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Primorye Week: Leopard (Panthera pardus)

by JR Kinyak on October 3, 2011

in Carnivores,Theme Weeks

Leopard (click image to enlarge)


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Today, we visit the smallest of the big cats at home in Primorye, a fascinatingly diverse region of far eastern Russia that you can read a bit more about in last Monday’s post on the musk deer. In that post, I quoted John Valliant’s The Tiger in saying that only in Primorye, and nowhere else in the world, “can a wolverine, brown bear, or moose drink from the same river as a leopard.” I have no reason to doubt that, but leopards are pretty adaptable. The IUCN says that “the leopard has the widest habitat tolerance of any Old World felid, ranging from rainforest to desert,” and in that range is the “boreal jungle” of Primorye, as well regions ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

Leopards are also quite adaptable in terms of what food they’ll eat, not disdaining to eat a beetle, a baboon, or a wildebeest. Walker’s Mammals of the World informs us that when leopards hunt, “larger animals are seized by the throat and killed by strangulation. Smaller prey may be dispatched by a bite to the back of the neck.” Leopards are so strong and so good at climbing trees that they will store carcasses bigger than themselves in trees to eat later.

If you’re wondering about leopards and panthers and whether they’re the same animal, let Ivan T. Sanderson, my favorite mustachioed, swashbuckling naturalist, set you straight with this passage from Living Mammals of the World:

“Before anything else is said about leopards, it is essential to dispose of the age-old argument about the names ‘panther’ and ‘leopard.’ Fairly important men have been challenged to duels for either affirming or denying that there is a difference—i.e., that there are two different animals. There are not: the two names denote the same animal or animals—for they vary greatly—though they may be used to differentiate between large and small, or between light and dark individuals in any one area. All the Great Cats that can roar are now officially panthers, as their technical name implies.”

I wonder if there’s any point in trying to find out just who was involved in those duels.

Tagged as: cat, ivan, primorye

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Bushy-tailed Olingo (Bassaricyon gabbii)

by JR Kinyak on March 14, 2011

in Carnivores

Bushy-tailed olingo (click image to enlarge)


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Sadly, my long mammal-posting streak was broken yesterday…because I jumped off a rock and broke my calcaneus, the big bone at the bottom of the heel. It hurts like mad! But while I recuperate, I will try to keep up the mammaling.

Today’s mammal is the bushy-tailed olingo, which lives in Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Colombia. It is a procyonid, putting it in the same family as the raccoons, coatis, kinkajous, and their friends. The bushy-tailed olingo’s scientific name, Bassaricyon gabbii, comes from William Gabb (1839–1878), a paleontologist and geologist who collected natural history specimens in Central America for the Smithsonian.

The olingos caught my eye because of a characteristic Ivan T. Sanderson note on the genus in Living Mammals of the World:

“Of all idiotic scientific names for an animal this takes the cake: it means literally the ‘Fox-dog’ or ‘Dog-dog’ as bassara is an ancient Thracian word for dogs and foxes, and kyon meant a dog in classical Greek. The animal in question has caused a great deal of confusion in scientific records, completely bamboozles the nonspecialist, is usually overlooked, is seldom represented in museum collections, and yet appears to be fairly common.”

Tagged as: ivan, names

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Blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra)

by JR Kinyak on March 11, 2011

in Ungulates

Blackbuck (click image to enlarge)

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I do love seeing that mammal counter inching toward 365! Say good afternoon to the blackbuck, an antelope native to India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan, but now extinct everywhere but India—and Argentina, Australia, and Texas, where it has been introduced. I’ll try to tell you what I’ve learned about the blackbuck roughly in the order of my learning about it:

1. According to the IUCN, there are some 50,000 blackbuck remaining in India, an increase from 22–24,000 in the 1970s. But there are at least 35,000 in Texas. As far as I can tell, those are all on game ranches, for “an exotic hunt would not be complete without a Black Buck Antelope,” according to the website of one of the ranches. I think the blackbuck in Australia are also confined to ranches, but there may be a feral population in Argentina.

2. Blackbuck are protected as endangered species in India, but they are still poached. In fact, Salman Khan, the star of one of my favorite Bollywood movies, was sentenced to five years in prison for poaching blackbuck (in addition to another protected species, the chinkara, I think—some of the news accounts are a little obscure on this) in 2007. IMDB says that Salman Khan is known as “Bollywood’s Bad Boy” and “Controversial Khan.” His court case continues, apparently. An Indian cricket star named Mansoor Ali Khan was also sentenced to prison time, in 2005, for poaching blackbuck.

3. In Living Mammals of the World, Ivan T. Sanderson writes: “Blackbuck have been the target of sportsmen, real and otherwise, since time immemorial and have been hunted with everything from Cheetahs to machine-guns—until this last revolting practice was summarily stopped.” My first reaction to that was “You can hunt with cheetahs?” Sure enough. I found the below video on YouTube. It purports to be from 1939, but it looks more 1950s to me, and the voice sounds quite contemporary, but wherever it’s from, it does show people using cheetahs to hunt blackbuck.

Coco also drew a blackbuck. It’s so hard to draw a straight-on portrait of an antelope because of the foreshortening of the nose and the way the eyes bulge out, but she completely nailed it. Here it is:

Blackbuck by Coco, age 12

Tagged as: antelope, coco, humans, ivan, threats

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Mating Week: Northern Elephant Seal (Mirounga angustirostris)

by JR Kinyak on March 2, 2011

in Carnivores,Theme Weeks

northern elephant seal

Northern elephant seal (click image to enlarge)


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There’s so much to say about elephant seals, and yet it’s so distasteful. These guys are rapists and baby-killers. Their necks are discolored by scars incurred during mating or fighting for mates, and one of my books, Wonders of Animal Life from 1928, lists “Sea elephants, frightfulness” in its index. In Living Mammals of the World, Ivan T. Sanderson says that they “present the most grotesque and revolting appearance, especially when they lounge around on shore in great misshapen, heaving masses under a hot sun, moaning, groaning, gurgling, and roaring.” A 1979 article in People about one of the top scientists studying elephant seals includes the sentence, “Says Le Boeuf bluntly, ‘It’s a rape society.’” (The title of the article is “Burney Le Boeuf Finds One Way to Pick Up a Seal of Approval.”)

I have a reprint of an 1874 book called The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America that includes a graphic account of the brutal way elephant seals were hunted for their blubber. Trust me, you probably don’t want to know, yet it’s not much worse than what the seals do to each other—except the blubber-hunters nearly drove the seals to extinction. Now they’re pretty healthily back in business in their habitat along the Pacific coast of North America.

And what is that business? Well, a dominant male controls a harem of females and can mate with them whenever he pleases. If a female objects, he holds her down with his massive body weight—up to three tons, and two or three times as much as the female weighs—and forces himself on her. Females have light-colored necks from all the scars they get when the males bite them during mating.

If a non-dominant male tries to mate with one of the females, the female starts screaming, which attracts the dominant male to defend his territory. At that point, he’ll get in a fight with the non-dominant male—a big, bloody fight, as any fight between two creatures that weight two tons would be. They beat each other with their noses and thrash around, sometimes suffocating other elephant seals in the process, especially babies. From Courtship in the Animal Kingdom by Mark Jerome Walters (1988):

Every spring along certain California beaches, bulls engage in bloody competition for female seals. The fight begins as a gruff shouting match with two males exchanging deep-throated roars. If one doesn’t retreat, then the shouting match escalates into combat…[T]hey slam their bludgeonlike noses into each other while trying to sink their large teeth into the neck of their opponent. Newborns are the most frequent victims as males throw their weight around, and the beaches resound with the shrill cries of crushed infants. Nearly half of the pups’ deaths in a single season are caused by battling males.

Walters goes on to say that sex is one of the major reasons for conflict among animals. “Spring is also the season when life’s astounding variety comes clearly into view—a richness that owes much of its existence to sex. And to which the world owes much of its woe.”

It certainly sounds like elephant seals lead woeful lives, and I’m glad that we humans have stopped contributing so murderously to their travails. But we are messing things up for them in another way, and that’s climate change. It seems that in warmer years, females give birth to more male babies. This is apparently because males and females have different feeding grounds. When it’s warmer, the food resources are more diffuse, and the females have to go further to find something to eat. If they have male babies, they won’t create competition for themselves the way they would if they had female young. So they’ve adapted to give birth to males when the weather is warm. Global warming could cause the proportion of male elephant seals to increase, which would mean more competition and more of the violence I discussed above. It could also mean that females have a harder time finding food, which would mean they’re undernourished and less likely to survive.

Tagged as: climate change, humans, ivan, mating, seal, threats

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Hammer-Headed Fruit Bat (Hypsignathus monstrosus)

by JR Kinyak on June 3, 2010

in Bats

Hammer-headed fruit bat (click image to enlarge)


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Meet the male hammer-headed fruit bat, whose head, says Ivan T. Sanderson in Living Mammals of the World, “is almost beyond belief. That of an adult male looks just like the cartoon of a horse when viewed from the side.” The female hammer-head doesn’t deserve the name at all: her dainty foxlike face is like those of most fruit bats, and very different from the male’s.

The reason for this big honking snout is the hammer-heads’ fascinating mating behavior. During mating season, the males congregate in groups called leks, where they hang out and make a lot of noise, creating one rhythm with their calls while flapping their wings at double time. The females hover about judgmentally, paying repeat visits to certain of the males until they’re sure they’ve narrowed it down to the one they like best. Then they mate—a business of 20 or 30 seconds’—and the females take off. The lek lasts for nearly four months out of the year. And the bigger the muzzle, the better the nuzzle (har), as far as the female hammer-heads are concerned. They tend to like the same males as all their friends do, with just a handful of the menfolk doing all the mating.

Hammer-headed fruit bats aren’t the only animals that use lek mating. A few other mammals do, too, as well as a number of birds, insects, fish, and amphibians. The male hammer-head pays a price for his sexiness, though. Scientists speculate that the higher mortality rate among the males comes from the energy that they have to expend in their mating displays.

Tagged as: bat, ivan, mating

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Aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis)

by JR Kinyak on June 1, 2010

in Primates

Aye-aye (click image to enlarge)

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The aye-aye is the only mammal I can think of that is primarily known for being ugly. Anytime someone writes a think-piece about the primacy of “charismatic megafauna” in conservation efforts, the poor aye-aye comes up as an example of an uncharismatic animal that is nevertheless in need of protection and aid. (People seem to want to donate money to help animals when the animals are cute or otherwise iconic, like pandas, tigers, and polar bears. Those three are classic examples of charismatic megafauna. I think it would be a good name for a band, too.)

The good (or at least goodish) news for the aye-aye is that it’s not as endangered as we once thought, and in 2008, the International Union for Conservation of Nature downgraded its status from Endangered to Near Threatened—two steps back on the road to extinction. It seems to be both more widespread and more adaptable than we feared. But still, the aye-aye is threatened by the ubiquitous specter of habitat destruction in its native Madagascar. And apparently, a traditional Malagasy superstition holds that the aye-aye is an evil omen that must be killed on sight. This superstition is repeated so often in the aye-aye literature, and in such similar words, that I thought it must be a rampant scientific urban legend, but even my most reliable sources (in other words, not just Ivan T. Sanderson) report it as fact. Poor aye-aye! I love the nocturnal guy just the way he looks tonight.

Now, the aye-aye is not just strange but unique. It is the only surviving member of its family and one of only two mammals (the other being the long-fingered triok of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea) that occupies the evolutionary niche that the woodpecker holds elsewhere. The aye-aye tap-tap-taps its looooooong middle finger on dead wood to locate insect larvae inside. Then it uses that same looooooong middle finger to extract the delicious bugs from the wood. Sometimes it uses its finger to tap on coconuts, perhaps to assess their ripeness or the amount of milk they contain, before using the finger to get the pulp and milk out.

Theo drew an aye-aye, too. See?

Aye-aye by Theo, age 13

Tagged as: endangered, ivan, theo, threats

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Mammals of Alaska Week: Bearded Seal (Erignathus barbatus)

by JR Kinyak on July 4, 2009

in Marine Mammals,Theme Weeks

Bearded seal (click image to enlarge)

Bearded seal (click image to enlarge)

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We continue our visit with the mammals of Alaska today, with this guy, the bearded seal. Like the bearded pig, he’s really more mustachioed than bearded, but that’s okay. Bearded seals live throughout the arctic. They eat mostly benthic creatures, which means creatures that live at the bottom of the water. That’s probably what their long, brushy whiskers are for: helping them find food at the bottom of the sea. They’re solitary and generally spend their time alone, floating around on small ice floes. Bearded seals are important to arctic native people for their hides and meat. Ivan T. Sanderson, in Living Mammals of the World, describes what it’s like to hunt these seals:

“Bearded seals are hunted by the Eskimos for their tough hide and tender flesh and they display a most singular trait when shot, leaping into the air and turning a complete back somersault from the ice into the water, so that one never knows if they are dead or alive.”

Isn’t that just like Ivan to say? By the way, I don’t ever want to take a month off from drawing mammals again! These last four have been so difficult, but each one gets a little easier. Next time you notice me falling down on the job, shoot me an e-mail, will you?

Tagged as: humans, ivan, seal

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