Perfect Past Tense - Earwig

If you are visiting through the Washington Post article: Welcome! I hope you stick around, look through my old posts, and leave some comments. If you’ve got any suggestions for animals to write about, I’d be glad to hear them. I’ve even got a forum here. As for my old readers (all six of you), I’ve got a nice, juicy insect for this month.












Meet the Saint Helena Earwig (Labidura herculeana), the largest earwig in the world. It lives (lived?) on Saint Helena¹, a small volcanic island in the South Atlantic. Much like Attenborough’s Echidna, this specimen in the picture is not cavorting around its tropical island home, and for much the same reason: this species might have gone extinct in the ‘60s.

While most earwigs will eat about anything they can get their mandibles on, the Saint Helena Earwig is probably mostly herbivorous. They seem to spend most of their time in burrows, coming out only during nights after it has rained. This withdrawn behavior probably has not helped the people who are trying to determine if, in fact, it has gone extinct.

Though, it is not as if people have stopped looking. There have been a number of expeditions over the years, mostly led and funded by the London Zoo. From what I’ve seen, The Independent has been incredulous, if supportive, of spending thousands of pounds for people to wander around a tropical island looking for earwigs.

Most of the island of Saint Helena seems to be in ecological peril, and long time readers of this blog will understand when I say: “It’s because it’s an island.” Remote islands have a very specific ecology that is easily thrown off balance. Then, humans show up bringing rats, pigs, cats, dogs, and deforestation, wrecking the whole place. In the case of the Earwig, people seem to be blaming an introduced centipede, as well as the clearing of an area of forest.

Conservationists are worried about the Saint Helena Earwig, as well as other endemic arthropods. An airport, proposed in 2005, has not been built for fear of destroying the only habitat in which these gentle, albeit freaky-looking, giants may still survive.

¹Apparently named for the same saint as the volcano in Washington, though she doesn’t seem to have any direct connection to volcanoes.

Unsung- Helmet

It’s been a while since I’ve written about a bird. The problem with them is that they tend to be cute, pretty, or majestic. Except, of course, for the carrion-eaters, but I can’t just write about vultures and pretend I’ve covered the entire class. So, like I always do, I went trolling through ARKive’s bird section and found this beauty.

























The Helmeted Hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil), hails from Southeast Asia, where it spends its time eating fruit, like the majority of Hornbills. They also hunt bugs, using their pointy beak in much the same way that a woodpecker would. This is not a small bird, growing up to around a five feet from beak to tail. Wikipedia describes their call as “hoots followed by maniacal laughter.” Listen to any of the recordings on this site all the way to the end, and you’ll understand what they mean.

The casque—the helmet that gives them their name—is solid, as opposed to most hornbills, which means the skull is about ten percent of the total body weight of the bird¹. This comes in handy, as the males participate in the aerial equivalent of Bighorn Sheep clashes, fighting over females and territory by running head-on into each other while flying. I can’t find any videos of this, but I’m sure it would be amazing.

Their headgear has also gotten them into some trouble. As it is solid keratin, it can be used as a reddish ivory-like substance for carving (called, surprisingly enough, hornbill ivory). As one can expect, this does not bode well for the bird. Well, it was all right when only the natives were doing it², but once the civilized world got wind of this material, things were not looking good. CITES has now clamped down on this, making any trade of hornbill ivory completely illegal. The constant rainforest destruction that everyone has worried about for as long as I can remember isn’t helping the Helmeted Hornbills’ population either.


¹Compare our atypically large head, with about 0.7 percent of our body weight.
²This tidbit isn’t entirely related, but I can’t think of anywhere else to put it: apparently the natives believe that a giant Helmeted Hornbill guarded the river between the land of the living and the land of the dead.

Velvet Revolver

I have been somewhat disappointed with the limited ability for back-and-forth communication on Blogger, so, at the suggestion of some of my colleagues at the Writing Center¹, I’ve started a forum on another site, which can be found here. Please visit it, and let’s start some fun discussions. This month’s EUT comes once again from ARKive, though I’m sure I had seen it in the past, and skipped over it due to lack of information. I think I’ve got enough to talk about this time around, so here is the Pink Velvet Worm





















At a little more than an inch long, the Pink Velvet Worm (Opisthopatus roseus) looks something like a squishy centipede. However, it belongs to the phylum Onychophora, though most of the members look quite similar to the human eye. Velvet worms, as they are commonly called, are quite closely related to the Arthropods, though they lack the jointed legs that give the latter group its name. Instead, they have dumpy-looking caterpillar-esque legs with a pair of claws on the bottom of each.

All velvet worms are carnivorous, feeding on any invertebrate smaller than them. Much smaller prey are simply hunted down and eaten, but for larger prey, they have the coolest prey capture method: twin projectile glue guns concealed in their face, which they can fire up to ten times their body length. This glue is also useful for deterring predators, because no one wants that in their eyes.

Back to the Pink Velvet Worm itself. It has been found in a single forest in South Africa, and this forest has been logged heavily since the 1900s, both for the wood, as well as for plantations of non-native vegetation. These three factors—the small range, the logging, and the invasive species—have conspired to place the Pink Velvet Worm on the Critically Endangered list.

Conservation efforts are still in the works, of which listing is just one. They are putting together education efforts, which have worked in the past for other animals. Also, there are five Pink Velvet Worms in captivity, and hopefully we can learn more about what they do from these squishy little ambassadors to our race.

¹Yeah, I’ve been working at a Writing Center for about a year now. It’s made me a heck of a lot more confident with my writing. There’s no better way to learn something than by teaching someone else.

Velvety Underground

I’m sorry I missed February, but I started the in-depth work on my thesis, which makes it difficult to get into the blogging mindset. However, I have found another parasite that has managed to get listed¹. They live on the bodily fluids of a single species, rarely even seeing the light of day. After that description, I want you to imagine an orchid.
Now, look at this picture.














This is the Underground Orchid (Rhizanthella gardneri). While many orchids are parasitic—living as the botanical equivalent of a louse—they produce pretty flowers, so no one thinks twice about trying to save them. The Underground Orchid’s lifestyle is not much different, except for the fact that it looks like a root with a tumor. It lives in the root system of the Broom Honey Myrtle, a pine-like tree from Australia. This orchid produces no chlorophyll, because that would be pointless if the flower might break the surface. Instead, it gets its energy and nutrients from the Myrtle, but it’s not as simple as that. It never is.

I had originally thought that parasitic plants work by putting its roots into the roots of the host and effectively sucking the tree’s blood. Some do. The Underground Orchid, however, is myco-heterotrophic. This means that there is a fungus living in the Myrtle’s roots, sucking out its juices. The orchid then subsists on the juices of the fungus, making this some sort of strange nesting-doll version of parasitism². The end result is still the orchid parasitizing the tree, but with some (unwilling) help from a root fungus.

The Underground Orchid relies on the existence of the Broom Honey Myrtle, and tracts of these trees are being cleared to make way for agriculture. People are also attributing a decrease in health of the myrtle to a decrease in the numbers of the orchid. Preservation sites are being set up throughout the Underground Orchids’ range to help save them. Also, botanists are also working on finding a way to breed these root-flowers in captivity.

¹Just so you know, the Pygmy Hog-Sucking Louse managed to get a mention on QI.
²I’m sure there is some Australian burrowing insect that would suck the juices out of the orchid, making this even more recursive.

Come Sail Away

I'll be the first to admit that this month's EUT isn't all that ugly, but they can't all be eldritch abominations from the dawn of time. It does, however, look very dragon-like, though the color makes it look like it's straight out of a cartoon.














This is the Philippine Sailfin Lizard (Hydrosaurus pustulatus). It lives up to its name well, with a tail that would not look out of place on a Dimetrodon¹. As one can guess from the scientific name, the Sailfin is not out of place in the water, using the sail to power its swimming through the rivers of the Philippine Islands. In this case, swimming is mostly a defense mechanism to avoid terrestrial predators, though they have been known to eat crustaceans. This supplements their mostly herbivorous diet of fruits and leaves.

The fact that the males have a larger tail fin, along with their crayon-blue color, suggests another reason for the fin; the same reason Blue Iguanas are blue--it looks sexy. If a male has enough energy to produce a fin that large, and can still escape predators despite being the color of an interstate sign, that means he's got some good genes to pass down to the kids.

The Sailfin Lizard is no longer listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN list. This is not necessarily a good thing. It has been moved to Data Deficient, which means we don't really know how bad it is. Life on a tropical island means habitat loss is almost a given threat, but overshadowing that is the pet trade.

Ah, the pet trade, such a mixed curse. It destroys the wild population, without killing that many of them. If they can be bred in captivity, it means they might be able to be bred to be released. It also means that there can be a higher demand for them, leading to more being taken from the wild. It about killed the Red-Kneed Tarantula and Macaws², but it might save the Axolotl. It looks like it could go either way for the Sailfin Lizard. This guy (where I got the picture) is selling captive-bred Sailfins as pets, and these guys are breeding them the same way to be released into the wild.

¹Dimetrodon are actually more closely related to us than they are to this lizard.
²You do not want a Macaw as a pet. They might be pretty, but imagine having a five-year old child for seventy years. Whose screams can be easily heard for miles. Who can bite through an eighth of an inch of steel.

I'm Not Dead

Last month, Phantom Midge made a wonderful suggestion for an EUT that I hadn’t thought about. I had known about it for ages, and, like her, had been pronouncing it wrong for years¹. Somehow, without any foreknowledge, I’m managing to post this on an exceedingly appropriate day, as today is the 70th anniversary of its discovery as a living animal.










Order Coelacanth (pronounced See-la-canth) had been well documented since 1836, and fossils show that it lived for 345 million years between the Devonian period and the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs died out. This must have come as a big surprise for the West Indian Ocean Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) caught by fishermen off the coast of South Africa in 1938. These fishermen were friends with the curator of a small, local museum, and she would frequently check through their catch for anything interesting. Needless to say, something interesting was, in fact, found. Dinofish, who seem to be experts on this matter, have the whole long story on their site in far more detail than I can manage.

Coelacanths spend most of their time in deep (90-200m) caves, where they suction feed on any fish smaller than their head. Exceedingly sensitive eyes, along with an electro-sensory organ help them hunt. These are not small fish, getting up to about 6 feet in length and weighing about 175 pounds, thus surpassing the other “Living Fossil” fish I wrote about². Coelacanth tail fins are split into three fleshy sections, and all eight of their fins move in a mesmerizing, visualized wonderfully—as always—in an ARKive video.

I was surprised the Coelacanth is listed at all, much less as Critically Endangered. I thought there would be far too little information on its numbers and habits to be called anything other than Data Deficient. Analyses of populations in 1989 suggested that there might only be 500 individuals left. The low population, ironically enough, might be attributed to by-catch. This could explain why all the natives were so perplexed when the Europeans got excited by the catch of a fish they knew to be inedible³. Since then, conservation and outreach programs have given fishermen the tools to release the fish directly back to the murky depths from which they came.


¹In Freshman Zoology, I made a list of letter combinations that made an “s” sound. “Coe” always annoyed me, because I’ve never seen it outside of biology.
²Wikipedia has some nice articles about the term “Living Fossil.” Coelacanths are a “Lazarus taxon,” while the Australian Lungfish falls into the wider “Living Fossil” expression. I don’t think I’ll ever get a chance to write about an “Elvis taxon.”
³Never underestimate the local population when it comes to ecology.

Put the Lime in the Coconut

Oversized arthropods will always be welcome on this blog. Alright, most arthropods are condidered icky enough, but there is a special type of revulsion saved for really big creepy-crawlies. Well, I've already written about the largest freshwater invertebrate, so the largest terrestrial invertebrate can't be far behind¹. Also hailing from order Decapoda, this is the Coconut Crab (Birgus latro).









³





When I say "big," I'm sure that you're looking for some measurements to back that up. The Coconut Crab, also known as the Robber Crab or Palm Thief, has a body length of 1½ feet, with a legspan of 3 feet. It weighs up to 9 pounds but its strong claws can apparently lift up to about 60 pounds. Yes, this crab can lift a medium-sized dog.

Why is it so beefy? Well, anyone who has tried to open a coconut with simple tools can answer that. This is not an easy fruit to get into. The Crab will strip the outer husk near the germination pores (those things that make a coconut look like a bowling ball). It will then use one of its legs to punch a hole through the inner husk, and break the coconut apart. Once again, ARKive provides us with wonderful footage of this in action.

Mating occurs quickly and on land, and the female carries the eggs under her abdomen. She then drops those into the ocean, where they hatch into marine larvae that look something like shrimp. Coconut Crabs are closely related to the Terrestrial Hermit Crabs you'd see in pet stores, and the young will find snail shells to protect their soft rear-end. As they grow larger, their abdomen grows a thick carapace, so they lose the need to find snails. Good thing, too, considering their size. They also become fully terrestrial, though they can still drink seawater.

Coconut Crabs are found dispersed throughout islands in the South Pacific. Being a huge crab, no one would be surprised that they're hunted for food. Being an island species also means invasive species like rats, pigs, and ants are a problem for the juveniles. As the islands get more populated, habitat destruction is a problem as people encroach on the beaches. As population estimates vary from island to island depending on the number of people there, the IUCN lists the Coconut Crab as Data Deficient.

Conservation varies from island to island as well. Some places set hunting limits, while others have set up breeding programs. More research needs to be done to really find out how to help these huge creepy-crawlies out.


¹The fact that weight is pretty much meaningless in the ocean leads to some pretty big invertebrates down there. The Japanese Spider Crab²(Macrocheira kaempferi) with a 13 foot legspan wins as the largest arthropod, while the Colossal Squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) puts all other invertebrates to shame with a body length of 33 feet.
²You can't tell me that picture doesn't look like a video game boss.
³The image that many of you were expecting to see was probably this one, which I would have used if I could have found an original source.