Today we have photos from the U.S. and the Neotropics.
First, a single picture from reader Michele in Arizona:
Princess finds a desert kingsnake (Lampropeltis getula). I suspect it was here to eat some lizards, which my small backyard is full of. Princess has also found spadefoot toads and even a baby diamondback rattlesnake. She just observes them.
Yeah, but maybe the snakes will not just observe Princess! What if the rattler were an adult?
Reader Lou Jost, a biologist in Ecuador, sent photos of local animals and scenery (the notes are mine, not Lou’s). His first pictures are of one of the world’s weirdest birds, the hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin). Although I’ve been birding in Central and South America several times, and with experienced birders, I never got to see these:
I’ll interject some biology here. It’s well known that hoatzin chicks have claws on their wings, and when I was in school these were thought to be atavisms—the evolutionary remnants of the ancient toes of their dinosaurian ancestors that developed in chicks and then disappeared, much like the transitory coat of hair (the “lanugo”) that covers the human fetus but then is shed before birth. (Unlike the lanugo, though, the claws are actually useful; see below.)
But now, at least according to that unimpeachable source Wikipedia, these claws are not thought to be “atavisms,” or at least they don’t seem to represent the re-activation of long-suppressed genes for foreleg digits. But they are still used handily by the chicks. The Wikipedia discussion below is pretty confusing, for it implies that the claws are both “autapomorphies” (that is, unique traits derived in the hoatzin lineage) and “an atavism toward the dinosaurian finger claws,” implying that they use the same genes that built the fingers of dinosaurs. It’s further confusing because the article further says that “the hoatzin’s claws are of more recent origin.” I’m not sure whether they’ve studied the development and genetics of these claws. If they do appear only in hoatzins, as they do, but still involve the same genes used in reptiles to make fingers on the forelegs, then they would be genuine evolutionary atavisms and, at the same time, unique atavisms that appear only in hoatzin chicks. But at least how they’re used is understood, and it’s very cool:
The chicks, which are fed on regurgitated fermented food, have another odd feature; they have two claws on each wing. Immediately on hatching, they can use these claws, and their oversized feet, to scramble around the tree branches without falling into the water. When predators such as the great black hawk attack a hoatzin nesting colony, the adults fly noisily about, trying to divert the predator’s attention, while the chicks move away from the nest and hide among the thickets. If discovered, however, they drop into the water and swim under the surface to escape, then later use their clawed wings to climb back to the safety of the nest. This has inevitably led to comparisons to the fossil bird Archaeopteryx, but the characteristic is rather an autapomorphy, possibly caused by an atavism toward the dinosaurian finger claws, whose developmental genetics (“blueprint”) presumably is still in the avian genome. Since Archaeopteryx had three functional claws on each wing, some earlier systematists speculated that the hoatzin was descended from it, because nestling hoatzins have two functional claws on each wing. Modern researchers believe that the young hoatzin’s claws are of more recent origin, however, and may be a secondary adaptation from its frequent need to leave the nest and climb about in dense vines and trees well before it can fly.
Here, from The Birds in my Beard, is a series showing the chicks clambering about with their claws:
Reader jbillie, in the comments below, called our attention to a David Attenborough video (of course) showing hoatzin chicks using their claws. Is there any evolutionary marvel Attenborough hasn’t filmed?
Back to Lou’s photos. Here is the cryptic potoo. I’m not sure what species this is, and Lou can weigh in, but I suspect this is the common potoo, Nyctibius griseus. But there’s nothing common about these birds, for they’re incredibly cryptic. They sit atop branches with their heads up and eyes closed, and look for all the world like a piece of wood. I’ve seen them in Costa Rica, but only when our guide pointed them out. Spot the potoo!:
Anacondas, one of several neotropical and aquatic species in the genus. I’m guessing that this is the green anaconda, Eunectes murinus, whose name means “good swimmer and mice-y”, referring to its aquatic abilities and presumed fondness for rodents. If you know your languages, you’ll recognize that its “Latin” binomial is actually a hybrid of a Greek word (“Eunectes”) and a Latin one (“murinus”). If I got the wrong species, never mind. . .
Adorable squirrel monkeys in the wild (Saimiris ciureus). My dad had one of these as a pet when he was young; its name was “Chippy”:
Tropical landscapes:
Man, I wish I were in that boat! Lucky man, Lou.
Are you sure you haven’t got Zaphod Beeblebrox in monkey form there?
No. Like his semi-cousin Ford, Zaphod is not descended from an ape.
Wow, nice photos Lou! And LUCKY YOU!
Thanks Jerry, for the info on the claws on those birds. Cute little dinos, aren’t they?
I would love to a close-up of the wing claws.
Cheers!
And: “Cute dinos” was my reaction before I read the parts about atavisms.
They sure look like our (typical) concept of dinos. From head to toes.
Fabulous post!
Those snakes give me the shivers but they are beautiful. The birds are fantastic too.
Excellent photos, Lou Jost.
Thanks Stephan. They’re taken with my trusty Panasonic Lumix FZ200…
I have the same camera. I bought it after doing a lot of research on bridge cameras. It does an excellent job for most situations. It’s not good for birds-in-flight, though. I suspect no bridge camera would be.
Yes,that’s why I mentioned it. I remember you used this as a “grab-shot” camera when it was awkward to take the big guns…..
Very nice! I am going to be away from a PC for a week – I get WEIT hungar pangs when that happens, & sometimes never catch up on all the posts as PCC is soooo prolific.
Great pictures.
For those interested –
Earliest and first Northern Hemispheric hoatzin fossils substantiate Old World origin of a “Neotropic endemic”
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00114-014-1144-8
That’s very interesting!!
😉
This distribution pattern is also found in another New World endemic group, the hummingbirds. The earliest hummer fossils are from Europe, just like the earliest hoatzin fossils mentioned in the link. Here’s the story:
http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2004/05/ancient-hummingbirds-were-european
Same author as the hoatzin paper,Gerald Mayr.
Here is a video of chicks claws, climbing, swimming.
Nice find; I’ve added it to the post above,thanks!
I envy Lou. And I have got to find some time to finish reading his papers, and especially to read his paper in the latest Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.
Estimating diversity and entropy profiles via discovery rates of new species
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.12349/abstract
Sorry – wrong one!
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-120213-091540
Thanks for mentioning these, jaxkayaker and dominic. If you need any others just write me and I’ll send them to you. If you click on my name you can find my email address.
Thanks Jerry for putting these up and writing such nice notes! I had sent the text separately because of email problems, but it looks like that didn’t get through. I saw all this stuff a few days ago in the flooded forest of Cuyabeno Reserve, in Amazonian Ecuador (Magic River Lodge). Here’s some additional info:
Jerry gave a great lesson on the hoatzin’s claws. The hoatzin is one of the world’s most distinctive birds,in its own family and suborder, and sometimes its own order. Its closest (but still very distant)relatives may be cranes and plovers, according to the latest whole-genome bird phylogeny. Apart form the claws, they are also unusual as the avian
equivalents of the mammalian ruminants, eating vegetation which gets digested in an enlarged crop with the help of bacteria. They are big and heavy and can hardly fly.
The anaconda was stunning.
No way to walk past this without noticing it! It is a gigantic Green Anaconda (Eunectes murinus). It was as thick as a small tree and
looked like a couple of tractor tires piled up in the forest. We did
not touch or bother it so we don’t know how big it really is, but it
must have outweighed me by a lot, judging by its volume.
The potoo is indeed a Common Potoo (Nyctibius griseus),
invisible from afar, but we were a few feet from it. This is a distant
relative of the nightjars. It sticks its head straight up when it
thinks it is being watched, but it relaxes when the observer leaves.
We saw it peeking at us with its nearly closed eye. The guide said
this was a baby Long-tailed Potoo (N. aethereus) but I don’t think so.
The sociology of guiding in Cuyabeno is unusual. All the dozens
of local guides know these special spots and trade information, and
between all these guides they search a large area, so everybody who
comes here to this vast wilderness of a million acres (and hundreds of
people come every day) ends up seeing the best and rarest things, if
the things sit still. The guides are mostly well-trained and do not
touch the animals, which have become completely oblivious to humans.
Monkeys are everywhere here. Those are some young squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus)contemplating us at close range, from a group of over 150 individuals. They follow the more intelligent capuchins to take advantage of the capuchins’ more detailed knowledge of the forest.
I also included a few habitat shots of this seasonally-flooded
blackwater forest, under water for all but a couple of months per year. A land of pink dolphins, giant fish, and lots of very cool plants as well.
Lou
“We saw it peeking at us with its nearly closed eye.”
I love that description. Reminds me as a kid when you’re pretending to sleep and slightly open an eye to surreptitiously spy on whoever is in the room. “Keep moving…nothing interesting here.”
The ‘resurrection’ of genes for clawed fingers in the hoatzin I think could be fairly straight forward. If the genes were always preserved for other uses (for toes, etc.), then they could be recruited to also develop clawed fingers by selection of mutations for new enhancers and silencers that regulate gene expression. These regulatory sequences are very small, and pretty easily made and lost by mutation and selection.
I had learned a while ago that other birds (ostrich and emu chicks) have simple finger claws. Here is a link if anyone is interested. Mouse over ‘Evidence Overview’ and select ‘Remnants’, and scroll down. I do not think these are really ‘remnants’, but they are claws.
I came across this article a few years ago:
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2010/06/30/clubs-spurs-spikes-and-claws/
It seems claws are relatively common on birds. Is there something particularly unique about hoatzins? I mean, the way they use them is really cool, but is it anything particularly significant evolutionarily? Are their claws just bigger and a little more well developed than normal? Does it take longer for their hand bones to fuse, leaving them with ‘hands’ instead of wings for longer than most birds?
Heck, here’s a closeup of a chicken wing, and even though its claws are much smaller, they’re still clearly visible:
http://www.popsugar.com/food/photo-gallery/7247754/image/7247758/full-chicken-wing-bottom-view-shown-here-have-two-distinct
Woa, I had not know that about chickens.
It seems to me that the hoatzin really has strongish clawed fingers, maybe with flexor muscles, and these other examples are much more wimpy. Maybe used for grooming? I do not know.
A vestigial clawed finger, if bigger, I suppose could start to sport more robust features as a natural outcome. It reminds me of the famous examples of the 3-toed horses that turn up. The extra toes, complete with little hooves, are enlarged vestigial and useless toes on horses.
Maybe some day someone could experiment on this. Get a vestigial structure to grow more and see if that then starts to add features that were not present in the smaller vestige.
Great post, Jerry.
One small correction, if I interpreted your message correctly on the first photo of Princess: King snake’s are not rattlers. As far as I know, they are non-venomous constrictors.
No, you interpreted the post incorrectly: I meant that what if the baby rattlers inspected by Princess (as indicated in the description) were BIG rattlers?
I didn’t mean that the kingsnake was a rattler.
Even “baby” rattlesnakes are very dangerous. I know someone who almost died from a bite. One could easily kill a cat.
I have heard more than once that their bite is more dangerous. Supposedly because, unlike an adult, they don’t regulate the amount of venom they discharge and instead discharge their entire reserve.
Yes, that is what I have heard as well. And they can be a lot faster. Hope the kitty stays away!
I couldn’t say about speed, but juveniles sure are unrestrained! Last year I found a juvenile, couldn’t have been more than 12″ (30 cm), in my neighbor’s front yard. As I observed it, carefully, it repeatedly struck at me over and over again non stop, throwing itself its entire body length plus some each time. Don’t know where it got the energy.
This has turned out to be a myth. See for example here.
I’d be more concerned about the snakes than the cat. While d*gs are frequently bit, cats seem snake-savvy, and apparently kill very large numbers of reptiles and amphibians. In either case, a good reason to keep your animals indoors (or on a leash).
This is also the case with the Eastern Brown Snake (Pseudonaja textilis) in Australia. A few years ago a gentleman the the Riverland of South Australia noticed a juvenile brown snake crossing a road, picked it up and carried it to safety. With a certain lack of gratitude the snake bit him. He thought that since it was a juvenile, this was not a problem and did not seek medical assistance for some hours. He died in hospital!
Yeah…but…Australia.
That’s where even the butterflies have lethal stings, and the hedgehogs live in mortal terror of the hedgerows. If it moves, it’ll kill you. If it doesn’t move, it’ll kill you even worse. Hell, even the stuff that doesn’t kill you? Like the beer? Even that shit’s lethal, too.
b&
This is a baby Massasauga rattler one of my cats found in our basement:
https://flic.kr/p/rfqyCu
What a beauty! One hopes it’s been safely relocated to somewhere it’ll catch rodents rather than be caught be felids…?
b&
Oh, yes. That happened in August 2012. I took a few pictures, then let it go out back.
We see Massasaugas pretty frequently, including new juveniles, so I think they’re doing pretty well around here despite being a species of concern overall. (And despite many of my neighbors killing them on sight.)
The snake-ling and the cat were having a mutual stand-off when I found them.
Fortune smiled on your timing that day, for all three of you.
b&
beautiful snake! I’ve encountered rattlers in the desert, and they seemed more afraid of me than I was of them. I stay way, way back, and just look at them. People freak when they see snakes and spiders, and automatically think, “how can I kill it?” but they’re 2 of my favorite creatures.
I love snakes. 🙂 Our Massasaugas are especially shy, preferring crypsis over aggression. Last summer I set my radio down on one. (Accidentally, of course!)
I struggle a bit with acrophobia, but that doesn’t mean I don’t admire spiders as well. In the summer I sometimes name the big argiope orb weavers I see every day. 😀
Princess is a very cautious naturalist. She would not approach closer than 10 feet from the diamondback. It was only 5 inches long and had only rudimentary rattles. When I went inside to get the snake book, Princess followed. When I went back outside it was gone! She seemed to know, however, that the king snake wasn’t dangerous.
Lovely photos Lou. My daughter wants to be your apprentice on your next expedition.
Curious kitty! One night our cat was getting rowdy in our bedroom, right next to my side of the bed within arms reach. This went on for some time and since it didn’t seem like I was going to get any sleep I finally got up and turned on the light to see what the heck she was up to. To my surprise she had a snake cornered right next to the bed. The cat was having a great time, but the snake was very upset.
Darelle, this is a great place to introduce someone to the tropics. Not many bugs, lots of easy-to-see birds and wildlife. I highly recommend it to your daughter or anyone else who loves nature.
Nice post! Years ago I photographed hoatzins in Colombia. The large colony had an awful, strong smell, as did one bird we collected.
Their local name is “Stinking Turkey” and local people don’t hunt them because of their bad taste.
Beautiful photos, and very interesting to see the hoatzins! I think my favorite of the set is the Common Potoo – I hear several different species of Caprimulgiformes frequently, but rarely see any of them (apart from the Common Nighthawks).
I have to object to the characterization of lanugo as “not useful” though – it holds in place the waxy vernix caseosa, which protects fetal skin from the amniotic fluid (which is not innocuous stuff).
More potoo spotting, please. (fewer nightjars!)
Love the Birds in my Beard!
Wonderful photos all.
“Ditto.”
b&
When I lived in Tucson, King snakes usually got really big, and fast. I wonder if that is because so many people call the fire department to have the rattler’s taken away. [Of course, they say they only put the rattlers a couple of miles away which is easy enough for them to find their way home.]
Our cats eat snakes that size, or at least they kill them, which is too bad.
So… why didn’t Michael Crichton, or Horner and the other advisors to the first JP films use hoatzin eggs instead of frog eggs? And have live hoatzins lead the hatchlings into the forest.
Of course would have had them “de-activating” the feathers to save the animators grief.
Frog eggs can be fertilized parthenogenically.
Great selection of photos and commentary today. THANKS!!!
Those dino-bird hoatzins are one of the strangest birds I’ve seen- and super interesting.
Lou- did you spot any pink dolphins? I learned about those from Jeremy Wade’s series “River Monsters” and have since been fascinated by the species.
I’m glad to hear Princess only observes and I hope curiosity doesn’t end up…well, you know.
Are desert kingsnakes “immune” to rattlesnake venom like the California kingsnake? IIRC, rattlesnakes are common prey to California kings. My 4th grade teacher had a California kingsnake in the classroom. It was an immense pleasure to hold the snake and let it crawl around under your shirt next to bare skin. Though one time it did crap on me and that was very embarrassing, especially for a 4th grader.
Mark, yes, we saw pink dolphins, both adults and juveniles,on several occasions. We even saw them from our lodge’s dock at close range. Wonderful animals! The Cuyabeno reserve is a good place to see them in Ecuador.
As Jerry said “I wish I were in that boat!” And I bet it is very difficult to take a good photo of a pink dolphin…just a ghost under the amber waters.
The problem is that they surface quickly and can hold their breath a long while, so you never know where they will resurface. I did manage to photograph a few of them as they surfaced, but the photos are poor.
Web cams following several species:
http://www.beleefdelente.nl/
Great reader picks, as always. I am jealous. I guess I need to start traipsing more.
The Hoatzin are very interesting. I had never seen them before. Now that I have seen them, I can appreciate some of the Aztec and Mayan representations of birds more.
I love that you always include the binomials with the species, but is there any chance of including some form of pronunciation guide along with each name? I’d rather learn the binomials, but I would like to avoid sounding like a completely ignorant putz whenever I try to say them! Just a thought…
The photo of the canoe on the mirrored water surface brings back my memory of a similar journey in Borneo, 16 years ago. Because I was two days late (Garuda and Merapi Airlines), I followed my written instructions to reach the Earthwatch project. I hired a speedboat to take me down the Kumai River, then into the narrow Sekonyer River, the only access to Taman Nasional Tanjung Puting. The black water was a perfect mirror; vegetation arched over the narrow stream, not much wider than the boat, and was reflected below. The impression was of flying through a green tunnel. Magical.
Our transect trails branching away from the river were under water, though it was not supposed to be the wet season. We went in with canoes, then jumped out into the neck deep water (welcome relief from the heat) to do our measurements of tagged trees. There was a beautiful snake on one tree, barely a foot long. May have been a Krait, not sure. There was a sign warning of a Cobra under one of the buildings in our compound, though we didn’t see it.
My favorite memory: I was out alone when I saw a family of Proboscis Monkeys, daddy, mommy, and junior, jump into the river to swim across, one, two, three, tails streaming behind, plop, plop, plop.
What a wonderful experience!
Hmmm… I wonder how homemade Hoazin sauce would taste. (ducking)
*please add the ‘t’!
Wow, hoatzins!
Such fantastic birds. Superb pictures Lou, of these and all the other species and the landscapes as well!
Is the carpal claw a modification of the alula? Then the wing-tip claw might be…a fore-fingernail, as it were? What a thrill it must have been to see them!
I think I may have “seen” (virtually) something distantly related yesterday…I’m compiling a “virtual international bird list” via game-cams, and there’s one I watch at an Antarctic telecommunication station. Generally it has nothing but Gentoo Penguins, but yesterday I found Snowy Sheathbills! (Also a rather odd bird.) Anyway, it’s in a family of one genus and 2 species, and the Wikipedia page says this about them: “There is a rudimentary spur on the “wrist” (carpal) joint, as in plovers.”
Sorry for the digression. I did not realize hoatzins flocked. Such striking birds! And I think I’d kill to see a potoo in the wild, let alone one close enough to get a picture one tenth as nice as yours. It’s interesting that it (or at least this one) manages to perch in a snag that has just the right colors & patterns to blend in with.