Fishing for Salmon (When You're a Bear)

Bears like eating fish. Among the most iconic images of brown bears (Ursus arctos) are those that show them wading out into a wide river or by a waterfall, and catching salmon for their food. Yet this isn't necessarily an image of everyday ursine behaviour.

This is because wide rivers, whitewater rapids, and so on, aren't all that common. Or at least, they don't form the majority of bear habitat. We watch and photograph bears feeding in such places because it looks dramatic and, more importantly, it's relatively easy to do. It's the same with other predators. We know a fair amount about the hunting habits of wolves and lions because we can watch them in Yellowstone Park or the Serengeti, where the terrain is wide open. That allows us to safely observe their behaviour from a distance, so, understandably, we'd prefer it where possible.

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.

Antilopine Antelopes: The Giraffe-Gazelles

Gerenuk

Despite appearances, true gazelles are not the closest living relatives of the springbok. That honour is probably tied between two other species, although there have yet to be sufficient genetic studies to absolutely nail that down - one could be closer than the other. They likely diverged from the springbok over 10 million years ago in the late Miocene, earlier than the blackbuck is thought to have diverged from the true gazelles, so it's perhaps unsurprising that they look quite different.

They also look slightly odd, and very distinctive.

The better-known of the two is the gerenuk (Litocranius walleri). The name comes from the Somali word for the animal, but it is more commonly known as the "giraffe-gazelle" in many European languages, and it's easy to see why. It is, of course, much smaller than a giraffe, with males having a shoulder height of around 100 cm (39 inches). The colour is also different, a relatively uniform reddish-brown over the back, with a paler shade in the flanks, neck, and limbs, and stark white underparts. There are also white markings on the face, around the eyes. Only the male has horns, which rise almost vertically out of the skull before curving back in an S-shape.

Learning to Hunt at Sea

One of the distinguishing features of mammals is that they invest a lot of time and effort in caring for their young. Of course, birds do this too, as do some other vertebrates, but the provision of milk is one of the key defining traits that's true of all living mammal species. (Probably most extinct ones, too, although it's hard to tell with the very early species). This means that newborn mammals are entirely dependent on their mothers in a way that the young of, say, most reptiles are not. 

But there comes a point where any mammal has to be weaned and make its way in the wider world. Even then, the maternal investment doesn't necessarily end with the mother continuing to raise and train her offspring for what can be an extended period. Brown bears, for example, are weaned at around six months, but they commonly stay with their mothers for at least another year, and often for two or more. We can see similar patterns in other mammals including, perhaps most obviously, primates.

A Puma's Larder

Most animals, mammals included, spend a considerable proportion of their time either eating or searching for something to eat. Foraging for food is not necessarily difficult in the case of grazing animals, since grass is usually plentiful where they live, but for most others, it is not quite so simple. There is generally a pay-off of some kind to be made between how nutritious the food might be and the amount of energy that would be expended in finding it - as measured by the time spent searching and the area that needs to be covered to do so. And then there's the amount of energy that will be expended in acquiring the food once you've found it; easy enough if you're a herbivore or even a scavenger, but possibly requiring a fair bit of effort if you're trying to kill something.

But that's not necessarily the end of the story. Many animals cache a proportion of their food, saving it for later. One immediately thinks, perhaps, of squirrels storing their nuts so that they can come back to them in winter when food is in short supply. Many burrowing rodents do something similar, hoarding food in underground chambers that can return to at their leisure. But carnivores can cache food, too, despite the fact that meat tends to go off more quickly than properly stored nuts or grain.

Bats That Eat Fish

Greater bulldog bat

With over 1,300 different species of bat known, it shouldn't really be surprising that there's a wide range of different dietary habits among them. Of course, a lot of that is on a fine scale, as I discussed just last month, but there are more significant differences in the kinds of things that bats feed upon. Insects, fruit, nectar, even blood all form the core diet of at least some kinds of bat.

One of the more unlikey food sources, however, is fish. Yet, when you think about it, fish is a really common food source for birds - there are a huge number of bird species that feed primarily on fish, including seagulls, kingfishers, and ospreys, among many others. Clearly, there's no inherent reason why a flying mammal couldn't eat fish, yet very few of them do.

As a recent review makes clear, however, "very few" is not "none".

Fishing in the Ganges

The most spectacular cetaceans are, arguably, the really big ones - sperm whales, blue whales, and so on. However, while our knowledge of the exact numbers is a little hazy, somewhere around half of the cetacean species alive today represent much smaller animals. The majority of these belong to just two taxonomic families.

By far the most numerous are the "true" or "oceanic" dolphins, a family that also includes killer whales and pilot whales - small in comparison with the like of humpbacks, but fairly large by most standards. The second family are the porpoises, which are exclusively small, by cetacean standards, and usually slightly smaller than dolphins.

But there are a few small-sized cetacean species that fall into neither group. These oddities share one thing in common: they don't live in the sea. While they are, of course, just as fully aquatic as their better-known kin, this has lead to them receiving the common collective name of "river dolphin", thus distinguishing them from the "oceanic" sort that most people are more familiar with.

The Laziness of Venomous Shrews

While there are some bats that could challenge them for the title, by most measures, shrews are the smallest of all mammalian species. They typically weigh no more than about 20 grams (two-thirds of an ounce), and are often much smaller than that. Being so small poses a number of challenges, but there's one in particular that affects mammals of this size that would not affect, say, beetles.

This is because mammals are warm-blooded, and need to generate internal heat in order to keep functioning (unless they're hibernating). The smaller you are, however, the more rapidly you lose heat through your body surface, which means that shrews need a fierce metabolism to keep burning enough calories to keep themselves warm. This means that they have to eat almost constantly, but it also means that they want to exert themselves as little as possible while doing so, so as to waste the minimum amount of energy in the process.

Diving for Your Dinner

Dinner!

Cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) are the best adapted of all mammals to life underwater. Their food is often found far below the waves, requiring them to dive deep to find it. But this, of course, is countered by the fact that, not being fish, they also have to return to the surface to breathe. The deeper the desirable food happens to be, the longer they will have to dive for just to reach it, and the longer they will have to spend recovering on the surface afterwards - even if the actual feeding time remains the same.

Such pay-offs are arguably particularly important for the huge rorqual whales, which feed by lunging at great masses of krill or other small prey and gulping them down. For them, it really matters that wherever they are diving is rich in food, so that they can find enough to offset the effort required to catch it. Quite how they strike that balance should depend on how good they are at diving, which relates to things such as their lung capacity and how much oxygen they need to sustain their bodies.

Do Kangaroos Chew the Cud?

Mammals that eat a lot of grass, or other relatively low-quality vegetation, have to process their food thoroughly to extract the maximum amount of nutrition. I've previously discussed how this works in some detail, but, in general, there are two approaches. In "fore-gut fermenters", the stomach is divided into multiple chambers, allowing the animal to ferment its food, then bring the solid parts back up to the mouth to re-chew ("chewing the cud"), before sending it back to finish the job. This is the system found in cows, deer, camels, and many other animals, collectively known as "ruminants".

The second approach is to place the fermentation chamber behind the stomach, down in the colon. This is less efficient, but quicker, and is the arrangement found in horses, rhinos, and a number of other animals. Rabbits are also "hind-gut fermenters" of this sort, but take the additional step of re-eating the fermented food once it passes out of their back end for the first time.

I mentioned in passing in my previous post that kangaroos are fore-gut fermenters, but that they are not ruminants, and have a slightly different system. Today, I'm going to explain what it is that they do do. (Much of what follows applies equally to wallabies, and, to a lesser extent, rat-kangaroos).

Pinnipeds: Ross and Weddell Seals

Weddell seal

The majority of 'true' seal species live in the Northern Hemisphere, with just five found south of the equator. While they were once more widespread, today, all five of these live in the extreme south, with the most widespread - the southern elephant seal - reaching Tasmania, southern New Zealand, and Patagonia. The remaining four, which are all relatively closely related to one another, do not range so far north and are exclusively Antarctic and sub-Antarctic.

The Weddell seal (Leptonychotes weddellii) is a typical example. With fully-gorwn males up to 3 metres (10 feet) in length, and weighing about half a ton, they are noticeably smaller than elephant seals, but still pretty large by the standards of seals in the north. They were first discovered during the expeditions of navigator James Weddell, who, in the 1820s, sailed further south than anyone had previously travelled, into the sea that now also bears his name. Since the seals are named for him, rather than for the body of water where they were first found, it's perhaps unsurprising that they are not unique to that sea, and are equally common right round the frozen continent. During the winter, they can travel as far north as South Georgia and other islands of the extreme South Atlantic, but they don't normally reach (for example) the Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America.

Compare the Mongoose

The mongoose family includes over 30 different species, found across Africa and southern Asia. That's excluding a few species of "mongoose" found on Madagascar, which were discovered, back in the last decade, to be more closely related to some of the other carnivores of the island than they were to the "true" mongooses on the mainland. On the other hand, it does include a small number of species that aren't commonly called "mongooses" in English. Ironically, in fact, it's one of these latter that's probably the most familiar of all mongoose species to westerners: the meerkat (Suricata suricatta).

(As an aside, the word "meerkat" is Afrikaans... which is a bit odd, since it means something completely different in Dutch).

Even when they aren't singing Hakuna Matata or trying to sell you car insurance, meerkats are common features on wildlife documentaries (at least they are in Britain; I can't speak for other countries) and in zoos across the world. In part, this is because they're rather cute, sociable animals, with complex, telegenic, lives that involve a lot of cooperation. But, while meerkats are probably the most social of all mongooses, they are by no means the only ones. Another example, for instance, is the banded mongoose (Mungos mungo), which lives in groups almost as large as those of meerkats.

Perils of the Big Snooze

There are over 280 recognised species of squirrel, only a little over a half of which spend any significant time up trees; the others include an array of more or less ground-dwelling species, from chipmunks to susliks. They live in almost every terrestrial habitat imaginable, from tropical rainforest to semi-desert. One of the few habitats they don't live in is, unsurprisingly, polar ice cap, but, even then, there's one group of squirrels that at least gets sort of close.

These are the fifteen species of marmot (Marmota spp.), most of which inhabit mountainous regions, often above the tree line. Marmots are the largest of all squirrels, being at least twice the weight of, say, prairie dogs. However, the weight of marmots isn't necessarily the easiest thing to quantify, because it changes so much over the course of the year, which is in turn due to their need to bulk up before entering hibernation. And the reason for hibernation in marmots? Well, that brings us back to the crappy habitat.

Whispering Bats on the Hunt for Nectar

Southern long-nosed bats (L. curasoae)

There are likely three things that most of us think of when we think of bats: they fly, they're nocturnal, and they can echolocate using inbuilt sonar. In fact, only the first of these is universally true of bats; there are (and never have been, so far as we can tell) any flightless bats in the way that there are flightless birds. The other two statements, while broadly correct, are not absolutely true of all living bat species.

Indeed, the bats are the second largest order of mammals, in terms of number of species, after the rodents. This, as might be expected, leads to a remarkable variety in their habits and ecology, even if much of it is not immediately obvious to the layman. There are, under the most common present scheme, no less than nineteen different families of bat, and while many other mammal families have names that can easily be rendered in regular English ("cats", "deer", "marmosets", and so on), those of bats are have to rely on more obscure terms ("funnel-eared bats", "sheath-tailed bats", etc.)

Heading South for Supper

Birds are by no means the only animals to make lengthy annual migrations. While most annual migrations by mammals are of the relatively short-distance kind - moving down the side of a mountain as winter approaches, say - some can be surprisingly impressive. To travel a truly long distance, walking is generally not your best bet, so most mammals that do so are not the kind that would travel overland. Given their parallels with birds, perhaps the most obvious mammalian examples are bats. While most sleep away the insect-free winter in a cave, some bats do travel long distances. As just one example, straw-coloured fruit bats (Eidolon helvum) have been reported to travel up to 2,500 km between Congo-Kinshasa and Zambia in search of the best ripe fruit in any given season.

Which isn't up there with the most impressive of the migrating birds, by any means, but isn't exactly a short hop, either. And, if you can't fly, swimming is another option. Indeed, one of the mammalian species that migrates the furthest is the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), with migrations of up to 10,000 km having been reported.

Humpback whales are, in fact, found just about everywhere on Earth that's covered by seawater, excepting only the Arctic Ocean and some smaller seas with restricted physical access (such as the Mediterranean). Different populations, therefore, can migrate along very different routes. But the pattern is generally the same: they spend the summer in cold waters, where they stuff themselves with krill, and then head towards warmer climes as the winter sets in, giving birth and raising their young over the summer before returning to their feeding grounds.

Of Moon Bears and Skunk Cabbages

One of the major debates in the study of human behaviour is that of "nature versus nurture". How much of what we do is the result of inbuilt tendencies and how much to the habitat we are raised in, including those things that we are taught? With non-human animals, the debate is, perhaps, less central, but there is still the question of inborn instinct versus learned behaviour.

Mammals being reasonably sophisticated animals, the possibility of some behaviour being learned - and moreover, of being learned socially, from other individuals, rather than by personal trial-and-error - is clearly one worth considering. For a great many behaviours in fact, there is going to be a bit of both; a mixture of instinct and learning.

For example, one of the things that most animals spend a large part of their time doing is searching for food. Much of the way that they do this is inborn. Cats, for instance, are born with the knowledge that anything that's small and scampering about is probably going to be tasty, and they instinctively know how to pounce on it, even if they have to practice to perfect the technique. On the other hand, social learning can also be important, both in determining what to eat, and where to find it. An example here is common marmosets, where the infants have been shown to avoid new and unfamiliar food unless an adult shows them that its safe to eat.

Fur Seals Going on a Winter Holiday

Once each year, animals like seals and sea lions haul themselves out of the water to spend time on rookeries located on remote coasts or distant islands. Once there, the females give birth to their young, raise them to the point that they can swim effectively, and then take part in the long orgy of reproduction during which the males fight for their affections. And then they all return to the water again, living out the rest of the year at sea.

For obvious reasons, nature documentaries tend to focus on this time of a seal's life. Scientists, too, know rather more about what the animals are up to when they're on land where they can see them, than they do about what they're up to when they're away from the coasts. Yet, fun though reproduction undoubtedly is, most of a seal's life is spent at sea, not at their annual breeding grounds. With modern tracking technology, however, we're beginning to get a better picture of what seals do during this time, and where they do it.

Take the northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus). Technically, these aren't seals, in the sense that they don't belong to the seal family, bur rather to the sea lion family. That's a bit confusing, so the term 'seal' is often used more broadly than that, and the two families are distinguished as 'earless seals' (the actual seal family, the Phocidae) and 'eared seals' (the sea lion family, including, of course, the sea lions themselves). That is, you can either consider sea lions to be a special kind of seal, or fur seals to be a special kind of sea lion. Or both, if you must. Take your pick.