Zoology to the Max

New paper on memory has important implications for cryptozoology

2011-08-05T09:15:00.000-07:00

Finally, a blog update. Only a quick one, but it’s a start nevertheless. A really important psychology paper was recently published by Simons & Chabris (2011) in the open-access journal PLoS ONE. It shows, basically, that the public’s perception of memory is pretty much at odds with what is actually known about memory. Ed Young at Not Exactly Rocket Science has, as usual, written a very good review of the paper, which you can read here:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/08/05/five-myths-about-memory-and-why-they-matter-in-court/

But this paper has a huge number of applications in cryptozoology. Irrespective of what some people say, it really doesn’t matter how certain eyewitnesses are about the accuracy of their statement, the fact of the matter is that the mind plays tricks on you (not literally). Eyewitness evidence can basically be ignored, unless there is a large enough pool of data with which to analyze it scientifically, and to tease out the most commonly reported characteristics which are thus the most likely to be on the animal itself. The authors are not cryptozoologists, and have not written a paper designed to help cryptozoologists, but the findings of said paper should be of real interest to everyone. And yes, by everyone I do mean the 10 people who are actually going to read this blog entry. So, in order to see this paper get more hits from Googlers in the future, I will now pepper this with key words:

Psychology; Cryptozoology; Big Cats; Memory; Evolution; Cryptozoology; Simons & Chabris; Psychology; Loch Ness Monster; Eyewitness; Cryptozoology; Montauk Monster; Memory; Gable Film; Cryptozoology; Psychology.

That’ll do. So, to reiterate, the paper is open access, which means that everyone with an internet connection can download it and read it. The more hysterical people within the cryptozoological community who claim that somehow mainstream science is trying to exclude outsiders from sharing in the latest discoveries shouls take note. The cryptozoological community (and indeed the police) and anyone else reliant on eyewitness testimony? should consider these findings closely.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022757

A novel sea monster report. Or not...

2011-03-23T18:18:00.000-07:00

This newspaper report was originally published on Saturday the 16th of October, 1725, in Farley's Bristol News. I have copied the report below:

"Bristol, the 16th. Last Wednesday morning, when the Fishermen went to take up their Nets at Fosset-Point, they found entangled in them, and dead, a Fish call'd a SEILE, or Sea Dog, being 4 Foot 4 Inches long, very fat, as big in Body as a Man; the Head much like a Calfe's without Ears, the snout like a Lion's, but the under Jaw and set of Teeth like a young Mastiff; his fore Legs short, but thick and strong as Lion's, having 5 Tallons on each Foot, shap'd like a Christian's Hand, it's hinder Legs are Finny, and the Feet like a Goose, with 4 strong Tallons in each, and near a Foot wide; the Tail like a Deer's Skut, and Fundament like a Dog-Bitch, being full of Young; with a Navel like a Christian's, and a Skin as fine as Velvet, full of mottled spots; above a Hundred Weight; the like hath hardly ever been taken in or near our channels. It was brought up to Town the same Morning, and ever since expos'd to publick view."

At this point, with a normal "sea-monster" report, you, dear reader, would be allowed to make up your own mind on what the animal was. This time, I am not giving you that luxury: the animal is blatantly a common/harbour seal Phoca vitulina.

Yes, I know, the report calls the animal a Seile, but still, that description is pretty blatant. Apart from the references to "thick and strong" forelegs, the calf head, the lack of reference to a "Finny", taloned forearm and the missing digits on the hind limbs, the description is clear.

But the report is still really interesting, even if no sea-monsters are described within. What, for instance, is up with the repeated references to Christians? Can you tell a Christian apart from other people by their hands or navels?

But really, if you try to imagine the animal as the article describes you do come up with something that does look like a seal, but a very strange one with well developed, strong human-like forearms.

It does go to show: its probably best not to look too deeply into old newspaper reports of sea-monsters. People do have a colossal tendency to "monsterify" even fairly mundane discoveries.

And as to how I found this article? Its long and complicated, but once again I have to thank the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery...

Review: Moa Sightings by Bruce Spittle.

2011-02-05T16:42:00.000-08:00

Hardcover: 448 pages
Publisher: Paua Press Limited; 1st edition (January 1, 2010)
Language: English
Vol1

ISBN-10: 0473153564
ISBN-13: 978-0473153564

Vol2

ISBN-10: 0473153572
ISBN-13: 978-0473153571

Vol3

ISBN-10: 0473153580
ISBN-13: 978-0473153588

http://www.pauapress.com/

Once in a while, I get my hands on a book which makes me think “why on earth don’t more people write like this”? Most cryptozoological books are, basically, rubbish. Yes, there are a number of great books out there, but an awful lot just rehash previously covered stories, or dive into the paranormal and sensationalism to increase sales. This book is about as far removed as one can get from these works of tripe.

Split across three volumes, “Moa Sightings” is a real behemoth which, due to its high price tag, will not sell many copies. But anyone with a great interest in moas or New Zealand’s cryptozoology should sell a portion of the family silver and buy the whole set. In five words, the three books are incredible.

Hardback with full colour printing throughout, the books are very high quality indeed. The front cover, I feel, looks a little basic, but that really does not matter. Upon opening the book, you are greeted to a wonderful range of maps (there are probably hundreds of maps between the three volumes), portraits and biographies of most of the witnesses, drawings of skeletons and huge numbers of photographs of the areas in which the sightings occurred. This is a book which draws you into New Zealand. The maps and photographs help you picture the areas vividly in your mind; whilst the long and detailed discussions of each sighting help you assess the circumstances in which the sighting event occurred.

The analysis of the Freaney photograph for instance is 283 pages long. That is enough for a book alone on the photograph. Though the analysis is generally very thorough, and the photographs clear, I would have liked to have seen more photo measurement analysis, perhaps comparing the measurements and angles to a deer. This is a slight weak link in the book, and because of this it does not change my opinion that the photograph shows a young red deer, but in reality, this is pretty much the only negative point (and it did really make me consider my initial opinion). If Mr. Spittle published his analysis of the Freaney photograph as a separate, much smaller and more affordable book, I think he would do the world of cryptozoology a huge favour.

This book then is exactly how cryptozoology should be done. Has is changed my opinion on the Freaney photograph? No. Has it changed my opinion that there are no large (4ft tall+) species of moa still alive? No, I remain sure that they are extinct. Has it changed my opinion that there are no small species of moa still alive? Sort of I suppose; I think there is a high chance they lived until the 1800’s, but I don’t think there are any left alive.

To finish this review then, I am going to quote Mr. Spittle on why he formed Paua Press Limited in 2007: “Just as a paua [Haliotis, a species of New Zealand abalone] appears dull and nondescript on the outside but is of compelling interest when the surface dross is taken away, I am hopeful that the books my press publishes will have, at their centre, something of substance for the reader.” He is absolutely correct, this is an incredible book, “On The Track...” for moa enthusiasts. For God’s sake ask for it as a birthday present...

MB.

TAN 10 appeal

2011-01-04T05:42:00.000-08:00

Due to the ongoing success of The Amateur Naturalist magazine, I have decided to make our tenth issue a special covering Europe. European animals, European conservation, and European news. European species in the exotic pet trade are sometimes seen as being boring, presumably due to the assumption that animals from distant lands must be more interesting than common or familiar animals here in Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth...

If you feel you would like to contribute to the next issue, please email me (max@cfz.org.uk) with your idea. The deadline for submissions is somewhere is the start of February.

Stoat funeral processions

2010-09-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

It is very rare that I slip into the mind of a Fortean and actually write about something that cannot be examined scientifically, so please forgive me...

The reason for my slip is one Maurice Burton. A well known zoologist during his life, he wrote many books and articles dealing with natural history, but also looked at cryptozoology. I first came across him in Peter Costello’s In Search of Lake Monsters where he (Costello) repeatedly criticised Burton for hypothesising that the Loch Ness Monster, and many other such creatures, were rising and falling logs, as well as misidentifications. I am currently reading Just Like an Animal by Burton, which gives a wide range of examples showing that many traits that ignorant people assume are only possessed by Homo sapiens, as well as some “higher” apes, are found in a wide range of other animals. Indeed, the most polite animals on earth don’t actually have backbones...

Anyway, at one point he records some instances of animal funeral processions; the most interesting of which (well, there are only two examples given) regards a procession of stoats. He notes that “about a hundred stoats in twos [were] following four carrying the dead body of another stoat.” Apparently this was published in the Irish Times and it “carried the comment that the legend of such ‘funerals’ is persistent throughout Eire.” This was first published by him in More Animal Legends, so if anyone has that book I would be most grateful if you got in touch with me...

The only thing on the internet I can find that mentions other stoat funerals than this is a requiem entitled The Beauty and the Wonder of the Erne written by Charlie Ward who is a “journalist, broadcaster, and ardent angler.” This appears to have been published online in November 2009, but it provides no information on when it was actually written, who is/was Charlie Ward and when he saw the stoat funeral march. Anyway, he notes:

“I watched a stoat's funeral. It was up at the Old Mill above Laputa, just before dark. Two-by-two they marched along the top of a wide, low wall, not twenty feet from me. Then came four with the corpse upside down between them, a leg in each sharp-toothed mouth.

“Ten more, two-by-two, followed, all making a low, whimpering, keening sound. The cortege, numbering about thirty or forty, disappeared into the culvert covering the old millrace, and went out of my life forever. Do stoats have communal cemeteries as elephants are reputed to have?”

This does sound like a similar story to Burton’s, but without his original book I cannot check the source. Regardless of whether this is a different reference or not, it does nothing to help support the existence of stoat funerals and burial processions. One hundred stoats marching in line is totally out of character for a stoat; most of the time they are fairly shy animals, though I, and many others, have seen them being very bold, especially if they are used to people. The closest I have got to a wild stoat was about 2” through a pane of glass before it got bored of me and decided to go down its hole under the chalet. I should note at this point that the stoat must have been incredibly tolerant of people because it had chosen to live in the middle of Centre Parks in Nottingham...

Stoats are also highly territorial and are usually seen singly. The only times that more than one may be seen at a time is when they are mating, fighting, or the parents with their young. To my knowledge, one hundred stoats together have never been reported other than the two references above, but if anyone knows of any others I would be most interested in reading them.

So, based on some simple knowledge of stoat behaviour, we can discount the existence of stoat funerals, and I would suggest that these are purely folkloric ideas with no basis in reality. The written sightings of such things are highly likely to be hoaxes, however, I would be quite happy to take back my opinion if it turns out there is a good body of evidence to support such events. A photo of such a funeral procession, consisting of around one hundred stoats wearing waistcoats and top hats, would do very nicely.

On the hunt for Dinsdale’s signature...

2010-09-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

Tim Dinsdale should need no introduction to readers of this blog, so I won’t give him one. A couple of days ago I found a copy of “Project Water Horse” for £1 from a second hand book dealers, which is very little for the book which would normally, according to Amazon, retail at over £5 for the book and postage. This, however, was not the reason for me buying the book with a poker face and leaving the shop pretty rapidly lest the seller realise their mistake. There, on the third page in the book was scrawled a signature which looked like it spelt “Tim Dinsdale” which is underlined.

Now, I never met Dinsdale (seeing as he died before I was born means this is not surprising), and searching for his signature online brings up nothing. So, dear readers, does anyone own something signed by Dinsdale? If you do own anything, I would be really grateful if you could email me a photograph of the signature to: max@cfz.org.uk

Thanks to anyone who can help.

Oh, and the classic depiction of a plesiosaur with a lamb in its mouth is only being used to spice up what is otherwise a slightly dull blog post...

ANGUILLIFORM CONFUSION

2010-08-18T06:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.myshqipvideo.com/0_video_Reefwalk_4511708_A%20Striped%20Moray%20Eel%20In%20TTideppols,%20Hawaii%202.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOYVxJyhmzI&feature=player_embedded
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4511652/striped_eel_in_tidepools/

The above are all videos (including the one posted up on the CFZ Bloggo the other day) which show an elongated aquatic animal similar to either an eel or a sea snake living in a tidal pool in Hawaii. The video posted in the original bloggobit intimated that this was Laticauda colubrina, a seasnake unknown from Hawaii (top right). Initially I thought the animal was a zebra moray eel (Gymnomuraena zebra), which is pictured top left, but further research made things much more interesting, for about five minutes.

First stop, a list of fish species for Hawaii. There are seventeen listed Muraenidae species in Hawaii, from giants to dwarfs. The video shows an animal between 40-100cm in length; easily within the size range of the target species, the zebra moray. However, on this particular list, the zebra was not listed as being present in Hawaii. The implication for cryptozoology was obvious. What was it doing there? Was it a released ex-captive individual? Was it totally unrecorded? Was it a new species to science that just looked similar to a zebra?

These questions were all answered rapidly when it turned out that there was a slight typo thing, and the zebra was listed outside of the other Muraenidae from Hawaii. Mystery solved, the animal in the videos is a zebra moray eel.

A tale of a giant eel

2010-08-12T03:27:00.000-07:00

I was up in Cumbria last weekend, just passing through from Scotland. I spent my first few years in Cumbria and have subsequently always thought of this as my home, not the South-West. Anyway...

A friend took me up to see the ospreys at Bassenthwaite lake (the 2 chicks have recently fledged) and we were rewarded with a lovely sighting of the male eating a fish (likely a perch). I got talking to one of the volunteers about their diets, and she mentioned that the other week a heron (well known for being very greedy at times) decided to take on a giant eel. Naturally, I asked how big this eel would have been. She said it was very thick for an eel, and was almost bent double to the ground when the heron picked it up.

Now, eels usually get to around a meter in length, but can in a number of documented cases grow up to 1.5 meters, and weights over 11 pounds. So, how large do herons get? Well, a height of around a meter is about right, and so this would make this eel anything from 120cm to 180cm. By any accounts, that’s a very big eel, and a potential British record.

Then again, I’m not so sure if the British anglers associations would be happy about giving the fisherman’s name as “A. Heron”...

Bullhead bonanza (or not, as it turns out)

2010-07-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

My biology class at school was always a little dull. We never really went on field trips, unless it was for a vitally important piece of coursework of course, but generally found ourselves stuck inside a large beige laboratory. So imagine my surprise when my younger sister bursts in exclaiming that her class had been out stream dipping on a stream I had never heard of, and that most importantly, they had caught some bullheads, miller’s thumbs, Cottus gobio, whatever you want to call them. This is our only freshwater sculpin, (a cottid as was pointed out earlier today by an anonymous reader) and it was not a species I had seen before. I set off the next day armed with a net, buckets and a friend to help catch them.

It took us a few minutes to find where they were hiding, and after a while we had our first bullhead. Admittedly, it was only about 10mm long, but still, it was a bullhead. More searching revealed a couple of juveniles, around 40mm long. But then we stumbled along a dead individual. And another. And then another. This was strange. Bullheads are long lived for small fish, and the chances of seeing these dead specimens all dying from old age was disproven due to the huge variation in size, from babies right up to huge 120mm adult males. By the end of the day, we had caught 6 bullheads of a range of sizes and seen others alive (plus a few young 3-spined sticklebacks and an adult female), but seen more dead ones in a state of decay. We found no dead sticklebacks, which is odd, and anyone thinking that my sisters class from the other day were to blame, they can’t have been because we went quite far upstream to catch ours whereas they went downstream.

We also found a putrid dead badger upstream with a huge pile of maggots on top. I chose not to tell my sister this...

I went down there again today briefly just to get some photos, and saw four dead specimens, and 3 live, one of which was certainly the large adult we caught last time. Does anyone have any ideas what could have caused this?

What A "Bee" That Was

2010-07-06T15:36:00.000-07:00

A lot has been said about the decline of our bumblebees in the last few years, but fortunately my garden at home still has large numbers of bees visiting which come and go as the flowers on different plants open and mature. Anyway, earlier today I decided to finally begin the long process of teaching myself to identify the bees in the garden. I, like many people, will know that there are a large range of both social and solitary bees which make their way into British gardens each year, and many of them, being constantly on the move in a manner somewhat akin to a clockwork toy, are tricky to narrow down to species level without a close up photograph.

There are 6 main species of British bumblebee (this name specifically refers to members of the genus Bombus) and 95% of sightings of furry bees will be these. Other furry bees include mason (Osmia), miners (Andrena) and hairy footed flower bees (Anthophora), as well as less common Bombus. Many others still look more like honey bees, or, like the white faced bee, something totally different.

(Anthophora)

Bombus terrestris is the most common species, the typical big bee with a pale tip to the abdomen and two bold yellow bands, one at the top of the abdomen, the other on the thorax. Queens are large, prompting the, frankly stunning, headline “bees as big as mice!” to be plastered everywhere. On a bizarre side note, this was one of my favourite random phrases to throw around in conversation last spring. And on another side note, typing said phrase into google has the CFZ news blog as its third link. I suppose we must be doing something right!

If you live up north, you are more likely to have B. lucorum as your main large bumble bee, though it is common in the south as well. It is similar to B. terrestris, but the yellow bands are paler and the tip of the abdomen is a crisp white. Like B. terrestris, they have short tongues, and sometimes cheat flowers out of nectar by biting through the side of long flowers to steal their food directly. They are declining slightly in abundance, but are faring better than many species.

Bombus horturum is another common bumblebee. Smaller than the above species, and with a longer tongue, B. horturum lives in small colonies in many different habitats, but in summer is often the most common species found in woodlands. Getting a close photograph of its head shows that the workers of this species have a longer head than relatives, but observation should show the extra yellow band on the thorax and the slimmer build over both B. lucorum and B. terrestris.

Ginger fuzzy bees can belong to a number of species, but the most common is Bombus pascuorum. Small and with a medium length tongue, B. pascuorum can be distinguished simply from similar solitary bees by its round compound eyes, which are much taller and slimmer in Anthophora. There are reports of this species being aggressive if disturbed when nesting or feeding, but casual observation should not cause it to attack.

(Anthophora)

By far the most easily recognised bee is Bombus lapidaries. It’s simple colour scheme, with a jet black body and red abdomen tip, renders it easy to identity in the field. Their short tongues mean that they need a landing platform on the flowers they land on, so they have a slim build to reduce weight and to make it easier for them to successfully land on a flower. They are doing well for themselves at the moment, spreading northwards at a strong pace. They are now common in Aberdeen, whereas 50 years ago they were extremely rare.

The final of the Big 6, as they are so called, is Bombus pratorum. The smallest of the 6, and with a short tongue, they are generally found on daisy-like plants with big easy landing pads and very short flowers. Though one of the most variable bee species, the abdomen tip is almost always brown, orange or pink, or any shade in-between. The colour tip of B. lapidaries is much more pronounced, but both the colour of the tip and diminutive size differentiates B. pratorum from the other species. A yellow bar on the thorax is generally present, but its extent (from a full thick band, to a couple of hairs) varies. The yellow bar on the abdomen may be full, broken, or non-existent. The photographs show an individual which lacks this yellow bar.

So there you have it, a quick guide to the 6 most commonly found bumblebee species in Britain. I would recommend looking at some photos of each species on the internet to get a better feel for what they look like. But, next time you are out in the garden, don’t just take the bumblebees for granted, do them the honour of studying them closely to see what they really are!

I must apologise quickly for both the quality of the photographs and the identifications, the lens I was using was rubbish, but any mistakes in the identification of the bees are totally my fault!

MAX ON THE TRACK OF THE CHEPEKWE

2009-12-26T02:14:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

I am looking for some help in tracking down an online version of a very famous cryptozoological photograph, namely that which was taken in the early 1930’s (some references give the date as 1932) by J. C. Johanson of the Central African cryptid the Chepekwe. Various synonyms are in use, and it may also be known as the Chipekwe, Mbilintu and Mfuku. Supposedly, the cryptid is a huge reptile, reported from various countries in Central Africa. It has a single horn/tusk upon its head, a large body and dark, smooth skin.

However, although the photograph I am looking for is a hoax, and the animal itself seems to be too volatile in its descriptions to be conceivable (in my eyes at least), I am still very interested in seeing the hoaxed photo. I expect a lot of cryptozoological commentators have never seen the photograph in question, so it would be nice to bring it to an area of larger attention via the CFZ blog. Everything I search for brings up the three things the internet is most fond of finding; namely miscellaneous rubbish, Scarlett Johansson or pornography.

Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this.

Max

Giant Snakes - for Goodness Sakes

2009-11-13T01:30:00.000-08:00

Initially, I must say I am very grateful to Matt Pickering for bringing this to my attention. He forwarded me a post about this photo, supposedly from China which shows a giant 55ft long “boa”. Seeing as no-one has really taken a constructive look at this, I thought I would start something.

The text below is from Ananova.com, and most of it is reproduced below:

“It was originally posted in a thread on the website of the People's Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper in China. The thread claimed the snake was one of two enormous boas found by workers clearing forest for a new road outside Guping city, Jiangxi province. They apparently woke up the sleeping snakes during attempts to bulldoze a huge mound of earth. "On the third dig, the operator found there was blood amongst the soil, and with a further dig, a dying snake appeared," said the post. "At the same time, another gold coloured giant boa appeared with its mouth wide open. The driver was paralysed with fear, while the other workers ran for their lives. "By the time the workers came back, the wounded boa had died, while the other snake had disappeared. The bulldozer operator was so sick that he couldn't even stand up." The post claimed that the digger driver was so traumatised that he suffered a heart attack on his way to hospital and later died. The dead snake was 55ft (16.7m) long, weighed 300kg and was estimated to be 140 years old, according to the post. However, local government officials in Guiping say the story and photograph are almost certainly a hoax as giant boas are not native to the area.”

Make of the story what you will, but for this I will just stick to working out what the snake species is, and how large it is. First, just to get our bearings, Jiangxi is in the South East of China. This area does have some huge snakes, but not large boas. No Chinese boa would ever get to 55ft. A python would have to be the culprit. Burmese pythons (Python molurus bivittatus) are the largest species that definitely occurs in the region, but Jiangxi lies close to the ranges of the Indian python (Python molurus molurus) and the giant reticulated python (Python reticulatus). All these species get to 16ft, but the Burmese and reticulated can get larger; up to 30ft (the reticulated is usually longer and currently holds the title of the world’s largest scientifically verified snake). Giant snakes over the 30ft mark have been reported from South East Asia, the naga could well be a giant species of python, so clearly a 55ft long snake would be of major cryptozoological interest.

But does the snake species pictured match any of the three largest snakes from the rough area? Well, looking at the back of the python, it has large dark blotches along its length that get larger toward the middle of the snake. The blotches are a brown-grey colour in the centre, with black margins then going to pale. There are smaller dark markings in this pale area which seem to follow a line between the large blotches and the pale underside. The underside is paler and seems to have some small spots of dark pigment on, a peppery effect if you will. Red blood can be seen coming from the snake’s mouth. The snake is fairly slim, but it has a thickened “saddle”, suggesting it is in the process of digesting a meal.

Burmese pythons have very similar blotches on their back that would certainly fit in with the blotches in the photo. They also have paler undersides, but they can be very variable in colour. Usually the markings in-between the blotches are darker than the snake in the photo, but their variability over such a large distribution range, including the region where the photo is supposed to have been taken, makes them a strong contender for the individual photographed.

Indian pythons have very similar markings to the Burmese, but tend to be darker overall with less mottling. Because the snake in the photo is quite light in colour, it is more likely to be a Burmese than an Indian, plus the Indian’s range is more southerly than Jiangxi. This pretty much rules the Indian python out as a candidate.

Reticulated pythons have very similar blotch markings to the Burmese, but usually have a distinct yellow-green background colour in contrast to the Burmese’s usual pale brown background. These snakes are also variable in colour, but not to the extent that Burmese pythons are. Reticulated pythons also occur further south than Jiangxi province, making their presence there unlikely. Of the two species, I would say the Burmese python is more likely to be the species in the picture.

But how big is the snake in question? The first thing to note is that the photo has been taken with a wide angle lens. The slightly oddly shaped foliage to the left and right of the image results from the bent effect that wide angle lenses achieve to get more image in the frame. These types of lenses also shorten the apparent distance between the foreground and back ground, making objects in the foreground appear larger, and those in the background appear smaller. Making measurements on a zoomed in version of the photo, the snake is roughly 43cm long, adding 5 cm for the rest of the tail which is not in the photo. Using 55 feet as a reference, the people in the background are therefore 4.8cm tall, or just over 6.1 feet tall (conversion factor of 1.279). This is an estimate based entirely on the image itself with no allowances.

But, although this measurement puts the men at the back of the photo into a size range appropriate for a human, the digger poses a problem. It is not a large model, being very flat to the ground. Now look at the scoop. Any digger of the size apparent in the photo would topple over as the scoop reaches out. Using the above calculation, the scoop appears to be 8.18 feet wide, a monstrous scoop! With the same calculation, the digger is 8.69 feet wide, in other words, way too small to support a scoop nearly as wide as itself! Looking at the thickness of the arm compared to the thickness of the digger, the scoop must be smaller than 8 feet. Being vaguely familiar with diggers, and having a similar size digger at my old employers, the scoop is probably in the 3 foot area, perhaps a little larger. For the purposes of simplicity, and to be generous, let’s call the scoop 3.5 feet wide.

Now using this as a length indicator, because the scoop and snake are the same distance away from the camera, the measurement will not be affected by the lens. 26.5cm is the length taken for the snake, and 5cm for the scoop. The snake is 5.3 times the length of the scoop, so roughly a 18.55ft long snake. Or, a perfectly average sized adult individual for either a reticulated or Burmese python. Even if the scoop was 4 feet wide, the snake would be 21 feet long. To get the reported 55ft, the scoop would need to be over 10 feet wide! For a new world record holding snake at 34 feet, the scoop would need to be 6.4 feet wide, a very big scoop and one totally impossible for the size of the vehicle. This is a hoax; it merely shows an average to moderately large individual of a well known species.

If I was to make a guess at the species shown, I would go for the Burmese python based on the distribution of the animal, and that the markings between the photo and the species match very well.

NEVER MIND THE AUROCHS

2009-10-21T01:32:00.000-07:00

The Aurochs has played an extremely important part of human lives for thousands of years. In it’s wild state it was hunted to provide food, leather and tendons for bow strings. After being domesticated, it now decides the fate of billions of people worldwide thanks to its meat. At an estimated 1.53bn cattle in 2001, the species is clearly of massive importance in the modern world.

But back to the Aurochs. It is probable that it was domesticated 8,000-6,000 years ago by a number of different cultures around the world. It was exterminated in Britain somewhere between 4,100-2,750 years ago (or the Bronze age if you would like), but in the 13^th century (AD), the Aurochs was only left, in its wild state, in eastern Europe. In 1564, gamekeepers surveyed the lands and found 38 cattle. In 1627 the last female died, and the wild species became extinct.

Anyway, that is the background to the story. This morning, whilst researching Vampire Bat control, I got distracted and ended up reading Walker’s Mammals of the World (1999). It was here that I got distracted again by Artiodactyls, and got reading about wild cattle. The author then mentioned something extraordinary. Harrison (1972) had discussed possible Aurochs late survival in Iraq. D. L. Harrison had written in “The Mammals of Arabia” that the Aurochs could have survived into the early 20^th century in Iraq. After googling this, I can find the book for sale, but there is nothing about late Aurochs survival in Iraq. No website mentions it, only to say that the Aurochs probably became extinct in the Middle East and surrounding areas a few thousand years ago. Is there anyone out there who knows more about this, or would have access to a copy of the book? Please please let me know if you can, this could be a very interesting bit of sort-of crypto information.

A taxonomic footnote: Although it is usually given the name of Bos taurus, domesticated cattle have more resently been fitted into B. primigenius. European cattle developed from the subspecies B. p. primigenius, whilst the Indian Zebu was developed from B. p. namadicus. I have tried to avoid giving anything a scientific name in this blog; chances are when it comes out the taxonomy will be out of date!

The white hot flame.

2009-08-28T11:27:00.001-07:00

White morphs of aquarium fish are relatively easy to find in aquaria. Albino Giant Danios, Convict cichlids, Tiger Barbs, Oscars, Kribensis, Guppies and Mollys are commonly found in pet shops, as are leucistic morphs of Bristlenose and Sailfin plecs. Leucistic morphs occur when there is a lack of melanin pigment (the pigment that causes dark colours in organisms) over the body, but not on the eyes. You may have read Jon’s blog this morning whereby he mentions some white Firemouth cichlids. These are common aquarium fish, mainly bought for their attractive red throats and ease of care and breeding. The photo below shows a male engaged in a visual threat display.

I will now take the time to completely move off topic and talk about visual threat displays in cichlids. Firemouths and their genus (Thorichthys) are one of the few cichlids that have evolved a mechanism to reduce the amount of energy expended when defending their territory. Cichlids as a group are extremely territorial, and males usually go for the full blown method of defence; attack. As a way of defending your livelihood, it is a good technique. It is fast, as the biggest male usually wins, but often wounds are sustained which need healing. This healing, together with the actual act of fighting, incurs a cost to the fish, that of using energy from food to provide energy to perform these two acts. This energy would have been spent normally on getting big, and thus the fish is able to win more fights. Cichlids don’t have great eye sight, and as they usually live at the bottom of rivers and lakes, visuals are not normally that important, so they are usually dull in colour, or coloured in very obvious patterns (the convict is a good example, being banded completely in black and white). Firemouths have however evolved a method of defence which reduces the energy lost by fighting. The red throat from which they get their common name can be expanded to produce a very obvious signal. Indeed, in a study by Evans and Norris (1996), males with larger and redder throats won more display conflicts than those that did not, regardless of size! So, a very large, but dull male would lose to a colourful, but much smaller male. Only if the opponents are matched in colour will they actually fight. Interestingly, and again, in opposition to most cichlids, female Thorichthys are almost as colourful as males, but smaller. In normal cichlid pairs, the male defends the territory, leaving the female to tend the eggs and fry, but with these guys, both sexes help defend. This makes the territory more secure, and ensures better survival for the fry.

But how have they evolved this method of display? With a cichlids standard eye sight and choice of habitat this display would not really be seen! It would seem then that Thorichthys have evolved better eyesight than normal cichlids, but also live in clearer waters where they can see each other properly. But to my knowledge this experiment has never been carried out! Never mind. Interestingly, you may have seen Jon or I blogging about out Thorichthys sp. “Mixteco Blue”, an undiscribed species. These guys don’t have the same throats as Firemouths, but it will be interesting to see if they have the same displays. Anyway, to the crux of this blog.

Jon spoke about white Firemouths the other day (photo above), presumably these are either albinos, or leucistic. Either way, these guys don’t have the red throats that are as we have seen an integral part of their lifestyle. So, will this change their display? I would expect that it does. If we can get hold of some of these guys and raise them to adulthood, we will be able to perform experiments on them to see if the display is actually present or if they omit it completely and resort straight away to violence. If they do try to display, what will the outcome be? As the red is reduced drastically, with they just give up and fight? But my main point is that if these fish do display to each other, fail to resolve the struggle visually and end up fighting, is it right to breed fish which are unable to perform their natural behaviour? Personally, I don’t think it is. We will certainly be having a go at breeding them, but not to sell on the offspring, but just to see if there is any change in behaviour, but I am sure most who keep them will not be so scrupulous. I would love to know if it is just me who thinks this, or if I have any more support out there!

BITTERN BOOGIE DROPOUT

2009-07-30T04:43:00.001-07:00

Max has just finished his A-levels, which is - I suppose - a perfectly valid reason for him not having done any bloggo stuff for yonks. However he has managed to sneak out a few times to sit in his car and listen to Tarkus with a peculiar look on his face, and occasionall to do a little bit of bird watching. He usually takes his camera with him, and over the last few months has built up a fantastic library of images of the wildlife of the Wells region of Somerset. Here are some of them...

Bitterns are very strange birds. Being a heron they have the families typical features of a long bill, long legs and a fondness for fishing. My two local nature reserves, Shapwick Heath and Ham Wall, have been given large grants in order to attract bitterns. They need extensive reed beds, but with water levels such that they can build a nest which is at ground level, but not in danger of any flooding. The two nature reserves are at such an altitude that they are not in risk of flooding from global warming, even if the estimate of 17ft higher sea levels (the last interglacial period had sea levels 22ft higher than today, so this figure is not really, in a long term view, anything to worry about) is found to be too small, then the bitterns will be fine as they are well above sea level. This makes the colony sustainable in the long term.

Anyway, bitterns are now breeding at Ham Wall, which is great news. I went down there a few weeks ago to see what I could see, and I saw 7 episodes of flight from the bitterns, plus 3 lots of booming from the males. The photos from this trip are shown below. At Shapwick Heath I have seen 3 bittern flights, but they are not currently known to be breeding.

As an interesting postscript, there is a Little Bittern at Ham Wall at the moment. This is a rare bird indeed, not currently breeding in Britain. They are found all over Europe, apart from Britain. It would not surprise me if within 20 years they begin to breed in Britain. At the bottom of this page is some footage of it being bitterny.

HEY HEY MAMA SAID THE WAY YOU MOVE, GONNA MAKE YOU SWEAT GONNA MAKE YOU GROOVE

2009-07-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

Hopefully most of you will have read the initial Gurt Dog story from yesterday, plus Dan Holdsworth’s posting this morning. To answer his question, posted as a comment on the original story, in a public way, the sighting occurred somewhere to the North East of Westbury Sub-Mendip along one of the country lanes. Looking on Google Earth, you can find the rough area by searching the above village and moving up the hill to the North East, moving to an eye altitude of 12000ft, with Priddy toward the top right of the image, Westbury down the left hand side about halfway up, and Ebbor Gorge and Wookey Hole Caves in the bottom right of the image. From this position, you can pan to the East until you reach a village called Rookham. This village marks the easterly border of the sighting area. This should give you a good view of the area, mostly of fields and a small wooded gorge. The sighting would thus have been at quite a high elevation, between 700-900ft above sea level. A rough set of coordinates is: 51º14’10 to 51º15’00 North, and 2º42’17 to 2º39’00 West.

For those without Google Earth, Google Maps will work fine. In fact, it is probably best to look at both Earth and Maps to get a good feel for the area, only Maps shows the roads along which the sighting must have occurred. Just follow the above directions with this URL: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?daddr=Westbury+Sub+Mendip,+Wells,+Somerset,+UK&geocode=CUqSmQK1JgThFVreDQMdz4vW_w&dirflg=&saddr=wells&f=d&hl=en&sll=51.246283,-2.716713&sspn=0.022458,0.055017&ie=UTF8&ll=51.23043,-2.669334&spn=0.044932,0.110035&z=13

The village of Priddy has always had an association with big cat stories and sightings, most of which are in the roads toward the South East of the village. They pop up from time to time in the local paper, along with the occasional livestock kill. Now, I am sure that some big cat sightings are spectral in origin, but the vast majority are of flesh and blood animals in the way we understand it. Other than the generalised Black/Gurt/spectral Dog stories, I was unaware of any sightings of the fellow around the North of Wells, until now of course.

Looking at the website that Dan Holdsworth posted up earlier, if you match up the images of North Somerset, then click on “view layers”, and tick the box on Europe marked “Europe BRGM 1:1.5M Faults”, you will see a series of black lines, along which faults lie. If you match the One Geology map up with either Google Earth or Maps, it can be seen that Westbury Sub-Mendip lies very very close to the most northern fault in Somerset. However, if you match up the coordinates on the One Geology with those obtained from Google Earth, the village ends up being much further inland than it actually is. If the position of the fault is correct, then the village of Westbury Sub-Mendip lies close enough to the fault for this sighting to provide evidence for Dan’s theory about faults and zooforms being linked, but I cannot find if the fault is still active. I have found a list of earthquakes in Somerset, but this is unfortunately only dates, not locations.

However, my computer decided to restart, and for the life of me I cannot find the webpage again! So, instead we have some details of earthquakes that have occurred in the Wells area. Mathew of Paris recorded the effects of the Wells' earthquake on December 21, 1248:

“...an earthquake occurred in England, by which (as told to the writer of this work by the Bishop of Bath in whose diocese it occurred) the walls of the buildings were burst asunder, the stones were torn from their places, and gaps appeared in the ruined walls. The vaulted roof which has been placed on the top of the church of Wells by the great efforts of the builder, a mass of great size and weight, was hurled so as to strike great terror into all who heard it....”

The Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries for 1895 gives details about a number of shocks around Priddy, Wells, Shepton Mallet and Glastonbury on December 30, 1893. At Wookey it seemed as if the earth was assuming an undulating motion, such as is observed on the waves of the sea. The first of the shocks, for there were several, was preceded by what seemed to be 'a terrific explosion' (Anon, 1895). This explosion is the noise that the fault made as it slipped, thus showing that the fault was close by.

Ahah! My efforts have been rewarded! Anyone seriously interested in researching zooforms and faults will enjoy this groovy tool. Follow the link below and hover over the “Earthquakes” tab at the top. Move the mouse down to “Interactive UK Earthquakes Map”. In the new window you can select the area you want to look at, then fiddle around with the tabs on the left hand side. Zooming in on the sighting area there are 5 earthquakes occurring within 10kms of the rough sighting area. One occurred 8kms away, one 4kms, one 7kms and 2 10kms away. Evidence? I should say so!

A ROE BY ANY OTHER NAME

2009-06-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

Max is in the middle of his A-Levels at the moment, which is - I suppose - a perfectly valid reason for him not having done any bloggo stuff for yonks.

However he has managed to sneak out a few times to sit in his car and listen to Tarkus with a peculiar look on his face, and occasionally to do a little bit of bird watching.

He usually takes his camera with him, and over the last few months has built up a fantastic library of images of the wildlife of the Wells region of Somerset. Here, in a new series, are some of them...

I was out bird watching ‘t other day to stop myself from having a mental breakdown, (it being the second week of my A-Levels) and I found myself sat in a silent hide hoping for something interesting like a hobby or bittern to pop down, drink a pint of shandy (you can’t drink and fly remember) with me in front of the camera, before going off about on their daily business. I waited for half an hour or so, and heard a rustling in the reeds to my left.

“Great Scott!” Exclaimed I, “It must be a hoatzin!” (OK I didn't say anything of the sort, but in my Biology exam yesterday there was a question about hoatzins, and I feel incredibly smug because I think that I was the only person in class to know what the hell they were).

It was not a hoatzin, but a very cute female roe deer with her young (interesting rod deer fact: their coats are grey in winter (see the photo posted on my blog a while ago about the roe deer being killed by a big cat) and a light orange to red colour in the summer).

They were not bothered by me, and came to within 10 yards of my position, not minding as the camera shutter clicked or I dropped my binoculars. The female moved into the reeds in front of me, whilst the baby stayed a little way back, obviously still a bit new to this whole thing.

Grebe-oh Guru

2009-06-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

Max is in the middle of his A-Levels at the moment, which is - I suppose - a perfectly valid reason for him not having done any bloggo stuff for yonks. However he has managed to sneak out a few times to sit in his car and listen to Tarkus with a peculiar look on his face, and occasionall to do a little bit of bird watching. He usually takes his camera with him, and over the last few months has built up a fantastic library of images of the wildlife of the Wells region of Somerset. Here, in a new series, are some of them...

Whilst out at a local reservoir checking out the local birds, I saw a pair of Great Crested Grebes. These are the largest British grebes (adults are usually 1200g in weight), though not the largest in the world , they are still impressive birds. Fire-red head tufts, often extended upon meeting another grebe, are their most impressive feature (other than their stupendous diving abilities) and form an integral part of their mating display. The male and female erect the tufts and begin to dance around each other, each doing the same as the other. So, if the male moves his head to the left, so does the female. If the female moves her head back to the right, so does the male. Note: this is NOT a mirror image!

The grebes swam closer to my vantage position, and, causing annoyance to a nearby fisherman, began to display. This was great for me, and I started snapping away. Behind me, an elderly couple walked past and the gentleman (as indeed, he was) exclaimed

“How brilliant! Crested grebes displaying. Go on son, get in there!”

The last part was yelled directly at the male grebe, who then zipped under water. Bugger, thought I , that is the end of them displaying at such close range.

The male popped back up again just as I began to wander off, with a large piece of weed in his beak. He began to display to an impressed female, and again the gentleman got overly excited and shouted “That’s the stuff lad! You are going to get some tonight!” His wife told him sharply to shut up before chatting to me about the camera.

Only when I got home did I realise that the photos were so out of focus (I have now learnt from this mistake, and have changed the autofocus point), so I must apologise for it!

OUT AND ABOUT WITH MAX: Egrets

2009-06-09T10:09:00.000-07:00

Max is in the middle of his A-Levels at the moment, which is - I suppose - a perfectly valid reason for him not having done any bloggo stuff for yonks. However he has managed to sneak out a few times to sit in his car and listen to Tarkus with a peculiar look on his face, and occasionall to do a little bit of bird watching. He usually takes his camera with him, and over the last few months has built up a fantastic library of images of the wildlife of the Wells region of Somerset. Here, in a new series, are some of them...

Here, at a place called Shapwick, back in March, we see two rare egrets.

For those of you not in the know, egrets are any of several heron species, most of which are white or buff, and several of which develop fine plumes (usually milky white) during the breeding season.

Many egrets are members of the genera Egretta or Ardea which contain other species named as herons rather than egrets. The distinction between a heron and an egret is rather vague, and depends more on appearance than biology. The word "egret" comes from the French word "aigrette", referring to the long filamentous feathers that seem to cascade down an egret's back during the breeding season.

They were hunted to extinction in Britain during the 19th Century, mainly because the aforementioned feathers were so sought after.

However, they have been very succesful in recolonising the UK with four species existing here now..

However, it is unusual to see two species together at once, and Max was very pleased to be able to photograph a little egret Egretta garzetta (left) and a great egret Ardea alba (right) together.

A non-cryptozoological trip to Redditch

2009-04-23T05:31:00.000-07:00

You should all have by now read Ross’ turn of events regarding last Sunday’s auction. Now, I am not going to attempt to pretend that this was a purely cryptozoological trip, far from it; it was a chance for those who went to get their hands on some great new fish. Ross wanted to get his tanks started with something attractive, but easy to keep; Jon wanted anything with a sp. “something” at the end of its name; Emma wanted some fish for her community tanks; and I wanted both anything with sp. “something” (this means that this certain fish has not been scientifically described, but it is probably from the genus before the “sp.” part. So, Cryptoheros sp. "Honduran red point" relates to an undiscribed cichlid from the Cryptoheros genus, probably from Honduras) and something to sit with a couple of other medium sized cichlids in a 3ft tank opposite my chair to entertain me.

After paying the rather high entry fee, we were given a load of free tubs of food, which we worked out as being worth about £5 more than the entry ticket, so I wasn’t too disappointed. After a quick general meeting (which none of our party had much to say, we were not members), we listened to a talk by Bernd Degen, a Discus breeder and show master for over 30 years. He talked about first showing Discus (with some great photos of the massive Japanese shows) and some of the techniques people use to get that “perfect” discus, then he moved on to a talk about keeping discus in a planted aquarium, something I have always advocated.

After a break, the auction began. The first lot was exactly what I wanted, a 4” male Nandopsis salvini, a medium sized predatory cichlid from Guatemala. This is a stunning fish not that often seen in the shops. When it is, it is usual £5+ for a juvenile about 1-2” long. My male over 8 times that size for £8 was a bargain.

From then on in, our table ended up buying about12-15 lots of fish; I cannot even remember what we got! Emma got hold of her community angelfish and an unusual species of Corydoras catfish, Jon got his beloved Rams (at about half the cost of buying from a shop, and better quality) as well as Aequidens sp. “Peru” (a nice smallish cichlid, similar to the hobby staple the Blue Acara, see top photo); whilst Ross ended up with another undiscribed species (Krobia sp. “red cheek” if you are interested) and various other fish to fill his tanks up with. I got myself a group of Thorichthys sp. 'Mixteco Blue' (see bottom photo) which are currently sat in Jon’s local the Farmer’s Arms. These cost me about £3 for 8 youngsters. This is just plain stupid!

Following from the excitement of the auction, we had Alf Stalsberg, a writer and traveller who was speaking about Aequidens sp. “Silver Saum”. Time for taxonomic cock up! Aquarists may well have heard of a fish called a “Green Terror” (why? Because they are generally a metallic green, and are seriously aggressive). Now, this was thought to be a species called Aequidens rivulatus. This was debunked a good few years back, and the hobby’s fish is now known as A. sp. “Gold Saum” because of the gold edges to the fins. A. sp. “Silver Saum” is very similar, but has silver edges to the fins. Stalsberg went out to collect these fish, and found that these three cichlids represented different species. Now, the Americans (his words not mine!) “walked in and think they know everything!” and said that this was rubbish, A. rivulatus was the species in the hobby, and the others were just geographical variants. Well, says Stalsberg, do variants of a species occurring in the same river system breed only with fish with their own colour edging? No says he, they would all breed together. The fact they he has witnessed a separate breeding divide in the wild proves that they are different species. I for one feel that this argument will carry on for a long time...

After a quick raffle, we went home again to get the fish into their new aquaria. The traffic was terrible and I for one got back about an hour later than expected, but hey, if this is the price to pay for such a superb day, then I would gladly do it again.

THE UNIDENTIFIED FISHES OF YOUTUBE PART TWO: An Unidentified Submarine Object

2009-04-19T09:36:00.000-07:00

Round 2 of the unidentified fish blogs. Here, we go all crypto and look at a U.S.O. from a lake somewhere. (Sadly, we have no idea where, which makes things more confusing). In the film, we see a group of small orange-yellow “things” surfacing and dropping repetedly, before dropping and not reappearing. This is clearly not one animal, so the cameraman's idea that it is a manatee is so wrong that I am going to stop midsentence.

Little groups of the things break off from time to time and disappear quickly. Now, I can think of two suggestions as to what it may be, but they both have their faults.

1. A group of small fish that are being corralled into a ball by an organised group of predators. Depending on where the footage was filmed, it could be a group of bass (small or large mouthed) or perch that are attacting the small fish. This accounts for the rising and falling of the fish in the water column plus the smaller groups splitting off. The disappearence of the fish occurs when the predators are full, and leave to digest their meal. However, if predators were attacking, there would be some splashes from boh the small fish, and larger splashes from the predaors. Plus, bright orange bait fish? I've not seen many species that are this colour.

2. Snakehead fry. Yay! Snakeheads! When snakeheads spawn and the eggs hatch, the parents push the young up to the surface to fill their “lungs” with air. If the babies don’t inflate their “lungs” quickly, they die. Snakehead fry are bright orange-yellow, which accounts for the colour. They are also not prone to jumping out of the wach much, which accounts for the lack of surface movement. The small groups are quickly herded back into the main group by one of he parents, which accounts for the short-lived nature of the small groups. At 2:21 a small fish jumps out of the water. The orange group drops down again, probably because the adults moved off to get rid of this interloper into their area, before surfacing again when the adults push them back up.

This too has its problems. The only footage I have seen of snakeheads exhibiting this behaviour shows them doing it in shallower water, usually with some cover from plants and rocks. The main argument against it however, is that snakeheads are not found in English speaking countries (as natives), and any local would have no trouble identifying a cresh of baby snakeheads as being so. This could well be video footage of introduced snakeheads in the USA breeding (as if there was not enough evidence), if it is indeed from the USA.

GUEST BLOGGER DAVID MARSHALL: L Numbered catfish

2009-04-19T03:45:00.000-07:00

Since my yesterday's posting about the new catfish species, I have had a number of emails asking what I mean by "L Numbered" catfish. To explain, here is an article by David Marshall, reprinted from the 2007 CFZ Yearbook:

In the late 1980's a small variety of loricarins new to the U.K. aquarium hobby began appearing in aquatic retail outlets. All of these fish were given exotic-sounding common names so a small white fish with black stripes was sold as the emperor or zebra peckoltia, a fish with wavy black and yellow markings the scribbled plec, and one with a dark black body and white spots was sold as the vampire plec.

From the scant information that could be obtained, mainly through friendly retailers, U.K. aquarists were led to believe that all of these fish had originated from the Rio Xingu area of Brazil and were vegetarian by nature. It would take sometime for this information to be corrected, and make aquarists realise that these particular loricarins’ natural range extended beyond the Xingu area and that their dietary requirements were actually very varied.

As more of these loricarins began to appear, the sales tickets on their aquaria (first seen in Yorkshire through L 018 - Baryancistrus niveatus 'golden nugget') began to show a sequence that began with the letter L followed by a series of numbers. Shortly afterwards the letters LDA began the sequence with some of these fish. The shape and character of the sequenced species was also starting to change as no longer did they all have the look of a miniature plecostomus, but some resembled whiptail catfish, others large otocinclus, and then came the truly bizarre sight of little loricarins with grey and black marbled patterns - best described as elongated wine gums with fins. What on earth was going on?

Confusion in Germany

When all was revealed, it became clear that these loricarins had been available on the European mainland for some time before we had seen them in the U.K. They were appearing not only from the Rio Xingu, but from many other areas of South America. As each new fish had been discovered, the well known German magazine DATZ had featured their portrait.

Worried about varying common names that had been given to these fish in the trade, the DATZ Editorial staff had come up with a system in which each new fish would be given an L-Sequenced number that would allow it to be universally recognised, until the scientific community could get through the tortuous procedure of giving them a proper scientific name. Going back in their records revealed that the fish U.K. hobbyists would come to know as the `white spot pleco` had been the first to be pictured, so this fish began the L Sequence as L 001 (L1). With some of the new species, it was clear to see that these were only colour, or regional, variants of loricarins already sequenced. So this was indicated, by adding a lower-case letter at the end of their number. Thus L O90d is the fourth known variant of ‘panaque species Peru'.

The Editorial staff of the rival German magazine Das Aquarium had also received photographs of other new loricarins coming out of South America, along with different-looking photographs of some of the L numbered fish, so not to be outdone they created the LDA numbering system for their photographs. Starting this sequence was the gold peckoltia which thus became LDA 01 (LDA1).

So from the start, we had confusion with different L and LDA numbers applying to the same fish. This became even more compounded when regional and colour variations of sequenced loricarins would slip through the system, thus giving them a totally different L number than that already assigned for their kind.

This would become partly to blame for further errors occurring, as other aquatic publications began captioning loricarin photographs with incorrect L and LDA numbers. These problems aside, the two sequencing systems remain the recognised - and best - way to keep a record of all the subject species, until the arduous task of scientifically naming them all is finally completed.

How many L and LDA numbered fish do we know about?

It is hard to keep track of LDA numbered fish through publications available in Britain, but by September 2003 a total of 76 loricarins had been sequenced. Thankfully, information on the L numbered loricarins is easier to come by, and of September 2004 the sequence had reached number 387. According to the Y.A.A.S. Fish Showing Size Guides, a total of 52 L numbered fish have now received valid scientific names, and these are split into a large number of genus classifications. With the LDA sequence, this process appears to be going much more slowly with fewer than 20 of these species having gone through - as yet - the scientific nomenclature process.

The well-known Canadian aquarist and fish collector Oliver Lucanus, while speaking to members of the Catfish Study Group UK, believes that there are many more such fish awaiting discovery, but that this task may become a race against time, as the increasing demands caused by intensive agriculture and search for mineral wealth, threaten the future of many habitats.

On the other side of the coin, a number of communities along the Rio Xingu now make a living collecting just one or two of the most popular L and LDA numbered fish, and such is the conservation concern over this practice, that we have already seen a collecting ban put upon the beautiful zebra peckoltia.

Golden rules

There are four golden rules which apply to keeping L and LDA sequenced fish:

1. Always find out as much information as you can about any of the loricarins that you wish to purchase. Not only do their feeding habits vary greatly, so too do their natural habitats, so we find fish originating from river rapids, lowland rivers, uncharted depths, brackish areas, sandbanks, areas rich in plant growth, and fast flowing rivers where fallen trees provide the cover, all lumped together under the sequencing systems.

2. Never purchase specimens with thin-looking bodies and sunken stomachs, as once many of these species have ceased eating, they may never have the will to do so again.

Although the majority of these fish will take standard catfish food tablets, sticks, and flakes, in aquaria, many are specialised feeders. The best guide we have to establishing the supplementary foods needed in order to maintain their health, is by looking at their teeth (which is not always easily achieved).

4. Basically, those with a single row of thin teeth on each side of their mouths, prefer a vegetarian diet. Those with two rows of impressive-looking teeth, bore into wood, so thus need to be provided with mopani or bogwood. Those which appear to have two sets of woodlice imprinted onto their mouthpad, are omnivorous by nature, whilst those with mouths that show a pattern resembling an Olympic Torch, need to be fed a carnivorous diet - including mussels and shrimps.

As we shall see, it is important to do daily checks, if possible, as to the health of all L and LDA sequenced fish.

A warning

We cannot leave the L and LDA numbers without warning of the main drawback in keeping these particular fish. A number of these loricarins are prone to dying very suddenly and without giving any indications of ill health. When we realise that this has happened, we should remove the body straight away, and make a water change to help clear any pollutant this death may have caused to the aquarium water. Unfortunately many die unnoticed, and this is when the real problem begins, as the flesh of a number of these species can begin to decay very quickly.

As this decay sets in, a 'bacterial soup' is soon formed. This 'soup' badly affects the breathing of fellow tank companions, and when this condition takes hold, it can have devastating effects upon the whole community. Over the years, I have heard a number of accounts of whole aquariums - be they stocked at low or high densities - wiped out through this condition, and - sadly - large water changes and commercial aquarium disease treatments proved no antidote.

Without a properly-conducted scientific investigation, we do not know if this bacteria, or whatever it actually may prove to be, is dormant in the body of a number of these species, or if some of the aquarium foods they are fed - such as mussels - actually cause its fermentation.

Just to reassure our readers, many L and LDA sequenced fish are long-lived, and I had the company of a coffee and cream Plec for close-on eleven years.

In Part Two of this article, we will take an in-depth look at a number of the most popular L and LDA numbered loricarins.

n Part One of this article we looked at how the L and LDA numbering system for loricarins came about. This time we will focus on the most popular L and LDA numbered fish, looking at their care and breeding.

Ancistrus

Picking out one bristlenose from the sequenced fish was difficult, so I opted for LDA 08 (gold marbled bristlenose or Ancistrus 'species Mato Grosso'), originating from Brazil, which has the scientific name of Ancistrus claro. Growing to 6cm, these fish have a beautiful orange-brown body colour. Males are told apart from females through larger - and thicker - head spines.

LDA 08 prefers a hard water environment with a temperature of 26C. I kept a trio - one male and two females - in the company of swordtails without any problems. Like all Ancistrus they are very quarrelsome, and stake-out territories which are held until feeding time, when the urge to devour flaked foods, algae wafers, catfish tablets, and any brineshrimp, missed by the swordtails brought about a truce in proceedings.

Although these fish are very hardy, and resistant to many aquatic diseases, they are prone to one particular malady - vibration syndrome. When a severe thunderstorm hit the Ryedale area, the thunder caused the shelf, on which the aquarium housing my trio was kept, to vibrate. This caused such panic that I had the heartache of seeing the fish roll over and die in front of my eyes.

To write fully about the breeding procedure and fry care of LDA 08 would need an article to itself: A compatible pair seeks out a cave-like structure. Once the female has spawned, she - rather sensibly - vacates the cave, leaving her mate to guard the orange coloured eggs. An overactive male can do great damage to a female spent of ova, so this is something we must taken account of. About a week after the eggs hatch, the fry will be seen scurrying over the substrate and glass etc. feeding upon algae.

We help their growth through feeding crushed algae tablets, boiled nettles, and by trying to get them to eat live brineshrimp. Unfortunately for those of us who prize the natural forms of fish, some of the sequenced Ancistrus are already showing the signs of commercial breeding programmes, and currently available are butterfly forms of the xanthic-looking L 144 (which is much easier to breed than LDA 08) with such large fins that they find manoeuvring around their aquaria very difficult.

Chaetostoma

This genus is home to the bulldog plecs. So many bulldogs, of various sizes and colour patterns, are arriving in the U.K. at the current time that they appear to have by-passed the L and LDA numbering sequences. Of those which are sequenced, L 188 (white spotted bulldog), and LDA 11 (marbled Mato Grosso bulldog), have lovely body patterns upon importation but, as with the majority of their genus, these patterns often fade to an overall muddy green colour as the fish begin to age.

There are two very important factors to be considered when keeping these fish. Firstly, always quarantine any potential new tankmates, as all bulldogs are prone to whitespot disease, and can become so badly infected that you cannot see the flesh for spots. Secondly, always keep bulldogs as single specimens, as members of a group will often, unseen; wear each other down to a situation where only one survives.
Much debate has ensued about how these fish - some of which are found in brackish waters - should be kept in aquaria. From my own experiences they prefer an aquarium no larger than 60x30x30cm, pH7, airflow just above normal, and plenty of regular water changes.

All standard aquarium foods are eaten with great gusto. I have found that small barbs and platies make good companions.

I have only come across one spawning report for these fish. The aquarist concerned kept two bulldogs in separate aquaria side by side. One day it was discovered that one of these fish had jumped into the others tank, and, when found, was seriously battered. Concerned about the health of the resident bulldog, a search ensued, with the aquarist having the surprise of finding the fish - assumed to be a male - guarding eggs in a crevice between two rocks.

Cochilodon

L 77 (coffee and cream plec.), L 137 (rusty plec.), L 138 (black-spotted 'Bruno' plec.) and an un-sequenced Cochilodon with blue eyes, are all recognised under the tag of Panaque species 'Bruno'. Of all the L numbers, L 77 is probably the one most prone to whitespot upon importation, but - thankfully - this is easily treated by using the old method of raising the water temperature, and scrupulously siphoning the gravel.

When a scientific classification comes along, it may well be that all the four 'Bruno' species are given the same scientific name, because they are so alike in features, that only slight differences in body and eye colour tell one from the other. These fish originate from Brazil, where they reproduce inside the trunks of decaying trees, and can reach a size of 30cm. Although their sucker-like mouths are adapted to chewing at wood, they take standard aquarium foods with great enthusiasm. Keep at a pH of 7 and a temperature of 26C. They will accept various tankmates from Corydoras through to large Synodontis.

Hypancistrus

This genus was erected in order to accommodate the beautiful ice-blue and white striped fish Hypancistrus zebra (emperor or zebra Peckoltia). Although there are several other similar shaped and coloured L numbers, the true zebra is L 046. Also worth looking out for is the queen arabesque, L 260, which is widely tipped to make an official appearance in the Hypancistrus genus in the near future.

Panaque

Of the several colour forms of Panaque nigrolineatus (royal or pin-striped Plec/Panaque) which carry an L number, and derive from Southern Columbia, my favourite is L 191 which, when young, has a brilliant black-coloured background to its body. Although capable of growing to 25cm, those seen in aquaria rarely reach this size.

An aquarium of at least 90x30x30cm is needed to house a nigrolineatus. They make good tank companions, but dislike the company of their own kind. Although soft, slightly acid to neutral water is recommended, they will tolerate some deviation from this. Keep at a temperature of 25C. Bogwood or mopani wood must always be included in the set-up, as they take various enzymes from this wood which aid digestion. These fish need much vegetable matter to be included in their diet, so we turn to algae wafers, and vegetable-based flake foods

Panaque have the strangest life expectancy of any loricarin that I know. As their teeth are worn down, through munching at wood, several new sets are regenerated. Once the last set is used the fish are no longer able to feed so - sadly - starve to death. Their end, therefore, comes not through age but through how much wood they have consumed.

Pseudancistrus

To show how both the L and LDA systems can have numbers relating to the same fish, we will talk about the beautiful Pseudancistrus leopardus (leopard Acanthicus) identified by the numbers LDA 07 and L 114. They come from fast running water courses, and are natives of Brazil. Depending upon their mood, the plec-like body shows either a yellow or orange background, with a beautiful foreground of black spotting and bars. The tail is a bright orange-red.

Although I have not tried this, I am reliably informed that it is possible to keep several of these fish in one aquarium. This aquarium would need to be of a fair size, as these fish can reach a total body length of 35cm. Filtration needs to be of a high quality, as the catfish will start to fade away if their aquarium is not in pristine condition. Keep at a temperature of 27C. Although these fish are primarily vegetarian, taking lettuce and pieces of raw potato. They will take commercial catfish pellets, and large-sized flake foods.

The sexes are distinguishable, as the edges of the pectoral fins are thicker in males, who also tend to be the more aggressive. We have few pointers as to how these fish actually reproduce, but it is believed that they may follow the Cochilodon way of making nesting sites in the wood of decaying trees.

Finally we must mention the loricarin species sold as L 128 (blue Pleco.) and L 200 (green Plec.). These fish, which originate from the Rio Orinoco, have become the basis of cottage industries for several villages, with young boys diving to great depths in order to catch the best specimens. There was a time when all of their catches were exported almost exclusively for the Japanese aquarium market, but now these beauties are appearing more often in the U.K. So close in characteristics are these two forms, that in the near future they may both carry the same scientific name.

THE UNIDENTIFIED FISHES OF YOUTUBE - Part Three

2009-04-17T11:04:00.000-07:00

Time for a slight change now I feel. We can now look at a number of different videos showing undiscribed fish. First is this handsome fellow:

It is another cafish, but this time it is from the family Aucheripteridae, or the driftwood catfishes. These are a cracking group that is rarely seen in captivity because few people want a catfish that sits under driftwood all day and is generally of a nervous disposition. I, obviously, love them to bits.

I have no idea what this fellow is, so that will do for now on taxonomy. There is one interesting footnote to this specuies though. The chap in the film is a male which is shown by a very strange modification. If you look at his anal fin, he first few rays of it are modified into a copulatory organ much like that seen in fish like guppys and platys. This family of catfish are the only ones to have evolved such a device, making them a very interesting group indeed.

Here is another Loricariidae catfish. Nothing to say here other than it is a male again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stWLsqJFfRs

THE UNIDENTIFIED FISHES OF YOUTUBE PART ONE

2009-04-17T05:11:00.000-07:00

Youtube is a powerful tool. I spent some time this morning looking around its archive to try and find something interesting to witter about for a bit. So here we are, a look at the undescribed species of Youtube.

We had best start with some fish. First we have this very attractive Loricariidae, or, a plec. These are common inhabitants of aquariums, but they are either one of the huge species which are sold as “only growing to “4”” and the size of the tank”, or one of the stunning “L-numbers” which are almost always wild caught, very pretty and astoundingly expensive. £30 is about what you need for one of the more common species, but individuals selling for multiples of hundreds are fairly commonplace. This is an adult male, so at about 7cm he is one of the smaller species. The thickened first ray on his pectoral fins show him to be a sexually mature male, ready to defend his site from all comers.

It is a Venezuelan species, which in itself is nothing unusual, but if in the video you look closely 26 seconds through, you should notice fronds on the front if he fish’s sucking mouth. These are modified sensory barbels which help in the search for food. Not many Loricariidae have these, so this species is unusual in having them. It is thought to be from the genus Leporacanthicus, but appears to be the smallest species in the group: the others all get over 20cm in length. Its dorsal fin appears to be much more triangular than all the other species in the genus, but hey, I am not a taxonomist.

Yet.

KOUPREY KAPERS

2009-04-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

Let us start from the off by saying this: Bovids are cool. My personal favorities are the large wild species like Bison, Indian Water Buffalo and Guar, but the most interesting from a crypto point of view are Kouprey, a huge species from (mainly) Cambodia growing just shy of one ton for a bull.

They live primarily in deep forests, and their thin bodies are an adaptation for moving through dense woodland. Like most large bovids, they are diurnal and only feed in the daytime. They are not closely related to any other species of wild ox, but they are placed in the genus Bos (species sauveli) along with most wild cattle. The males have a huge dewlap which is probably used in sexual selection: for Kouprey this works better than large horns (although, the male’s horns are faily large) for attracing a mate, because the thin dewlap helps the male move in dense forest; horns would get in the way!

As the worlds rarest large mammal, they are a critically endangered species. Only 250 are thought to remain in the wild: although some people claim that they have not been observed since 1957 (possibly 1983) tracks and skulls for sale on local markets can help to esimate the population. The IUCN has this to say about the species:

“This species is listed as Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct). The total population is unknown, and the species is most likely to be extinct. At most, there could only a few individuals remaining, certainly many less than 250 mature individuals, and almost certainly less than 50 mature individuals. The high level of hunting in the region has led to a significant decline, estimated at over 80% in the last 30 years”

They are thought to live in Vietnam where a group of park rangers spotted what may have been 3 Kouprey (but could have been a small group of Banteng or Guar) with the forward pointing horns typical of the species. The Vietnam group supposedly gets much larger than the Cambodian (up to 1.5 tons), putting it in a position to get the title for the “worlds largest Bovid”, beating the Guar by a few hundred kilogrames. It has however not been cirtified that this group exists, so more researech needs to be done in the area.

The Kouprey sat in a small grey zone for a while after it was discovered that the species shares an awful lot of DNA with the Banteng (anoher species of wild ox), such that the scientists who made the discovery asserted that the mating between the Banteng and probably the Zebu could only have occurred in the last 50 years, perhaps to produce a new variant of very tough cattle to survive in harsh conditions. This view was very trendy for a while, until someone unearthed a Kouprey skull just under 100,000 years old.

The hybrid argument was dropped.

The Kouprey is interesting to us cryptozoologists because it was only discovered in 1937. Why on earth the Okapi is trotted out so ofen as being a very large species of mammal which survived until the 20th century without having being “discovered” by science, when the Kouprey is 4 times the size, and was first described 36 years later, I just don’t know!

Kouprey - overview New York Zoological Society

The other interesting point is that there is supposedly a smaller species/regional variant which is hinted at on some webpages, but despite my best efforts I just can’t find anything on it at all. The main reason for writing this is so that I could show you this cracking video which I found by fluke. (when and how it was taken when the creatures have allegedly not been seen for fifty two years I cannot say) Enjoy!

SCORP STORY

2009-04-11T14:44:00.001-07:00

I have a thing for arthropods. I had guessed that you, dear reader, had already grasped that fact, but just to reiterate it, here is the funny tale of just one of Britain’s top tiny pond predators, the common water scorpion.

First, a little taxomony. Water scorpions are insects (ED: no, really Max? Tell us something we don’t know) from the family Hemiptera. A colloquial name for most small insects is a “bug”, but this name is actually the common name for the Hemiptera. Hemiptera are called so because they have two pair of wings, the front of which is very thick and serves as a sort of armour. Hemi= half, ptera=wing. Get it?

As well as the wing thing, bugs are distinguished by having an incomplete life cycle (where the young pass through stages of being nymphs before full adulthood, just like cockroaches, Phasmids, grasshoppers and mantids) and sucking mouthparts. They are known as a “primitive” order because they have an incomplete life cycle, but they still have more than 60,000 species described, more than any other primitive order. They are infact the only inscts to be found in the open ocean (a funny group of water striders, you know, the funny fellows which sit on top of the water in your pond in summer). Some common bugs (other than those mentioned) include: assassin bugs, leaf/stink bugs, backswimmers and leaf-footed bugs.

Water scorpions come from the family Nepidae, which is very similar to the family Belostomatidae, or the giant water bugs. They both fullfill very similar niches in their environment: highly cryptic ambush predators who stalk the upper reaches of ponds, lakes and streams. Both families are always a shade of brown (kinda hard to look like a dead leaf if you are not brown) with large and very stong raptorial front legs. With these they grab onto prey before injecting them with a cocktail of venom and digestive juices, and then sucking out the mush. There are two species of water scorpion in British waters, the common (the short fat fellow) and the stick (the long thin one). I have never seen a stick water scorpion, but the other day I found my first common waterscorpion for about a dozen years.

I am currently wrighting a huge piece of Geology coursework. To avoid it killing me, I try to get out every day if I can. On Friday, I decided to go out to a local garden centre or two to have a look around. Now, thanks to some interesting benefits of competition which I am not going to discuss here, in one place on my route there are two large garden centers right next to each other. In front of the larger one there lie a couple of large ponds. I have never bothered to look at these before, but seeing as I walked right passed one on my way to the other garden centre, I had to take a look. It must have been about 35ft long, 8ft wide, but only 1.5ft deep. There was thick reed growth, but oddly, no other aquatic plants. This made it great for looking into, and in about 3 seconds, I had seen my first newt of the day. A possibly smooth, possibly palmate female. This was followed by about 15 more, so I got bored of looking for newts, and mumbled to myself: “Ooo, this would make prefect water scorpion habitat”. I looked, but to no avail.

Until I moved to a different side of the pond and immediately found one. I was slightly surprised; I have said “Ooo, this would make prefect water scorpion habitat” to myself more times than I can remember, but never seen one, so I thanked the giant water bugs in the sky, and began the tricky process of getting the beggar to walk onto a reed stem so that I could pin it down with another piece and transport it back to the car...

In which I had a plastic bag filled with water and some small snails I had got (for free) from the garden centre. There was nothing for it, I had to take my new fiend home with me in this bag. So I did so.

He is currently sat in a small tub on my desk, and I have managed to persuade him to eat a dead baby cockroach, which bodes well for his future life in captivity. He is living with some small snails and is doing rather well. A handy thing about water scorpions is that they don’t have gills, instead relying on a pair of tubes coming out of their back end to reach up out of the water and breathe. This means they can easily acclimatise to different waters (temperature still remains an issue however) and thus they can settle down in captivity very easily.

What I would really like to have now is a couple of giant water bugs. Forget the inch that my water scorpion is, the larger giant water bugs get to over 4 inches, tha largest even hits 6”, making them easily able to make a meal of newts, fish and very large fat snails. What has this got to do with cryptozoology? Could a giant water bug/water scorpion account for sightings of a huge aggressive preadator that lives in the congo and has been known to take down hippos? Err, no. This story has nothing to do with cryptozoology. But hey, I bet you all learnt something from that tale did you not?

DON'T BOGART THAT ROACH

2009-03-21T15:12:00.000-07:00

EDITOR'S NOTE: It wasn't actually Maxy who came up with that title. I wonder if you can guess what it actually was?

This whole new species in the pet trade thing of mine is coming along nicely. I recently received an order, to be split between CFZ HQ and myself, consisting of 5 undiscribed species of cockroach. These are not cryptids, but they are the next best things; something science has yet to find a name for. They range from being tiny dark brown animals; right up to large showy species which are pretty enough for every naturalist to admire. In this little collection of gems, we have species that are known to species level, but appear to be a new sub-species, those known to genus, and 2 are known to family only. The last two especially are special indeed.

But before we take a look at the different species, let us first look at what the hell a cockroach is. They can be grouped into a couple of “looks”, each suited for a different habitat and mode of life (NOTE: these groupings are not taxologically correct). First we have the large bodied flightless species who spend their time either underground, or under shelter of some sort. We also have the smaller long legged reduced wing species, which lead a more active existence. They tend to run from danger, not fly. The small species with full wings are the most common; indeed, the British species belong to this group. Finally, you have the large winged species. Most of these are partially arboreal, but some become so large that they can no longer fly.

Termites, mantids and cockroaches are closely related, and the name Dictyoptera has been erected to name the group. Cockroaches first evolved in the early Carboniferous period, about 359MYA. Mantids evolved from “proto-cockroaches” about 145MYA in the very early cretaceous. So, as Tyrannosaurus rex was romping around biting chunks out of Ceratopsians, early mantids were munching their way through small invertebrates on a micro level. Proto-cockroaches (or Blattoptera) are cockroach like insects that the true cockroaches first evolved from. Looking at a large cockroaches’ leg, you can see the numerous large spines projecting downwards from the leg. It is not hard to see how these could have evolved into raptorial appendages. Termites are just social wood eating cockroaches. They probably evolved about 120MYA in the Cretaceous from a similar group to Cryptocercus, a small wood eating cockroach. Genetic studies have shown that Cryptocercus shares more DNA with termites than any other genus of cockroaches. It is the only cockroach to exhibit true social behaviors like caring for it’s young. I always find it funny when I say “cockroach” to people, and get a repulsed face. Say mantis or termite to them, and they usually hold them with regard and respect in their mind. You now know that they are basically the same thing.

Cockroaches are best known for being pest insects, which some of them are. But only 25-30 species out of the 4,000 around today are pests. They are generally tough animals, able to survive for a long time without food or water. Indeed, that old myth about cockroaches being able to survive for a month without it’s head is actually true!

In cockroaches, the head performs sensory functions like sight and smell, as well as being the holder of the mouth through which the roach drinks and feeds. Like all insects, the mouth is not used as a respiratory organ, instead they breathe through a series of tubes called trachea. Outlet holes called spiracles on the side of the abdomen open into the trachea, which, like our lungs, feed oxygen to the tissues, and remove carbon dioxide. Large species, with their high oxygen requirement, need to pump their abdomen often to keep air moving through the tubes. Insects also have no brain, they instead have ganglia decentralised throughout the body. Each ganglia controls, say, one pair of legs and acts both independently and in combined movements with the other pairs. In chordates, decapitation leads to death as almost all functions are controlled by the brain. In insects, they will carry on living until starvation, desiccation or predation claim them.

Another myth is that cockroaches will survive through a nuclear war. Well, they will certainly survive better than us, but for an insect, they are nothing special. Most cockroaches have a radiation resistance 6-12 times higher than a human, but animals like flies have even higher resistances. Radiation affects cells only when they are dividing, either by mitosis or meiosis. In humans, cells divide constantly to grow our bodies, repair ourselves or to produce sex cells. In insects, cell division only occurs at ecdysis (skin shedding). Only after they have shed their skin, do the cells begin to divide to quickly grow their bodies before they harden. If a nuclear blast occurred whilst they were hardening, they would be effected. If it occurred whilst the insect was hard, there would be little effect to the insect. However, long-term radiation could hit the insects when they shed, so they are as at risk as us to long-term radiation.

Cockroaches are generally silent animals, but supposedly there is a Floridian species which makes a chirping noise. Better known is the hiss that members of the tribe Gromphadorhini make by contacting their abdomen and forcing air out of the spiracles to create a predator repelling hiss. Members of this group (particularly from the genus Gromphadorhina) are common pets for those with a taste for the unusual, and are often seen in zoos as a handalable exhibit because they are a very large insect that although very impressive looking, is actually very calm when used to being handled. Cockroaches are in fact fairly large for insects. Like mantids, the smallest members of the group are about thumbnail sized (with the average being just above this size), whilst the group contains a very high number of large insects. Some of the largest and most impressive are:

Blaberus giganteus, the giant cave cockroach. At up to 90mm long, this is one of the longest cockroaches. Males are slim and fly well, but females have such massive bodies that the best they can manage is a sort of controlled fall. Males are often aggressive to each other, and both sexes release a very pungent smell which always reminds me of a nice vaguely fruity chemical. A few nymphs of this species usually retail for a couple of quid each.

Macropanesthia rhinoceros is the largest cockroach. At 75mm long, it is not the longest, but it’s sheer bulk more than makes up for this. They can weigh about 35g, which is huge for a terrestrial arthropod. They live for over 10 years and feed on eucalyptus bark and leaves exclusively. They dig and live in deep burrows with networks all around. Males (being larger and with a shovel shaped pronotum) do most of the digging, and the young usually stay in the burrow for a year before they move off. An adult pair of this species can set you back £80!

Megaloblatta insignis is the longest cockroach. At 105mm long, it is a huge beast that has been very poorly documented in the wild. It apparently (and very oddly) mimics larger Blaberus species, but differs in a few areas obvious to a layman, chiefly amongst which, no Blaberus is the uniform brown that M. insignis is. This could be something to do with the defensive chemical I spoke about earlier, but this is just my hypothesis and not scientific fact. This species has not been raised in captivity in the west.

But enough about roaches as a whole, we need to look at the species currently in my care. We start with a species known in the trade as the African Bullet Roach. Why? Well, they are from Africa and move as fast as a bullet! They are a small species getting to between 12-17mm as adults and were first collected in about 1997/8 at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. They are so easy to keep and breed that they are being used as feeder roaches for larger amphibians and reptiles. Just run that through your head, an unidentified species, being so common and numerous, that it is thrown to toads without a second glance!

The second species is one that I have yet to photograph properly, due to their small size and fast speed! This is Blaberidae sp. “Kenya”. Notice the “dae” on the end of that name. This means that this species is only known to family level, not even genus (like the above species). Males are an appealing orange colour, but females are a dark brown with reduced wings. They are only small at 10-12mm, but I am really looking forward to breeding them.

Now we look at Pycnoscelus sp. " Malaysia”, a small parthinogenic species (where females can produce offspring without a male) related to the sort-of-pest-sort-of-not Pycnoscelus surinamensis which causes a problem with its size and speed by being able to do well in most conditions (as long as there is a lot of moisture), so it jump’s animal tanks easily. They are tiny, which adults rarely reaching 10mm.

A cracking species is Eublaberus sp. “Pantanal”. This species is related to two common roaches in the hobby, E. disanti and E. posticus, but has much more black on it’s head with paler wings. It is found in a more southerly area than the other two species, and at 50mm, it is longer than the other two species. It is a stunning critter and both nymphs and adults are very showy whilst being rather shy and tending to burrow.

Finally, we have a new colour form of Eurycotis opaca, a large species up to 50mm long. It is related to pest species, but is itself not a pest. It has the build of a running species, but it is much larger than most. Adult’s have a blaze of colour on the pronotum which looks to me vaguely like a setting sun.

I have tried to contact a chap called Darren Mann, an expert in cockroaches, to see if he can identify whether it is worth naming them ourselves, or if they turn out to be a colour form of described species. He is out of office until early April, but naturally, I will keep you updated on developments.

We are also working on a project to try and document the behaviour and biology of these animals involving volunteers from the CFZ readershi[, so watch this space.

Back-dating the Somerset Cat.

2009-03-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

On Monday, I went on a field trip. Field trips in Geology are a common occurrence; what better way to learn about rocks than to get out there and look? We were off to a place called Vallis Vale in East Somerset, the site of an unconformity. An unconformity occurs when sediments are laid down, folded so the beds lie at an angle, and then eroded.

Younger sediments form on top of the old sediment in typical straight beds, and an unconformity is created. They are only visible when falling sea levels and colliding continents cause the unconformity to rise above “normal” ground level.

Cutting by a river or quarrying also helps. You can see in the photo the different dips of the beds. The beds themselves can be dated by looking at the fossils within them; the rock below is from the Carboniferous period, and the rock above is from the Jurassic. This site is geologically important as it was described in the world's first Geological Survey memoir in 1846 and helped establish the science. Anyway...

In the minibus on the way up, through the sounds of Rush’s “2112”, I overheard my teacher talking to the lad sat in the front seat that he had seen a “black panther” crossing this road at night. I realised where we were, and found that we were about 800m from the field in which the big cat has been killing dozens of sheep! Hooray!

The next day I stayed behind to ask him about it. He said he had been driving along the road at about 2145 to take his son’s babysitter home, when out of a wood on the left this Labrador walked out onto the road. He stopped to see if it was ok (clearly a dog walking around on its own is a cause for concern), but it suddenly dawned on him that it was a big cat. He stopped the car and watched the cat watch him. It carried on it’s way to the right, and he can remember clearly pressing the button to wind the window up; just in case.

He also said that his first encounter of big cats (or rather, something) happened at around the same time when climbing in Cheddar Gorge. He was getting up to the top of the ridge in an area where no people go because it is very heavily wooded. He got to the top of the ridge, and found an area of scraped ground with a large mound of foul smelling dung deposited inside. He didn’t recognise it as being something he was familiar, but he left it due to the difficulties in getting it back down again.

My teacher is not unknowledgable when it comes to animals; parts of teaching geology necessitate a good knowledge of the natural world, and I would take his account as highly credible. The diagnostic features he remembers are; very long thin tail, jet black colour (“such that if it was hidden in bracken or a ditch, you could come within 3ft of it and not notice it was there” he said), slightly pointed ears and a very calm demeanour. It’s total length was about 2m long.

This is all very interesting, but there was one more thing. The sighting happened 14 years ago.

COMPETITION: Walking in a winter wonderland

2009-03-13T04:51:00.000-07:00

Back in early February, as I am sure you remember, the British Isles had a flurry of snow. Here in Somerset, we had our fair share, and I - being the good field-man I am - went up to the usual place to see if Mr. Kitty had left any traces of his existence. The farmer had moved his sheep away into shelter over the cold snap, so I knew that there would be no new kills to poke.

I battled my way up to the field, parked up, got out and had a look around. I was extremely surprised to see the amount of snow prints I did (nothing feline though), and got round to the fun business of identifying them all, as all good naturalists should. Now, I know what most of these are, but the real question is, do you, the CFZ blog readers, have any idea what these prints are from? The person who sends in the most accurate answers as to what the following 8 photos show wins a year’s subscription to either The Amateur Naturalist or Animals & Men magazine, it’s your choice! Answers can be sent to max@cfz.org.uk. The number at the end of the text next to the photo shows the question number.

First up, we have this image. Any ideas? They are right down to the ground (3”), so we must be dealing with something with fairly small feet for its body size.

The two prints are about 6” apart, and each print is 1.5” wide. Claws are clearly visible, which are short but thick.

The central pad is also diagnostic. [1]

Moving briefly to a photo I took near my house, what have we here?

We have thinner snow, maybe an inch, with two sets of prints.

One very large long one and two smaller distinct prints. The prints are about 2” wide.

Any ideas? [3]

And this one? An odd one this. The snow is very thin here. [4]

And this? Four points originating from a central source. [5]

Right, let’s get tough. The next few photos are fairly indistinct, and I won’t be adding my suggestions and hints for any of these. Good luck!

Oh, and just for fun, this is the amount of prints that you get around a decaying carcass as scavengers, errr, scavenge for meat left on the bones.

Walking in a Winter Wonderland: the answers.

2009-03-12T14:16:00.001-07:00

Well, hopefully you enjoyed the little quiz that I put up a few days ago. I am pleased to announce that Sean South won the competition, by getting six out of eight completely correct.

The answers, and the precise details as to what gives them away, are below.

1. A red fox. The characteristics you should have picked up on were the visible, blunt claws with 4 digits, which show it to be a canid, plus the size of the print and particular spread of digits from the central pad, showing it to be a fox. A dog in comparison would have it’s digits spread less than this fox.

2. A roe deer. The speed of the movement (snow kickback) and size (stride length) show the animal to be large, and the thin prints going deep in the snow show it to have narrow feet. Must be a deer! I know it was a roe deer because I saw them making the tracks, but the distance between the strides show it can’t have been a large deer like a fallow.

3. A domestic dog. The four digits with visible blunt claws show it to be a canid, but the size and the narrower spread of digits show it to be a dog.

4. Two dog prints on top of each other. The 6 digits give this away a bit! Again, the claws were visible.

5. Probably a blackbird, but I am not an authority on bird prints, so any medium size passerine would have been acceptable. The flat feet show it to be a passerine.

6. Probably a fox digging. The print in the centre of the depression is from a fox, so I expect that the rest of the print was made by a fox.

7. A rabbit, I think! 4 main depressions are visible, and it must have hit the ground with some force to have punched straight through to the ground. The close together prints show that this is probably a rabbit.

8. Not a clue! It looks to have been melted by the sun to for a print larger than the original. This was probably a fox.

Needless to say, the last few prints are up for interpretation, and my ideas are just informed guesses. I have printed below the suggestions some people made as to the last 3, make up your own mind who is right!

badger
hare
okapi
chupacabra

Methinks that I know the young lady who suggested `okapi`, and that someone else wasn't taking this excercise particularly seriously...

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

2009-03-12T10:56:00.001-07:00

First up, we have this image. Any ideas? They are right down to the ground (3”), so we must be dealing with something with fairly small feet for its body size.

The two prints are about 6” apart, and each print is 1.5” wide. Claws are clearly visible, which are short but thick. The central pad is also diagnostic. [1]

Ok, now try this. We have two prints, which plunge very deep into the snow with a pretty large amount of kicked back snow. The prints are about 1-1.5” in diameter, and are about 1’ apart. [2]

Moving briefly to a photo I took near my house, what have we here? We have thinner snow, maybe an inch, with two sets of prints. One very large long one and two smaller distinct prints. The prints are about 2” wide. Any ideas? long one and two smaller distinct prints. The prints are about 2” wide. Any ideas?

Moving briefly to a photo I took near my house, what have we here? We have thinner snow, maybe an inch, with two sets of prints. One very

[3]

And this one? An odd one this. The snow is very thin here. [4]

And this? Four points originating from a central source. [5]

Right, let’s get tough. The next few photos are fairly indistinct, and I won’t be adding my suggestions and hints for any of these. Good luck!

[6]

[7]

[8]

Oh, and just for fun, this is the amount of prints that you get around a decaying carcass as scavengers, errr, scavenge for meat left on the bones.

An opossum's tail

2009-03-11T06:16:00.000-07:00

Opossums are a group of about 90 different species occurring only in the western hemisphere, occurring from southern South America right up to Canada. The most famous species is Didelphis virginiana, the Virginia opossum. It looks vaguely like, and is usually portrayed as being, a giant rat with a fluffy coat, when actually it is a marsupial that happens to benefit from human habitation as it uses houses for shelter and food (scavenging for scraps) in the same way that rats do. I guess it’s partly hairless tail doesn’t help its cause...

Possums are a group of about 65 different species occurring in Australia, Sulawesi and New Guinea. The most commonly encountered species is Trichosurus vulpecula, the common brush-tailed possum. At a maximum of 4.5kg, it is not far off the above species in size, but it’s bushy tail, shorter muzzle and darker colouration make it easy to tell apart. It too likes people’s houses for the same reasons, and usually it causes an annoyance for people who have to sleep with them running over the roof every night.

Now, although there is only one letter different between “possum” and “opossum”, apparently this causes a problem for some people. Google for instance, throes up dozens of photos of both possums and opossums when you google “possums”, mainly of D. virginiana. Why on earth does this species have the common name of “possum”, when it is nothing of the sort?

Unlike other common name confusions, which are usually due to visual similarities between species, D. virginiana looks very little like a, for instance, T. vulpecula. It must then be pure and simple laziness which causes people to mix the two names up. Why bother to say “opossum” when you can say the easier “possum”? Waste of time innit? Whose gonna care ‘bout one letta?

Hummm.

The catalyst for this short rant is a video (http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/Australia/). Although very funny, and the vocals say “possum”, they cock it up by depicting a very rat-like D. virginiana with the long muzzle and nearly hairless tail. Oddly enough, the idea that possum attacks are the “number one reason for a day off” is, according to an Australian friend, complete rubbish, mainly because they only attack people in extreme circumstances. But how hard would it have been to google “possum”, looked in Wikipedia or whatever site first comes up, and found a representative possum from Australia?

Again, why bother? What’s Joe Public going to care? Well, if I had my way, they damn well would. I bet even 8yr old me could have told you the difference between possums and opossums. Why not everyone else?

A picture's worth a thousand cryptids (OK that headline is completely meaningless but Jon thought it up, and I have to humour the old chap)

2009-03-07T14:10:00.001-08:00

For this evening/morning/whenever you read this you are going to be talked at by me about the importance of photography and being a naturalist.

Digital photography is quickly becoming a very mainstream pastime. No longer do you need to faff about with darkrooms and expensive films; a simple household computer is all you need. The advantage of the technological revolution is that equipment drops rapidly in price over time (just look at widescreen televisions; you can pick up a 32” LCD TV for £500, a couple of years ago they were over double that!) whilst the quality of the goods increases (you can look at digital cameras this time). So, we are getting double benefits: prices for goods are dropping as the goods get better and better. It’s a great situation to be in, and with the current recession reducing demand for luxury goods (cars, for instance, have seen an unprecedented 35% drop in demand this year compared like for like to last year), if you can afford to buy a good digital camera, now is the time to do it!

In this series of blogs (yes I know, I should be following a trail of dead sheep, but the famer has moved them indoors for a while, so the cat has buggered of elsewhere), I will be looking at what to look for in a digital camera, if you are a naturalist. I could talk at great length about D-SLRs (digital single lens reflexes), but for the moment I am going to discuss more affordable options: entry level cameras.

In the above photo, the black dots are starlings.

A basic camera will set you back about £100 (roughly) and will probably have a 3x optical zoom, still and video modes, about 8.0 megapixels, a macro mode and a fairly large screen. A 3x zoom is not exactly superb, but all the other features are essential for a naturalist. Still and video modes gives you flexibility when shooting without needing two separate cameras, 8.0 megapixels allows you to produce a fairly large image which can be printed out at a later date up to about an A4 size, the large screen allows you to clearly focus on your subject, whilst the macro mode allows you to take clear photos of small flowers/invertebrates. These cameras are usually pocket sized, and are very easy to carry around in a pocket or handbag, and are aimed squarely at beginners, or people who don’t want to fuss around with photography.

Most of the settings are automatic, and there is usually a small manual override on some settings, but usually very little. A large memory card is essential to make sure that you have enough space for images, no matter what happens. So, if you do see that elusive big cat you have been chasing for ages, you want to be able to keep taking photographs for the full duration that you can see the animal and not have to worry that you are going to run out of space on the memory card, which will prevent you from taking any more photos. You don’t need expensive aftermarket image enhancer programs either. Windows XP/Vista (and I assume its equivalents) comes with a “fix” tab in the image viewing screen. It is not fancy, but if you are shooting at night you can enhance the brightness to pick out any figures in the gloom. You can crop the image in the same way.

Cropping cuts out a piece of the image to allow you to take out areas outside of the subject to enhance the look of the image. You can also use it to show a particular far away object in a better zoom, letting you, as I said earlier, determine between a bustard and a goose.

If your budget will stretch to it, a camera with a better optical zoom is a good investment for obvious reasons (to look at Jon’s article the other day, a bigger zoom allows you to see if it was a bustard or a goose when you look at the photo afterwards). Some manufacturers will con you by telling you the digital zoom. This is something quite different to optical zoom (where lenses move inside the camera to zoom), where the camera zooms in digitally on the image. It gives the impression of a bigger zoom, but when you look at the photo on the computer, it will probably be very grainy. You could get exactly the same results by cropping the image from your computer.

Beware however, as you move up from the beginner’s pocket sized cameras, the need to incorporate more space for lenses to move necessitates the need for a larger lens, so the size of the camera tends to increase from this point onwards. But, these more expensive cameras come with customisable features, allowing you to fiddle manually with things like ISO, exposure settings and white balance to produce more tailored images. Image stabilisation (helpful for shooting fast moving objects, or when you are moving) is also a very handy thing to have.

But why am I taking the time to talk to you about photography in a zoological blog? It is because I have a dream.

A dream of a day when everyone, interested in zoology or not, takes a camera with them everywhere they go. How many more photos of cryptids would there be if everyone took a camera around with them? The quality of cameras is rising rapidly, and their use to naturalists is increasing. I find myself wanting to kick people after I talk to big cat witnesses when I realise that although the big cat is a regular in their area/field they never thought to bring a camera with them. A not insubstantial amount of big cat sightings are made face to face with the cat as both sides stare at each other in surprise. Meetings like this can go on for minutes on end, think of how many photos you could take in this time! Even if the first photo wasn’t brilliant, you would still have lots of time to tweak the settings for a better next shot. Why on earth don’t people do this! One of the best ways to prove something’s existence is to photograph it; for the price of one piece of hardware. A small price to pay methinks.

Plus of course, cameras are kinda nice for photographing the kids growing up, family events or holidays. Talk about killing two birds with one stone...

The CFZ solves another mystery!

2009-02-12T08:46:00.001-08:00

And then, as if by magic, just when I had finished writing the previous blog, I got an email from a contact from the local news who said “One of our readers e-mailed me these this am. I’ve had a long chat with her and she is convinced they are a big cat’s prints. She heard a big “kerthump” as if it was jumping down. She has fields and woods around her and just three houses up there. Lots of deer in the fields. She is on the Cranmore side of Doulting. I said I would pass the photos on to you to see what you think. Her details are below and she is happy to talk to you. I have sent her copies of the stories we did as she had not seen them.”.

Attached were two photos, one showing the print, and the other showing the stride length. They looked pretty damn canine to me, but for a second opinion (always important) I passed them (again) on to Richard Freeman, who had this to say:

"These are clearly dog tracks. The concave shape of the main pad can be seen in the first photograph. Also, the toes are symmetrical and show the blunt claws of a canid. A cat's claws are finer and only seen in prints when unsheathed for a firmer grip on slippery or uneven surfaces. A cat's main pad has three bulges or lobes akin to the shape of a club in a deck of cards. The toes on a cat are asymmetrical unlike a dogs."

I don’t think I can add anything to that! Never mind, at least the CFZ now has a very good photo of what a dog’s print in the snow looks like!

I did have chat with the person who took the photos, and the fact that she lives next to a field in which a few dogs are walked closes this case. Apart from one thing: “She heard a big “kerthump” as if it was jumping down.”. This does sound a bit odd, until you realise that the prints were in her garden, and to escape the dog would have had to jump over the fence, creating the “kerthump” noise. Case closed.

But, the journalist who sent me this case also mentioned that she is “trying to check out the report from the lady from Cranmore who was saying she heard something big snarling in the bushes near her home last month.”. Now, as you can see, Cranmore is very close to the place where the lady found the dog prints. Naturally, I will keep you updated.

Cat prints? Not again...

2009-02-11T12:15:00.000-08:00

It is now time to update on the hunt for alien big cats in the UK. Last time, you will remember I was told by a member on an invertebrate’s forum that her boyfriend had taken a cast of the print of an ABC, or so her other half’s mate said, in their local area. Naturally, I asked; “where is it now?” and the reply was “I don't think he has the cast anymore”. “Bugger!” thought I. Never mind, she sent me a link to a photobucket account where there were photos to look at instead. They looked like a good match for a cat to me and the size was well within big cat range. After forwarding them to Richard Freeman, I emailed Hollie, as her name turned out to be, who gave us permission to use the photos, and it is to her that I am very grateful for otherwise this extra evidence would not have come to light. The best photos are shown below.

Also, she said that her boyfriend (Dan) had “actually seen the cat one night when hunting up there, though it was it dark he says he remembers seeing a big pair of eyes, too big for any "normal" animal, and looked orange coloured apparently.”.

Now, it is time to explain this eye shine business. Eye shine is, obviously, caused by light entering an animal’s eye, reflecting out of the animal’s eye and then entering our own. The shine effect is from a layer of tissue called the Tapetum lucidum which is found in many vertebrate animals. Its function is to reflect light into the light sensing cells (Rod cells) in the eye to enhance night vision further. So, when a light is shone into an animal’s eye, you quite often see it shone back at you from their eyes as the light escapes from the lens and through the pupil. Carnivores possess a choroidal tapetum cellulosum which is made of reflective crystals, whereas artiodactyls and perissodactyls have a choroidal tapetum fibrosum made of extracellular fibers. So, these two different reflective layers give different eye shines.

Eye shine varies between different animals, but it is not an exact science. Cats usually have green eye shine (domestic), as do deer, but dogs can vary from green to yellow and to orange, depending on breed. However, a number of reports say that big cats like leopards have orange eye shine, which completely confuses the matter! I must say this subject has been hard to research; everything contradicts everything else!

Then, as if this wasn’t good enough, Hollie spoke to her boyfriend, who said that his mate still had the cast, and that we were welcome to have it for a bit! This is excellent news, so we will have to sit tight and wait for Pat.

In the mean time, Richard got back to me to say this:

“Though I will reserve final judgement until I have actually seen the cast my initial feelings are that these are indeed cat prints. The toes are asymmetrical and lacking in visible claws. The central pad lacks the concave shape of a dog’s .The toes also appear to show greater flexibility than a dog's.”

He attached the following photos; the uppermost photo is of a leopard, whilst the other is of a puma’s print.

Now compare these photos to the cast photos above. Richard says:

“It could belong to a puma or leopard but I think it is most like a puma's with the wide toe pads. In fact the print reminds me of a Florida puma print I saw that had been cast from a track left in sand.”

I agree with him, but also the central pad in a puma is more compact than a leopard’s, very similar to the print in the photo.

For a further analysis, we will have to wait for the print to be delivered. Watch this space with bated breath! But may I just say again how grateful I am to Hollie for letting me look at the photos and for doing her best to help find the cast. If only everyone came forward with evidence!

UK ALIEN ANIMALS STUDY GROUP: Never outfox a fox

2009-02-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

There seems to be a theme running threough the CFZ. After Beth's post about her pet fox Millie, we had Tim’s post on urban foxes, Dr. Holdsworth’s post on their biology, and now we have me looking at a very interesting alien animal indeed, the wily fox.

Vulpes vulpes is the UK’s local fox. The genus contains 12 species who are to be found on almost all continents (Antarctica is, as usual, an exception) and they all fill the same role: small adaptable carnivores who are adapted to eating any animal from the size of a typical insect, right up to a large game bird or lagomorph. Foxes moved up from the land bridge from Europe into the UK, but they never got up to the small islands off the coast of Scotland. However, it seems they may well have found a way.

Thanks to the very helpful Glen Vaudrey, (soon to be CFZ Cheshire rep) we have the news that it looks like the red fox has found its way to the Outer Hebrides. Although no reports have been certified by Scottish National Heritage, between December 05 and January 07, with 2 reports before this, 12 reports of foxes have been reported. These come from the Islands Lewis, Harris, Benbecula, and South Uist. I did try to upload an image of the area, but it was too small to see the Island's names, so I have not. But, the reports nearly span the entire area of the Outer Hebrides, from Lewis in the north to South Uist near the South. The sheer span of reports is what settles this matter for me; we have sightings of adults, sightings of cubs, 2 reports of droppings, a dog who acted strangely in response to smells, and finally, that a fox was seen for 15 minutes by a professional mammal biologist. The reports I was sent are repeated below:

Dec-05 Tolsta, Lewis = Report of fox seen on croft
Dec-05 Gress, Lewis = Report of glimpse of fox by road side
18-Feb-06 Urgha, Harris = Report of fox watched for 15 mins by professional mammal biologist
2005 Barvas road, Lewis = Note on local paper about someone seeing a fox cross Barvas road
2005 Clisham, Harris = Letter in Stornoway Gazette reporting seeing fox cubs beside a loch
28-May-06 Tong, Lewis = Report of fox seen in garden
May-06 Galson, Lewis = Report of fox droppings, and a dog behaving in a strange manner in response to smells
06-Jun-06 Daliburgh, S Uist = Report of fox seen crossing road in the evening
06-Jun-06 Liniclate, Benbecula = Report of fox
27-Jun-06 Tolsta, Lewis = Report of fox droppings by Garry Bridge
Aug-06 Uig, Lewis = Seen on road somewhere between Gisla and Grimersta
31-Aug-06 Arnol, Lewis = Seen near fish farm
Dec-06 Gress, Lewis = Seen on a croft
Jan-07 Aline, Lewis = Fox seen in trees by the road

This is a lot of reports, most of which seem viable. As one would expect from foxes, there are reports from a number of different areas, notably including a garden (typical!). 10 of the reports predictably come from the largest Island, Lewis. Now for the real question, how did they get there?

Tough to answer that is. If this was a geological report from 3 million years in the future, and we were looking at fossils not live animals, we could confidentially say that they got to the islands by using the sea as a vector and were washed out to sea, possibly via a flood, where their swimming and the action of the current swept them over to the islands.

The distance from the Inner Hebrides to the Outer Hebrides, is about 25kms, not too far for animals to be swept. This may have taken a few days and a lot of luck, but the fox may well have got there still breathing. Thin, but alive. All it would take is a male and female to be washed up within a few years (their lifespan is only about 3 years in the wild) and you probably have a breeding population. Better than that, a pregnant female is washed over and then you have multiple foxes.

However, we are not dealing with geological time; this is “real” time. I am not so sure that this a long enough period of time for this theory to work, although we must not dismiss it. It seems that humans are a more likely vector, either deliberately or by accident. They could have been released by someone bringing a few over from the mainland, or in the hold of a ship. I am really not sure what to make of it! David MacLennan from Scottish National Heritage says “It’s very difficult to say how they got here, because we don't even know if they are here!” and I must say I agree with him in the main. It seems highly probable that they are there, but more evidence is required. Photos however, are to easily faked by photographing a fox from the mainland, so a pinch of salt may be required if one comes to light.

WIKIPEDIA FACT FILE: Today, the Red Fox has thje widest range of any carnivore - range spanning most of North America and Eurasia, southern Australia, and with several populations in North Africa. In Australia the Red Fox is an introduced species and a serious conservation problem. Introduction occurred about 1850, for recreational fox hunting, In North America the Red Fox is native in boreal regions, introduced in temperate regions. There is a recent fossil record of Red Foxes in boreal North America, and one subspecies of these native boreal foxes extends south in the Rocky Mountains. In temperate North America, Red Foxes are derived from European Red Foxes, which were introduced into the Southeastern United States around 1650-1750 for fox hunting, and from there to California for the fur trade. The first introduction is attributed to Robert Brooke, Sr., who is said to have imported 24 Red Foxes from England. The introduced European Red Fox may have interbred with the scarce indigenous population to produce a hybrid population.

Three subspecies of Red Fox are found in India: Vulpes vulpes montana (the Tibetan Red Fox), found in Ladakh and the Himalayas, Vulpes vulpes griffithi (the Kashmir Fox) found in Jammu a nd Kashmir less the Ladakh sector, and Vulpes vulpes pusilla (the Desert Fox) found in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan and in Kutch, Gujarat. A subspecies, the Japanese Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes japonica) migrated from India to China and eventually to Japan.

Californian Condors gain 2.37% boost to numbers!

2009-02-04T14:47:00.000-08:00

I heard recently that in a public release, 4 captive bred California Condors (Gymnogyps californianus) will be sent out to join the 67 wild condors in Arizona. This is a welcome boost to the species’ wild population, which currently numbers 169 spread across 3 states plus that rough number again in captivity. Before being re-introduced to Arizona, the species had suffered a massive decline across the US. This is mainly from hunting, disturbance by tourists and air traffic, and from pesticides. The numbers had dropped to 20 birds in the 80s, and now a strong captive population is producing young at a steady rate. Steady that is, for a bird which takes 6 years to mature, lays one egg at a time, breeds every other year and can live for just shy of 60 years (although this is usually between 40-50).

In the event that you do live in California, you can take Highway 89A from Kanab or Page to the Vermilion Cliffs (from Flagstaff take Highway 89 to Highway 89A) before turning north onto BLM Road 1065 (a dirt road next to the small house just east of the Kaibab Plateau) and continue about 2 miles to get to the Vermilion Cliffs Monument. The event starts at 1100 on the 7th of March.

Now, condors (both species) are new-world vultures, family Cathartidae. There are 7 living species split into 2 groups: the turkey vultures, black vulture and Californian condor (essentially, it is a giant turkey vulture) make up one group, whilst the Andean condor and King vulture (a stunning animal) make up the other group. The first group lives in North America, and the latter group is from South America. So, although they are only slightly related, if I refer to condors, please take this as both the Andean and Californian species.

During the Pleistocene epoch (1.8m-10,000 years ago) this species was very widespread, covering most of the Americas. There were two other members of the Gymnogyps genus, but these became extinct before man arrived. There was one sub-species of G. californianus; amplus which lived across America, even down into Florida. This sub-species was a bit larger than today’s, being about 2kg heavier on average, with a larger bill. Since the Holocene began (10,000 years ago to the present), the Californian condors range contracted and became increasingly inbred. Now, those who know their geology and paleontology will know that about 10,000 years ago, much of Americas megafauna died out, either as a result of human activity, or a massive climate shift, most likely a combination of both. Species which died out in America at this time include a number of species of elephants, dire wolves, short-faced bears, giant long horn bison, the glyptodonts, four species of giant ground sloth and saber-toothed cats. Now, after this extinction, surviving species increased massively in number, most notably the current sub-species of bison.

The Californian condors did not cope well with this huge extinction, and they reduced in numbers massively. Other larger relatives of condors (family Teratornithidae) died out with the megafauna (or did they? But that is for another day). All large birds need near perfect conditions with lots of hot thermals to soar upon, lots of food and water and little competition. Even 500 years ago, it was spread across the American South West. The Californian condor is known to kill small animals. This is probably a recent trait as its relative the Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) does not do this, so it may well be an adaption to new areas where it had to kill to survive. In my opinion, this species has been reduced in numbers somewhat by human persecution, but mainly because it is a scavenging bird that eats the carcasses of large animals. It could probably have struggled on and found new food sources from the massed numbers of bison, but the 19th century extinctions destroyed any hope of that. It seems to me that the Californian condor was a species doomed to extinction. We have however, saved it. Its numbers are rising, but the day will come when its concentrations hit a maximum. It will probably be a very low concentration: their food source is very limited in number. We are now just prolonging its eventual demise, but why?

I think that as long as people who give money to the charities which are keeping it alive, the people who do so much volunteer work to help the species and the people as well as the people who manage the companies and government departments who are instrumental in this task know that this is a species doomed to die without our help. Assuming we stopped helping it now, it could be extinct in only 1000 years (please remember, we are talking geologically here, human life spans are too short to talk about the natural world in) which is no time at all. But it is a stunning bird, the second largest flying bird in the world that lives in a fairly accessible location. I myself have seen these birds in captivity, and seeing this bird flying in its aviary was unforgettable. The sight of the 10’ wide wings, black with a white flash, propelling that massive body up into the air; its muscles straining before it could soar and down onto its perch. Now, imagine seeing that in the wild, somewhere where it wouldn’t run out of flying space, somewhere where it can live its life free without needing to be surveyed, checked upon and helped constantly by us.

That is what we should be aiming to do, get the species to a stable state (which doesn’t mean 1,000,000 of them in the wild, 330 as we have at the moment is fine) and within a small area so it can breed easily. We stick a perimeter fence around the area to prevent egg thieves (admittedly, this is the only area we should be helping, the low lives that are egg thieves could love a condor or two) and put up watch posts where people can observe them. Leave them alone to live their lives, stay out of their way and don’t disturb them too much. Condors often break their eggs after being disturbed or being frightened: the eggs can roll off the nest whilst the huge adult moves to look at the potential threat. We get rid of these daft tags they have on at the moment and let them be properly free. The species has bred in the wild recently, so they can do it without our help. The conservation of these animals has cost $35 million, so let’s quit whilst we are ahead, and move on to saving something else. The species will survive for a while before reverting to its natural progression and becoming extinct; it’s incredible temperature tolerance (0-40 degrees C) and longevity will see to that. We ourselves are probably doomed to die only a few hundred years, but if we see through that we as a species will die out for the opposite reason as the Californian condor: we will die out from over population.

Possibly the strangest bats ever...

2009-02-02T10:04:00.000-08:00

There has been much discussion about New Zealand bats on the CFZ blogs in the last few days. Jon wrote something off-the-cuff about wishing that a certain long-extinct species of New Zealand bat was still in existance. This got me thinking. What was it? Why did it die out? and could it have survived?

New Zealand has been home to three species of bat within living memory. The two species left alive and in a reasonably stable state (well, their numbers have been reduced dramatically, but they are not in danger of extinction yet) are the lesser short-tailed bat (Mystacina tuberculata) and the long-tailed bat (Chalinolobus tuberculatus). But, there was another species, the greater short-tailed bat (Mystacina robusta) which, at 90mm in length was New Zealand’s largest bat. It became extinct in 1967, leaving only one photo of its species taken in 1965. However, it seems someone forgot to tell the bat.

The Short-Tailed Bats are a funny group, being from the family Mystacinidae, and are endemic to New Zealand. The Greater had a large distribution over the northern climes of the island which is known from sub-fossil bones. It was classified as a sub-species of M. tuberculata until 1962 when it left the other 3 sub-species of M. tuberculata to form its own species. Greaters did the job of small rodents on the island, moving on the floor with all four limbs and only flying when necessary. Lessers are slow flyers, rarely getting above 3 meters above the ground, so it is expected that Greaters, with their larger body size, could only live in the north where the temperatures were high enough to allow them to warm up and fly (all Mystacina bats allow their core body temperature to drop at night, so when they want to become active again they need to become hot). Below is the only photo of the greater short tailed bat.

Now here we have an interesting example of an animal going against Bergmann’s Rule (within a group of closely related animals with a large north-south range, species/sub-species nearer the poles are larger). This rule works for “normal” homeotherms (constant body temperature), but here the advantage of keeping the core temperature high by having a large body to retain heat (lower surface area to volume ratio – better heat conservation) is outweighed by the time it takes for the body to heat up again in the day; thus we have small bats nearer the pole, and larger bats further toward the equator.
I expect you are now thinking “How on earth did this bat keep its wings out of the way whilst it foraged?”. Very good question: both species did so by tucking the wing membranes under a different membrane on their body, leaving the bats to scurry around in and out of burrows and about on the forest floor as eagerly as a mouse. The illustration shown opposite shows the bat as it would probably have stood, with its wing folded out of the way. They were most likely insectivores like M. tuberculata, but this is not known for certain.

So, why on earth are they gone? Well, New Zealand is one of the countries hardest hit by human intervention, and when rats were introduced to the mainland the short tails were in danger. Habitat destruction began their decline, and very soon rats followed and decimated the local wildlife. Soon, the greater short tail was gone from the main land, surviving only on Big South Cape Island. Then, tragically, rats got to the island from a ship. The populations of South Island saddlebacked wattlebird, Stead's bush wren, Stewart Island snipe and greater short-tailed bat were all but wiped out within the space of a few years. Only the saddleback was saved and is still alive, the other three unique species were gone for ever.

However, the IUCN continue to list Mystacina robusta as Critically Endangered as apparently “recent, unconfirmed reports of bats from this small island [Big South Cape] and a neighbouring island, however, could be this species”. The current evidence for this apparent survival extends to “several reports of bat sightings from Putauhina, and in 1999 Colin O'Donnell recorded Mystacina-like echolocation calls from the island that do not belong to M. tuberculata (O'Donnell 1999). There have also been two unconfirmed reports of bats being seen on Big South Cape. The identity of the bats being seen still must be confirmed” because it could have been one of the two other species. However, the long-tailed bat lives 50km away, which is probably a little far as it has not been recorded on the island before. It was listed as Extinct in the most resent revision in 1996, before being changed to Critically Endangered in 2008.

The launch of the UK Alien Animals study group

2009-02-01T13:12:00.000-08:00

Hooray! A new venture for both the CFZ and for its shortest member, myself. Alien animals, as we define them, are animals inhabiting a habitat where they are not native. These can be animals which have been introduced into new areas by human intervention, animals moving along pathways which have been created by human activity, or animals which have expanded their range into an unexpected area through natural process.

During this quick introductory post, I will be having a quick look at examples of alien animals in Britain, discussing our plans for the future, and finally, looking at what you, CFZ members and representatives, but first and foremost naturalists, can do to help our studies.

So first, some examples. New area introductions are numerous and well known.

The coypu is a great example. Introduced into fur farms in 1929, this large (4.5-9kg) rodent swiftly made its escape, and soon found that the habitat in East Anglia was very much to its tastes, where it settled and bred very nicely. This news was initially taken as good tidings: Coypu eat a lot of reeds and would clear streams wherever they went, keeping them free flowing. However, it was soon found that they loved vegetables from gardens, and crops from farms, plus their reed clearing activities and burrowing would only cause the river banks to be undermined and collapse. Their only predators big enough to take the babies in Britain were foxes, stoats and herons; they would leave the adults (if only we still had wolves...).

Now, you may be saying to yourself “Well, this is all well and good, but in their native habitat [throughout South America] surely they would cause a huge amount of damage to the area?”. Well, no. Coypu in Britain had hit such densities thanks to so much food from our farms that their numbers could sky rocket. Indeed, some clever ecologist worked out that only when Coypu hit a density of 4 per acre, do they begin to cause large amounts of damage. A huge number of Coypu living in one area of course results in far more burrowing structures than normal, causing bank undermining, and increasing the risk of flood damage.

So, that is new area introductions dealt with, but what about new pathway introductions? This is a bit of an odd term, and I will try to make it clearer. When animals are removed from a food chain, a gap appears which may be suitable for another animal to exploit. For example, by removing top predators like wolves and bears from Britain, we have produced a gap which will be filled by evolution (maybe not now, but certainly in the future, evolution can take a long time to work!). So, by removing these predators, there is a top spot available which is just beginning to be filled by (for the purposes of this article) two types of animal. 1. Big cats, 2. Eagle owls (amongst others)

Big cats, you are quite right, are new area introductions, but they have adapted to new pathways which we have left open. Eagle owls however, may or may not have been present in Britain in recent times before extermination, but they are back! Some birds are undoubtedly captive releases, but some of them I am sure are birds who have flown over from the continent, found a huge amount of prey (from voles to rabbits and even up to buzzards (who incidentally have moving up into that top carnivore slot)) available, so they decided to stay here.

There is currently a male Eagle owl who lives outside the Biology building at Bristol University, which does push this university a little higher up my favourite list for next year. This young fellow is almost certainly a captive release however, but it is still quite interesting! Eagle owls enjoy a bit of a love hate relationship with people, they are stunning birds which people love to see flying around, but when it turns out that they may eat the occasional game bird, the shooting lobby fires up (pun intended) to claim that they should all be shot.

I have nothing against game shooters; indeed, working on a shooting ground has shown me the great help they can be to keeping some species of British bird breeding on land which would have otherwise been eaten up by housing or farmland. The great expanse in breeding areas for game birds must be a good thing, for, as Pink Floyd said, “the price of a few hundred ordinary lives”.

So, that is the basics sorted out. Now for our aims.

We hope to set up a sighting and watch database where we log sightings of alien animals alongside notes about their environment, activity and numbers. We are looking to produce a book by the end of the year: either it will be a monster of a book looking at every alien animal in Britain, from the confirmed to the unconfirmed; or it will be a book split into three parts:

Mammals
Birds
Reptiles, amphibians, and fish
Invertebrates

but we shall have to see.

The most important factor in making this venture work is you! The people up and down the country who want to help this project go. You can do so my informing either Jon Downes or myself of any sighting you have of an alien animal, together with as much information as you can get about it (not the animal species itself, but what they are doing there, their size, estimated weight, habits, food source etc), or by suggesting ideas and suggestions to helping this get started. We hope to have you on-board soon.

The cat came back

2009-01-31T11:56:00.000-08:00

After me bemoaning the fact that there were less and less kills from this ABC in my area, it seems once again it is time to pop open a Beast (fear not reader, I will explain all).

Yesterday as you are all aware was Saturday, the day I fire up my car and zoom off to work to earn an honest buck in order to keep myself and beer as close friends. Now, the day was fairly unspectacular (other than the freezing cold conditions) until it got to around 1400, when one of the shotgun coaches said to the three people he had just been tutoring “Ah, here’s the chap you want to speak to.” as I wandered past. One of the gentlemen proceeded then to tell me that he had a big cat in his area (Taunton) and that it was killing sheep.

It had been through a fair few apparently, but the only bodies my contact had seen were those that the farmer had shown him after he had dragged them in from the field. The sheep’s pelt had been taken off the bones, and the only bones the farmer brought back were the spine, ribs and skull. Now, this proves very little (ie, was the killer a cat, canid or just an excuse) as the sheep had been moved from, what we would call in palaeontology, life position (you can think of it as being moved from its exact position of death). The sheep killed were all grown on lambs at about ¾ of full size.

This is very interesting indeed, and I have exchanged emails with one of the chaps who will provide me with photos when he can. I intend to get up there as soon as I can. This is probably not the same cat that I have been dealing with closer to home, but 25 miles away as the Raven flies (or as the Leopard runs for that matter) is, although seemingly large, not completely out of the question. Remember, an ABC in the wild would probably not have a territory this large, but this is not their wild habitat (with the possible exception of Lynxes). We have no idea how they behave when their prey is confined to a comparatively small area of land and are fairly easy to catch and kill. Will their territory size increase? My feeling is that yes it will do. Territory size is controlled mainly by two factors, how many competitors there are nearby, and how much food there is nearby. So, taking a Leopard as an example, lots of Hyenas and Lions around will diminish its territory size, and lots if easy to catch prey with a high nutrition value will again, diminish it. Few competitors and hard to catch, low energy prey (rabbits for instance) will both increase territory size. Note, low energy prey is prey that may be low in calorific content (or whatever measure of nutrition you want to use), but also take a lot of effort and energy to catch. For a Leopard of 80kg, a Rabbit which might get to 1kg is much more energy intensive to catch and eat than it is for a 10kg Fox, hence why Foxes take a lot of Rabbits.

Here in the UK, we can see a large amount of easy prey (expected to reduce territory size), but a low population density and little competition (expecting to increase territory size). I would expect with the evidence available to me that 25 miles for a territory is not as mad as it may at first seem for a Leopard/Puma/whatever. Just to err on the side of caution however, I would say that this is not the same cat.

Now, that lot is good for a day’s work. However, it gets better. I got home, showered, ate tea and then went onto the computer to write an article about keeping beetles for Exotic Pets magazine. I went onto an invertebrate’s forum, (on which I am the moderator of the beetles, aquatics and cockroaches sections) to check how things had been over the last day, and what did I find? Someone had posted a thread in Off Topic about big cats in Britain. Obviously I looked at it, and I was really surprised at what I found (I will not repeat the thread here, but you can go and look at it if you sign up as a member for Bug Nation).

The jist of the thread is that one of the forum’s members had noticed in the local paper (the Hastings Observer: http://www.hastingsobserver.co.uk/509/Bumper-year-for-big-cat.3674641.jp) that there were big cats in the area, and was wondering what people’s thoughts on them were.

Now, attached to one of the thread starter’s posts was two photos which her other half had taken. One was of a large paw print in some mud, and the other was of the plaster cast this person had made of it. This is a brilliant example of people (one wants to use the phrase “general public, but that would be a touch insulting) using their initiative, getting something done and helping us all out. Good job!

Unfortunately, I cannot tell if it is a cat or a dog, as although there are no claw marks, the back of the central pad is obscured by a lighter used to show size. The pad is the same length as the lighter, and the whole print looks to be about 1.5 lighters tall, within cat size. The digit pads are close to the central pad and are all of similar size. I have contacted the member to see if I she can get some better photos of it for me, and obviously, I will keep you all updated.

As for that thing about the Beast, well, it is a little tradition I have.

Whenever something big happens with my big cat research, I open a bottle of one of my favourite ales, Exmoor Beast (a superb dark ale with a strong chocolate and hops flavour) which depicts a melanistic leopard jumping toward the drinker. As proof of this being a good day for me, here you can see me drinking aforementioned beer...

The Raven's Revenge

2009-01-29T12:06:00.000-08:00

The Raven (Corvus corax) is, at a maximum of 1500g, Britain’s largest crow. It is an omnivore, but its specialty in Britain is scavenging from dead animals. Its size puts it pretty near the top (for birds at least) of the scavenging chain, and it can easily intimidate smaller scavengers like carrion crows into giving up the lion’s share of the dead animal. Since the 1500s it has been persecuted by Sheppard’s and gamekeepers for scavenging or eating young animals and by the late 19th century it was confined to the west coast where the craggy cliffs it nested on afforded it some protection. Only after the First World War did the persecution slow and the Raven’s number begin to build up as it adapted again to tree nesting. Since then it has gone on to spread slowly inland, into Wales and Cumbria as well as making inroads into Devon. I had thought that the Raven was a species not really found in Somerset (where I currently live) and if it was at all to be found it would be far over to the west near Minehead and Watchet. I was, however, to be proved very wrong.

On Christmas Day this year, as you will remember, I was out and about doing some big cat research. After getting into the field, I saw coming towards me as I stood in the field was a crow, a “bloody huge one” if I remember myself muttering. Anyway, I carried on and ignored the bird. This was at the same moment that it flew past me and turned around over my head calling a deep throaty “prrrrruuuk”. “Raven!” I burst out. And indeed it was. Not just one, but four Ravens seemingly in two pairs.

After taking some photographs of them (as well as some rubbish video footage) I started thinking why were they here? Back at home I did come research on the subject, and found that Ravens are indeed found throughout Somerset, but they are few and far between with breeding occurring in Glastonbury’s Ham Wall reserve and across the Somerset Levels. Even though I had spend considerable time up at the killing fields, I had not noticed their presence at all, but seeing as on this day there was a freshly killed sheep, I am guessing they were in the area for this. The sheep’s eyes had gone, so one would suspect the Ravens of being the main scavengers of these from the kills. After following them for a bit on that first day, I found that one pair seemed to be spending a fair bit of time down on the quiet side of the quarry; it could well be that this is their perfect habitat: craggy cliffs for nesting, an abundance of food in the form of dead sheep, and no persecution. I for one am overjoyed at their comeback to Somerset, even if it is at the expense of a few sheep to keep them interested. Ravens begin nesting in January and lay their eggs in March, so it may be time to spend a while searching for their nest.

I have seen the Ravens twice in the four times I have been up there in the last month, however, I have not seen any sheep kills in this time (apart from possibly one) so it could be, as my best friend suggested when we went up for a look around early last week, that the cat has perished in the freezing temperatures that we experienced in late December. I need to get back to the field to see what’s changed, plus chase up the farmer and water board about the CFZ’s stolen trigger camera.

In other big cat related news, I was interviewed on Wednesday by the superb Geoff Ward who writes the “Mysterious West” page in one of the local newspapers. The interview will go up as part of his weekly podcast, and I (or more likely, Jon) will add a link to it when it is edited and published. I know full well I answered a few questions in the daftest possible manner (for instance, answering a question along the lines of “If big cats are comparatively numerous, why has no-one trapped one yet?” with “Well, in one night outside a large southern African city they trapped 27 leopards.” which means very little), but hey, it may just bring an extra bit of knowledge into people’s minds along with someone to contact if they do see something. It’s all about spreading the word...

PS, I apologise for this, but Fleur wanted to see some photos of me in my cat catching gear, but I only have one good one and im not even wearing my wide brim hat, but never mind:

The absolute final catch up!

2009-01-27T00:34:00.000-08:00

Right, this is it now ladles and jellyspoons, the update on ABCs where I finally drag you all up to the present day. The music is on, door firmly closed, fingers flexed and the MSN conversation with JD shut down.

Previously we had just finished the quarry palaver, so we can now join the action on Sunday the 7th of December, early in the morning. I awoke early for two reasons, one, today was the day of the British Killifish Society’s annual auction and Jon and Matthew were picking me up to get up there before it started (as it so happened we didn’t, but that’s another story), and also because I wanted to have a look at the deer carcass to see if it had been eaten in the night. I breakfasted and kitted up with the video camera, stills camera (with 70-300mm lens fitted) and cat hunting hat I went out to record the nights action.

After driving up to work the temperature plummeted down to freezing levels (-3 degrees C I think) and so the walk down the road to the deer was slower than expected. Now, I must now talk briefly about the landscape near where the deer was killed. The first photograph is taken from my viewpoint near the top of the hill before it snakes its way past the carp ponds and the dead deer. You can see the road in front of me with brambles and other short plants between the road and the carp pond. A plump bush can be seen on the left which cannot be seen in the second picture. This other photo taken from in a field shows the ponds behind the vegetation, plus its thickness. The position of the deer cannot be seen in either photo, but it is to the right on the pond in the second photo. Got all that? Good.

Walking down the path, I got to the sharp left turn before the road moves in the straight line visible in the photos. It was now that I heard a loud, harsh and distinctive “Khheeeea!”. My immediate thought was “Holy Hell! A Leopard’s warning vocalisation!”. Needless to say, I moved back slowly the way I had came with the camera trained on the area the cry had come from as well as the pond in case it began to move away from me. I heard nothing again, so I went over into the field to take the second photograph. Again, I saw and heard nothing. By this time it was getting up to leaving time to catch the Matt car up to the auction, but I kept moving around closer to the pond. I noticed behind me about 200yrds away a friend who was also interested in ABCs with whom I had been examining the deer’s evidence the day before. We began to chat quietly, and he had been up since before dawn broke to look around the area. He was a keen rifle hunter, so I would have expected him to be both vigilant and muted when moving. He said he had seen nothing other than a large dark mass moving through the woods which could have been a deer. Now I got a phone call from Jon to tell me that they were very close to our meeting area and that I better get a move on.

We ended up being about an hour late, but had a cracking day.

Over the next few weeks the deer was moved around a bit and eaten in parts, probably by badgers, to the present day where it still sits in a broken heap next to some brambles where the badgers keep picking at it.

Nothing really happened for a few weeks until Christmas day when I got bored and decided to go up to the original killing fields (hooray! A reference to a Slayer song!) to see what had changed. After getting very distracted by Ravens (these will wait for another blog) I began my scouting and went up into the field above the normal one and came across a very nice bloody carcase of an adult sheep with a huge hole ripped into its side. As you can see from the photos, a few of the organs including the lungs and probably the heart were still inside the animal. The body was still warm at the time of discovery (1400). The eyes had been taken by the Ravens. The sheep’s head was bent backwards in the same shape as all the other kills.

I photographed and videoed this kill as I have done for all the others, and continued nosing around. I found an old kill which had rotten down to the bones and so the only tissue left was the ligaments between the vertebrae. It was in the same field as the above kill, but in a quiet corner where it looked not to have been disturbed (normally the bodies are moved after a day or two or the farmer knowing that they are there). The attached photos show the skeleton, plus the important bit of evidence for a big cat killing the sheep. The head of the sheep was twisted around to face the opposite direction, whilst the ligaments were still attached. You can see the twisted vertebrae in the photo. I pulled at one of the ligaments after photographing and it came away with little pressure. Because the ligaments are still attached, this leads me to conclude that the sheep had its neck broken before it died, not from an external force after death.

Now, we come up to mid January and finally, I had my trigger cameras to catch this beast! I had tested them beforehand, and myself and a few friends attached them to the fence which something jumps over to get into the field. We set the camera (only one was working) up attached to a fence not in the farmer’s field, nor in the water works land but technically in the quarry’s land, but this seemed to be a no-man’s land between the quarry and the field. We left after this...

Only to return the next day to find that the camera had gone! Seething, I rang Richard who muttered something about “commoners” and “Southerners” before ringing the farmer to see if he had removed them. He said he hadn’t, but he would try and contact the water board to see if they had. I could see the headlines running in my head: “Water technician proves existence of big cats in Britain!”, then a day later “Monster hunters claim the photograph was stolen!” then finally “Monster hunters triumph thanks to video evidence!”. Maybe that was a bit farfetched, but never mind.

A few days later I went back up to the field with a friend to take some photographs of me in suitably dramatic poses for an article being written about me by Geoff Ward (who did the article about the haunted pub a week or so ago, check the archives). Whilst there, I noticed that a few of the jaws were loose from the skulls, so I picked them up for a closer look. I found puncture marks in one, which led me on to search for more. I “stole” 3 jaw bones with damage and a skull which just looks cool. Next time I am up to CFZ headquarters I will take them up for a better opinion than mine.

Let’s hope the next blog is not quite as heavy going as that!

Dragging you up to speed

2009-01-22T14:32:00.000-08:00

Damn it! One always forgets something in a blog, and it appears I have missed something fairly crucial to this story (Derek, thanks for indirectly reminding me!) Back in mid November, the farmer told me that he had been talking to a deer and wild boar stalker in Gloucestershire who said that he would come down and take a look around the site, which he did. He took with him his rather large rifle (hoping to catch the cat in the glare of his spot light, then put a bullet between its eyes) which he left in the car whilst he had a look around the field initially.

It was dark at this point, but the light picked up a large pair of eyes shining, and I quote directly from him, “9-10 apart couler green little light gold”. Now, I must stress that his English was not superb, hence the incorrect spellings and lack of sentence structure, and the sentence seems ambiguous.

He was convinced it was not a sheep or deer as their eyes are not as far apart, and that they shine back a different colour. Remember that this is a professional deer stalker who would know ruminant eye shine when he sees it! The conditions of the sighting were a distance of 80yrds, dark but clear and calm.

He also provides evidence as he found one footprint (this was later driven over before I could get there by the same ******* who stole the CFZ’s trigger camera). He gives it as being 5” long with large digit pad marks and a tri-lobed convex edge to the main pad (a dog’s in comparison is concave). There were no claw marks.

Now, this is where things get interesting. I joined him and his two companions in a night’s foray into the field to see what we could see.

After chatting for a bit, myself and 2 of the hunters (not the main fellow, he stayed behind with the rifle) went into the quarry next door where we all thought the cat may be lurking. As we broke through the very thin line of forest and into the quarry we smelt a very very very strong smell of cat urine. Well, I have never had a cat so I wouldn’t know what their scent marking smelt like, but apparently this is what it was so say the two gentlemen I was with. We carried on down the quarry and found a frozen liquid on the floor which (again apparently) had the look of cat vomit (it did have the sickly sweet smell of vomit I can confirm), but as this was frozen it was probably a few days old and was inconclusive. We marched on.

Down at the bottom of the quarry there were some slag piles which were much taller than a man (about 14” high) and arranged in rough rows. They terminated about 15’ away from a dense but small wood. We walked between two slag heaps, me on the left, the fellow with the big lamp in the middle and the other chap on the right (who, like me, had a headtorch on). The chap on the right suddenly called “There! Large eyes in the trees!”. We ran up to see them, but we saw nothing but heard something big moving away from us through the trees. Again, I cannot confirm that this was, but judging by my experience with deer, they move much more subtlety through thick vegetation than this did. We could not follow it though the undergrowth as it was far too thick, but we had a look around, and we found a deep impression in a soft stream bed, about 6” deep, 6” long and 4” wide. There were no markings at the bottom. By the size, this suggests that it was not a deer.

I did not photograph it because I am a pillock.

By now the fog was thickening up as fast as the torch light was dimming, so we headed back. We saw nothing on the way back, but did manage to get ourselves lost in the woods before using the torch to guide us out by triangulating it with the stalker with the rifle. Then, the radio sounded: “Guys, you hear that scream?”. We looked at each other confused as our heart beats began to rise. “What scream?” we replied. “A very loud one” was the answer, “it sounded like a deer being taken down. Get the **** back here now.”

So, as the adrenalin began to flow nicely, we cut the faffing and got back to the field. Now, a long time stalker who has shot dozens of deer, would surely know what noises a deer makes after it has been mortally wounded, but why did we not hear anything?

There and only two answers. Either the woods we were in were thick enough to mask the sound, but the field was open enough to let it filter through loud and clear, or he was lying. I am really not sure what to make of it.

Unfortunately, the head stalker insulted me quite nastily, so I will not be working with them again. It’s always a shame when you realise that someone you respected and wanted to work with for mutual advantage turns out to be a complete prat, but hey, that’s life.

Maybe on my next blog we will manage to get up to the present? You never know!

Beginning the cat hunt

2009-01-20T12:56:00.000-08:00

Back in November I got involved in trying to prove the existence of a (or possibly more) big cat living and killing sheep about 15 minutes down the road from me. A farmer had had about 30 sheep killed within the space of just over a month and he wanted some help in verifying it as a big cat. He had seen it alone more than once, and had seen a pair (one larger than the other) once. A paw print had been found, and by the description he gave me it fits a large cat (possibly puma, possibly leopard). I photographed what I could see of the kills [one photo showing the hole from which the organs were eaten is attached] and went up to the field repeatedly to try and work out what was going on. For a while I was about 60% sure that it was dogs doing the killing, and that a big cat lived in the area.

Then something very interesting happened. In early December I was phoned up by my employer who told me that a big cat had been sighted by 3 people moving across the shooting ground’s (shotgun that is) land! I must add here that this was not a cat walking calmly amongst layouts where clay pigeon shooters stood looking on in disbelief. The cat had walked around the back of the layouts, through a field and onto a small private road where it was seen at a range of only 20 yards by 3 people in a car. Obviously I went up there as fast as I could to talk to the witnesses. They described it as being black, slightly larger than an Alsatian, fairly low to the ground, having a very long tail with a curl at the end and moving in the typical cat’s slink. These would suggest (particularly the tail) that this was a leopard. I had a look around the area, but saw nothing to suggest that there was a cat in the area (well, this was by now 2 hours after the sighting, so no wonder).

Everything was quiet until Saturday, 3 days after the sighting. I discovered a young roe deer (≈15kg) that had been killed [one photo is attached]. Hair (not skin) had been taken off from large patches on its abdomen, revealing the pale skin beneath. The hair was lying all around the deer, either in little clumps or as single hairs. This was especially interesting, as the body was still warm. Actually, it was more than warm; it was pretty much normal skin temperature. It would seem that I had disturbed the killer from eating its meal by roaring down the track on the quad bike (I actually get pair to drive a quad all day!). Footprints were abound around the mud next to the kill (these later turned out to be dog; verified by Richard Freeman).

I did not expect to have a big cat sat about 5 minutes from my house killing our prized deer! I say prized, rather, the 3 deer who lived partly on the shooting ground’s land had become used to us in the workforce and were not too bothered about us being near them. Near that is, compared to normal deer who bolt at the meer sniff of you. After chatting to a few people, it appeared that the cat had been pushed through from the area that it used to be in by the local fox hunt who by chance had swept through its territory pushing the cat in front of it. When the hunt stopped just after reaching the shooting ground the cat carried on and set up temporary residence in the woods one KM from the shooting ground.
This takes us up to December, I’ll update again soon to bring this straight up to January. That is, if I’m not killed by my exams.

A new venture

2009-01-20T12:51:00.000-08:00

So, here we have it, my first blog post. I guess I have to introduce myself first. I am a student working to obtain some decent A-levels so that he can go to Bristol University to do a degree in Zoology. I am involved in a number of disciplines within the zoological cover, including entomology, ichthyology, palaeontology and cryptozoology. The last one I guess is fairly obvious otherwise I wouldn’t be in the CFZ blogs page! Hopefully I will manage to keep on a zoological track as I witter incessantly about hunting big cats in Britain, writing a book and general musings about nature. I guess it’s time to get some sort of back story up and running...