Biomedical Ephemera, or: A Frog for Your Boils

Great Grey Shrike - Lanius excubitor

"Sentinel Butcher"

Shrikes are Passerines (the "songbirds", or perching birds), but are far from the pretty little finches and industrious sparrows most people associate with their order.

Their scientific name, Lanius excubitor, the "sentinel butcher", comes from the "sentinel" (lookout) behaviors that this species is known for. Well, that's where the "sentinel" part comes from. The "butcher" part...well, that's another matter. These birds impale their prey on thorny bushes (and barbed-wire fences).

The vernacular names for these birds are just as colorful; the direct translations of "strangling angel", "choking bird", "greater butcher-bird", and "murdering [mag]pie" show how well-known this little bird was for its shriek and butchery. 

While this method of butchery is quite effective for killing everything from large insects to lizards, mice, and young ermines, it also serves as a handy way to "age" some of their more toxic food sources. When exposed to the sun and heat for several days, the toxins in big, fat, nutritious beetles are neutralized. The habit of aging or storing uneaten prey gave the Great Grey Shrike its German vernacular name: Neuntöter - "killer of nine".

Curiously, this is one of the few passerines that currently does not have any cuckoo (Cuculus spp.) that's able to parasitize their nest sites. Until the mid-1970s, there were several populations that were affected by brood parasites, but in the late 1970s, they appear to have out-evolved the cuckoos, at least for the time being.

Natural History of the Birds of Central Europe. Johann Frederich Naumann, 1905.

American Flamingo - Phoenicopterus ruber

Flamingos aren't naturally pink! They get their coloration from beta carotene found in the blue-green algae they consume. The flamingos that consume blue-green algae directly are much pinker than flamingos that primarily consume the blue-green algae secondhand (via zooplankton/brine shrimp). 

Flamingos are also unique in their method of eating - their bills are designed to scoop the bottom sediment and then filter out the mud and silt, leaving only the blue-green algae or the brine shrimp in their mouth. They shake their head back and forth under the water after scooping up the sediment. The big, fleshy tongue of the flamingo pushes water back and forth in the mouth and facilitates the filtering of all that mud. They also swallow their food while their head is upside-down! The meaty tongue used to be considered a delicacy among the Roman elite.

Images: Nature Neighbors: Embracing Birds, Plants, and Minerals. Nathanial Moore Banta for the American Audubon Association, 1914.

Osteologia Avium; or, A sketch of the osteology of birds. T.C. Eyton, 1867.

Western Long-Beaked Echidna - Zaglossus bruijnii

Like all monotremes, the echindas are egg-laying mammals. Unlike their relatives, the platypodes, echidnas lay just a single egg per year, and the female carries the egg in an abdominal egg-pouch, rather than laying multiple eggs in a burrow. The female raises the offspring on her own, so cannot afford to spend her entire time curled around a nest.

The egg incubates 21 days internally, and 10 days externally. When the puggle hatches, it's nearly as undeveloped as a marsupial infant. For the next 45-55 days, the puggle develops within the pouch, lapping milk from the mother's milk patches - the modified sebaceous glands that excrete milk aren't organized into a "nipple" in monotremes, but are simply gathered in patches on the skin.

When the puggle begins to develop spines, the mother deposits it into a nursery burrow, and leaves it there for 4-5 days at a time, while she forages.  Around seven months of age, she comes back less and less frequently, until the puggle (now fully-developed) leaves the burrow on its own. Its food-finding and "hunting" skills are all instinctual, and don't require teaching by the mother to develop, unlike in most mammals.

Genera Mammalium: Monotremata - Marsupalia. Angel Cabrera, por Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, 1919.

Male Birds-of-Paradise, in repose (top) and on display (bottom)

Left to right: "Le Sifilet" [the Western or Arfak Parotia] - Parotia sefilata, Superb Bird-of-Paradise - Lophorina superba , "Le Nébuleux" [The Nebulous Bird-of-Paradise] - ??

Despite their incredibly different outward appearances, the Birds-of-Paradise are all very closely related. We know this because of their skeletal similarities, and, these days, their genetic similarities.

However, their close affiliation to one another genetically has also caused problems in pinning down the exact number of species in the family Paradisaeidae, as it turns out that within each of the fourteen genus, the species are able to (and occasionally naturally do) cross-breed with one another. This wild cross-breeding is believed to be the source of many of the specimens and illustrated birds that have never again, or very rarely, been seen in the wild.

An example of this cross-breeding is shown above, at right. The "Nebulous Bird-of-Paradise" is thought to either be a misrepresented Twelve-Wired Bird-of-Paradise (unlikely, given Jacques Barraband's reputation as an ornithological illustrator), or a cross between two species living in nearby ranges of New Guinea. As the ranges of many different species and genus overlapped at the time of the specimens being gathered, it's unknown which two would have created such a bird, or whether it would have been fertile (most wild cross-breeds of birds-of-paradise are). Genetic tests may give us the answers to these questions in the future.

Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de paradis et rolliers. Francois Levaillant, illustrated by Jacques Barraband, 1806.

Sea Otter (Enhydra lutris)

Aww, the sea otter...so cute, so resourceful, so smart. Such adorable bobbing buoys above the Pacific kelp forests. Such...jerks?

Yep, that's right - just like humans observed decades ago in animals that they considered to be "highly intelligent" (such as dolphins, elephants, and apes), when you get smarter, you get more potential for dickishness. The brain power it takes to use tools and find novel ways to extract food also gives sea otters the mental capacity to understand how to manipulate the behavior of other otters.

To wit: Male sea otters are routine kidnappers. Though otters often raise pups in close proximity to one another, and males occasionally interact with pups in an amicable fashion, one of the most common behaviors of younger males is to kidnap the pup of a sleeping mom and hold it ransom.

The mother goes into a panic and will procure an almost absurd amount of food for the male, just to get her pup back. Older males will engage in kidnapping from time to time, but from what's been observed thus far, it largely seems to be a behavior of the younger male who hasn't perfected his hunting skills, and instead of improving his skills, sees an easy way out.

What a jerk.

Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. John James Audubon. Completed and posthumously published by John Woodhouse Audubon, 1858.

Camelus bactrianus - Bactrian Camel

Ignore the title ("Camelus Bactrianus seu Dromedarius"), since all the camels depicted here are Bactrian.

One of the background images seems to be depicting a camel "kushing" (kneeling) on a struggling human, with an erect phallus. All camels become significantly more aggressive during breeding season, and the domesticated Bactrian camel has been described as "impossible to control" during that period. Obviously humans have managed to breed out some aggression/train many male Bactrian camels over the centuries, so "impossible" seems a bit hyperbolic, but even experienced handlers note that it's much easier to avoid the males than train them. 

The second background figure depicts...camels? Doing...something? I'm pretty sure camels don't make a habit of sitting on their haunches facing each other, and I know for a fact that they don't mate any differently than other camels, so I really don't know. Maybe they're just having a bit of a cuddle. Anyone knowledgeable on camelid behavior?

A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts. Joannes Jonstonus, 1678.

Ornithorhynchus paradoxus [now Orthinorhynchus anatinus] - Postures assumed by duck-billed platypus

Top Left: "While feeding" (more likely while drinking, as over 90% of the platypus' diet is at the bottom of rivers or under river sediment) Top Right: "Asleep" Bottom Right: "Partially awakened" (Note the prominent spur of this adult male) Bottom Left: "Combing itself"

Transactions of the Zoological Society of London Vol. I. 1835.

Brown Bear Bathing

Nothin' better than a flowing stream to wash away the remnants of your winter cave...or for a good (and cleaning) scratch on the pebbly substrate!

Wild life of the world: a descriptive survey of the geographic distribution of animals. Richard Lydekker, 1915.

The Ornithorhynchus

This illustration makes me feel like I could train a platypus to beg for treats...they'd probably stab me with their venomous leg-spikes. Well, the males, at least. 

Types of Animal Life. St. George Mivart, 1893.

Brown Bear (Ursus arctos)

You wouldn't want to be anywhere near this bear. Females with cubs are not only aggressive when you get near their babies, but are territorial in general - many are more aggressive than even adult males.

Wild life of the world: a descriptive survey of the geographic distribution of animals. Richard Lydekker, 1915.

Aye-aye skeleton and behavior.

Aye-ayes fill the same ecological niche as woodpeckers do, thanks to their loooong and skinny middle fingers that serve the same role as a woodpecker's long tongue. In addition to their long, bug-picking fingers, they also have constantly-growing teeth. This led to early naturalists to classify them as "Rodentia". They're now considered relatives of the lemur, but that classification is still not certain; some species of aye-aye have rodent-like bone structures, and even though molecular genetics shows lemurs and aye-ayes having a relatively recent common ancestor, its classification is still challenged.

Transactions of the Zoological Society of London. 1872.