Hippo's Wild World of Animals - Random Animal Facts

Take it @cub likes moths.

I don't dislike bugs, some of the bigger and interesting bugs can be fascinating in themselves (the "stop that now, how are you even a thing?" Venezuelan poodle moth being one of the more interesting examples) but I'll be honest, I'm no entomologist so it's like writing about plants or molecules for me. I'd be open to a new thread on random bug facts if anyone wishes to create a thread so I don't end up feeling bad about leaving things out.

I'd be interested in a botany thread - although there's a lot less I could contribute in terms of paleontology or other tidbits.

That cutie-pie is, in fact, a needle-felted moth plushie. I want one.

I love moths, especially the giant cecropia moths. One of these days I'm going to raise them.




I'm all for an insect thread.

The second most destructive invasive species (after humans), which has spread all over the world and dealt untold destruction upon many ecosystems, including the extinction of several species of birds, small mammals, and reptiles tends to remain well regarded and welcomed in many homes.  Campaigns to limit their destruction even face opposition from those who deliberately feed feral populations.

April Fool's Day.

I do agree with tight feral cat control because feral cats are trouble for local ecosystems and horrible fluffballs of disease but I feel like having random red panda (none of this "lesser" panda bull) culls is worse, they'll end up like prairie dogs!

If Prozac reduces the sex drive in humans do you think it would reduce the murder drive in felines?

I tried to find a record of an ostrich killing a human, which I didn't do, but I found this story about how one almost killed Johnny Cash, accompanied by this picture:

Ostriches were the subject of the very first animal report I did in Grade 1!

I'm not sure about documentation of ostrich attacks on people, but their relatives the emus did once win a war with Australia.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

From a palaeontological and biogeographical perspective, the ratites are quite possibly the most fascinating and puzzling of all birds. The modern ratites: ostriches in Africa, emus in Australia, cassowaries in New Guinea, rheas in South America, kiwis in New Zealand, as well as the very recently extinct moas of New Zealand and elephant bird of Madagascar are all flightless, generally big (other than kiwis), and mean (other than kiwis and moas) birds - that all live or lived in areas that were part of the Cretaceous Gondwanaland continent.

It would totally make sense that there was some family of big flightless bird that lived in Gondwana during the early Cretaceous, and as the continent broke apart little pockets of these flightless birds became isolated on their little islands to become the species we see today.

Problem is, the earliest ratite fossils come from the Paleocene, long after the continent of Gondwana had already broken apart. So how did they get to these far flung locations?

One thought, and one that was espoused by my old Ornithology professor, was that the ratites were a polyphyletic group. That is, the features we associate with these birds - the large body size, flightlessness, long legs, long necks and "decomposed" body feathers - were all convergent characters, that evolved totally separately when different lineages of birds got locked into these island continents. However, this hypothesis totally ignores a number of pretty important skeletal features that are unique to the ratites though, such as their broad, flat sternum, and especially structures in the pelvis and unusual configuration of bones in the jaw and palate. It's also been completely demolished by molecular evidence.

Another school subscribed to idea that flightless ratites rafted to the various islands on mats of floating vegetation, and then thrived once they got to the various parts of the ratite world (at least until humans showed up). It's odd how many times these floating rafts of vegetation show up in phylogenetic biogeography. They're used to explain how monkeys and rodents wound up in South America, geckos in America, iguanas across the South Pacific, and pretty much every group of animals now found in Madagascar. Some of these floating hypotheses seem more plausible than others. I can definitely see how giant tortoises, which can float just fine on their own, and survive up to six months without food or water could disperse this way from Africa to South America, and from there to the Galapagos and many other Pacific islands. It seems a bit less likely when you're talking about a giant flightless bird. Terry Pratchett brilliantly lampooned this in "The Last Continent", where it is the major pathway that anything (including Rincewind) reaches the continent of XXXX.

Recently, genetic evidence in particular has shown that within the ratites, kiwis are actually closer to elephant birds than to the moas with whom they shared New Zealand. The moas are actually closest to the tinamous - a group of chicken-like birds today found in South America. Tinamous share a number of characteristics with ratites, including the pelvic and jaw characteristics, but most notably, they are not flightless, and they are not large. They're not very good fliers, but they can indeed fly. It's looking more and more like early Cenozoic flying tinamous made their way to these island remnants via their own wings, and once there, they gave rise to multiple groups of big, flightless birds. So the flightless character is indeed convergent, but they're still a monophyletic, Cenozoic lineage.

This also saves us from the mind-boggling prospect of there having to have been big, flightless ostrich-like birds all over Gondwanaland during the Early Cretaceous, before the late Cretaceous Struthiomimid dinosaurs evolved. That just seems wrong, somehow.

I'd be interested to know why camelus's geographic distribution constitutes such a long, narrow band of territory. It appears to correspond roughly the Sahel, which is an ecozone, but it's still curious to me that they aren't venturing north or south of it at all. (Assuming this map is accurate).

It should also be noted that historically and prehistorically, the ostrich had a rather wider range. 

Back as far as the Miocene and Pliocene, their fossils have been found in Moldavia and Ukraine.  They lasted until after the last ice age in China. 

Historically, they were somewhat common across Asia Minor, including Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan.  They were wiped out by the same manly hunters who started blasting the cheetahs out of the same range in the 16th century.

As recently as a hundred years ago, they were still found in northern Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and parts of the Middle East.  The modern distribution is largely an artifact of human interaction.

Currently there are feral populations in New Mexico, so maybe they'll expand their range again.

Depends on which part of Arizona.  I don't imagine they'd last long in the Sonoran desert region, but in the chapparal valleys in the southeast, or the plains plateau in the northeast, I imagine they'd do quite well.  Anywhere you still find pronghorns would probably be suitable ostrich habitat.