Spanish ibex (click image to enlarge)

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The Spanish ibex is our penultimate mammalian World Cup competitor! Representing Spain, natch, it’s a nimble goat that lives in rocky places, once throughout the Iberian Peninsula, but now only in Spain and where it’s been reintroduced to Portugal. Of the four subspecies that once existed, only two remain. The last Pyrenean ibex, Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica, died in 2000 after being hit by a tree. It was successfully cloned, if you can call it a success when your clone only lives for seven minutes. The Capra pyrenaica species as a whole, however, is doing well, its numbers increasing as it hops its way over the cliffs of Spain.

Spain’s soccer team is doing well, too. Of the 19 World Cups in history, Spain has qualified for 13. Although it’s never before done better than fourth place, it was one of the favorites to win the whole thing this year, and sure enough, Spain will be playing in the finals against the Netherlands on Sunday.

Pudú (click image to enlarge)

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The Mammals of the World Cup series is almost finished! Just two more countries after today’s representative from Chile, the Chilean or southern pudú, which is the second smallest deer in the world, the first being the northern pudú, this guy’s cousin. The Chilean pudú is less than a foot and a half tall and is vulnerable to becoming endangered because of habitat loss (join the club, little pudú) in its forest home, poaching, and domestic dogs.

There’s a Chilean metal band called Power of the Pudú, and they have a song called “Oda al Pudú,” or “Ode to the Pudú.” Check out the video below, which has translated subtitles (seemingly translated by a computer). It’s pretty good!

As for Chile’s soccer team, they have a long and sometimes disgraceful World Cup history. They’ve made it to the big tournament eight times, earning third place in 1962, when they hosted, and making it to the Round of 16 this year. But in 1990, the team was banned from that year’s tournament and the next one, too (1994), because of something that happened at a 1989 qualifying game against Brazil. Chile was behind 1–0 when a Brazilian fan threw a firework onto the pitch. The goalie, Roberto Rojas (nicknamed Cóndor) fell to the ground, his head bleeding, and the team doctor came out to have a look at him. They took him off on a stretcher, and then the Chilean team captain came out and said the team would not be returning to the game because conditions were unsafe.

Well, it turned out that the firework did not hit Rojas, but that he had cut himself deliberately in order to stop the game. It also came out that the team doctor had submitted a “fraudulent medical certificate” and that the coach had ordered Rojas and the doctor, by walkie-talkie, to stay on the ground. In the end, Rojas, the doctor, and the coach were all banned from soccer for life, the team captain who kept the team from returning to play was banned for five years, and the team was banned from the following two World Cups. In 2001, FIFA lifted the ban against Rojas.

YouTube has several videos about the incident, but they’re all in Spanish or Portuguese. Here’s one, marking the game’s 20th anniversary. You may or may not be able to understand the words, but the footage of the firework and the injury say a lot on their own.

Tatra chamois (click image to enlarge)

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I don’t usually highlight a particular subspecies, but when it comes to picking a representative for Slovakia, my father-in-law’s ancestral home and the source of the yak in my name, I wanted to do it up right. Meet the Tatra chamois, a subspecies of the regular chamois, which lives only in the Tatra mountains of Slovakia and Poland and numbers fewer than 200 individuals. (The chamois species in general, Rubicapra rubicapra, counts more than 400,000 members, but all but one of the subspecies are declining in number.) The threats to the Tatra chamois are poaching, habitat loss, and both interbreeding—with other introduced subspecies—and inbreeding, since there’s not enough genetic diversity in a group of 200 to sustain a healthy population. They live in rocky parts of the mountains, and they nimbly make their way through their days, munching on leaves and grass.

Slovakia’s national soccer team got its start in 1993, after Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. (There was also a Slovak national team before World War II, but after the war it was combined with the Czechoslovakian team. I’m reading an article in The New Yorker about the Eurovision Song Contest, and it mentions that several of the nations competing in the 2010 contest didn’t exist as independent countries when the contest started in 1956. That’s true of a couple of the countries in the World Cup, too.) This is the first time the team has qualified for the World Cup as Slovakia. The team’s nickname is Repre, which, according to The Guardian, is short for “reprezentacny tim” or “representative team.” (That article is really snarky. I think someone got quite bored having to write up profiles of every team.)

This year, Slovakia got to the Round of 16, where they lost to Holland, who went on to beat favorites Brazil in the quarterfinals yesterday. Coco drew a chamois, too, and here it is.

Chamois by Coco, age 11

Alpine ibex (click image to enlarge)

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Here we go with our World Cup celebration, meeting one mammal from each of the 32 countries that were in the World Cup! Were is a key word in this case, as reigning champ Italy, today’s country, didn’t make it out of the group stage. But that’s not the alpine ibex’s fault!

Alpine ibexes were once pretty common in the Swiss, French, Austrian, German, and Italian Alps, and in Slovenia and Bulgaria, where they had been introduced. By the 19th century, it was extinct everywhere—because of overhunting and poaching—except for one small part of Italy, where about 100 Alpine ibexes were left. In the 20th century, reintroduction programs successfully brought the ibex back to all the countries where it should have been, and now its numbers are actually increasing, according to the IUCN Red List.

Here is a very short video of ibexes being reintroduced in Austria. I love that they’re carted up the mountain in crates, from which they spring exuberantly. And I love that the gamekeepers are wearing the traditional Tyrolean hats and that they pass a bottle down the line to drink to the ibexes.

I forgot to post Coco’s Bechstein’s bat with mine the other day, and that’s a shame because it’s so incredibly wonderful, so here it is now.

Bechstein's bat by Coco, age 11 (click image to enlarge)

Topi (click image to enlarge)

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Because I missed a few days and because if I don’t step on the gas the World Cup will end before the World Cup of Mammals does, tonight I’m posting the final three mammals of Group D (the other being Serbia’s marbled polecat from the other day). This first one is the topi (Damaliscus korrigum), an antelope representing Ghana. Ghana was the only African nation to make it to the Round of 16, in which they beat the USA. Ghana plays Uruguay in the quarterfinals on Friday.

Bechstein

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Die Bechsteinfledermaus (Myotis bechsteinii), of course, represents Germany and is known as Bechstein’s bat in English. It was named after a German naturalist named Johann Matthäus Bechstein. Germany beat England in the Round of 16 and is going up against Argentina in the quarterfinals on Saturday.

Long-nosed bandicoot (click image to enlarge)

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We must have a marsupial to represent Australia, and the long-nosed bandicoot (Perameles nasuta) has volunteered for the task. This bandicoot lives only in western Australia, and right now it’s widespread, but the rate at which its population is declining is a bit disturbing. Australia didn’t make it out of the group stage in the World Cup.

Group D Results

We read about how the marbled polecat is a virtuoso of killing, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it should win this group. Of the others, I think the topi has the edge because of its size and the hardness of its hooves. So the two mammals continuing on from Group D are:

Marbled Polecat (Serbia)
and
Topi (Ghana)

African bush elephant (click image to enlarge)

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We’re still celebrating the World Cup here at the Daily Mammal, and today we’re closing out Group B with Nigeria and the African bush elephant. These days, scientists generally divide the African elephant into two species, the bush elephant and the forest elephant. Then there’s the Asian elephant, for a total of three kinds of elephants in the world. The biggest is the African bush elephant, which can stand nearly 12 feet tall and weigh, oh, 10 tons or so. In fact, the African bush elephant is the largest land mammal of all.

I’ve just learned a few interesting things about elephants. One is that the sound of buzzing bees will drive elephants away, which means there may be an easy way to keep them from destroying farms and getting themselves killed: play them a recording of a buzzing hive, and feet-don’t-fail-me-now, or at least until they realize that it is just a recording. We need to do more study to see what would happen.

Another thing: the most common natural death for elephants is starvation. They go through several sets of teeth, each new set growing in just as the previous set is used up. But the last of their teeth are worn out around the age of 65 or 70, not to be replaced, and without being able to really eat, they starve to death. It seems so cruel, but that’s evolution for you.

And finally, a new word: musth. It’s the name for a periodic state that male elephants go through, when their testosterone levels shoot up and they become aggressive, cranky, and dangerous to know, with only one thing on their minds. The word comes from a Persian word meaning intoxicated. (The link above is to a site about keeping elephants in zoos and circuses. About musth, it says, “It is also very discouraging for the elephant keeper to work with a withdrawn, extremely aggressive elephant, which disapproves everything and actually is out to kill him.” I imagine that’s true!)

Nigeria’s soccer team is nicknamed the Super Eagles. This is their fourth World Cup; twice before they’ve made it to the Round of 16, but never any further. They came in third in this year’s African Cup of Nations, the biggest tournament in Africa (well, when the World Cup isn’t there, of course). I suppose it’s possible that they could move out of the first round this year, but of all the possible endings in Group B, only one allows that possibility. (They need Argentina to beat Greece, and then Nigeria needs to beat South Korea, and the goal differential among the non-Argentina teams needs to fall in Nigeria’s favor.) I wish that in this first World Cup held in Africa the African teams were doing better, but Ghana is the only one that’s won a game so far. (Nigeria likely would have won against Greece if not for Sani Kaita’s red card; see my Greece post for more on that.)

Group B Results

What two mammals will continue on to the Group of 16 Mammals from Group B? We have South Korea’s leopard cat, the Mediterranean horseshoe bat from Greece, Argentina’s Patagonian mara, and this here elephant. The bat may be able to get some draws by flying away from the match. Let’s say that’s what it does in all three matches, earning it 3 points (you get one point for a draw in the World Cup). The elephant obviously would trample the mara and the cat, giving it three points for each win and one for its draw with the bat, or a total of 7 points. I think the cat would beat the mara and draw with the bat, so it would have 4 points, and the mara would just have one point for its draw with the bat. So continuing on to the next round from this group are:

African bush elephant (Nigeria)
and
Leopard cat (South Korea)

Chacoan peccary (click image to enlarge)

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This peccary species lives in the Gran Chaco of South America, a region that overlaps Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. It lives in the driest, hottest parts of the area, and its main food is cacti. The Chacoan peccary is endangered, mainly because of hunting but also because of habitat destruction. Oddly, this peccary was first described by scientists in the 1930s based on fossil evidence and was thought to be extinct (by scientists, not by people who lived in the Gran Chaco and saw the peccary all the time) until 1975.

Below, see Coco’s cute Chacoan peccary and the prelimary sketch I did for mine.

Chacoan peccary by Coco, age 11

Chacoan peccary sketch