Salute to Tarsiers

It's time for a full-length feature on everyone's (okay, my) favorite tiny primate: the tarsier.

Photo source: Simba Nia's blog

Those of you with nerdy inclinations will recognize them from the covers of O'Reilly's books on Vi and Unix.

They've also been featured on I Can Haz Cheezburger:



Tarsiers are small, nocturnal primates whose 4-7 species live in the islands of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and the Philippines. Trademarks of their appearance are enormous eyes (which can outsize their brains), long feet (which give them their name--their tarsus [ankle] bones are extremely elongated), and long, spindly fingers.


Photo source: That's Just Ugly

Tarsiers possess an abundance of exceptional traits. They can rotate their necks 180 degrees in either direction. They are the world's most carnivorous primate, exclusively eating live animals that include insects, snakes and other reptiles, amphibians, and even birds. They are primarily insectivorous.

They give birth to giant babies that can weigh 25-30% of the mother's weight (imagine a >30 pound human newborn!). According to Tarsiers: Past, Present, and Future, "Since infants are so heavy, mothers and other group members rarely transport them. Instead, a mother will park her infant on branches while she forages nearby."

Photo uploaded by flickr user Specklet

As if all this weren't enough, tarsiers have incited a raging century-long debate over their proper phylogeny, or relationship to other primates. Some argue that their morphology shows their close relatedness to strepsirrhine primates (e.g. lemurs, lorises, and bush babies). Another camp scoffs at such absurdity and cites genetic, anatomical, and reproductive traits that make them haplorrhine primates (e.g. monkeys, apes, and humans).

Photo source: Asia Finest

Their ugliness factor also remains controversial; I personally find them to be utterly adorable, but, incredibly, others have ranked them the world's fourth ugliest animal.

Photo source: Animal Hub

They've also been featured on these illustrious pages before. So here's to tarsiers! May they never lack for crickets to chew.

Baby birds at home and abroad

Let's compare some baby birds found in the wild to their domesticated counterparts.

First up is a set of Western scrub-jays, native to western North America, in their natural habitat. This is how I typically imagine baby birds: giant, gaping beaks, skin stretched tightly over bulbous eyes, optional pinhole eye openings, scrawny necks, and transparent skin.

Photo source: the Register-Guard

Also in our wild lineup are some baby finches sporting crinkly yellow beaks and dubious tufts of down:

Photo source: Boing Boing

Now for the creatures we have invited into our own homes. Eastern Rosella parrots are prized for their brightly colored plumage, of which they give no hint early in life:

Photo source: http://www.parrot-bird.com/

Top honors, however, may belong to baby cockatiels, native to Australia but now common household pets throughout the world. Cockatiels are the second most popular companion parrot species (after budgies) and are known for their gentle and sociable natures. This outstanding specimen has been photographed mid-poop:

Photo uploaded by user tamaralynn24

Observe the veiny skull, sealed eyes, wrinkly neck and leg, full crop, arthritic-looking claws, and Chia pet-style down. This is truly the stuff of which dream pets are made.

So who wins the ugliness contest: baby birds in the wild or baby birds at home? Cast your vote in the comments!

Not just an ugly face

Nothing could please me more than a reason to post about proboscis monkeys. But I could never have imagined such a good reason: this headline at Discovery News:

Monkey Barfs and Rechews Food

A Japanese scientist studying a troop of these monkeys on Borneo has discovered that they regurgitate their food and basically chew their cud. They don't have the multi-chambered stomach designed for this like cows do, but they don't care. They do it anyway.

Don't believe it? You need to see for yourself? OK, it isn't pretty, but that's what you come here for, I guess:



Great angle on the nose in that, too, right?

I hope you appreciate the lengths that science goes to to bring you this sort of news. The researcher, Ikki Matsuda, told LiveScience what it took:

There are, of course, a lot of mosquitoes and leeches in the forest. The rainy season was the worst — the river water came up to our waists even inside the forest. It was really scary because at that time, crocodiles also came into the inland forest, and many creatures like centipedes and spiders came up to me on the water.

Yeah, I think I'll stick with the blogging.

Gratefully,
Wombat (No Relation)

Proboscis monkey in all his glory by Flickr user chem7 .

Revisiting an old favorite: the sphynx cat

What a heart-warming image of motherly love.

Photo source: The Weasel King

You can just feel the waves of joy, contentment, and pride emanating off her. I've not yet experienced motherhood myself, but I can only hope such delight is in store for me when the happy time comes.

This cat, however, just seems intent on showing us his privates:

Photo source: Wazaw

For more sphynx goodness, visit Sphynx Cat Pictures and the Sphynx Cat Blog.

Please consider breath mints

Few of us on a relaxing tropical vacation expect to be confronted by the leftover lunch, fat and shiny tongue, and ultra-hairy underlip of a towering pachyderm. While standing under this truly enormous animal, it was hard not to imagine that this gaping maw could be my last earthly sight. Luckily, this elephant was a friendly sort, perhaps because I was feeding her carrots. Elephants at the Taman Safari near Jakarta, Indonesia, are trained to accept food placed directly into their mouths, rather than picking it up with their trunks, for the entertainment and momentary shock of tourists.


As an elephant enthusiast and regular reader of elephant news, I had despaired of ever seeing these majestic creatures featured on this blog. It just goes to show that beauty is very hard to maintain from all angles.

Bonus: an aggressive zebra in the drive-through part of the safari demands carrots as well.

The Adorable Water Deer

No, I didn't mess up and post this on the wrong blog. The water deer, Hydropotes inermis, is quite deserving of a place here. It lives in China and Korea, in swampy regions and grasslands, where it follows a normal, deerish vegetarian lifestyle.

It also has three inch fangs.

Unfortunately for your nightmares, that is not a Photoshop, just a picture of a healthy male deer. Those giant teeth are used during mating season, when male deer fight each other for females' affections.

Now, try and imagine what Bambi would have been like with one of these starring.

Not trusting deer anymore,

tkrausse

Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia and Cracked.com (NSFW/18+)

Possibly the most horrible ants ever

Wombat normally handles the posts about animals that don't act right, but these are so horrible that I just have to post them. I'd recommend not reading this post before/during/after eating, because you might not for another week. If you still want to continue, I bear no responsibility for the consequences.

Today's ants come from the genus Adetomyrma, more commonly known as "dracula ants". The sort of fill the evolutionary gap between ants and wasps, but it's their dietary habits that make them so disturbing. While the name "dracula ant" makes you think they'd go for blood for dinner, it's not your blood they want. According to Myrmecos Blog,

...ants have a skinny little waist through which their digestive tract must pass. Solid food would lodge in the bottleneck and kill the ant, so the ants can’t eat solids. They can only drink.

Yet, in forgoing solid food ants miss out on all sorts of protein available in the environment. Ants must either give up protein or figure out how to convert solids into drinkable juice. That’s where the larvae come in.

Larvae are made to eat and can handle all manner of food. They consume the solids that the worker ants have brought back to the nest and, after a little digestion, pass the protein back as a liquid. Most ant species have a simple, elegant way to do this: they regurgitate for the adults when prompted. But this direct food-passing behavior only appears in the more recent ant lineages. The ancient subfamily Amblyoponinae- including Adetomyrma- diverged from the rest of the ants over 100 million years ago and couldn’t inherit this sensible way of doing things.

Natural selection is a blind process. Evolution often solves problems with unexpected, rube-goldberg solutions that any reasonable designer would never implement, and the Amblyoponines happened on one of those odd solutions. They found a more morbid way to get at all those larval proteins. The adult ants just chew a hole in the larval skin. The hemolymph oozes out, and the adults take a drink.

Yes, these ants cut open their own young and drink their blood. Fortunately, the young seem to have no long-term harm (besides scaring from having their abdomen chewed open), and grow up to continue the cycle.

Enjoy your lunch,

tkrausse

Pictures courtesy of Myrmecos Blog and Cracked.com (NSFW/18+)

Poof Go the Spores

Lie is hard for tropical carpenter ants. You've got to work in the heat (wet heat), with little fluctuation in the seasons. You've got no union protection, and your boss treats you like just another drone. But that's nothing compared to zombie fungus.

That's right, here's yet another tale of critters getting zombified by a parasitic something or other. In this case, it's a fungus that infects a tropical carpenter ant, coerces it to climb 25cm up a plant, face NNE, latch onto the plant with its mandibles, and then die. The fungus then sprouts the twiggish growth you see below, and *poof* go the spores (a great band name, if I do say so myself).

Thanks for the link, Kris. I'll be sure to skip the mushrooms on my pizza tonight. You can never be too sure.

Photo source: Pete Huele via CBC