Episode 257: Some Animals of Belize
Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo!\n\nA big birthday shout-out this week to Yori!!!\n\nI was fortunate enough to visit the country of Belize in December and saw lots of amazing animals! I've chosen four to highlight in this week's episode.\n\nFurther reading:\n\nThere may be more bird species in the tropics than we know\n\nThe adorable proboscis bat, my favorite:\n\n\n\nProboscis bats all in a row (photograph by me!):\n\n\n\nThe black howler monkey has a massive hyoid bone that allows it to make big loud calls:\n\n\n\nThe white-crowned manakin is impossibly cute:\n\n\n\nThe mealy parrot is cheerful and loud:\n\n\n\nA morning view and night view from our villa balcony, photos by me!\n\n \n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\nLet\u2019s start the new year off right with an episode about some animals I saw in person recently during my vacation to Belize!\nBut first, we have our first birthday shout-out of the year! A very happy birthday to Yori, whose birthday is on the 8th of January! I hope you have a great day!\nBelize is a country on the eastern coast of Central America on the Caribbean Ocean, just south of Mexico and north of Guatemala. It used to be called British Honduras but has been an independent country since 1981. The coast is protected by a series of coral reefs that are so little studied that there are probably dozens if not hundreds of animals and plants waiting to be discovered around them. Belize is serious about protecting the reefs and about conservation in general, which is great because it has some of the highest animal and plant life diversity in the Americas.\nMy brother and his family had made vacation plans for Belize in spring of 2021, about the time the Covid-19 vaccine was rolling out and things were looking up. They rented a big villa with more bedrooms than they needed so they generously invited me and one of my cousins to join them. I didn\u2019t mention the trip on the podcast because I was worried it would end up canceled. But we were able to visit in mid-December, with negative Covid tests coming and going, and wearing our masks appropriately in all public areas.\nBelize is absolutely gorgeous. We stayed right on the coast in an upstairs flat with a big balcony that overlooked the ocean. We spent most of the time relaxing on the beach or the balcony and eating amazing food, but we did go on two excursions.\nWe all went on a riverboat wildlife tour of the Monkey River, and a few days later my brother and cousin and I went on a birdwatching expedition to the nearby Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary. We had to get up at 5am for that one but it was worth it. In both excursions we saw lots of animals of all kinds, so many that it was hard for me to choose which ones to highlight in this episode.\nOne animal that I fell in love with on the Monkey River is the proboscis bat. Belize has a lot of bat species but I didn\u2019t expect to see any, much less up close.\nThe proboscis bat lives throughout Central America and the northern half of South America. It\u2019s only about 2.5 inches long, or 6 cm, and gets its name from its pointed nose. It lives near water, especially wetlands, because it eats insects that live around water like mosquitoes and caddisflies. It\u2019s so small that it sometimes gets caught in spiderwebs, especially of the big spider Argiope submaronica, [ar-JY-opee] a species of orbweaver spider that holds its legs in an X pattern while it\u2019s on its web. Different species live throughout the world, especially in warm places. It does actually eat the bats it catches, which is hard on the bat but a nice big meal for the spider. There\u2019s two sides to every story.\nHow, you may ask, did I manage to see a bat up close during broad daylight while on a boat? The proboscis bat spends the day on a tree trunk or branch or log near the water, especially in shady areas, and our guide was able to ease the boat up to not one but two diff...