Episode 338: Updates 6 and an Arboreal Clam!?!

Published: July 24, 2023, 6 a.m.

This week we have our annual updates and corrections episode, and at the end of the episode we'll learn about a really weird clam I didn't even think was real at first.\n\nThanks to Simon and Anbo for sending in some corrections!\n\nFurther reading:\n\nLessons on transparency from the glass frog\n\nHidden, never-before-seen penguin colony spotted from space\n\nRare wild asses spotted near China-Mongolia border\n\nAye-Ayes Use Their Elongated Fingers to Pick Their Nose\n\nHomo sapiens likely arose from multiple closely related populations\n\nScientists Find Earliest Evidence of Hominins Cooking with Fire\n\n153,000-Year-Old Homo sapiens Footprint Discovered in South Africa\n\nNewly-Discovered Tyrannosaur Species Fills Gap in Lineage Leading to Tyrannosaurus rex\n\nEarth's First Vertebrate Superpredator Was Shorter and Stouter than Previously Thought\n\n252-Million-Year-Old Insect-Damaged Leaves Reveal First Fossil Evidence of Foliar Nyctinasty\n\nThe other paleo diet: Rare discovery of dinosaur remains preserved with its last meal\n\nThe Mongolian wild ass:\n\n\n\nThe giant barb fish [photo from this site]:\n\n\n\nEnigmonia aenigmatica, AKA the mangrove jingle shell, on a leaf:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\nThis week is our annual updates and corrections episode, but we\u2019ll also learn about the mangrove jingle shell, a clam that lives in TREES. A quick reminder that this isn\u2019t a comprehensive updates episode, because that would take 100 years to prepare and would be hours and hours long, and I don\u2019t have that kind of time. It\u2019s just whatever caught my eye during the last year that I thought was interesting.\nFirst, we have a few corrections. Anbo emailed me recently with a correction from episode 158. No one else caught this, as far as I can remember. In that episode I said that geckos don\u2019t have eyelids, and for the most part that\u2019s true. But there\u2019s one family of geckos that does have eyelids, Eublepharidae. This includes the leopard gecko, and that lines up with Anbo\u2019s report of having a pet leopard gecko who definitely blinked its eyes. This family of geckos are sometimes even called eyelid geckos. Also, Anbo, I apologize for mispronouncing your name in last week\u2019s episode about shrimp.\nAfter episode 307, about the coqu\xed and glass frogs, Simon pointed out that Hawaii doesn\u2019t actually have any native frogs or amphibians at all. It doesn\u2019t even have any native reptiles unless you count sea snakes and sea turtles. The coqui frog is an invasive species introduced by humans, and because it has no natural predators in Hawaii it has disrupted the native ecosystem in many places, eating all the available insects. Three of the Hawaiian islands remain free of the frogs, and conservationists are working to keep it that way while also figuring out ways to get them off of the other islands. Simon also sent me the chapter of the book he\u2019s working on that talks about island frogs, and I hope the book is published soon because it is so much fun to read!\nSpeaking of frogs, one week after episode 307, an article about yet another way the glass frog is able to hide from predators was published in Science. When a glass frog is active, its blood is normal, but when it settles down to sleep, the red blood cells in its blood collect in its liver. The liver is covered with teensy guanine crystals that scatter light, which hides the red color from view. That makes the frog look even more green and leaf-like!\nWe\u2019ve talked about penguins in several episodes, and emperor penguins specifically in episode 78. The emperor penguin lives in Antarctica and is threatened by climate change as the earth\u2019s climate warms and more and more ice melts. We actually don\u2019t know all that much about the emperor penguin because it lives in a part of the world that\u2019s difficult for humans to explore. In December 2022, a geologist named Peter Fretwell was studying satellite photos of Antarctica to measure the lo...