Posts tagged as:

taxonomy

Random Rodent: Acacia Rat (Thallomys paedulcus)

by JR Kinyak on October 10, 2011

in Operations,Rodents

Acacia rat (click image to enlarge)


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I know you’ve heard it before, but the rodents are a problem. They account for some 40 percent of the mammals, and nearly all of them are small beige lumps. Many of them have evaded photographers up to now, so I often have to base my drawing on a related rodent but make changes based on the descriptions I can find. It’s often hard to force myself to draw a one of the little guys when I could be drawing a monkey or a carnivore. So every now and then, I’ll be letting random.org choose a rodent for me to draw to add the element of chance.

Today’s mammal, chosen by random.org from all the rodents I have yet to draw, is the acacia rat, which lives in sub-Saharan Africa in trees, likely acacias, wouldn’t you think? According to the IUCN, “Thallomys paedulcus possibly represents a complex of several similar species. Further studies are needed to clarify the taxonomic status of populations currently allocated to this species,” so there’s another taxonomic quandary for us to ignore for now.

Acacia rats apparently make good pets—as good as our fancy rats Earl Grey and Doctor Who, according to some people.

Tagged as: random, rat, taxonomy

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Japan Benefit: イリオモテヤマネコ (Iriomote Cat) (Prionailurus iriomotensis)

by JR Kinyak on March 31, 2011

in Carnivores,Mammalthons

All week, my daughter Coco and I are selling our drawings of Japanese mammals to raise funds for Japan! If you buy one of them, whether matted or unmatted, your entire purchase price will go to help those affected by the earthquake and tsunami: half to the American Red Cross, half to Animal Refuge Kansai, a Japanese animal shelter taking in homeless pets. Please help, and please send your friends by, too!

Iriomote cat (click image to enlarge)


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This drawing has sold!

This cat may be the rarest feline species on the planet. There are only about 100 individual Iriomote cats living, and they’re found only on the Japanese island of Iriomote, which is just east of Taiwan. It’s an island that’s made up almost completely of impenetrable forest and home to some 2,000 people. Unfortunately for the Iriomote cat, the people like the same part of the island it does, and their highway goes right through the cat’s habitat. Despite efforts to protect the rare cat from harm, about four cats a year become roadkill. They’re also threatened by their habit of interbreeding with feral domestic cats, instead of mating only with each other.

Iriomote cats are quite elusive. They’re solitary and mostly nocturnal, and some researchers who dedicate their lives to studying them still go years without seeing one. According to this great article from The New York Times, some residents of Iriomote don’t even believe the wild cat exists.

Iriomote cat by Coco, age 12 (click image to enlarge)

Coco’s drawing has sold!

I said that this cat may be the world’s rarest feline because it’s been part of a taxonomic controversy almost since it was first described in the 1960s. Back then, scientists theorized that it was a “living fossil” species, the only existing member of an extinct group of cats. Then, other scientists decided it was actually a subspecies of the leopard cat, which is pretty common on the Asian mainland. Then it was back to being its own species, but in the same genus as the leopard cat, not in its own “living fossil” genus like before.

None of that ever got settled for sure, and now it looks like some people are leaning back toward the leopard-cat-subspecies idea. It seems that the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources considered it its own species until just a few years ago, but now the IUCN lists it under the leopard cat species, even though none of my other sources do.

This is important because the IUCN’s Red List is widely accepted and used as a definitive list of endangered species worldwide. Perhaps if I do a little digging in the records of the IUCN’s cat study group, I can find some of their reasons, and I may do that when I have the time. It’s good to remember that the designation of endangered species is dependent on many actors other than just counting how many cats there are that look alike.

If you’d like to help Japan without buying a drawing, click the Donate button below and we’ll add your contribution to our people-and-animals fund. And we still have two monkeys and one squirrel available for sale. See you tomorrow!


Tagged as: cat, coco, endangered, japan, taxonomy, threats

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Bactrian Camel (Camelus bactrianus)

by JR Kinyak on March 8, 2011

in Ungulates

Bactrian camel (click image to enlarge)


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The Bactrian camel is the one with two humps. The Arabian camel or dromedary has only one hump. You can remember that by imagining the capital initials of their names turned on their side: B for Bactrian has two humps, and D for dromedary has one. (I didn’t come up with that, I read it on Ultimate Ungulate.)

Then again, maybe you don’t think there are two types of camels, not really. As far as I can tell, some scientists agree with you, believing that both the one-humps and the two-humps were originally one species. They can interbreed, but it’s possible that males born as a result are sterile. Then again, you may think that there are two kinds of Bactrian camels: domesticated ones, which you’d call Camelus bactrianus, and wild ones, which you’d call Camelus ferus. That distinction might make a bigger difference than you’d think. There are no Arabian camels/dromedaries in the wild, and fewer than 1,000 Bactrian camels in the wild. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) categorizes this camel (under the name C. ferus) as Critically Endangered, the last category before Extinct in the Wild, which is followed, of course, by plain old Extinct.

The reasons for their looming extinction in the wild are mostly human-related. Fifty or so are hunted each year for meat, and when there are only 1,000 of something, taking away 50 is a big deal. Much of their habitat—which by the way is in the rocky, sometimes very cold and sometimes very hot Gobi Desert of China and Mongolia—is being taken up by the raising of domesticated animals (including domesticated Bactrian camels). And continuing droughts, which some might call human-related if they’re connected to human-caused climate change, mean that wolves are increasingly preying on the camels. A human-related situation that actually hasn’t seemed to affect the camels is that part of their range was China’s nuclear-testing area for 45 years. It’s nice that that didn’t bother them, I suppose.

Tagged as: endangered, humans, taxonomy, threats

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Colocolo (Leopardus colocolo)

by JR Kinyak on June 9, 2010

in Carnivores

Colocolo (click image to enlarge)

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There are far more cat species than I realized. My Princeton Encyclopedia of Mammals lists 29 small cats, plus seven big cats. The domestic cat is a subspecies of one of the wildcat, Felis silvestris. Or it might be its own species, F. catus. The neat thing about taxonomy is that it has room for differing opinions, and it’s always changing. Today’s colocolo, also known as the pampas cat, is another example. Some scientists are thinking that it’s actually two or three species—Leopardus colocolo, L. braccatus, and L. pajeros—which would bring the Princeton Encyclopedia of Mammals’ list up to 31 small cats. But others argue that they should remain subspecies. If you consider the three species to be one, the colocolo lives in the grasslands of South America; if you think L. colocolo is separate from the other two species, this one lives in the Chilean cloud forests and  where it eats rodents, birds, lizards, and insects.

Tagged as: cat, taxonomy

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Black-backed Jackal (Canis mesomelas)

by JR Kinyak on July 1, 2009

in Carnivores

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Black-backed jackal (click image to enlarge)

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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

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Scientific Names Week: Black Rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis)

by JR Kinyak on April 24, 2009

in Theme Weeks,Ungulates

Click image to enlarge.

Click image to enlarge.

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Our current system of naming animals and plants is based on the system that Carl Linnaeus published in 1758. While others, including Aristotle, had previously attempted to organize the world’s living things into various arrangements, Linnaeus gave us an important innovation: the binomial system. Each animal (or plant or whatever) is known by a unique pair of names; no other creature has the same name. We’re the only Homo sapiens; the cotton-top tamarin is the only Saguinus oedipus. (Of course, there can be other members of the genus Homo and the genus Saguinus, but they have to have distinctive second, or species, names.)

The organization that keeps track of and codifies the system of naming animals is the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. The rules are quite extensive. My favorite guidelines are those that require namers to make every effort to ensure that their names are euphonious (pleasing to the ear) and that they don’t give offense.

Linnaeus was Swedish, but he wrote in Latin, as did pretty much everyone else writing about scientific matters at the time. The scientific names of animals are often referred to, casually, as their Latin names, and the rules governing naming do require the Latinization of some words. But there’s also a lot of classical Greek in the names, and many names derive from local words for the animals.

Many animals have redundant names (tautonyms, to use the official terminology), like Gorilla gorilla, Dama dama, and Uncia uncia. Usually, this happens when the name of the animal’s genus (the first name in the binomial system) changes, but the species name can’t. I like the black rhinoceros’s name because it’s redundant in two languages: diceros means two horns in Greek and bicornis means two horns in Latin.

The black rhinoceros’s common name is odd, too. The rhino is not black; it’s gray. Apparently, it was named the black rhinoceros to distinguish it from the white rhinoceros, which is also gray, not white. That animal’s common name comes from the Dutch word weit, which means wide, like the rhino’s muzzle. (My source for all this is A.F. Gotch’s book Mammals: Their Latin Names Explained.)

The black rhino is classified as critically endangered, the last step before extinction. It’s so bad, in fact, that the IUCN, which assesses the status of the world’s species, obscures the rhino’s range on its map “for security reasons.” While the black rhino was pretty numerous at the start of the 20th century, poaching caused a 96 percent decrease in the species’ population between 1970 and 1992. Black rhino horns are carved to create decorative handles for weapons and used in traditional medicine. Traditional medicine is going to be the death of a lot of mammal species.

Tagged as: books, endangered, names, taxonomy, threats, traditional medicine, words

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Scientific Names Week: Cotton-top Tamarin (Saguinus oedipus)

by JR Kinyak on April 23, 2009

in Primates,Theme Weeks

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I love words and names for things, and I’ve enjoyed learning a little Latin and Greek as I draw these mammals. Let’s spend a few days meeting some mammals with interesting scientific names, starting with this wild-and-woolly tamarin. The cotton-top part of his common name is apt, but what about Saguinus oedipus? Saguinus means “like a squirrel monkey,” which is straightforward. The oedipus part is interesting, though. Literally, it means “swollen-footed,” and these monkeys were probably named for their big feet. But of course we think of Oedipus, too, and the complex named after him, and it seems that after the fact, at least one research study has found that the name Saguinus oedipus was appropriately oedipal in the oedipus-complex sense, too: in 2004, A.J. Ginther and C.T. Snowdon presented “The Oedipal Conflict in Saguinus oedipus” at the American Society of Primatologists’ yearly conference.

I would have named this monkey Madmaxus tinaturnerus, for that resemblance is, I feel, obvious. The German name for the cotton-top tamarin is Lisztäffchen, a diminutive form of the name Liszt, and that seems appropriate, too. Which of these famous musicians do you think the tamarin most resembles?
tamarin_tina
tamarin_liszt

(Tamarin photos by Nuno Barretto and Dan Jordan; used under Creative Commons licenses.)

Tagged as: humans, monkey, names, taxonomy, words

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