Capybara

December 19, 2024

As the year ends, yet another baby animal is going viral on social media. Tupi was born at the San Antonio Zoo on December 3rd and the zoo has been sharing pictures and videos of him, his mother, (Luna), and other animals in his enclosure. As the largest rodent in the world, most capybaras spend their days munching on grass and water plants in dense vegetation around bodies of water. Tupi is the first of his species to be born at the facility in 25 years, according to a statement from the zoo.
Jacob Downing, a spokesman for the zoo, said, “Their births are not super rare. At the end of the day, they are still rodents.” There has not been any capybara at the zoo since 2018 and no babies since 2000. The zoo announced Tupi’s birth on its social media accounts late last week, getting an outpouring of internet love as Tupi was embraced on social media. An hour later the zoo distanced itself from a memecoin ($TUPI) named after the new capybara.

When I looked online, I found the capybara or greater capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) is the largest living rodent and is native to South America. The genus Hydrochoerus has only two member species, the greater capybara and the lesser capybara (Hydrochoerus isthmius). Close relatives of the capybara are the domestic guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) and rock cavy (Kerodon rupestris) both endemic to the Andes. The capybara is distantly related to the agouti (genus Dasyprocta), the two species of chinchilla (Chinchilla chinchilla and Chinchilla lanigera), and the semiaquatic nutria (Myocastor coypus), all from South America. Adult capybaras grow to 3.5 to 4.5 feet (106 to 134 cm) in length, stand 20 to 24 inches tall (50 to 62 cm) at the withers, and typically weigh 77 to 146 pounds (35 to 66 kg). Females are slightly heavier than males. Capybaras have slightly webbed feet and vestigial tails. Their hind legs are slightly longer than their forelegs, with three toes on their rear feet and four toes on their front feet. Their muzzles are blunt, with nostrils, eyes, and ears near the top of their heads. The capybara inhabits savannas and dense forests near bodies of water. The species is highly social and can be found in groups (herds) as large as 100 individuals, but usually closer to 10 to 20. The capybara is hunted for its meat, hide, and the grease from its thick fatty skin.

The San Antonio Zoo quickly posted on X that the facility was not associated with or benefiting from the Cryptocurrency named after Tupi, the new baby capybara born at the zoo. Memecoins are a form of cryptocurrency which are named after memes, characters, animals and other things related to the internet in hopes of drawing interest. The pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis) born in Thailand in July 2024 also has a memcoin named after it. As the crypto market experienced a revival this year, memecoins also surged, even as some, like the $HAWK coin created by Haliey Welch, appeared to exist solely to benefit the group of people behind the coin. The zoo is providing plenty of footage of the nearly 3-week-old capybara. Tupi is still nursing but has already begun eating solids. In one of the videos shared Tupi climbed entirely into a bowl of food in order to feast. 2024 has been a good year to be a cute baby animal at a zoo as social media users have personified them with popular internet lingo. The zoo gave Tupi a mantra for the new year:
“Unbothered. Moisturized. Happy. In My Lane. Focused. Flourishing.”

THOUGHTS: My first encounter with a capybara happened as a young boy at a small town fair in Kansas. The side show included a number of exotic animals. I paid my hard earned US50 cents to wonder at the bearded lady, sword swallower, and what had really caught my eye, a “Paris Sewer Rat”. The small town fairs have passed and have been replaced by the wonders of social media. The scam (and wonder) is still available to intrigue a young boy’s mind. “If its online, it must be true. Right?” Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.

Mexican Wolf

November 20, 2024

Toward the back of the front section of my local newspaper was a USA Today article on a reward being offered for information on a dead wolf. The female is protected under the Endangered Species Act and was found northwest of Flagstaff, Arizona, on November 7th. The US Fish and Wildlife Service did not provide a cause of death, but the “mortality was not attributed to agency management actions”. Officials are offering a reward of US$103,500 for information that leads to “the successful prosecution” of the case. The wolf, known officially as F2979 and colloquially as “Hope”, was first GPS collared back in July. The Western Watersheds Project, a non-profit dedicated to protecting western watersheds and wildlife, shared a photo of the wolf in July during a wellness check clearly showing the collar. Cyndi Tuell, director of the project, said,” the shooter had to know she wasn’t a coyote.” The Mexican wolf is one of the most endangered mammals in North America, being driven almost to extinction in the mid-1980’s by hunting, trapping, and poisoning practices.

When I looked online, the Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi), also known as the lobo mexicano or lobo, is a subspecies of gray wolf (Canis lupus) native to eastern and southeastern Arizona and western and southern New Mexico in the US and in fragmented areas of northern Mexico. The wolf originally ranged from eastern Southern California south into Baja California, east through the Sonora and Chihuahua Deserts, and into West Texas. The Mexican wolf is the smallest of North America’s gray wolf subspecies, weighing 50 to 80 pounds (23 to 36 kg) with an average height of 28 to 32 inches (71 to 81 cm) and an average length of 5.5 feet (1.7 m). It is similar to the Great Plains wolf (Canis lupus nubilus), but with a smaller, narrower skull and darker, more variable fur (pelage), which ranges from sandy to yellowish gray with black, brown, and some white highlights. The snout, inner legs, neck and undersides are white, while golden-yellow and beige hues dominate the top of the head and much of the rest of the body. The fur around the chest and neck forms a grayish black collar which flows onto the back where it is generally black all the way to the tail tip. As of 2024, there are at least 257 wild Mexican wolves in the US and 45 in Mexico. Another 380 wolves are in captive breeding programs.

There have been 92 Mexican wolf deaths recorded since 1998. Four occurred in 2012 as a result of illegal shootings. In 2015, a court ordered the US Fish and Wildlife revise the management rules after a survey done on the wolf population of the Mexican wolf in Alpine, Arizona, indicated the recovery of the species is being negatively impacted by poaching. Poaching accounted for 50% of all Mexican wolf mortalities from 2008 to 2019. In an effort to fight the slow recovery, GPS monitoring devices are being used to monitor the wolves. In 2016, 14 Mexican wolves were killed, making it the highest death count of any year since they were reintroduced into the wild in 1998. While two of the deaths were caused by officials trying to collar the animals the rest of the deaths remain under investigation.

THOUGHTS: The Mexican wolf was held in high regard in Pre-Columbian Mexico, considered a symbol of war and the Sun and referred to as Cuetzlachcojotl. The Apache call the Mexican wolf “ba’cho” or “ma’cho”, and there is a “wolf song” passed through oral tradition where the tribe used to summon the wolf’s power before battle. It is estimated up to 16% of the Mexican wolf diet may now include domestic cattle (Bos taurus), especially in locations where the cattle graze and calve year-round as opposed to seasonally. Studies suggest reports of wolf depredation on livestock are sometimes exaggerated or fabricated. That reflects the contrasting attitude as an invasive species (cattle) was introduced by Europeans. Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.

Siamese

November 13, 2024

Today’s MSN browser featured a report on a crocodile thought to be extinct in the wild a generation ago that is making a comeback. The animals are being bred in captivity and reintroduced to their natural habitat. The conservation effort began in 2012 and last June the crocodiles laid 106 eggs and produced 60 hatchlings. There are about 1,000 of the crocodiles in the wild, including 400 in Cambodia. The species was nearly killed off by habitat destruction, poaching, and crossbreeding. Ironically, the hunters who captured, bred, and killed the crocodiles to sell their skins helped them bounce back. These captured crocs are the source of purebred, fertile crocodiles that were pulled from a population of 1.5 million (mostly hybrids) being bred for leather. After the females lay eggs, the eggs are incubated at the Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Centre, allowing the crocodiles to develop before they are brought to a national park in the Cardamom Mountains. According to Pablo Sinovas of Fauna & Flora, only one in 20 crocodiles born in the wild survives, but if they are bred captively and not released until they reach 1 meter in length, “their chances of survival increase exponentially.”

When I looked online, I found the Siamese crocodile (Crocodylus siamensis), also known as the Singapore small-grain and soft-belly crocodile, is a medium-sized freshwater crocodile native to Indonesia (Borneo and possibly Java), Brunei, East Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The animal is medium-sized, with a relatively broad, smooth snout and an elevated, bony crest behind each eye. It is generally olive green but can range to a dark green. Immature crocodiles measure 4 to 5 feet (1.2 to 1.5 m) and weigh from 13 to 26 pounds (6 to 12 kg). Adults can grow to a length of 7 to 10 feet (2.1 to 3 m) and weigh from 88 to 265 pounds (40 to 120 kg). Adults have a bite force of 466 to 1,029 pounds per foot (2,073 to 4,577 N). Large males can reach over 13 feet (4 m) and weigh 770 pounds (350 kg). The species is critically endangered and already extinct in many regions.

The Siamese crocodile is critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List and is listed on Appendix I of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). In Cambodia, Fauna and Flora International and the Government of Cambodia’s Forestry Administration have established the Cambodian Crocodile Conservation Programme for the protection and recovery of Siamese crocodiles. This program works with a network of indigenous villages who are helping to protect key sites such as Veal Veng Marsh (Veal Veng District), the Tatai River (Thmar Bang District), and the Araeng River. The Araeng is thought to have the second largest population of Siamese crocodiles in the world but is being threatened by proposed construction of a massive dam. The Siamese take advantage of the increase in water levels during the Monsoon season (June to November) to move out of the river and onto large lakes and other local bodies of water, returning to their original habitat once water levels receding back to their usual levels. Since 2012, approximately 50 purebred Siamese crocodiles have been released into community-protected areas to reinforce the depleted wild populations.

THOUGHTS: Conservationists are also trying to protect Siamese crocodile’s habitat as 32% of the Cambodia’s tree cover was lost from 2001 to 2023 due to climate change and deforestation. Sean Pang stated, “Policymakers must recognize that addressing both climate and land use change is crucial for protecting the fate of South-east Asia’s trees, and likely for much of the region’s biodiversity.” The world’s natural resources are at peril without a combined effort by government, conservationist, and the local population. Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.

Sea Robins

September 30, 2024

David Kingsley, the Rudy J. and Daphne Donohue Munzer Professor in the department of developmental biology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, first came across an odd looking fish in 2016 when he stopped into a small public aquarium in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “The fish on display completely spun my head around because they had the body of a fish, the wings of a bird, and multiple legs like a crab,” Kingsley said. Kingsley and his colleagues decided to study the fish in the lab and found differences between the sea robin species and the genetics responsible for their unusual traits. The findings of the study team’s new research show how evolution leads to complex adaptations in specific environments, such as the ability of sea robins to be able to “taste” prey using their highly sensitive appendages. According to their research, some types of the bottom-dwelling ocean fish use taste bud-covered legs to sense and dig up prey along the seafloor. Sea robins are so adept at rooting out prey on the ocean floor with their leglike appendages that other fish follow them around hoping to snag some of the freshly uncovered prey themselves.

When I looked online, I found sea robins (order, Triglidae), commonly known as gurnards, are a family of bottom-feeding scorpaeniform ray-finned fish. Triglidae is one of the five largest orders of bony fishes and is divided into 3 subfamilies and 8 genera that include 125 species distributed in temperate and tropical seas worldwide. Most species are around 12 to 16 inches (30 to 40 cm) in length with the females typically being larger than the males. They have an unusually solid skull, and many species possess armored plates on their bodies. Another distinctive feature is the presence of a “drumming muscle” that makes sounds by beating against the swim bladder. Sea robins have three “walking rays” on each side of their body that are derived from the supportive structures in the pectoral fins (fin-rays). During development, the fin-rays separate from the rest of the pectoral fin and develop into walking rays. These walking rays have specialized muscle divisions and unique anatomy that differ from typical fin-rays to allow them to be used as supportive structures during underwater locomotion. The rays are used for locomotion and prey detection on the seafloor via tasting (chemoreception) and are highly sensitive to the amino acids in marine invertebrates.

While all sea robins have leglike appendages, only some have the macroscopic sensory organs that allow them to taste the environment. Research revealed digging sea robins depend on a regulatory gene called tbx3a not only to develop their specialized fin adaptations but also to form the papillae that cause them to dig. Tbx3 also plays a role in limb development in humans, chickens, mice, and other fish species. The fish grew legs using the same genes that contribute to the growth of our limbs and then repurposed these legs to find prey using the same genes our tongues use to taste food. Sea robins stand out among other walking fishes because their pectoral fins (walking fin rays) are highly jointed and their skeletal and muscular anatomy showcase unique modifications that enable the sea robins to walk.

THOUGHTS: Sea robins have firm white flesh that holds together in cooking, making them well-suited to soups and stews such as the French bouillabaisse. They were often caught in British waters as a bycatch and discarded, but as other species became less sustainable and more expensive, they became more popular. Sea robins (gurnards) are used as bait by lobster fishers but are also now appearing in fish markets in the US. As desirable species are overfished or become scarce humans turn to the “next one up” to meet our food needs. We need to find ways to make fishing sustainable, or even the rough (trash) fish will be in short supply. Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.

Moo Deng

September 28, 2024

Moo Deng is a pygmy hippopotamus living in Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Si Racha, Chonburi province, Thailand, born on 10 July 2024. Her name was chosen through a public poll with over 20,000 people voting for “Moo Deng”, translating to “bouncy pig”. The zoo posted images of her on its Facebook page and Moo Deng quickly became a fan favorite for her playful and energetic romps. Her popularity led the zoo to sell clothing and other merchandise featuring designs based on her likeness. Other companies produced merchandise, including a cake shop (Vetmon Café) which created a realistic cake shaped like her. Moo Deng’s viral popularity resulted in a doubling of daily visitors in early September. The zoo is in the process of copyrighting and trademarking “Moo Deng the hippo” to raise funds for the zoo and plans to launch a livestream to allow fans to watch Moo Deng over the Internet.

When I looked online, I found Moo Deng is a pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis) or pygmy hippo, a small hippopotamid native to the forests and swamps of West Africa. The pygmy is one of only two extant species in the family Hippopotamidae, the other being the larger common or Nile hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius). The pygmy hippo was unknown outside West Africa until the 19th century and is a reclusive and nocturnal forest creature difficult to study in the wild. Like the common hippo, the pygmy hippo displays terrestrial adaptations but is semiaquatic and relies on water to keep its skin moist and its body temperature cool. Mating and birth may occur in water or on land. The pygmy is herbivorous and feeds on ferns, broad-leaved plants, grasses, and fruits it finds in the forests. Current pygmy populations are primarily in Liberia, with small groups in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Ivory Coast. It has been extirpated (eradicated) from Nigeria. Pygmy hippos are primarily threatened by loss of habitat, as forests are logged and converted to farmland. The Pygmy are also vulnerable to poaching, hunting for bushmeat, natural predators, war, and are illegally hunted for food in Liberia. The species breed well in captivity and the vast majority of research is derived from zoo specimens. A 2015 assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated that fewer than 2,500 pygmy hippos remain in the wild.

As a viral sensation Moo Deng has prompted a makeup trend popular with beauty influencers. Moo Deng makeup is in line with what beauty enthusiasts look for, super dewy skin and lots of blush. The trend is perfect for fall as the skin will be hydrated and glass-like as the drier months approach. The trend started with influencers trying to recreate her iconic look by achieving the baby pygmy’s glass-like skin with the prettiest shade of blush. Before applying makeup, you need to ensure the base is nice and dewy to capture the baby hippo’s glistening skin. The trend incorporates lots of grey hues to represent Moo Deng’s skin color. An element common among influencers’ is the heavily flushed cheeks. Any blush shade will do, as long as it has a great color payoff. Grey eyeshadow or lip gloss, followed by a particular shade of blush create the final makeup look.

THOUGHTS: While Moo Deng may create viral views, sales, and makeup, she is at risk. Some visitors harassed Moo Deng by splashing her with water and throwing objects to wake her up, forcing the zoo to install security cameras around her enclosure. The zoo also implemented a 5-minute time limit for visitors to accommodate the high volume of visitors. While most marvel at the wonder of nature, there are others who find pleasure in destruction. Whether it is throwing objects at Moo Deng or toppling 100,000 year old rock formations the seconds of fame being sought are not worth the cost. “Influence” comes with responsibility. Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.

Leopard Darters

September 25, 2024

Last week the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AFGC) released 80 leopard darters into the wild with the help of state and federal partners along with Conservation Fisheries LLC, a private hatchery specializing in propagating rare and threatened species. According to Chance Garrett, fish ecologist for the AGFC, this release is the first of two scheduled for the Cossatot River in western Arkansas this year and is the first historical reintroduction effort of leopard darters anywhere. The fish were grown from broodstock taken from the Mountain Fork River which flows from Arkansas into Oklahoma. Another 250 fish are planned for release in early October. Garrett said, “They originally thought it was only found in Oklahoma, but some populations were found in the Rolling Fork and Cossatot after its listing. Those two populations are thought to no longer exist, so this effort to re-establish them is extremely important.” This is the second year of the project, but the first year saw a low survival rate as the hatchery and were added to the broodstock rather than being released. The leopard darters measured and an inch or two (2.5 to 5 cm) at stocking size and were transported from the hatchery to their destination in one day.

When I looked online, I found leopard darters (Percina pantherina) are a species of freshwater ray-finned fish, from the subfamily Etheostomatinae. The family (Percidae) also contains the perches (Genus, Perca), ruffes (Gymnocephalus cernua), and pikeperches (Genus, Sander). The species is native to the US and is only be found in the Little River drainage in Oklahoma and Arkansas. A typical habitat is medium to large streams with rubble and boulder substrate. The leopard darter feeds on small invertebrates on the riverbed and spawns in March and April. Adults rarely exceed 3 inches (8 cm) in length and have 11 to 14 large, dark spots on their sides, which contrast against a light background that ranges from pale olive on the back to yellowish olive on the underside. The back of the fish has numerous saddles and bars. The leopard darter is threatened by impoundment, habitat loss, and runoff from agricultural activity. It has never been a common species and has been listed as a threatened species in the US since 1978.

Transporting and releasing the leopard darter was a full day affair. They left the Conservation Fisheries hatchery in Knoxville, Tennessee in the morning, were met by AGFC personnel in Memphis, and driven to the other side of other side of Arkansas by 6:30 p.m. that evening. Once at the river, the fish had to be tempered to adjust to the river water. They arrived in bags which were floated to slowly acclimate to the temperature of the river water. Then some river water was let into the bags to help them adjust slowly to the chemistry of that location. Finally, they are ready for release. The staff scanned the release pool the next day and found many of the fish had dispersed. Garrett said. “Hopefully we’ll see them in future survey efforts . . . Ultimately our goal is to see some spawning activity in spring.” The leopard darters represent one of the longest-standing members of the Endangered Species Act.

THOUGHTS: Leopard darters typically live less than two years, but individuals older than three years have been found. Introduction of these 320 fish (total) could reintroduce a viable population into the Cossatot River, but the fragile species still faces the loss of habitat due to construction of reservoirs and population isolation, along with agricultural and industrial activity, that drove them to decline in the first place. Species reintroduction and preservation takes the combined efforts of government agencies, business, and individual landowners to be effective. While it may take a village to raise a child, it takes concerned communities to preserve endangered species. Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.