) goes inactive at a time, while the other enters a lower state of activity. Such unihemispheric sleep has been observed in some other marine mammals and some birds. Their respiratory system is also way more efficient than ours (and they can slow their heart rate, which a number of other animals, such as hummingbirds, can also do to conserve energy... I should probably post about hummingbirds, or someone else can!) which is why they can spend time underwater not breathing for about 7 minutes, although there are dive records over twice this.

Speaking of sleep... Calves actually often sleep/swim in their mother's slipstream, slightly behind the mother's dorsal fin and a bit above, in a position called echelon swimming; it's much safer this way for the calf, allows the calf to swim faster (free ride, practically), and also stops the calf from sinking. Sorry, Chou, but that is really, really cute!!

I should also mention that other mothers in a pod have been observed to babysit calves while the calf's mother is getting food or whatever.

I'd love to ramble about the hearing and vision of dolphins but I think I've typed enough ... a lot of this also applies to whales, too.

What a great way to procrastinate my biology essay...
Some species of dolphins can even teach their calves how to use sponges to protect their beaks when they poke into the sand to hunt prey.
And researches find out that female calves learn this faster.
 

Chou Toshio

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@Jumpluf-- that is cute.



^Orcas are, after all-- the biggest dolphins. They're also probably one of the most powerful and definitely the most sophisticated hunting species on the planet. Orcas hunt... basically EVERYTHING.

The cool thing about Orcas as hunters is that they have hunting "cultures". They're pretty clique-key, and tend to only stick with Orcas of the same "clan" (there are often several pods of Orcas that belong to the same clan), groups that speak the same "language" (same calls on the same frequencies), and eat the same things. For instance, off of the west coast of the U.S. there is a "mammal eating" clan that specializes in seals/dolphins more northern and off coast, and the "fish eaters" that stay closer in and even go down to Mexico, which almost never hunt mammals. Though the two clans have territories that overlap, the individuals almost never engage each other; and their hunting and eating cultures are totally different.

Depending on what they eat and where they eat it, Orcas develop different hunting techniques that are passed down through teaching-- hence it being called a culture (along with language). For instance, only in Australia/New Zealand do Orcas know how to grab a stingray by the tip of its tail and swim backwards to pull it out of the rocks without engaging its stinger.


Oh and also if there's any question at all as to who's the biggest bad-ass of the ocean:



Off the coast of San Francisco, a female Orca was seen by whale watchers as she engaged a fully grown Great White Shark. The great whites come to the bay area in fall to feast on breeding seals; which make up an important feeding season for the pacific white sharks. As the shark came in towards the seals (where the Orca was also feeding) it was the female orca who noticed the shark first. Echolocation > Electric Sensory ftw I guess.

It was over almost instantly.

The female Orca smashed the white shark in its gills to stun it, then dragged it deeper under water and flipped it upside down. Being flipped upside down forces every species of shark to go unconcious, and can even kill them (incidentally, the Australian/New Zealand ray hunters also use the same technique on rays). By the time they re-surface, the water was full of shark blood and the white shark was completely incapacitated. The orca took the Great White out no contest, no injury; and engaged the shark as if it knew exactly what to do with a flawlessly designed shark-killing technique-- this was not its first time.

The whale watchers, which the orcas had been previously observing, claim that the Orca then dragged the shark over to the whale watching boat and pushed it up for the whale watchers to see-- almost like a dog showing its master a dead bird; "look what I got!"

The orca (and its smaller companion) then ate the shark's liver before leaving it to sink and die. The next day, ALL the great white in the bay area fled-- they were gone, even in the height of the seal season. It's believed by scientists that the chemicals of the dead shark's body alerted the others to danger, and the followed the instinct to flee.

Orcas are now recorded as the only predator of Great White sharks.
 
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Brambane

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So I had biology lab the other day and we learned about animal behavior. And by animal behavior, I mean we watched a video and played with termites.

As a social insect, communication is incredibly important to maintaining the mound's homeostasis. Termites communicate through chemicals in their saliva. As the workers pass food to and from each other (which is required for soldiers, as their jaws are too large to feed) they pass on chemicals conveying a variety of messages. The mound is too hot. There are not enough soldiers. There are ants in the mound. The workers carry this message to their queen, who processes all the information given to her. Then her royal colossalness excretes a chemical cocktail at her posterior containing all the orders for the colony. And thus the queen rules her domain without ever moving an inch, not that she can. And when the time for battle comes, the soldiers audibly slam their mandibles against the ground, making a clacking sound.

Termites also have air conditioning. They have vents at the lower part of their mound that pulls in cool air as hot air exits the chimneys at the top.
 
This veers well away from animals and into Protista but termites can't actually digest wood by themselves. Termite guts are full of microorganisms (symbionts and parasites both). The protists take in wood particles as cellulose and ferment it, producing ATP to transfer energy and a bunch of other products. There are also a number of other microorganisms inside host protists (for each protist, there are many bacteria, all making use of the enzymatic processes of the protists) or just in the gut. There isn't much nitrogen in wood, so termites are quite nitrogen-deficient. This problem is ameliorated by the symbiotic presence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which recycle uric acid and, well, fixate nitrogen.

Of note, termite guts are very interesting and rich microbial environments full of methanogens (which are all from the conventionally-accepted third domain of life, Archaea, and also act symbiotically within the termite), protists that degrade cellulose as above, and a wide variety of bacteria, which variously perform acetogenesis, recycle uric acid, and interact with various compounds and acids inside of the termite gut. They also interact with each other, mostly mutually, although the acetogens and the methanogens (which form methane from the protists' released hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which the acetogens also want as substrates) compete for resources.

Admittedly that wasn't very animal-related, but the tl;dr is... wood is fucking hard to eat, especially if you want enough nutrients. Termites are one of the most interesting living microbiological environments, and only really through the presence of these microorganisms inside of them are they able to carry out many important biochemical functions for survival. They are known for their wood diet, but rely on microorganisms to obtain/most efficiently make use of the nutrients from it!

FYI similar shit (such as methanogenesis, which is uniquely, to our knowledge, performed by some archaea) happens in your own digestive tract :)

Just on my mind lately because I'm writing an essay on the archaea and we cut up some termites in biology recently and checked out the (non-chopped-up) protists under the microscope. My favourite organism was Trichomitopsis termopsidis, which is hyperactive as fuck and rapidly undulates both horizontally and vertically. Trichonympha campanula was also very cool (ugh, this is the animal thread, so I won't, but it contorts and changes shape quite a lot to be almost unrecognisable).
 
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I really love this thread, I'm a huge animal and dinosaur nut, but atm I'm just gonna post some staggering facts about the most massive animal our planet has ever seen.

A blue whale's tongue alone can weigh as much as an elephant, and some of its veins and arteries are so massive that a human could crawl through them. Its heart is the size of a car. Their young weigh 28 tons when they enter the world and are over 8 meters long. They gain around 90 kilos and drink around 600 litres of milk in a day. They are the loudest animals in the world, able to communicate at a distance of 1600 kilometers.

This isn't specific to blue whales, but a humpback whale has literally been proven to be capable of emotion. One was tangled in deep sea cables and completely unable to free herself, the cables cut into her and drew blood. A team of divers went out to rescue her, but as she was so agitated they had to cut through the cables entangling her, and probably hurt her significantly in the process. They were also at considerable risk, as a single blow from her fluke could have killed them instantly. But when they approached she stopped thrashing and became very still as they cut the cables, and they saw her eyes following the whole time. Once she was freed she didn't swim away instantly, but instead circled the divers and very delicately nudged each and every one of them with her snout, while emitting a very deep hum. She was showing her gratitude, she understood that they were helping her.

Stories like these just make me well up, I'm not a vegetarian and like to eat meat, but to me there's something different about eating chicken and fish compared to whales, and will remain a vehement protestor against whaling. They are the biggest, possibly the most incredible animals in the world, and we have a lot to learn from our massive cousins.
 

v

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jumpluff

did you know dolphins are the only animal other than humans to engage in sexual slavery and rape? roving gangs of male dolphins will physically prevent female dolphins from eating until she services them. dolphins also torture other sea creatures, seemingly for no reason other than their own enjoyment.

my favorite ant is the amazon ant because they can only do one thing: kill other animals. that said, they are great at it, having razor-like pincers that cut through exoskeletons like nothing else. they are so specialized that they cannot feed themselves or take care of their young, so they instead storm into nearby carpenter ant colonies and kill the adults. they then take the larvae back and use them as slaves to build nests and harvest food for them.
 

dwarfstar

mindless philosopher
jumpluff

did you know dolphins are the only animal other than humans to engage in sexual slavery and rape? roving gangs of male dolphins will physically prevent female dolphins from eating until she services them. dolphins also torture other sea creatures, seemingly for no reason other than their own enjoyment.

my favorite ant is the amazon ant because they can only do one thing: kill other animals. that said, they are great at it, having razor-like pincers that cut through exoskeletons like nothing else. they are so specialized that they cannot feed themselves or take care of their young, so they instead storm into nearby carpenter ant colonies and kill the adults. they then take the larvae back and use them as slaves to build nests and harvest food for them.
I'm not sure about the sex-slavery part, but dolphins are not the only nonhuman animals to engage in rape. It's fairly common in ducks and sea otters, and especially weird in the latter case because it's sometimes cross-species. Otters have been observed capturing and raping baby seals, often killing them in the process. That last comes from the fact that the sea otter mating ritual involves the male holding the female underwater for a long enough period that the seal will drown (female otters themselves are estimated to be killed in the process about 10% of the time). So yeah, there's a lot of fucked-up stuff out there.

With regard to the ants you mentioned, there are actually multiple species of slavekeeping ants - the first ones I can think of are the 14 Amazonian species in the Polyergus genus and the European Myrmoxenus ravouxi and Chalerpoxenus muellerianus. The case of the European species has demonstrated some of the potential for learning in ants; experiments determined that Temnothorax unifasciatus will serve slavemakers more readily if exposed to them for 10 days following their emergence from the pupa than ants who were already adults at the time of the takeover. It's thought that the victims raised in slavery learn to associate the smell of the slavemaker ants with "their" colony, and they often display aggressive behavior toward members of their own species who are then introduced into their environment and preferentially groom the slavemakers (I could write a whole paper comparing this to the false consciousness of the proletariat in a capitalist system, but that's a job for another thread).
Another interesting thing I've read about slavemaker ants (I'm pretty sure it's the ones in the Amazon; I'll check up on that later) is that multiple different species of ants from different colonies have been observed banding together for mutual defense in battle against raiding parties of slavemakers on a couple of occasions (in the wild, not in laboratory conditions)
 

Ununhexium

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I wrote a like 5 page essay about a fish in the Amazon River and can swim up a stream of urine into your penis where it hooks itself in and sucks your blood. I'm not even kidding. Its called a candiru and its kinda frikin scary. It is the only vertebrae that is parasitic to humans. Its has two common nicknames: the penis fish, for reasons outlined above, and the toothpick fish, because of its very small size. It can also make its way into the gill of a fish and suck blood from there.

I would give a link but I'm on my phone. :P
 

Aragorn the King

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I wrote a like 5 page essay about a fish in the Amazon River and can swim up a stream of urine into your penis where it hooks itself in and sucks your blood. I'm not even kidding. Its called a candiru and its kinda frikin scary. It is the only vertebrae that is parasitic to humans. Its has two common nicknames: the penis fish, for reasons outlined above, and the toothpick fish, because of its very small size. It can also make its way into the gill of a fish and suck blood from there.

I would give a link but I'm on my phone. :P
That is certainly one thing I didn't need to read. I'm scared now.
 

Chou Toshio

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Argentine ants now have a SUPER colony spanning Europe, Asia, AND south America.

These ants are native to South America, but climbing onto humans has allowed them to span the globe.

While there are small pockets of aggressive, non-included colonies, the vast majority are so closely related that you can take an Argentine ant in Tokyo, drop it off in Paris, and it'll touch antennae with the locals, get its orders and greetings, and go about its typical colony business-- Bonjour! Welcome to Pari'! (hoh hoh hoh)
 

Jorgen

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Speaking of sleep... Calves actually often sleep/swim in their mother's slipstream, slightly behind the mother's dorsal fin and a bit above, in a position called echelon swimming; it's much safer this way for the calf, allows the calf to swim faster (free ride, practically), and also stops the calf from sinking. Sorry, Chou, but that is really, really cute!!
I think this is the only time anyone will ever call fluid dynamics "cute".
 

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