It Sucks to be Me

Blood-sucking. Slimy. Limbless. A face like an orbital sander mated with a shark. A species in concern in about 10 states. Sounds like we’ve got a candidate ripe for the honor of Endangered Ugly Thing, and EUT's new mascot. Meet the Ohio lamprey (Ichthyomyzon bdellium).

Image from Ohio Department of Natural Resources

The Ohio lamprey is a 2 foot long, eel-looking fish, which is native to streams and rivers in the eastern Midwest (or western East) states. In their two years as adults they parasitize fish by sucking onto other fish with its gaping maw (also known as an oral disc; lamprey don’t have jaws), where it proceeds to suck the host’s blood¹.

Before the parasitic adult stage, baby lamprey (now isn’t that an adorable mental image?) spend four years buried in the riffles of small streams with their head poking out, filter feeding on algae and plankton. After this time, they develop eyes and an oral disc, make their way to a larger river, and find a suitable host. I’m not sure if how frequently they switch hosts, and it’s possible that the scientists don’t know either. After their first year, the lamprey disengage themselves from their hosts, and make their way back to the river that spawned them. Here, they will build a nest, often with the cooperation of other spawning lamprey, lay their eggs in the gravel, and die.

Quick quiz! What have all the aquatic vertebrates I’ve written about had a problem with?
Time’s up! If you guessed “Dams,” you’re correct! With the lamprey, dams stop them from being able to move to their feeding grounds as adults. The entrance of more silt in the streams, usually from runoff, gives the juveniles problems with filter feeding.

There are people working on fixing these problems, through land conservation and habitat monitoring. Determining good solutions for lamprey preservation requires that we learn a lot more about them. Sampling is hard due to their habits of being either buried in a stream or a fish for five-sixths of their life. Getting people interested in them is the first step toward saving them, so I’m trying to do my part.

¹Can anybody think of a parasitic vertebrate that isn’t a lamprey? I know of the male anglerfish, but that hardly counts.

Gonna Be a Blue Collar Lizard

I personally don’t think the Grand Cayman blue iguana (Cyclura lewisi) is ugly, but reptiles are usually given a bit of a short straw in terms of caring about their conservation. What they lack in ugliness (which is a bad thing?) they certainly make up for in being so endangered, with a long-term goal to get up to 1000 individuals, including those in captivity. They represent the last Endangered Ugly Thing that I’ve actually dealt with.

Image by me

Endemic to a small Caribbean island that’s roughly 20 miles across, the blue iguana makes its living as the largest native land vertebrate on the incredibly sharp coral rocks that make up Grand Cayman. They somewhat fit the elephant’s niche as the large (they get up to maybe 5 feet long) herbivore, with no predators as adults, though the young are preyed upon by snakes native to the area.

They live up to their name well, though they are the bluest when they are either very angry or trying to impress a female. They differ from green iguanas, which are an invasive species in the Caymans, in a variety of ways, such as the shields on the green iguanas’ cheeks, or the thicker tail on the blue iguana.

The reason why blue iguanas are so endangered is, like the tuatara, after a few million years of isolation with minimal predators, human interactive has brought rats and cats, which go after the eggs and young, and dogs, which will attack the adults. This brought their population down far enough to earn them the distinction of the world’s most endangered iguana.

They are not without their champion, however, as the Blue Iguana Recovery Program has come into existence to help save the iguanas from the edge of extinction. Captive breeding programs at the Queen Elizabeth II Botanical Park have managed to hatch more than 80 baby iguanas the last few years. Female iguanas, when they are ready to lay their eggs, will dig a burrow. However, to the dismay of the conservationists who wish to incubate the eggs in a controlled environment, the female’s burrows are labyrinthine, with many dead ends, where only one will contain any eggs. After the eggs hatch, the young are kept at the botanical park until they are two years old, big enough to deter any rats and cats. These are released into a reserve on the sparsely populated eastern end of the island.

The news that I am very happy to impart upon you, the reader, is that these released iguanas spent the last weeks of this past June mating. This July, the females were busy laying eggs around the reserve. The past few weeks, the first of the hatchlings have begun to emerge from their burrows. These hatchlings represent the first generation of wild hatched iguanas in the reserve, untagged and free.

I Wish They All Could be California Arthropods

This one falls into the category of ugly things that I came across while randomly looking through The List. I'm going to keep on the lookout for any others, but I'm running low on EUTs that I've heard of. If anyone has any suggestions, start sending 'em in.

Image by Aviva Rossi

Looking somewhat like a cross between a horseshoe crab and a shield bug, the vernal pool tadpole shrimp (Lepidurus packardi) gets the distinction of being the first invertebrate on Endangered Ugly Things. It will not be the last, as the diversity of invertebrates is staggering, and, with the exception of butterflies, they're pretty much all considered ugly.

Distantly related to triops and sea monkeys (actually brine shrimp), which you can buy at any decent science shop, the tadpole shrimp share their ability to breathe through their 35 or so phyllopoda (leaf-feet) which also act as paddles. They grow up to a whopping 2 inches in length, eat organic matter smaller than them, and get eaten by everything that normally eats benthic macroinvertebrates: other invertebrates, amphibians, fish, and some birds.

The vernal pool tadpole shrimp hangs its small, strangely shaped hat in ephemeral pools in the San Fransisco bay area that dry out every summer. It survives these dry spells by laying drought-resistant eggs, which will hatch once the pools fill up again.

There are no big surprises with why these are endangered. Habitat destruction is always a problem when your habitat is a big wet spot, and someone says, "Hey, this looks like the perfect place for a shopping mall." Suddenly, your big wet spot is under a ton and a half of concrete. Agricultural and urban runoff, overgrazing, and invasive plants are also having an effect on the tadpole shrimp. Hope exists for them in the form of programs to save wetlands, which are being put into effect all over the United States.

Third Eye Blind(ish)

The Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is a reptile that is also grouped into the "living fossil" category (see footnote on the lungfish). They belong to order Rhynchocephalia, which has existed worldwide about 220 million years ago, and the tuataras themselves look about the same as they did 140 million years ago. They aren't exactly worldwide anymore, as they are confined to New Zealand, and being an island species is never good news in terms of population.

Image from Wellington Zoo

While superficially resembling lizards, there are various characteristics separating the two groups, such as lack of external ears, another set of teeth, and a developed pineal eye¹. This "third eye" may help in temperature regulation, circadian regulation, Vitamin D absorption, or something completely different.

Tuataras are nocturnal and able to function at much lower temperatures than most reptiles. They have long lifespans, taking 20 years to reach maturity and living up to 100 years. Like many predators, they subscribe to the idea, "Is it animal matter, smaller than my head, and easy to catch? Then it's food." Hunting by ambush, they will eat insects, lizards, eggs, and seabird chicks.

The endangerment of the tuatara starts out fairly textbook. After millions of years isolated on islands, humans interfere and begin habitat destruction, removing them from the New Zealand mainland. Europeans bring rats, which eat the eggs and the young. However, there is a newer problem facing the tuatara. Like many reptiles, incubation temperature determines the sex of the offspring. Too warm (above 71.6 degrees Fahrenheit for the tuatara) and the nest is all males, too cold (under 69.8 degrees) and the nest is all females. What happens when global warming comes into play? One female can only parent one litter at a time (and four years apart), so this hurts the population much more than if fewer males were being hatched.

There is hope for our spiny little friends. Breeding and release programs are working on bringing the tuatara back to the New Zealand mainland, with the help of rat-proof fencing. Various studies are being conducted to determine the extent of global warming's effect.

¹Though not near as developed as this guy's, who I came across while searching for images.

Like a Salamander Outta Hell

There has to be a story behind the eastern hellbender's name. It sounds like Dante on a drug trip, a motorcycle gang, or a punk metal band¹ (the Ozark Hellbenders would perform cover songs heavily involving banjos). If anyone has the actual etymology behind the name, I'd be glad to hear it.

Image from Ohio Department of Natural Resources

Despite having an ugly sounding name, the eastern hellbender, Cryptobranchus alleganiensis, is, in fact, not pretty. As an adult, they can achieve lengths of 11 to 20 inches. Folds of skin hang from their sides, through which they breathe. The hellbenders have lungs, but those are used only for buoyancy. Their heads are flat, with tiny, beady eyes. Their habitat exists under rocks and debris in clear, fast-moving streams.

These giant salamanders hunt crayfish, small fish, and large insects, searching mainly using lateral lines and then sucking in prey, a method not shared by any other adult salamander. Also seperating them from other salamanders is the fact that the hellbender practices external fertilization, where the female will drop the eggs and then allow the male to fertilize them. After this, the male will guard the eggs for two to three months until they hatch.

Hellbenders are endangered in Ohio, Maryland, Illinois, and Indiana, threatened in Alabama, and a species of concern in New York. Pollution is a major problem facing eastern hellbenders, and for that matter, many amphibians. This is due to their ability to breathe through their skin. Any chemical with a higher concentration in the water than their body is drawn in, be it oxygen, nitrogen, or agricultural runoff. Damming rivers cause silt to clog the hellbender's nesting site (remember the lungfish?). The bad rap that the hellbender gets also doesn't help, as there are many legends of the salamanders sliming fishers' nets or poisoning river water. Photos of herpetologists, gloveless, holding it, might help dispel these myths. So if you happen to be creeking in the eastern Midwest (or western East), and see a gigantic salamander, consider yourself lucky to be in the presence of the largest salamander around.

¹They are a band! That's what I get for looking too far on the internet for hellbender research. Though, they look more indie than punk metal.

Hey, Aqualung

I have seen a few blogs that mention the plight this animal is in, but with less life history than I'll provide you with.

Yeah, it's kinda blurry. Aquaria are not good places for snapshots.

The Queensland (or Australian) lungfish, Neoceratodus forsteri, is a fish with, as its name suggests, a lung (living in Queensland, Australia is secondary). This is to help it manage when levels of dissolved oxygen in the water are low, which is likely to happen in the slow-moving pools that it inhabits. It is completely aquatic, in contrast to African or South American lungfish (with two lungs) that spend entire dry periods burrowed in a mucous cocoon with an airhole to the surface. However, N. forsteri can spend hours out of water if it's kept moist, according to this study.

Appropriately described as "a living fossil," lungfish certainly look the part. They can grow up to three or four feet in length, and have large, platelike scales and fins that look ready to attempt to flop onto land. In Australia, lungfish fossils dating back 100 million years (when our mammal ancestors were running from Compsognathus) have been found, and there are minimal differences. The Queensland lungfish, even moreso than the other lobe-finned fish, helps give an idea of how the water-land transition happened in vertebrates about 370 million years ago¹.

Alright, so it's not endangered, it's threatened. They are very long lived, which, in population terms, means slow to reproduce. The majority of problems facing the lungfish are actually facing the eggs.Invasive tilapia prey on the young and eggs. Also,dams on the rivers in which they live flood out the vegetation in which they breed. I've seen links to this petition, but I'm trying to be more of an educator than activist (and I linked to it anyway).

There doesn't seem to be any official Queensland lungfish breeding programs in existence. There are, however these guys, from whom you can buy a baby lungfish for just $850! Don't forget to buy the 6 foot tank. They are CITES approved, whose job is to check up on the trade of threatened and endangered species. Breeding for pets is not the way to save animals in the wild, so programs on releasing lungfish and saving habitat are the way to go. Kids! Just be sure to ask your parents nicely for a lungfish. And say please and thank you.

¹As a somewhat random aside, I want to point out that flies are never described "living fossils," even though they were in their modern form a good 100 million years before the lungfish.

Death in the Fast Lane

I'd like to begin with a profile of the species that started it all, at least for me: Thamnophis radix radix, the eastern plains garter snake.

Now, if anyone is reading this in any state from Indiana to Montana to Kansas, inclusive, and has a knowledge of local snakes, you're probably thinking "Plains garter? Endangered? We've got tons of 'em!" Yes. Yes you do. But if you'll look at the range posted on ODNR's website about them, you'll see a tiny dot in northwestern central Ohio. That is Killdeer Plains Wildlife Area, where I spent much of my high school career.

Visually, the plains garter is nothing too impressive. It gets to be at most 2 feet long, which you can compare to the harmless black rat snake at 6 feet. In terms of coloration, I was hard pressed to tell it from the common eastern garter snake. The difference consists of a row of dots under the lateral stripes on the plains garter. It is even behaviorally unobtrusive, as it manages to be less likely to bite than the common garter snake, which I have picked up dozens of times without getting bitten. Its preferred habitat is, of course, plains and praries, but more specifically, near the ponds and drainage areas to be found in such habitat. Food sources for the plains garter include large insects and small rodents (agricultural pests, if anyone's wondering why we should save these snakes), along with amphibians and earthworms.

A threat facing many endangered species, habitat loss, is what has endangered the plains garter snake in Ohio. We're already at the eastern edge of its range, and the conversion of more and more prairies into developed land, agricultural fields, or even forests, has led to fewer numbers of plains garters.

Another issue plaguing these snakes is traffic, which is how I became came to know of the plight of this species. As a freshman in high school, I wanted a science fair project where I could do research on wildlife. I managed to get in touch with the contract herpetologist with ODNR, and he suggested that I perform a road mortality survey at Killdeer Plains Wildlife Area. Consequently, for the next four years, my fall season was spent by peeling dead snakes off the road. A few unfortunate specimens were the plains garter. This is why many of the pictures I have of them look like this:

Image by me

Though there were a few less... "vitally challenged" specimens:

Image also by me

There is hope. ODNR has enlisted the Columbus and Cleveland Zoos to breed captured plains garters to release their offspring in the wild. This colony has been breeding since 1999, with releases every fall since.

A short note on biodiversity:
I have mentioned that plains garter snakes look a great deal like common garter snakes. They also both live in similar areas. They eat about the same thing (earthworms, small rodents, frogs), but a study in the late '70's showed that there were plenty of those to go around, so there's no competition for food. "Hey," says the contrarian, "why do we need two of these, if they fill the same niche? Why do we need to save the one, if there's another just like it?" Well, they aren't exactly alike. There are habitat differences (the common garter snake is a habitat generalist), along with many genetic differences that don't show up in ecological research. What happens when a disease comes by and takes out a large number of common garter snakes, but the plains garter is immune? You'll be glad it's there, helping keep the rodent and insect population in check.