Posts tagged as:

dog

Black-backed Jackal (Canis mesomelas)

by JR Kinyak on July 1, 2009

in Carnivores

canis_mesomelas_72

Black-backed jackal (click image to enlarge)

0263

Hello, mammals, and thanks for your patience through the long hiatus I seem to have taken from drawing and posting! We’re back in the swing of things now with this black-backed jackal, who lives in two separate parts of Africa, one in the east and one in the south. There is some controversy about who’s a jackal and who isn’t, but my copy of Walker’s indicates that there are four jackal species. This is the second featured on the Daily Mammal. (Here’s the golden jackal, which I drew a while back.) We’re halfway through with the jackals!

The black-backed jackal is both a scavenger and a predator. It will eat nearly anything: other mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, plants, whatever. It can band with other jackals to bring down a gazelle or antelope, or it can follow lions around and eat their leftovers. Black-backed jackals have been known to work cooperatively with cheetahs to bring down a tasty dinner. Ivan T. Sanderson, in Living Mammals of the World, says, “Their name has come to be applied to all forms of unpleasant hangers-on—a result of their habit of following the large cats, making a special noise when doing so, and then eating up most of the feast as soon as the cat’s back is turned.” I say it’s the cats’ own fault: if someone’s following you and making a special noise that indicates he wants your food, don’t turn your back!

Black-backed jackals live in groups of up to eight or so, at the core of which is a mated pair. A pair may stay together for several years. Adolescent jackals stick around to help their parents raise new babies. In some desert parts of their habitat, black-backed jackals can apparently go up to nine months without drinking water.

Tagged as: dog, ivan, taxonomy

{ 1 comment }

Bat-eared Fox (Otocyon megalotis)

by JR Kinyak on May 8, 2009

in Carnivores

bat-eared fox (click image to enlarge)

bat-eared fox (click image to enlarge)


0259

Well, that’s an apt name! This fox (whose scientific name translates into something like ear-dog big-ear), lives in two separate areas of Africa that are about 1,000 km (621 miles) apart. One is in the eastern part of the continent, ranging from Ethiopia and southern Sudan to Tanzania, and one is in the south, from southern Angola to South Africa. Depending on where they live, bat-eared foxes eat insects, other arthropods, rodents, birds’ eggs, and plants. They’re especially keen on termites and dung beetles.

Besides those extra-large ears (which they use for sending each other visual signals as well as for hearing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they serve a cooling purpose, too, out there in the desert), the bat-eared fox has unusual dentition, which means the arrangement of its teeth. May I throw around some more mammalogist jargon just to impress you? The bat-eared fox has more teeth than any other placental, heterodontal mammal. That means it has a lot of choppers. Okay, specifically, it has the most teeth of all of the non-marsupial mammals that have kinds of teeth that are different from each other. For instance, humans: we’re placental with heterodontal dentition. But our pieholes are not nearly so crowded with the ol’ pearly whites.

Tagged as: dog, fox, words

{ 2 comments }

Hibernators Week: Raccoon Dog (Tanuki) (Nyctereutes procyonoides)

by JR Kinyak on February 6, 2009

in Carnivores, Theme Weeks

click image to enlarge

0224

Guess what! The raccoon dog is not endangered. In fact, in some parts of its range, it is considered a nuisance! How exciting for us, don’t you think?

The raccoon dog is in the canid family, although it does resemble a raccoon, especially facially. It originally lived from Siberia to Vietnam, as well as throughout Japan, but it was introduced into Russia to provide more work for fur trappers. Now it has made its way into northern Europe, and has been found in France, Germany, Sweden, and Finland, among other countries. It is the only canid that hibernates (torpor, I think, not “true” hibernation), although in warmer parts of its range, it doesn’t.

In Japan, where the raccoon dog is called the tanuki, the species is pretty common and can even be found in some urban areas. The tanuki is an interesting figure in Japanese folklore. It’s a shapeshifter and a bit of a trickster, and tanuki statues can bring good luck. The most interesting and, to me, strange element of the tanuki legend is the animal’s remarkably large scrotum, which it can use—in myths and stories now, not in real life!—as shelter from a storm or as a net for catching fish. I recommend this baffling series of 19th-century comic prints that show some of the tanuki’s creative uses for its endowments.

Tagged as: dog, hibernation, humans

{ 5 comments }

Mammals of Iraq: Golden Jackal (Canis aureus)

by JR Kinyak on August 4, 2008

in Carnivores, Theme Weeks

click image to enlarge

0193

Golden jackals live not only in Iraq, but throughout northern Africa, Asia, and up into southern Europe. They mate for life, living in tight little family packs. They have one litter a year, and each time, a couple of their offspring stay on with their parents to help raise the next litter. These big brothers and sisters are called “helpers” and are vitally important to a jackal family’s survival, offering assistance in guarding, hunting, and regurgitating food for the little ones. Speaking of food, golden jackals like to eat eggs, birds, other small animals, baby gazelles, and fruit. They also enjoy taking lions’ leftovers, and they’ll bury their scavenged food if another animal happens upon the feast. The golden jackal is the last animal we’ll meet in this Mammals of Iraq series.

Incidentally, I want my husband Ted to start writing an advice column called “Help! My Jackal Looks Like a Cat!” He says there’s no market for it, but I think the demand’s there. What’s your opinion?

Consecutive days of mammals: 3
Record: 16

Tagged as: about drawing, dog

{ 3 comments }

New Feature: Mammal News Roundup

by JR Kinyak on May 18, 2008

in Mammal News

Sometimes I see articles online or in magazines that I think would interest Daily Mammal readers. When they concern mammals I haven’t drawn yet, I can feature them as Daily Mammal Now posts. But when I’ve already drawn them, or just don’t want to or can’t draw them right away for some reason, I don’t have a good vehicle to share them with you.

That’s why I’m going to start occasionally (weekly? fortnightly? semiweekly? who knows?) pointing you to some very recent news stories and articles that you might want to read, or at least know about. Here’s the first Mammal News Roundup.

Daily Mail, May 12, 2008: There’s a cow the size of an elephant. He was left on the doorstop of an English animal sanctuary when he was an infant. The first picture makes him look especially large; check it out. Note to Americans: swede is what Brits call rutabaga.

Science Daily, May 13, 2008: Double mammal newsflash: In Brazil, they’re training dogs to recognize the scent of various endangered mammals (like the jaguar and the giant anteater), helping researchers monitor their populations.

Madison, Wisconsin’s Capital Times, May 13, 2008: They’re still trying to figure out what’s causing white-nose syndrome, the strange ailment that’s devastating some populations of bats in the northeastern United States. (Click on the Daily Mammal Now link above for more.)

U.S. Department of the Interior news release, May 14, 2008: Polar bears are now listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Since climate change is a major cause of polar bears’ decline, but it’s very difficult, to say the least, to prove how any particular action by Americans influences the climate change that’s harming the bears, it is unclear how much the move will help the bears.

When I drew the polar bear, I found in my research that some people think that the polar bear is actually the same species as the brown bear. I looked into that a little more today and learned some interesting things. It seems polar bears, which are recognized as a distinct species by most anyone without an ax to grind, evolved from the brown bear pretty recently, some 200,000 years ago. And they were still developing adaptations as recently as 40,000 years ago.

I wonder how you would decide when the species was still the brown bear and when it had become the polar bear. Maybe there’s a bare minimum of changes and differences that must be present? Or a certain number of DNA markers that should be present or absent? Or is it a case of “you know it when you see it”?

Some people, evidently regarded as nuts by some other people, think that melting ice in the Arctic will force the polar bear to evolve back into the brown bear, but it seems pretty likely to me that they’re endangered enough that we can’t expect them to be around long enough for that to happen with no intervention. Being an amateur biologist, though, I can just speculate.

BBC News, December 10, 2007: An Icelandic (yay!) scientist found the most ancient polar bear jawbone we have, a 150,000-year-old specimen. The article discusses, in brief, the evolutionary history of the polar bear.

(Polar bear photograph by Scott Schliebe, USFWS)

Tagged as: cow, dog, endangered

{ 3 comments }

Mammalthon 2: Kit Fox (Vulpes macrotis)

by JR Kinyak on May 9, 2008

in Carnivores, Mammalthons

click image to enlarge

0162

My uncle Jay, a great uncle in more than one way, requested a baby kit fox. This was at first confusing to research because baby foxes are sometimes called kits no matter the particular species (when they’re not being called pups or cubs). But here in fact is a kit fox cub. They live in the Chihuahuan desert (I used to live in it too!) and elsewhere in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Animal Diversity Web says they get as far north as the deserts of Oregon. The kit fox’s Spanish name is zorra del desierto.

You know those signs at work sites that say something like “consecutive days without an accident: 164″ or whatever? I’m going to try something similar to keep track of how long I manage to post a daily mammal without missing one. We will see how depressing this proves when, say, I’m sick or out of town or something. It’s certainly depressing that I’ve only ever gone 11 days before! (Of course, I’ve often posted after midnight, intending it to be for the previous day, and it would count for the next day.)

Consecutive days of mammals: 7
Previous record: 11

Tagged as: dog

{ 1 comment }

Cape Hunting Dog (Lycaon pictus)

by JR Kinyak on February 9, 2008

in Carnivores

Don’t forget to download your free Daily Mammal valentines!

click image to enlarge

0122

This African wild dog with big round ears and thin, mottled fur uses abandoned aardvark holes as dens to bear its pups. It lives in packs of around 10 dogs. Cape hunting dogs have what Walker’s Mammals of the World calls “a largely undeserved reputation as an indiscriminate killer of livestock and valued game animals,” which means, of course, that people have tended to take whatever opportunities they could to kill the dogs. This, combined with the usual habitat loss that’s threatening animals all over the world, means that the Cape hunting dog is quite endangered. Another quote from Walker’s:

Considering its immense former distribution and its scientific, cultural, and behavioral interest, the prospective disappearance of this genus from the wild at a time of supposed increasing emphasis on conservation values must rank as one of the great wildlife tragedies of the late twentieth century.

National Geographic News article about reintroducing Cape hunting dogs into the wild

PDF of a very short piece from the May 14, 1880, New York Times about the Cape hunting dog at the London Zoo. Sample quote:

It is a queer beast, with shifty ways that give it an appearance of irresolution and occasionally of crazy bewilderment, induced, no doubt, by the consciousness that its features justify its being looked upon as neither dog nor anything else, but something half-way toward the first hyena and about as far from the last wolf.”

Tagged as: dog, endangered, threats

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries