Goo Goo G'joob

"Pinnipeds" is the technical term for flipper-footed aquatic mammals that are able (although often with difficulty) to move about on land. Although there had previously been some speculation on the point, we now know that they are a natural group of animals, all descending from a single distant ancestor. They are carnivorans, more closely related to dogs than to cats and probably represent the third major branching within the living dog-like carnivores, after the dogs and bears, but before (for example) the raccoons, skunks, and weasels.

The living species of pinniped are placed within three families, although one or two extinct ones are also recognised. Most pinnipeds belong to the Phocidae, or "seal family". While the term "seal" is often used in modern English to refer to pinnipeds in general, the seal family proper consists of animals especially well-adapted to living in the water. They lack visible ears, and their hind limbs are arranged so to be efficient for propulsion underwater, but almost useless on land, forcing them to haul themselves about using their front flippers only.

Euplerids: Falanoucs and Fanalokas

Fanaloka

The relationships of the native Madagascan carnivores were uncertain before the advent of genetic testing at the end of the 20th century. The majority were assumed to be mongooses, since that is very much what they looked like, but three species didn't quite fit the pattern. 

Two of these were, so far as anyone could tell from their physical appearance and habits, civets. They were often placed in their own subfamily, reflecting their distance from other civets, but nonetheless, they were thought to belong among the viverrids. Following genetic studies in 2003, however, it became clear that they belonged in the same group as (i.e. shared a unique common ancestor with) the Madagascan "mongooses". Since some of them clearly weren't mongooses, and since they had diverged from the real ones so long ago, the subfamily was split off and promoted to full family level, now including both the mongoose-like and civet-like species.

Looking for Leaves: the Travel Routines of a Koala

Animals inevitably have a preference for the particular habitat in which they live. Factors such as climate and the presence of suitable hiding and sleeping places are important, along with the presence of suitable food. While climate is less of a problem, food and shelter may be patchily distributed, with insufficient food in any one place to support the animal for long. The animal may also wish to avoid sheltering in any one place for too long, less predators find it easy to locate, and it also makes sense to travel between different patches of land if you want to find mates.

Thus, it can be important to know not merely which habitats a particular species of animal prefers, but how it moves about within that habitat to use to its best advantage. Does it tend to revisit particular patches of ground, and if so, how often? A herbivore, after all, wouldn't want to head back to a given place before whatever it had eaten there had had a chance to regrow.

Viverrids: The Odd Ones Out

Binturong

Most viverrids have a similar appearance: slender, long-snouted animals, many of them spotted or brown-coated. One, however, stands out as particularly distinctive. This is the binturong (Arctitis binturong) and it's the largest species of "civet", with a total body length ranging from 61 to 96 cm (24 to 38 inches) and weighing between 9 and 20 kg (20 to 44 lbs), similar to small dog such as a Jack Russell or border terrier. Moreover, they appear somewhat larger than they are because, unlike other civets, they have a thick shaggy coat that obscures their actual body.

They are mostly black in colour but with grizzled fur that makes them look grey, and prominent white whiskers. The tail is long and prehensile, and the feet have large, rough pads, giving them an enhanced grip. In other respects, however, they are civet-like, with the same general pattern of teeth and other detailed anatomical features, including a simple perineal scent gland.

The Patagonian Homunculus

In 1891, Argentinian naturalist Florentino Ameghino, the founding father of South American palaeontology, described a new species of fossil primate. Naming it Homunculus ("little man"), he recognised that it resembled a lemur almost as much as a monkey and must therefore be very primitive, but he was unable to categorise it further.

To be fair, all he had at the time was a section of the lower jaw. Over the next seven years, working with his brother Carlos, he uncovered a few further specimens. These included part of a skull and some limb bones, but the exact details of what they had discovered remained obscure, beyond the fact that it was a primate of some sort.

It didn't help that, after 1898, the next discovery of a fossil belonging to the genus didn't happen until the 1980s. And that was only a few isolated teeth. Since then, nothing until the current century.

Staying Away from the Boys

Many large, hooved mammals live in herds. This has obvious advantages of safety in numbers, spreading the work of looking out for predators, as well as benefiting from the knowledge of more experienced herd members as to the best places to find food or shelter. The structure and composition of these herds vary from species to species, but one common trait is that males and females often form single sex herds that travel apart for much of the year.

This is referred to as "sexual segregation", and was first formally described by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man. It isn't unique to mammalian herd animals, being seen in everything from fish shoals to bird flocks, as well as in non-hooved mammals (dolphins, bats, primates, etc.) Most zoological research, however, has tended to focus on large cloven-hooved mammals, such as deer and antelopes.

Hungry Hippos

The hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) is an unusually large animal. Among land-dwelling mammals, only the elephants and some species of rhinoceros are larger. It is also, like elephants and rhinos, herbivorous and, since it prefers to eat plants that aren't especially nutritious, this means it needs to eat a lot. 

As in, it eats 35 to 50 kg (77 to 110 lbs) of food each day. 

Which is fine if the hippo happens to be out in the wild, far from human interference. But the reality is that there are fewer and fewer such places around these days. It's not so much the urban sprawl that humans bring, or even the roads and other infrastructure of an expanding African economy, but more the cropland that's required to feed us all. Although hippos are hunted for the ivory in their teeth, the number one threat to their survival is probably the expansion of farmland. Compared with many other animals, this is exacerbated by their reliance on large amounts of fresh water, so even if the farmland isn't near them, they suffer if water is diverted to where it is needed for crops. 

Delphinids: Pilot Whales

Long-finned pilot whale

The term "dolphin" is not, strictly speaking, a scientific one. It refers, in common parlance, to any small cetacean, often even including porpoises. Even ignoring the porpoises, however, not all dolphins are members of the dolphin family, technically referred to as "delphinids". This is because some freshwater animals are not closely related to the dolphins proper (or, indeed, to the porpoises). We call them "dolphins" because they're about the right size, a similar shape, and... well, we don't have a better word, at least for them all collectively.

But it works the other way, too. Not all members of the dolphin family are commonly called "dolphins". With the exception of the melon-headed whale, which it's hard to think of as anything other than a dolphin, this is because they're too big. We call them "whales" - another term that doesn't map to anything scientifically - since that's what we call any large cetacean.

Delphinids: Newest and Largest Dolphins

Fraser's dolphin

One of the largest features at the British Natural History Museum is a full-scale model of a blue whale, occupying a large chunk of one of the mammal halls. This was installed in 1938 by Francis Fraser, a Scottish zoologist with a lifelong interest in cetaceans. Eighteen years later, still working at the museum, he was put in charge of reorganising their collection of cetacean skeletons and came across one that hadn't been closely examined since it had arrived in 1895.

It had been donated by Charles Hose, a colonial administrator and amateur naturalist who had found the skeleton on a beach near a river mouth in Sarawak (then a British Protectorate). Hose hadn't been quite sure what it was, and simply labelled it "white porpoise ? Lagenorhynchus sp." before sending it on. When Fraser examined it, however, he soon realised that it couldn't possibly be what Hose had guessed and that it was, instead, an animal previously unknown to science.

How to Drink Nectar

Orange nectar bat

When most people think of what bats eat, the first thing that likely comes to mind is insects. It probably doesn't make much further thought to remember that fruit bats also exist. And these are the two most common sources of food for bats, although 'fruit' in particular can cover quite a wide range of specific food types. But bats are the second largest order of mammals, after the rodents, and there is considerable variety amongst them.

This is particularly true of the leaf-nosed bats, or phyllostomids. While most formally recognised families of mammals have names almost everyone is familiar with - cats, bears, dolphins, horses, gibbons, etc. - and most of those that don't at least sound like they're actual names - binturongs, tuco-tucos, tenrecs, colugos - bat families tend to lack anything we could reasonably describe as a common name. Instead, we have bulldog-bats, and sucker-footed bats, and disc-winged bats, and so on. 

So it is with the leaf-nosed bats, which are the second-largest family of bats in terms of number of species, beaten only by the vesper bats. The family is usually divided into no fewer than eleven subfamilies, all of which have equally obscure-sounding names, and, in some cases, not even that much. It may not be obvious that, say, the spear-nosed bats are a subgroup of the leaf-nosed bats, but they are. And it's even less obvious that stenodermatines are phyllostomid, but kerivoulines are not.

Sea Lions v. The Blob

The waters off the coast of Alaska are supposed to be cold, especially in winter. Yet, in the autumn of 2013, they cooled far less than they normally would. A great mass of warm water, 2,000 km (1,250 miles) across and around 100 metres (330 feet) deep, remained trapped in the North Pacific. Nicknamed 'The Blob', this was caused by the weather patterns over the region remaining stuck in a high-pressure mode, preventing the warm water from dissipating with the winds as it should do. With temperatures stuck at up to 4°C (7°F) warmer than normal, the high pressure did not dissipate for eight months.

When it did, tropical winds pushed the warm water up against the American coast, from southern Alaska to southern Mexico, where it basically sat until El Niño kicked off in 2015... and that kept things unusually warm for another year. Inland, this disrupted weather systems leading, among other things, to frequent thunderstorms that sparked what was (at the time) the worst wildfire season in California's history.

The Diets of Parallel Pigs

Peccaries from South America

The word "ungulate" refers to a broad category of mammals that are generally large and herbivorous. They form a natural evolutionary group, although only if you include the cetaceans, which are descended from vaguely hippo-like ancestors. The word comes from the Latin word for "hoof", and the great majority of living ungulates have hooves of one kind or another. Even ignoring the cetaceans there are exceptions, but it doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to see that camels, for instance, are at least the same general kind of animal as deer or cows.

All living ungulates can be placed into one of two mammalian orders: the artiodactyls, which includes the cloven-footed kinds, and the perissodactyls, which includes, among others, the horses. If you start looking at fossils, however, it becomes clear that other ungulate orders once existed. Most were very early, dying out in the first half of the Age of Mammals, representing early branches in the great ungulate family tree that ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Wolves, Foxes, and Food

Large scary predators are, by their nature, rare. There simply can't be too many of them, or they would run out of food to eat, something typified by the trophic pyramid often seen in biology textbooks: plants are eaten by herbivores are eaten by carnivores are eaten by bigger carnivores, with each step necessarily having a smaller total mass. The reality is, of course, somewhat more complex than this simple chain would suggest, most obviously because it ignores omnivores and decomposition.

But the basic idea holds, and apex predators - those that are large enough that nothing else normally eats them - exist in much smaller numbers than herbivores or smaller carnivores. This means that, relative to their numbers, they have a disproportionate effect on the ecosystem within which they live. Take away the apex predators and, even though there weren't very many of them to begin with, you will radically change the local ecology.

And, because they are relatively few in number, apex predators tend to be especially vulnerable to being wiped out. That's even assuming that humans don't focus on them deliberately out of fear, whether for their own lives or for the good of their livestock. Globally, apex predators are declining. (On this blog, we're mostly interested in mammals, but consider, for example, that at least eight of the 23 species of crocodile/alligator are currently thought to be endangered).

The Struggles of a Pollinating Bat

Note the dusting of pollen...

When we think of flowers being pollinated, for most people, the first things that are likely to come to mind are insects, especially bees. But other creatures, including mammals, can also be a part of the pollination process, and this is particularly true of bats. Nor are we talking about some occasional event that merely gives the flower some sort of backup - for some the presence of pollinating bats is crucial to their survival.

Even aside from the obvious importance that this gives bats to the wider ecosystem, this can also have direct economic importance to we humans. For example, sour pitayas are an important cash crop in parts of Mexico. Similar to the much sweeter dragonfruit (although not closely related), they grow on a particular type of cactus that is native to the country but is also commonly cultivated. As it turns out, this cactus relies on bats for pollination. While they are not essential, crop yields drop by over a third when the bats are prevented from reaching them, which would clearly be devastating for a Mexican farmer who may be living on the edge of profitability to start with.

From Dragon to Cave Bear

In 1675, German physician Johann Paterson Hain published a detailed description of the bones of what he believed to have been a dragon. Such bones had been unearthed from German caves for centuries and identified as belonging to various mythical creatures, with unicorns perhaps the most popular - likely since one could sell supposed unicorn horns for their magical healing properties. Fortunately for us, his illustrations were highly accurate and we can identify them for what they really are.

Indeed, while naturalists continued describing such bones as belonging to fantastical animals into the 18th century, physician and rationalist Gregor Horst had beaten them to the punch, pointing out as early as 1656 that bones recovered from Unicorn Cave (yes, that is its actual name) looked remarkably like those of "bears, lions, and humans". Today, we can look at Paterson Hain's original illustrations and confirm that he had produced the first known published drawings of the bones of a cave bear.

Mice at the Oak Tree Cafe

Forests, it should come as no surprise, rely on a complex set of interdependencies among the native species. The animals that live in the forests rely on the existence of the trees for shelter or food, or feed on other animals that rely on the trees for food. But the trees also need the animals, or at least some of them.

Obvious examples include the reliance of many plants on insects and other animals for pollination. Another is the fact that plants have edible fruit specifically so that animals will eat them and spread the digestion-resistant seeds in their dung. That doesn't work where the animal obtains nutrition from the seed itself, as is typically the case, for example, of plants that produce nuts. But, even here, the plants may rely on scatter-hoarding.

That is to say, many seed-eating animals in temperate regions store food in caches hidden across the landscape - squirrels being among the better-known examples. Some of those caches won't be found again, or the animal that made them will die from other causes before it has the chance to use them. And then, the seeds can germinate - the great majority won't, but it happens often enough that this simple process is of key importance to the survival and growth of some nut-bearing trees.

Drought and the Mother Rhino

You may be surprised to discover that the white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) is not internationally listed as an endangered species. This is because it is reasonably widespread across southern Africa, poaching of the species has been in decline since 2014, largely due to effective enforcement methods. While it did almost go extinct in the late 19th century, well over 10,000 of the animals are thought to be alive today, with populations in some areas still rising in recent decades. In fact, it meets all the usual criteria for a species of "least concern", one that we wouldn't normally consider even close to being threatened.

This, of course, hides a fair bit of complexity.

A Tiger's Dinner

One of the basic concepts in ecology is that of the food chain; the idea that plants are eaten by herbivores are eaten by small carnivores are eaten by large carnivores. The reality is both more complex - because, for example, omnivores exist - and simpler, because, at least on land, many of the largest carnivores eat large herbivores, not smaller carnivores. Nonetheless, there's still an underlying truth, and it introduces us to concepts such as the apex predator.

An apex predator is essentially a carnivore that has no predators of its own, an animal that sits at the top of its local food chain. Many mammals fit this description, including wolves, big cats, bears, and killer whales. (The last of those, of course, being an example of a large carnivore that does mainly eat smaller carnivores). Outside the world of mammals, one could add eagles, crocodiles, and sharks, among others. Humans could count as another example, given that we obviously don't have regular predators, but this does depend on your exact definition, since we're clearly omnivorous and, in many parts of the world have a nearly or totally herbivorous diet.

The Rarity of Gophers

What exactly does it mean to say that a species is "rare"? The general idea, of course, is that it must have a lower total population than some species that is "common", and we can certainly argue over where to draw the line between the two. But, even then, rarity can manifest in different ways and that may have an effect on our perception of it.

Take the tiger for example. Today, this is undeniably a rare animal, and it's internationally listed as an endangered species. But go back two hundred years, and tigers were found across southern Asia from the easternmost parts of Turkey to the Russian Far East. They stretched from the deserts of Central Asia to the jungles of Java. But even then, if you'd gone to any of these places, the chances of actually meeting a tiger weren't all that high. Tigers are big predators, and they need a wide area to find enough food to eat. So they may have had a high total population (certainly compared with today) but they weren't exactly abundant in any given locality. Does that count as being "rare"?

The Other One: Red Pandas

Over the course of this year, I have looked at all the species of the raccoon and skunk families, two groups of smallish carnivorous mammals that are mostly confined to the Americas. These two families are themselves related, forming part of a larger group called the "musteloids", traditionally ranked as a "superfamily". The group is named for a third family within it, the mustelids or "weasel family", which contains a much wider - and more widespread - group of species, including otters, badgers, and wolverines. 

The musteloid superfamily, however, also contains one other living species that does not fit into any of the three main families: the red panda (Ailurus fulgens). Six years ago, I took a look at the history of Western knowledge of this animal, and of how it relates to other mammal families. The upshot of that, you may recall, is that there is broad agreement that the red panda is the only living species in its family, distinct from raccoons, skunks, and weasels although quite how was unclear. Since I wrote that, a further study has come out supporting the evolutionary tree I described as "the current best bet", but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that at least one contradictory study has also been published. It's perhaps fair to say that the four families of musteloids all appeared fairly suddenly at around the same time (likely around the Grande Coupure) and the exact sequence of events is difficult to disentangle.