The Genomics of Yellow Bats

In terms of species, bats are the second-largest order of mammals, after the rodents. New species are identified all the time, due in part to the relative difficulty of closely examining night-flying mammals, many of which sleep in hard-to-access caves. The current total stands at over a thousand, representing over 20% of all known mammal species. 

Within this huge group, there is, perhaps, rather more diversity than many people realise. While bats have probably not received the same level of attention as some other mammal groups, scientists have nonetheless long attempted to disentangle the relationships between all these subgroups. (Also, when I say they have received less attention, there's a mammal-centric bias here; it's probably still a lot better than, say lizards, let alone millipedes or the like). 

Cheating Little Vixens

The majority of mammal species are either polygynous, where one dominant male mates with multiple females, or promiscuous, where both sexes have multiple partners. However, while monogamy may be less common, it isn't exactly rare, either, with it having evolved several times in widely separated mammalian groups. In some cases, this is what we would term "facultative" monogamy, where animals (often large predators) are sufficiently widely spaced that it's simply difficult for a male to find multiple partners, or, if he can, they live sufficiently far apart that he can't plausibly defend more than one of them from his rivals. In others, monogamy is an essential part of the breeding process, typically because the young are too much effort for one parent to raise alone.

Boys or Girls?

Generally speaking, a newborn mammal is equally likely to be male or female. The sex ratio in the resulting population may not always be a perfect 50/50 if one sex has a shorter life expectancy than the other, but it's still going to be pretty close. There is a sound reason for this, and it's called Fisher's Principle, after geneticist and mathematician Ronald Fisher, who promoted it in the 1930s (although he probably wasn't the first to have thought of it).

The argument runs like this. Let's say that a particular species produces more females than males. Then males will have more mating opportunities than females, and will, on average, have more offspring. If a mutation then arises in a given individual that makes her more likely to give birth to sons, she will tend to have more grandchildren, many of whom will carry that mutation. Since they will also have an advantage, the mutation will spread through the population... until males are more common, at which point it's preferable to have more female offspring, and so on. 

The Hybrid History of North American Deer

There are five species of deer native to the US and Canada. Two of these, the moose and the caribou, are distinctive animals with no especially close living relatives. The elk, while perhaps not as distinctive in appearance as these two, is even more distant from the others in evolutionary terms. The other two, however, are the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and the mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) which not only look similar to one another but are, indeed, each other's closest relatives.

When I discussed these two species in detail last year, I mentioned the existence of the "black-tailed deer" a subgroup of mule deer with tails of a more solidly black colour than others of their kind. The black-tailed deer are native to the Pacific Northwest and are generally considered to consist of two subspecies of mule deer that share a common ancestor that split off from other mule deer early on. Since are subspecies, not full species, it should come as no surprise to discover that they hybridise with other mule deer where the two come into contact, although, if anything, this happens more often than we might expect.

When White-footed Mice Invaded Michigan

When I'm describing a particular species of mammal on this blog, one of the first things I usually mention is where in the world it lives wild. Clearly, there are differences in the fauna of different continents or specific islands. Cougars, black bears, pronghorn antelope, and coyotes are all common enough in the US, but don't live in Europe. We have Eurasian and Iberian lynx, but not bobcats and Canada lynx. There are bison in Europe, but they're a different species than the American sort, and we only have wild raccoons because some were deliberately released in Germany in 1934. 

Clearly, the existence of the Atlantic Ocean is not to be sniffed at. However, this applies on a smaller scale, too, where some physical barrier that's some way short of an ocean, but is still significant, prevents an animal from advancing further across its home continent than it might like. 

And then there's the fact that animals have particular requirements as to the climate and vegetation of their native areas - even if the vegetation is only affecting the prey animals that they themselves need to feed on. The difference between this and the physical geography of rivers, mountains, and so on, is that it's changing over a much faster timescale, especially in recent decades. Animals may be forced to move to new areas, which can be a problem if the physical geography prevents them from doing so and can be a problem for other reasons even if it doesn't.

Spotting Ocelots

There are a number of different species of cat living in South America, including some that are not widely known by the general public. Across much of the continent, however, the most abundant are often the ocelots (Leopardus pardalis), outnumbering both the larger cats that require substantial food resources and the smaller, more localised ones. Aside from the desert regions west of the Andes, ocelots live across almost the whole of the continent from northern Argentina to the Caribbean coast and their population is large enough that they are not generally considered a threatened species.

But that broader picture, which is generally positive for the species, hides some local variation. They are not, for example, especially common in the Caatinga, the area of dry scrubland that covers the easternmost regions of Brazil. More significantly, perhaps, they also become less progressively common once you leave South America and head north. Ocelots are found throughout Central America, and along both coastal regions of Mexico, and they are even found in small numbers in southern Texas and Arizona. In both of these latter countries, however, their populations are low enough that they are listed as endangered species by the local authorities responsible for such matters - the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources.

Voyage of the Kinkajous

For much of the time since the extinction of the dinosaurs, South America was an island continent. Developing in isolation, the mammals living there developed a number of unusual forms not seen elsewhere. Around 2.8 million years ago, however, South America became joined to its northern counterpart via the Isthmus of Panama. Northern animals flooded south, and relatively few headed in the opposite direction. As a result, unlike Australia, which remains an island continent today, the mammalian fauna of South America includes many animals at least broadly familiar from elsewhere.

Among the first mammal families to make the crossing was that of the raccoons. Although this had first appeared in Asia, living species are now found only in the Americas (ignoring some recent man-made introductions) with most of them found in tropical habitats. In fact, they reached South America almost ridiculously early, something we know because we have a fossil example that's around 7 million years old... at least 4 million years before the land crossing we'd expect them to have used had formed.

Don't Sleep with Your Sister

Conservation of mammals (or other animals) isn't simply a matter of providing enough suitable habitat for them to live in. One other consideration is that that habitat should not be overly fragmented - and this can be a problem as we build roads or other transport networks that cross otherwise wild terrain. The problem with fragmented habitats is that, even if there is enough space and food to support a small population of the animal in question, that population cannot reach and interact with other populations. And this leads to inbreeding.

We have known that inbreeding is a bad thing in animals since... well, probably at least since we started domesticating livestock. In our own species, there's a natural revulsion against incest, something that's reflected in moral teachings that go back at least as far as the Old Testament, and similar codes in other cultures. Animals too, avoid inbreeding when they can, perhaps finding the scent marks left by genetically similar individuals to be unpleasant.

The Smallest British Mammals: Shrews

Common shrew

For some reason that I no longer recall, a picture of a shrew cropped up while I was talking with a friend on the internet. "That's a mouse," she insisted. "No," I said, "it's a shrew." "Mouse!"

It was only later that I remembered that the German word for "shrew" is spitzmaus (literally "sharp/pointed mouse") and, since my friend was Austrian, she wasn't necessarily entirely wrong. From a certain perspective, perhaps to German-speakers, all these small, furry, long-tailed things are mäusen.

And it's certainly true that shrews do look, superficially, quite like mice. They tend to be smaller, with narrower snouts, and very small ears and eyes, but there is something quite mouse-like about them. Nonetheless, shrews (unlike, say, voles) are not rodents. In fact, as placental mammals go, they aren't even particularly related to rodents - humans are more closely related to mice than shrews are.

Small British Mammals: Field Mice

Wood mouse

While the common house mouse is likely one of the most familiar of all animals living wild in Britain, it is only one of four species of mouse native to the islands. (France and Germany, for comparison, have six each, although they aren't the same six). Of the other three, the closest relatives of the house mouse are the two species of field mouse, which are also found widely on continental Europe.

Field mice have benefited less from the presence of humans than house mice, since they tend to avoid human dwellings, and there are rather a lot of those in Europe. Given their common name, however, one might suppose that they have at least benefited from the spread of agricultural land. This, however, only true of one of the British species. This is the wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus), sometimes also known as the "long-tailed field mouse". In Britain, when the term "field mouse" is used without qualification, it typically means this one.

How Mothers Stop Their Daughters from Sleeping Around

Northern mole-vole (E. talpinus)

Generally speaking, mammals are equally likely to be born as either males or females. The exact proportion may vary a little, and it doesn't follow that both sexes form 50% of the adult population, because one or the other may be more likely to die young. It's even less the case that all males, or all females, are equally likely to pair up and have offspring of their own.

This disparity is known as reproductive skew, and it varies considerably between species, and sometimes even between populations of the same species. At one extreme, it's essentially zero. This happens if the species is basically monogamous, usually because child rearing is a sufficiently draining exercise that being able to share the duties between two individuals is really helpful. It can also happen for what might be regarded as the exact opposite reason - if the species is highly promiscuous so that the females will mate with absolutely anyone, once again, everyone's chances of reproducing are the same. There's just less of that courtship stuff to worry about, off-set by having a single-parent family once you're done.